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hahahafangirl · 24 days ago

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[WBK Character Analysis] Suo Hayato and the Crisis of Contact [Part 1]

EDITs

5/29: Added commentaries to Suo v. Oobiki and minor edits.

This is yet another contribution to the well-made observations that: Suo does not eat with others in a story that emphasizes eating together; his fighting style is predominantly evasive amidst a narrative of fighting as a conversation; and all the deflections he deploys in response to any attempts to know him deeper. All in all, an avoidance of contact and any violation of boundaries — the literal boundary of bodily contact and symbolic boundary of knowing.

Overall, most of the observations here are… not that new. However, there are a few things I have personally seen less discussed in details: humor as deflection (both in the story and its effect on the fandom), Suo’s arrogance and disinterests in his opponents, and his subtle detachment from his peers… even if he loves and cares for them.

The language of this analysis is heavily based on Anne Carson’s essay Dirt and Desire: An Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity. Unfortunately, I am too much of an insane Anne Carson stan to discuss this in any normal way (deeply sorry for that). Regardless, I will try to be as clear as possible, despite my general insistence in uh. using the words that I do (bear with me). Because I am absolutely insane, have a table of content:

Contact as a crisis; dirt; leakage (Part 1)

Suo's general (habitual) deflections (Part 1)

Suo's emotional intelligence and approach to emotionality (Part 1.5)

Teenage arrogance and disinterest in Others

Suo's relationships to other people; or, the disparateness between Love and Relationship

Suo versus Sakura

Note that much of these are interpretations/extrapolations outside of things that are explicit in canon.

I will try to keep each post about 2-3k or less; this total analysis will be split over multiple part. Part 1 (this one) will focus on point 1) and justifies its connection to Suo (and WBK) and point 2), which are primarily textual evidences.

Crisis of Contact: so what the hell am I talking about?

This portion will be on Anne Carson's Dirt and Desire essay, as to provide the context in which I framed this character analysis. I will try to be as brief as I can while being understandable. The original essay itself, as the title revealed, is mostly about the construction of female gender (roles) in Greek antiquity, but its discussion of Touch, Dirt, and Leakage proved to be very useful frameworks!

First, on Touch:

As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another---whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional, or imaginary. Contact is crisis. As the anthropologists say, "Every touch is a modified blow."

This is what I mean by the "crisis of contact." Every contact itself is a mini-crisis: when we exchange blows, our skin touch, thus violating a closed and fixed physical boundary; when we converse, our words and minds touch, thus breaking open our worldviews and preconception; when we connect with other, they (and we) shattered the walls we constructed in our mind and permanently nestled themselves into our minds and hearts. These are all the things that Sakura, our beloved MC, is challenged by the narratives to learn how to do-- and succeed. His blushing embarrassment, in this framework, is a response to these "crises" of violations.

[Sakura blushes nearly every time he learns how to communicate and recognize his feelings... lol]

[the mortifying ordeal of being known]

on Dirt:

"Dirt" may be defined as "matter out of place." The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt; the poached egg on the floor of the Reading Room of the British Museum is... Mary Douglas calls pollution "a particular class of dangers which are not powers vested in humans but which can be released by human actions."

A little more background: the Greek antiquity conceptualize men as "hot, dry, vessel" and women as "cold, wet, liquid (to be contained in a vessel". So, dirt as "matter out of place" equates to "liquid not being properly contained". As Mary Douglas puts it, being "dirt" is not anything inherent to human or even women in particular; we all just have the ability to displace matters and make them "dirt" -- including ourselves. Sakura was treated, as we can put it, "less than dirt" for being "out of place." Same with Kaji's unrestrainable anger -- until Hiiragi figured out a way to help him "contain" it. Umemiya, as a child, felt that his own grief was displaced, his own life and his family's lives misplaced between who die and who gets to live -- his entire existence as "dirty". We can formulate any ostracism and troubles in Wind Breaker into displacement and dirt -- it's a fun exercise! But it will be more helpful if we put this construction of "dirt" into use.

