#to both read and to write | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

cenvast · 10 months ago

Text

"Toshiro Is Sexist," "Toshiro Owns Slaves": What's Really Going on With This Guy?

I've seen a lot of debate on whether or not Toshiro is problematic because he's a slave owner or because he's sexist in the context of his crush on Falin. While I do want to examine his relationship to Falin, I'd like to take a few steps back and unpack his upbringing first. We'll dive into the gender and class dynamics he was raised with and how it impacts his behavior in the main storyline.

Like all people, Toshiro is shaped by the environment he grew up in. Toshitsugu, Toshiro's father and the head of the Nakamoto clan, is the most impactful model of authority and manhood in his life. Toshiro does recognize some of his father's flaws and tries to avoid replicating them. But whether or not he emulates or subverts his father's behavior, Toshitsugu is often the starting point for Toshiro's treatment of others, particularly marginalized people.

The Nakamoto clan exists under a patriarchal hierarchy with Toshitsugu at the top. As noted by @fumifooms in their Nakamoto household post, his wife has more authority than Maizuru. She's able to ban Maizuru from parts of their residence, but despite disliking his infidelity, she can't divorce him or stop him from cheating on her. Their marriage is not an equal partnership.

On an interpersonal level, Toshitsugu and Maizuru also have a fraught relationship. While she does seem to care for him, she's often frustrated by his thoughtless behavior.

For example, he drunkenly buys Izutsumi for her — without considering how she'll have to raise this child — and invades her room in the middle of the night. When he cryptically says, "It's all my fault," she replies, "I can think of a lot of things that are your fault." She calls him an "idiot" and "believes that [Toshiro] will grow up to be a better clan leader than his father," implying that she takes issue with Toshitsugu's leadership.

Because Maizuru and Toshitsugu are described as being "in an intimate relationship" and "seem[ing] to be lovers," Maizuru appears to be a consensual participant. Still, this doesn't negate the large power imbalance between them as a male noble clan leader and his female retainer. This imbalance introduces an insidious undertone to Maizuru's frustration with Toshitsugu. Like Toshiro's mother, Maizuru doesn't have the agency to do as she pleases in their relationship; he has the ultimate authority. For instance, she doesn't seem to want to raise Izutsumi, but she has to anyway.

While Maizuru's role as Toshitsugu's mistress is significant, she's also the Nakamoto clan's teacher and Toshiro's primary maternal figure. She cares deeply for Toshiro: tailing him, feeding him, and taking responsibility even for his actions as an adult. While it might seem sweet that she cares for him like a son at first, Maizuru was notably fifteen years old at the time of his birth. In the extra comic below, he's six years old and has already been in her care for some time. Even if we're being generous and assuming that she didn't start raising him until he was six, she was still only twenty-one at the time she was parenting her boss/lover's child with another woman.

Maizuru's roles as mistress and maternal figure, in addition to her role as retainer, demonstrate the intersection between gendered and class oppression in the Nakamoto household. Despite her original role being a retainer trained in espionage, Toshitsugu presses her into performing gendered labor for him and eventually, Toshiro. She's expected to be Toshitsugu's lover, perform emotional labor for him as his confidant, care for his child, and carry out domestic tasks like cooking. She says, "Even during missions, I was often dragged into the kitchen." If she was a male servant, I doubt she would have been expected to perform these additional tasks. She can't avoid these tasks either, stating that her "own feelings don't factor into it."

Toshitsugu disregards his wife's and Maizuru's desires and emotions to serve his own interests. Because he has societal power over them as a nobleman and in Maizuru's case, her master, neither woman can escape their position in the household hierarchy.

As a result, Toshiro grew up within a structure where men and male nobility, in particular, wield the most societal power. The hierarchical nature of his household and society discourages everyone, including him as a clan leader's eldest son, from questioning and disrupting the existing hierarchy.

The other Nakamoto household members also internalize its sexist, classist power dynamics.

For example, Hien expects that she and Toshiro will replicate the uneven dynamics of the previous generation, regardless of her personal feelings. She sees her and Toshiro's relationship as paralleling Maizuru and Toshitsugu's relationship; she is the closest woman to Toshiro and his retainer, so she's shocked when Toshiro doesn't attempt to begin an intimate relationship with her. Notably, she doesn't have actual feelings for him. Her expectations are centered around the household's precedent of placing emotional, sexual, domestic, and child-rearing labor onto the female servants without any regard for their personal desires.

