#this post brought to you by a second gen chinam

[peridot-tears]

Quick & Sloppy Analysis of Blue Eye Samurai

Mizu is from a time period before western ideas of gender took hold in Japan. A lot of the discourse around Mizu's gender seems to stem from what people think transgender identity is in a 21st century, western context.

They were born as a woman but had to live as a man. The rub over whether or not this makes them trans seems to come from these two points.

Many people transition because they have always known they were another gender born into a body that does not reflect that gender. If they were forced to live as another gender, that doesn't count as trans.

Many people are transgender because their sex and gender are different. Mizu was physically born in the body of a woman, but functions in society as a man. Regardless of how they came to be, they are, by gender, a man.

Mizu themself did find happiness as a woman, but had it snatched away from her by a man's insecurity over being bested by his wife. Mizu found comfort living as a boy under their Swordfather's care, but felt shame for hiding his true sex from him.

I think these two periods of their life are not about which slot in society they fit in, because obviously they don't fit perfectly in either, but acceptance by the people they choose to love instead. Mizu was forced by filial duty and love for their mother to become a wife, but fell in love with Mikio when he began to accept her as she was -- until he didn't. Master Eiji accepted Mizu as a boy, and raised him as he is. He stopped Mizu from confessing his sex not because he couldn't accept it, but because it didn't matter. The most telling scene to me is when Mizu says that they must be a demon, and Master Eiji tells him, Yes, perhaps they are, but that is only one part of a whole.

The show is social commentary on our expectations for people of certain classes, genders, and racial makeup. One of the biggest themes of this show is about the limits of living as a woman during the Edo Period, and the creators refer to them as "she," as she is based off of their daughter.

But we are free to interpret Mizu's gender as we wish. The whole point of their existence is that there is a question of culture and identity in our modern, globalized age, and instead of a yes or no answer, we are given a whole person and the story of their life in a completely different culture and era to draw our own conclusions.

The debate over Mizu also reminds me a lot of how westerners will point to certain historical figures throughout history as examples of genderqueer identity having always been a thing. Chevalier d'Éon of France and Bíawacheeitchish (Woman Chief) of the Crow Nation come to mind. How they identified may not fit the 21st Century English-language phrases we apply to them, but the idea is still that they lived outside of the social expectations of people born in their bodies.

Sidebar:

Mizu's reveal as someone born into the body of a woman surprised me, actually! As someone who grew up on East Asian media (primarily C-drama and anime and K-pop, with full cultural context for the former but only what I learn from my friends for the latter two), I'm very used to androgynous characters! My whole thought process throughout the first few episodes was, "Wow, they really took C-drama tropes and put them in an American show!"

Even after the reveal, I was like, "Oh, they took the other trope!" where in C-dramas, male characters played by female actresses turn out to be female characters disguised as men in order to roam with more freedom.

This whole show felt like I was watching a C-drama turned into a western cartoon, and because one of the creators is Japanese American, it made me realize how many tropes must've carried over from our Chinese and Japanese storytelling, and our cultures' influence on each other.