How does any of this relates to Suo? We already noticed that he avoids, and, if he cannot, minimizes all contacts-- avoiding all the crises that everyone else, especially Sakura, go through. Most of these have lead to immense character growth. Maybe it's just not Suo's time to go into it yet. But for a deuteragonist, on a similar level of screen-time and importance as Nirei, Suo's arc thus far remains glaringly stagnant. One thing that he perhaps "grew" in is holding in his ruthlessness better after Sakura refocused Suo's vengeance in a more productive way (fight off other opponents and not beat one guy to death) during the KEEL fight. But we haven't seen a situation that actually "proves" that growth in a fight yet. So far, no contact, no crises yet, to grow, while Umemiya has explicitly said: "You need a little bit of conflicts to grow." Thus far Suo's "vessel" remains completely intact and its contents unseen (unlike Sakura's and Nirei's anxieties and trauma).

Where does dirt comes in? On a more literal sense, we have seen that Suo... never get dirtied after a fight. There is one (1) chapter where his face is scuffed (ch145)...

... significantly less than others, and it magically disappear in the next chapter. I think it's innocuous enough to be a mistake in Nii-sensei's part (either to remove or to add it), but, there is another interpretation: Let's remind ourselves that stories are about narratives, and that character, their design, their physical and mental states, are tools of the narratives*. Suo's (minimally) scuffed state is more symbolic of the Bofurin kids engaging in Sakura's struggle to pull him out of it -- a collective contact, willingly be "dirtied" to touch and pull Sakura out of drowning -- rather than Suo finally getting injured in a fight, after all. In addition to this, it will be visually jarring if Suo remains untouched here (note that this is not to dismiss what I said right before that).

*(Nii-sensei has such a command of details and themes in WBK that I must allow everything to be Symbolic-- there will be more on this in other topic)

Although this is a counterexample, it is to emphasize that, well, we noticed that Suo has never been dirtied or "touched" in any way in a fight. In a work where people routinely gets injured, bleed, violently got their face smashed in (I'm still in pain thinking about the Kaji v. Banjo fight), Suo never has his boundaries breached the way others has. No contact, no dirt. A closed room. He never let anything "out of place" be on him and is never actively being "out of place" himself -- even in the Red Light district, he does not seems frazzled (out of place) the way Nirei or Sakura were. No crack in the vessel, no leakage; nothing is leaving him either. No substantial personal fact is known-- for a deuteragonist, that's quite unusual.

The only "secret" we know? Natto. It is honestly lighthearted enough to be a joke (that is not to dismiss its importance or factuality!). It becomes a gag in the fandom! Purely because of how little else we know about Suo!

AND SUO DOESN'T EVEN NEED TO SUCCESSFULLY DEFLECT IT HIMSELF. THE NARRATIVE DID IT FOR HIM!!!!!

LIKE. LMFAO. OMFG. WE HAVE ALL BEEN PLAYED!!!!!!!!

THE NARRATIVE WANTS SUO TO BE AS INSCRUTABLE AS POSSIBLE.

GO HOME. THERE IS NOTHING FOR US.

JK! WE ARE STILL DIGGING OURSELVES INTO IT FOR ANY GRAIN OF INFORMATION THAT WE CAN!

We have some textual evidences already. Let's go for more.

More on Suo's habitual deflections

Let's begin by making a list of his deflections:

Fighting style: predominantly defensive; "pushing away" instead of "smashing in"

Personal information: humor to deflect from (what could be) his insecurities; reveal-not-reveal origin of his fighting styles, or details about his master; the "diet"

Emotionality: "I'm not usually this emotional"; disquiets hiding underneath maturity

Clothing: no skin?.megamind

Narrative/Production deflections: why is Suo the only person whose room is not revealed? lmfao?

Ok. I think that's everything.

Fighting styles:

Suo is a predominantly defensive fighter. In a fight with non-fighters involved, he naturally steps into a protective role by default. The only time this changed was when Nirei volunteered to take that role and encouraged Sakura and Suo to go on the offense. Defense or offense, Suo deflects moves and takes down opponents by their offensive momentum — if they pass out hitting their head on concrete, great! He does not contribute his own force into the fight; no horse in the race, no input to the conversations.