Hien also probably knows that her position in the household will improve if she is Toshiro's lover because she's seen it improve Maizuru's position. However, the fact that being the future clan leader's lover is the closest proximity she, as a female servant, has to power further reveals the gendered, class-based oppression she and the other women live under.

It's important to note that the Nakamoto clan bought Benichidori, Izutsumi, and Inutade as slaves, so they have less power and agency than Maizuru and Hien. The clan further dehumanizes Izutsumi and Inutade as demi-humans; their enslavement contains an additional layer of racialization.

Toshiro isn't oblivious to the gendered, class, and racial power dynamics of his household. He tries to distance himself from participating in its exploitative power structure. He walls himself off from Hien, who he's known since childhood, to avoid replicating his father's behavior and making his servant into his lover. He disapproves of his father's enslavement of Izutsumi and Inutade, and he lets Izutsumi go when she runs away in the Dungeon.

But does any of this absolve him of his complicity in his household's sexist, classist power dynamics and racialized slavery?

The short answer is absolutely not.

Despite his distaste for his father's exploitation of his servants and slaves, Toshiro still uses them. He refers to his party as "his retainers," and he has them fight and perform domestic tasks for him. You could argue that Toshiro doesn't like to and thus, doesn't regularly use his servants and slaves. In the context of him asking his retainers to help him rescue Falin, Maizuru says, "The only time he ever made any sort of personal request was for this task." But it shouldn't matter whether exploitation is a regular occurrence or not for it to be considered harmful. Toshiro asking Maizuru to cook him a meal still constitutes asking his female servant to perform gendered labor for him. He's also very accustomed to her grooming and dressing him.

Maizuru sees feeding, washing, and even advising Toshiro romantically as fulfilling Toshitsugu's orders to care for his son. They aren't fulfilling a "personal request." But just because her labor has been deemed expected and thereby devalued doesn't mean that it isn't labor or that she isn't performing it.

Maizuru's dynamic with Toshiro is also complicated by her role as his maternal figure. She loves him and wants to take care of him, and she doesn't have a choice in the matter. During Toshiro's childhood, the onus was on Toshitsugu to cease exploiting his lover and release her from servitude, but Toshiro is now an adult man. Seeing as how Maizuru defers to his wishes and calls him "Young Master," they still have a power imbalance that he's passively maintaining. Ideally, he would not ask anything of her until he has the authority to release her from servitude.

Throughout the story, Toshiro acts as if he has no agency and quietly disapproving of his father's actions absolves him of his participation in maintaining oppressive dynamics. While his father still ranks higher than him, he's essentially his father's heir. He has much more power than Maizuru, the highest-ranked servant. At the very least, he could leave his slave-owning household.

Unfortunately, his refusal to confront injustice is consistent with his character's major flaw: he does not express his opinions, desires, or needs. While this character trait obviously hurts his friendships, it also furthers his complicity in the injustices his household runs on.

Toshiro's relationship with eating food — the prevailing metaphor of the series — also parallels his relationship with confronting injustice. Maizuru mentions that he was a sickly child, so the act of eating may have been physically uncomfortable for him. As an adult, his refusal to eat crops up during his rescue attempt of Falin. Denying himself food might have been punishment for not accomplishing important tasks like rescuing Falin and/or a way to maintain control over something in his life when he felt like he'd lost control over the rest of it, again in the context of losing Falin. (Note: I suggest reading this post on Toshiro's disordered eating by @malaierba.)

But he cannot and does not avoid consuming food forever.

Similarly, Toshiro keeps his distance from his retainers and tries not to use them until the Falin situation occurs. His efforts to avoid exploiting his retainers amount to inaction — things he doesn't ask of them or do to them. But his inaction does nothing to dismantle the existing hierarchy that places his retainers under his authority, denies them agency, and often marginalizes them as not only servants or slaves but as women, and he ends up using them as servants and slaves anyways.

Returning to the narrative's themes of consumption, Toshiro cannot avoid eating just as he cannot avoid perpetuating the exploitative system of his household. The Nakamoto clan consumes the labor and personhood of those lower in the hierarchy. The retainers' labor as spies and domestic servants is the foundation of the clan's existence. Thus, the clan consumes their labor to sustain itself.

Within this hierarchy, the retainers' personhood is also consumed and erased. As Izutsumi describes, they are given different names and stripped of their agency to reject orders or leave. Maizuru and Hien also say their feelings are irrelevant in the context of Toshitsugu's and Toshiro's wants and needs. Both women are expected to comply with whatever is most beneficial and comfortable for the noblemen. Clearly, despite Toshiro's detachment from his household's functions, these social structures remain in place and harm the women under him.

