Netflix, I don’t know how to tell you this but a woman doesn’t have to be self taught to be a strong female character. It’s ok to let her know her limitation and ask for help. It’s ok to let her get angry, it’s ok to let her be jealous, it’s ok to let your female character have flaws and WORK on them. Your female character doesn’t have to become a master on her own to be memorable, it just makes her accomplishment feel unearned.
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just endlessly thinking about blue eye samurai.
thinking about how akemi, taigen, and mizu are if a coin had three sides or maybe just the two and mizu is the bridge of metal between them.
akemi being the ideal image for women, for the life they endure. she was simultaneously a princess, a prostitute, and a prisoner. her entire life was men making decisions for her, even the ones that had good intentions, and she believed her deepest desire was freedom. it still is, but she has been revealed to this heinous predicament of her gender, and she’s realized that to reach true freedom as a woman is to be the bird in the cage, to play nice and to earn the love of a man until he buys her a bigger cage and a bigger cage until he trusts her not to fly away. and it'll never be true freedom, but it will come with power. it'll come with the freedom of only one master rather than many.
taigen being the ideal image of a man. not all powerful, but not weak. he had a taste of what it'd be to succeed, and when it was taken from him, that easy success, he mistook it for his honor. he hunted mizu down to kill him, and instead he saved him. he saved him and saved him and he came closer to killing mizu when they were on the cliff's edge, and just when he gets to the point where he may actually fight mizu, he's tortured for information on him. he is tortured. Literally tortured within an inch of his life, enduring such a heinous violence, and he refuses to break. this man was a fight, was the torturer, and the victim of his torturing could've been his salvation from pain but he refused. mizu gave back taigen's honor but not by fighting him.
akemi wanted freedom and learned she would need power to have it.
taigen wanted power and learned that the violence that came with it was infinite and dishonorable.
and then there's mizu. mizu who wants revenge, wants acceptance. arguably the same things as them both. mizu wants acceptance, the freedom of living and the freedom to love and be loved. mizu wants revenge, which follows after violence and power, to get said acceptance. she thinks she must do both, have both, to live peacefully, and she's blatant about how she will not live without either.
she's given acceptance with the blacksmith, her "mother," her husband, but she sees the flecks of avoidance in it.
the blacksmith will not hear of her true gender. her "mother" will not acknowledge the crime of her birth. her husband can't find tolerance for the violence within her, the man of her.
and so she has to balance the woman and man of her, the ronin and the bride. taigen and akemi. and it's meeting mizu that they start to unravel their own identities.
mizu, who is both, and akemi and taigen who thought themselves one but turned out to be neither.
god.
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sometimes I see people calling Aziraphale selfish in an accusatory way, as if it's a flaw that needs to be smoothed out, as if it isn't a trait that is at once defiant and emancipating, as if his selfishness isn't mostly wielded in an empowering and kind way, as if it's categorically bad to want things for yourself, to enjoy them, to have and keep them, as if selfish isn't the most revolutionary thing an angel can be
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Dragon giving Luffy to Garp with the assumption that he's going to take care of him until he's ready to meet his son (because it's dangerous to have a child while he starts a fucking revolution, thank you very much) and then Garp just- Leaving Luffy on a village where he spends 24/7 alone waiting for the pirate he now considers his role model (because he doesn't have anybody else and Shanks is the only father figure around and he's just that nice) to come back from his adventures, and only being taken care of by Makino who has no responsibility over Luffy but still takes care of him because otherwise the kid would probably die from starvation, and lucky for him she's a sweetheart. And then he loses Uta, his only friend (with no explanation at all), to then carry the guilt of Shanks losing an arm for him and suddenly his legacy as a pirate. And then he's sent to another place with other people he doesn't know, because Garp thought "oh, yes, wonderful idea to leave my grandson with this depressed kid and some bandits" and Luffy luckily befriends Ace and Sabo because they're good people. Luckily. And luckily, Dadan is a good mom and loves them. But then Sabo fucking dies because nobody with authority was protecting these kids (I wonder who could've done that). And now Luffy has to carry both guilt, a legacy, and the biggest abandonment issues I've ever seen after losing his best friend and his brother when they were just children.
And I'm not saying Garp has made horrible decisions but he has made horrible decisions and Dragon should hit his own dad with Sabo's metal pipe.
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