Compare to, say, Sakura and most others, who charges ahead, moving into their opponents' space to attack; Tsugeura, whose virtue involves allowing opponent one (1) hit and then... German suplex them; or Kiryu, whose fighting style is most similar to Suo — except he often disables his opponents with what looks like accupressure. Perhaps the most relevant difference is that Kiryu does charge ahead to fight, and some of his moves involve pulling the opponents in. Suo does none of that— he waits until they violate his space and pushes them out.

Pulling in...

Pushing out. Note that Suo does not reach for his opponents— he waits until they are in his space.

The only time we have seen Suo "attack", per se, is 1) KEEL and 2) against Oobiki, where he needed to wrap things up quickly and this isn't an opponent who would go down with deflection. That's the literal, in-text explanation at least. Symbolically? I'm not sure! Maybe Suo did in fact get close enough to Nirei and his classmates to expresses something about himself— not deflect, but rather, physically engages in the fight. That will take me more time to think about.

EDIT: Hey, this is also the fight where Suo finally reveals something about himself— specifically, his philosophy and focus on teaching, “discipline” as passing down knowledge (and, side notes, not as “punishment” — this is something I’m exploring in a fic actually xP). We even got the first visual of his Master! So, yep, he contributed something in this conversation here. This is the very first step in advancing towards Suo’s backstory; Nii-sensei is telling us to be patient! We got a similar visual (the back of the head) of Akari ~200 chapters before Kiryu’s arc, after all.

And this is also the same fight where Suo's untouchability and INSCRUTABILITY ("I can't read you at all") is explicitly addressed— by a fighter that is approximately Noroshi's caliber; or at least, much stronger than KEEL or Kanuma.

In KEEL, his aggression was taken as unusual/"the wrong decision". Against Kanuma, he didn't even mean to hit for real— only to scare/shock the opponents. Suo is an incredible fighter, acknowledged by Nirei's intels, Hiiragi and Umemiya themselves, and Sakura wanting to fight him. And, from his untouchability, literally (as in, not symbolically) we have yet to actually see Suo's full, current capability at all! And that is A LOT to hold out on when every character, one after another, get pushed to their limit. Suo's avoidance of initiating fights is narratively convenient to this end and also... says something about his refusal to initiate a "conversation".

2. Personal information and humor

We have seen this before with natto! His easy-going demeanor, ability to diffusive and deflect ("This conversation is about Sakura!") enables him to stagnate the conversation until the narrative ended it for him. As for reveal-not-reveal: I want to note that we do know things about Suo; quite a few things, in fact. Suo does not never say anything about himself, but give enough information to satisfy/shut down the conversation without providing anything revealing about himself. "Oh, I can't personally tell you what my fighting style is-- my Master is self-taught." (You have a Master? What are they like? How long have you been practicing? What?) "Oh, I'm on a diet." (What kind of diet? What can you actually eat and not eat? Why aren't you eating anything at all?)

Suo has been demonstrated to be an incredibly socially-capable person; his self-selected main role as vice-captain is negotiation and people-dealing. He has shown an incredible level of emotional intelligence, sensibility, and sensitivity to other's thoughts and feelings: being able to tell that Sakura is not used to other helping him, therefore knowing that it will be difficult for them all if Nirei and him continue to push; repeatedly being able to use Umemiya "against" Sugishita to get the latter to do things. Suo knows how to start and end a conversation, what to say, how to steer the interaction one way or another, how to stall— his social skills and suaveness are vitals in all these social deflections.

Notably, humor plays into this a lot (yet another example of social-capability). His eyepatch is the biggest mystery by far— and he was able to shut down any speculations or focus on it by bringing it up before anyone else can, therefore being in control of the topic.

Note that he brought it up out-of-nowhere, already anticipating the curiosity: "By the way..." and quickly changes the topic to Sakura

The constant, mysterious "diet" is also introduced under humorous connotations (Suo agreeing with Nirei's about the unusualness of the context of the meal, then immediately subverts expectation by reveal that should he be able to eat, he would-- he is just on a diet).

He blatantly lies — for innocuous things such that they are humorous — and gets out of explaining anything; like why he does not want to go into water

(My theory on this is quite innocuous: depends on how recent Suo's eye injury is, healing can be quite slow and touching sea water is... bad for that. It'd just ruin the mood if we bring it up.)

