"Her face and figure are far from perfect, so why do you waste your time with her?"
Warning: total geekery ahead that involves combining an English degree with an anime that was never meant to be analyzed.
---
I love Falc, partly because we had a conversation tonight that started with:
How was [watching] SMJ Again with John?
And somehow grew into:
[The Saber Marionette franchise deserves a good hard feminist reading] because [the marionettes] kick butt, but in the end they need the love of a man - even an emotionally, physically, and in SMR's case sexually abusive man - to survive. [1]
Mmhm.
(Even Otaru's emotionally abusive, though not physically) [2]
Yes. Even though he's good to them from a robot-human relations perspective, he's not perfect; see especially his idol star moments. [3]
Leading to Lime running away.
See also: "Don't follow me or I'll hate you"
Ieyasu is good to them, but he's not their master.
Right.
I don't think the manga has the idol star subplot - but it does have Lime getting hurt and not telling Otaru because it'll annoy him.
She falls out of the tree, that bit.
There's no time for the idol star subplot. ^_^;
Anyway, the thing is, it has this dichotomy--
Girls who kick butt, girls with development and emotion and personality - but girls who NEED men, girls designed to serve men, programmed girls (they're strong and loyal only because a man made them that way), the entire cultural ideal of ALL marionettes as useful eyecandy, the saber dolls and the girls in particular being designed as components of one ideal woman, the entire idea of Cherry--
and, as discussed, being willing/expected to endure abuse and in the saber dolls' case especially, HAVING to in order to survive
Bloodberry, honestly, is the best woman in the series (I count Lime as a girl) - she loves fighting more than the others and it doesn't make her less of a woman, she has that element of actively wanting and pursuing the boy without shame-- [4]
But even so? Little Miss Fanservice, and greatest ambition is to marry Otaru.
Only thing in Cherry's favor is her critical thinking skills, but oh noes we'd better package critical thinking / strategic skills in a nice little yamato nadesico type so the men won't feel threatened by her.
[1] - For those who're unfamiliar with the series but are reading this anyway: yes, literally to survive. Or at least to remain sane and functional.
[2] - I meant to suggest here, and never got around to it, that Otaru's mid-series neglect and failure to notice Lime's injury in the manga IS a form of physical abuse. At any rate, Falc makes a good point - I was initially referring just to Faust and Starface, though I'd argue that, just as SMR's Starface is a worse (to the extreme) version of SMJ's Faust, SMR's Junior is a much better (to the extreme) version of SMJ's Otaru - I'd have to watch it again, though, to get a better idea of what Junior's like. He may not fit the emotionally-abusive mold at all - though maybe it's just the contrast between him and the other three that makes me think so, since the arena battle at the beginning of SMR showcases both his love for the marionettes AND their status as service/entertainment objects, even to him.
[3] - Which is particularly vexing because his behavior during the idol star subplot is broadly implied to be wrong, but outside of that he's held up as a paragon of how to treat a marionette - just because he's the best example of how to treat them still doesn't make his ordinary behavior the proper way to treat them.
[4] - The text here is changed from what I originally said, but now makes sense to people who are not me and Falc, due to a reference made in my original text.
---
Why yes, I asked an innocent "how's the anime-watching going" question and somehow it turned into the start of a feminist reading of a blatantly misogynistic decade-old anime franchise. ^_^;
Er, I mean, ^_^_v
And Aaron did say more than what's there - I just cropped it to the most relevant bits from both of us. In fact he's the one who first pointed out what a jerk Otaru is, which REALLY got me going on this.
Really, this is WAY too easy because the entire anime is predicated on the fact that it's a planet of only men, with robots designed to look and act like human females, so every female in SMJ (not sure about J Again, J to X, and SMR) is, as Falc put it later, "literally objectified." It's not a real brain drain to find all this, but at the same time, it's kinda fun. Been a long time since I've done literary criticism for fun.
(Disregard the icon's mood-tag - it's the only SMJ icon I have these days.)
Addendum: Saturday afternoon, driving around, it occured to me that the scene the subject line is taken from is actually an interesting counter to the trend - the fact that Lime, at least, wasn't designed to be flawlessly beautiful, indicates something positive about the founders - although, again, maybe she doesn't count because emotionally and cognitively she's a five-year-old with the body of a grown woman and the strength of a robot.