Although we know the Nakamoto clan has male retainers, the choice to highlight the female retainers seems intentional. We're asked to interrogate how not only being a servant or a slave in a noble household impacts a person's life and agency, but how being a woman intersects with being a member of some of the lowest social classes.

Toshiro only distances himself from his father's behaviors of infidelity and exploitation so long as it doesn't take Toshiro out of his comfort zone. He doesn't free his slaves. He's far too comfortable with his female retainers performing domestic labor for him, and he barely acknowledges their efforts; they're shocked when he thanks them for helping him save Falin. He hasn't unpacked his sexist (or classist or racist) biases because he perpetuates his household's oppressive hierarchy throughout the narrative. Considering all of this, he inevitably brings this baggage to his interactions with Falin.

Falin is presumably one of the first women he's had extended contact with that isn't his relative or his family's servant. Because of his trauma surrounding his father and Maizuru sleeping together, he understandably falls for a woman as disconnected as possible from his father and his clan. He seems to genuinely like Falin, respects her boundaries, and graciously accepts her rejection. His behavior towards her is overall kind and unproblematic.

But if Falin had gone with him, she would've likely been devalued and sidelined like the other women of the Nakamoto household. No matter how much he loves Falin, simply loving her cannot replace the difficult work of unlearning his sexism. Love, of course, can and should be accompanied by that work, but by the close of the narrative, we gain little indication that Toshiro acknowledges or seeks to end his part in exploiting and devaluing women and other marginalized people.

A spark of hope does exist. Toshiro expressing his feelings to Laios and Falin suggests that his time away from home has encouraged him to speak up more. Breaking his habit of avoidance may be the first step towards acknowledging his complicity in systems of injustice and moving towards dismantling them.

Special thanks to my very smart friend @atialeague for bringing up Toshitsugu's relationship with Maizuru and the replication of dynamics of consumption and class! <3

#toshiro nakamoto #maizuru #hien #toshitsugu nakamoto #falin touden #izutsumi #inutade #benichidori #shuro #dungeon meshi #dunmeshi meta #dunmeshi analysis #quite literally free my girls #i got so sad after finding that parallel between maizuru and hien both saying their feelings don't matter #reading maizuru's character bio and how she's a brilliant woman #but she's stuck w toshiro's dad like #i'm toshitsugu's number one hater he better watch out #also thinking about how toshiro looked up to maizuru not even his own parents until he found out about maizuru and his dads relationship #that's devastating bro #im entering my clickbait title era LOL i was told my prev titles were too academia pilled and boring sounding #i think i want to write about izutsumi's and inutade's relationships w gender next #delicious in dungeon #dunmeshi #*mine #*meta

951 notes · View notes

beanarie · 18 days ago

Text

@bucktommywhumpweek day 4: grief. following from day 1 and days 2-3.

Tommy is awake. That might be the only way Buck was allowed in to see him; he was able to give consent. So Buck is grateful for multiple reasons.

He looks awful, weak and pale. But, he's awake. He blinks lazily, his brow furrowing as he registers what's in front of him.

"Why you here," he breathes.

Oh.

Buck should've known.

Buck touches the wheel of his chair. "I- I'll go, if you want. I-"

Tommy shakes his head slightly. "New cast," he says, a shade louder, pointing down. At Buck's leg.

"This?" Buck gestures at it. "Structure fire at a fitness center. Set of kettlebells tripped- tripped me up. I always hated those."

"Rude," Tommy whispers, a tiny smile playing on his lips.

"How are you feeling?" Buck asks.

"Like..." Tommy pauses to take a deeper breath. "I got T-boned."

"What a coincidence," Buck says, trying to sound light. "That's exactly what happened to you."

Tommy's smile goes from tiny to small, crinkling his crows feet. "S'good to see you." He lays his hand on the bed palm side up, and Buck gently takes it in his. "Never apologized."

And here's Buck's moment. The one he's been procrastinating over since the spring. "No, I didn't, but I am, so sor-"

Tommy tugs Buck's hand and points at himself.

"What do you have to be sorry for?"

Tommy lifts his other hand and uses two fingers to mime walking.

Buck huffs out a laugh. "That was like three relationship and federal crimes ago."

"Worst one," Tommy says, his smile gone.

"It was pretty bad." Buck runs his thumb along the back of Tommy's hand. "But I- I can't blame you for not wanting to live in the loft. I didn't even choose to stay there."

