#i just miss these unbelievably strong determined uncomromising and sturdy girls so so much

[posletsvet]

My thoughts keep circling back to some similarities I spotted a while back between the Hasaba twins and Nobara. There's a handful of them, really, from what I can gather -- even if we exclude the fact that both the twins and Nobara originally come from the countryside, which would be the most obvious coincidence.

Take, for instance, Nanako and Nobara's matching personalities: they both are outspoken, confident, brash and boisterous, with somewhat an air of a typical school bully around them. At first those traits might come off as off-putting and offensive, but when you delve deeper it becomes more apparent that such abrasive attitude might just serve as a defense mechanism of sorts and what it really shows is that these girls were taught, for better or worse, how to stand up for themselves.

Then there are curious similarities between their innate techniques. Techniques of all three of them require usage of inanimate objects, and in both Mimiko and Nobara's cases it's an effigy of the target, a voodoo doll -- whether stuffed one or made of straw. Their techniques also allow them to manipulate targets from afar.

Nobara also shows unusually high tolerance of pain, and it's something that keeps bothering me. And though we know that she was trained to be a sorcerer by her grandmother, and being a sorcerer involves adopting a certain mindset, that's not something one can simply order oneself to get used to.

One other thing that doesn't seem to escape my mind is how Nobara was only ever drawn to outsiders back in her childhood, and then proceeded to look up to Maki, finding it in particular admirable how she withstands the oppression of her own family. I guess it's also worth mentioning how Nobara doesn't believe people are excused just by the circumstances they grew up in. Again, I don't think that's an attitude one can afford without facing those hardships oneself.

So what if all the similarities really stem from the background they, Nobara and the twins, come from? I doubt that being a jujutsu sorcerer in a small, enclosed society such as found in a village in the middle of nowhere is a pleasant experience. People get nosy. They also get intolerant towards something they're not prepared to include in their tiny circle. We've already seen how an outsider unwilling to assimilate, Saori, was ostracized and driven out -- and she was just a city girl. We've also seen what being a sorcerer in an environment full of narrow-minded superstition costs.

How much bias and bigotry might Nobara face? Isn't it why she jumped at the first given opportunity to leave for the city? Why she only ever made friends with newcomers to the village? Why she considered all locals to be at least at some degree insane?

I don't know where I'm going with all this, really. If anything, it serves as yet another example of how the conservative mentality of those in charge of jujutsu society harms its sorcerers. Where both sides could've benefited from cooperation, non-sorcerers are left to ignorance and the misplaced antagonism towards sorcerers which that ignorance enables. I wonder if current, somewhat anachronistic, suspicion and superstition that still lingers with some parts of non-sorcerer population are fossilized remnants of the awareness their ancestors once possessed. What was it like to be a non-jujutsu user in the Golden Era of sorcery? Was it chaos and fear of that time which created an unbridgeable rift between sorcerers and non-sorcerers? I wonder what repercussions the current situation would have for the relationship between the two. Would it be history simply repeating itself, or is there an opportunity for real, substantial change, now that the system upheld by outdated tradition is utterly destroyed? Where are we heading with the story now?