I will hit the first person who says "Shut up, Aqua, it's just a TV show; don't take it so seriously."
---
I love Falc, partly because we had a conversation tonight that started with:
How was [watching] SMJ Again with John?
And somehow grew into:
[The Saber Marionette franchise deserves a good hard feminist reading] because [the marionettes] kick butt, but in the end they need the love of a man - even an emotionally, physically, and in SMR's case sexually abusive man - to survive. [1]
Mmhm.
(Even Otaru's emotionally abusive, though not physically) [2]
Yes. Even though he's good to them from a robot-human relations perspective, he's not perfect; see especially his idol star moments. [3]
Leading to Lime running away.
See also: "Don't follow me or I'll hate you"
Ieyasu is good to them, but he's not their master.
Right.
I don't think the manga has the idol star subplot - but it does have Lime getting hurt and not telling Otaru because it'll annoy him.
She falls out of the tree, that bit.
There's no time for the idol star subplot. ^_^;
Anyway, the thing is, it has this dichotomy--
Girls who kick butt, girls with development and emotion and personality - but girls who NEED men, girls designed to serve men, programmed girls (they're strong and loyal only because a man made them that way), the entire cultural ideal of ALL marionettes as useful eyecandy, the saber dolls and the girls in particular being designed as components of one ideal woman, the entire idea of Cherry--
and, as discussed, being willing/expected to endure abuse and in the saber dolls' case especially, HAVING to in order to survive
Bloodberry, honestly, is the best woman in the series (I count Lime as a girl) - she loves fighting more than the others and it doesn't make her less of a woman, she has that element of actively wanting and pursuing the boy without shame-- [4]
But even so? Little Miss Fanservice, and greatest ambition is to marry Otaru.
Only thing in Cherry's favor is her critical thinking skills, but oh noes we'd better package critical thinking / strategic skills in a nice little yamato nadesico type so the men won't feel threatened by her.
[1] - For those who're unfamiliar with the series but are reading this anyway: yes, literally to survive. Or at least to remain sane and functional.
[2] - I meant to suggest here, and never got around to it, that Otaru's mid-series neglect and failure to notice Lime's injury in the manga IS a form of physical abuse. At any rate, Falc makes a good point - I was initially referring just to Faust and Starface, though I'd argue that, just as SMR's Starface is a worse (to the extreme) version of SMJ's Faust, SMR's Junior is a much better (to the extreme) version of SMJ's Otaru - I'd have to watch it again, though, to get a better idea of what Junior's like. He may not fit the emotionally-abusive mold at all - though maybe it's just the contrast between him and the other three that makes me think so, since the arena battle at the beginning of SMR showcases both his love for the marionettes AND their status as service/entertainment objects, even to him.
[3] - Which is particularly vexing because his behavior during the idol star subplot is broadly implied to be wrong, but outside of that he's held up as a paragon of how to treat a marionette - just because he's the best example of how to treat them still doesn't make his ordinary behavior the proper way to treat them.
[4] - The text here is changed from what I originally said, but now makes sense to people who are not me and Falc, due to a reference made in my original text.
---
Why yes, I asked an innocent "how's the anime-watching going" question and somehow it turned into the start of a feminist reading of a blatantly misogynistic decade-old anime franchise. ^_^;
Er, I mean, ^_^_v
And Aaron did say more than what's there - I just cropped it to the most relevant bits from both of us. In fact he's the one who first pointed out what a jerk Otaru is, which REALLY got me going on this.
Really, this is WAY too easy because the entire anime is predicated on the fact that it's a planet of only men, with robots designed to look and act like human females, so every female in SMJ (not sure about J Again, J to X, and SMR) is, as Falc put it later, "literally objectified." It's not a real brain drain to find all this, but at the same time, it's kinda fun. Been a long time since I've done literary criticism for fun.
(Disregard the icon's mood-tag - it's the only SMJ icon I have these days.)
Addendum: Saturday afternoon, driving around, it occured to me that the scene the subject line is taken from is actually an interesting counter to the trend - the fact that Lime, at least, wasn't designed to be flawlessly beautiful, indicates something positive about the founders - although, again, maybe she doesn't count because emotionally and cognitively she's a five-year-old with the body of a grown woman and the strength of a robot.
I will hit the first person who says "Shut up, Aqua, it's just a TV show; don't take it so seriously."