"I'd live there..." Tommy's eyes slide shut and he drags them open. "With you." Then he does it again. After the third time, he is fully out. Endeared, Buck glances at the monitor, and his blood runs cold.

Tommy's heart rate shouldn't be climbing right now.

"T-Tommy?" Buck wheels away from the bed and the nurses close in. As he exits the room, assisted by an orderly, the doctor yells for an ultrasound.

After Buck gets settled in the waiting area, he expects someone to reclaim the wheelchair. They're for patients, and upon his discharge, he officially stopped being one of those. Surely it's needed somewhere.

But no one says anything. Buck drifts again.

A hand squeezes his shoulder. Buck opens his eyes, realizing he hasn't seen Josh since he got Buck's phone back from the ER.

"Hey, I got you a vitamin water. Drink up. We need to get some electrolytes back in you."

Eddie, of all people. Buck takes the bottle and takes a sip.

Eddie nods approvingly. "Bobby's sick, so Maddie gave me a call."

Buck keeps his flinch internal this time. "Thanks," he says, because that's what you do. Just as Eddie did when he told Buck he's relocating with Chris and Buck said they might as well take the house back.

"Are you sure?" Eddie said, and Buck nodded instead of shrugging. Of course he wouldn't keep what has always been Eddie's house while they found some other place. (It was Eddie's kitchen where they had the fight. Somehow that made it better in Buck's mind.)

Then Eddie said, "Thanks, man."

Buck never once considered asking him for help moving. Eddie was busy, and he was probably still raw about Bobby, and that was a bad combination. Buck was not going to set him off again.

"Let's get a move on. Chris is making up the couch for you as we speak."

Suddenly Buck is in motion, but he doesn't want to be. He doesn't want any of this. "Stop," he says, engaging the brake when Eddie doesn't react quick enough. "I'm not leaving. Tommy's still in surgery."

"Buck, you stay here any longer they're gonna put you back in a room. You look like roadkill."

Why does it suddenly matter what I look like, Buck thinks. "I'm not going anywhere."

Eddie eyes him for a second, before letting his shoulders drop. "Okay. So we wait."

Right, wait. For Eddie to point out that Tommy is his ex, not his boyfriend, or check the time on his phone, or point out what else he needs to do today. Or. Or.

Buck watches Eddie pick out a pamphlet about pain management from the display and take it back to his seat.

"You can go, actually."

Eddie groans. "Come on, Buck."

"I don't need to be handled," he says. His heart is pounding in his ears.

Eddie takes in a breath that is absolutely a stifled sigh. "What are you talking about?"

"No one knows how to handle me," Buck quotes. "That's- That's fine. I'm not asking you to."

"Give me a break," Eddie says under his breath.

"If he doesn't m-make it-" Buck blinks rapidly, his chest burning. "If- If he dies in there, it wouldn't be your loss, too. You stopped being his friend before you stopped being mine. W-Why are you still here?"

It's not fair. It's not even entirely true. But it feels right in the moment, and Buck is so sick of holding back out of fear of retaliation. Go ahead, he thinks. Grab me in front of all these people. Give me a shove that tips over this wheelchair.

Leave. Stop making me think I can count on you and then yanking the rug out from under me.

Eddie is staring at him, hands loose at his sides. The pamphlet fell on the floor at some point.

"I wasn't there for you after Shannon, and I- I tried to make up for that ever since. But you. You were here. You've been here."

Buck's ankle is killing him. Josh got him meds from the pharmacy downstairs, but Buck shouldn't take pain pills on an empty stomach. There's nothing he can do that doesn't require doing something else first. He's so tired.

He shoves at his temple with the heel of his hand. The headache is back, too. "I wake up three, four, five times a night every night and I don't pick up the phone. I don't tell anyone the next day. Because how dare I make it all about me."

"I wanted you to talk to me," Eddie says. "To actually talk. But all I got were those stupid assessment questions, because you were in your head about it. I didn't want psych triage, Buck. I wanted my best friend."

"Sorry picking you up from the airport and telling you we were just glad you came wasn't enough. Sorry, I couldn't be more of a 'best friend'."

"God, Joan of Arc over here. You sure you aren't Catholic?"

"What did you do?" Buck asks.

Eddie clenches his jaw. "I tried."

"When?"

"Is anyone here for Thomas Kinard?"

#bucktommy #tevan fic #bucktommywhumpweek #my writing #things by beanarie #i read an eddie stan post that both pissed me off #and made me think about the authorial intent behind the kitchen rager #so this is what you get

321 notes · View notes