With the eyepatch and the water, is there a chance that Nirei is too polite to push it? Absolutely. And that is another "manipulation" of social situation Suo is capable of: he gives non-answer that is tonally appropriates such that it is impolite/insensitive should anyone tries to push. Boom, nobody knows anything. Closed room, no leakage.

3. Emotional disquiets

Suo's "veneer" of calmness and maturity is so constant and iconic that the smallest ripple sends the narratives (and us) to ruin! And this contrast is emphasized by the narratives�� I'm only showing here the more subtle signs in each "incident", and we already feel the disruption!

(Note the look of disdain in this one— we will come back to this later)

Suo is not as "mature" or unperturbed as he paints himself to be; he is, after all, a human, and a 15 year old child at that. In a story that emphasizes realistic emotional responses, it is extremely unrealistic to paint a 15yo boy as having it all together (orewing wrote an excellent post on this subject). Maturity, in this case, is a mask and therefore another deflection— hiding away his emotions and disdain until it came bursting out of him, ignoring his emotions to prevent others from seeing and "interacting" with it — vision becomes another mode of boundary violations (yes, this is in the Anne Carson essay). Now, the interesting question here is: Why is this the case? Unfortunately, that is outside the scope of this research <3

4. Conservative clothing: no_skin?.megamind

It's not about being revealing, it's about his wardrobe being so distinctly old-school and especially jarringly conservative in the beach trip that brought to attention how uh. tall the wall is. Funnily enough, recently there was a fake-merch post going around on Twitter that people immediately spotted as fake because Suo reveals his upper torso in that one (lol) and the official one, coming out the next day, has him covered from head to toe. Symbolically speaking, this is yet another visual hint that Suo is extremely mysterious and elusive. Fashion and personal styles are extremely important to WBK's characterization and narratives. Everything design-wise is very intentional— including Suo's secrecy.

It's highkey just funny as a gag at this point. There were theories about secret back tattoos (I think primarily motivated by Nii-sensei once posting a character design hiding elaborate back tattoos under normal school uniform that does looks suspiciously like Suo's initial design, now that I think about it.) I don't know if I believe that; scars theories are more likely, but I don't think tonally WBK is trying to tell a more violent stories than what normal people within 1-1.5 standard deviation of the Bell curve will experience. In other words, I don't think the narrative looks to tell what is implied if Suo's back is elaborately tattooed or viciously scarred. I am not saying that HCs about these are invalid, just that— who knows what is in store! It is possible that Suo, with all of his evasiveness and general strangeness from the narrative, is in fact the one representing the "exorbitant" violence in the world.

5. Narrative deflections: Nii-sensei is holding out on us.

Here is the final straw: It is no coincidence or innocuous chances that all of these deflections and overall sense of detachment is overthinking. Nii-sensei seems to be extremely involved, by usual manga standard, into (at least evidently) merch and game adaptation of Wind Breaker. Wanijima, I'm pretty sure, was introduced as a WBK game character prior to his "adoption" into the manga. All the merch strictly sticks to Suo's visual conservativeness. And, very intentionally, Suo is the only main class 1-1 member whose bedroom is not shown in the artbook. What is Nii-sensei hiding? A lot, it looks like.

What does that means besides confirming that we aren't all extremely delusional? Nii-sensei seems to be deflecting us, too. Well, it's actually way too late at night and I have spent too long writing this to overthink this point. I can only be certain that there will be a lot in store for Suo's character developments, arc, and that I trust Nii-sensei's pen. Amen.

That's it for now! Part 2 will hopefully cover the last three points (maybe only one or two each) depends on how much I have to say. Evidently, I have waaaaay more to say than I thought. Thanks for holding out if you reach this point, and let me say that we did most of the heavy lifting/justifications here :thumbs-up: The discussion of dirt, leakage, and crisis was hopefully constructive/interesting!

I would love any feedbacks/thoughts AND FEELINGS on this, including if my writing is absolutely unreadable (and yeah feel free to use anon questions should you desire to). Would be beyond happy to clarify anything I wrote, and discuss more!

See yall in Part 2, which may come out earlier than I or you want or expected.

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