(no subject)
So: Pacific Rim. I saw it twice, can't stop listening to the soundtrack, am even writing crossover/fusion fic with Tron characters, etc. But the movie is widely advertised as having a Strong Female Character, and I find I can't recommend it to others on that basis.
The Strong Female Character must, by process of elimination, be Mako Mori, since the only other female non-extra has very few lines (in Russian) and then dies. (And is also awesome, FIGHT ME. But Alexis* Kaidanovsky, aside from sashaying around being awesome, has no CR with anyone except her husband, no lines outside of untranslated ones during her battle scene, and then, did I mention, dies. Which is exactly how the movie's three literally identical (o_O) Chinese male characters fare, so yay, equality of one kind or another?) But anyway: Mako. I watched the movie feeling increasingly confused about her, and have still come to no coherent conclusion.
Mako is not objectified. She is not lusted after by the male characters; she is not portrayed in her underclothes for the titillation of male viewers; she is not roped into a relationship with the leading male whom she's only known for a day or two but they have A Bond and they fought monsters together. She speaks Japanese and he responds in Japanese; her language is not gibberish to be othered by Western characters who can't be bothered to learn it. She was in charge of refitting Raleigh's old jaeger, though that was Told Not Shown. She is the movie's "chosen one", inexplicably the perfect co-pilot to Drift with Raleigh, sought after by him not because she's a woman but because her skill and drive intrigue him and they work well together. (I would criticize the strange "I know we can Drift because we sparred for a while" scene, but the bo staff is a weakness of mine, and shonen male characters traditionally bond by fighting.) And she gets the stereotypically male warrior's-journey story arc: family killed by kaijus, raised by a kind but hard and remote warrior, talents trained to a knifepoint in her quest for vengeance, counseled against letting it consume her but burning with it all the way, suspicious of her co-pilot and ready to criticize what she's heard about him, slowly learning to trust her partner, gaining her revenge while losing her mentor at the end.
And yet.
She and Alexis are the only non-generic-extra females in the Shatterdome. She defers to Pentecost almost religiously. Raleigh, despite counseling that "the Drift is silence", can't let a minute of their Drifts go by without telling her what to do, while she scarcely speaks at all. Raleigh prevents her from striking Chuck when Chuck insults him and then she stands by, barely even in the frame and showing little expression or reaction, as Raleigh, without waiting for her thoughts on the matter, beats Chuck to a bloody pulp for insulting her. She panics and weeps, begging him not to leave her, when she thinks he's dead.
A lot of her Strong Female Character points, as seen onscreen, have very little to do with her character and more to do with the way people treat her.
(I'm not surprised. Writers attempting, possibly for the first time, to avoid all the objectification pitfalls often have very little idea what else to do with a character who uses female pronouns. Much of the time, absence of objectification and camera time to equal the male lead is all a viewer can hope for, and the movie delivers that in spades.)
But then they have the We Won Let's Hug scene, and they don't kiss, and waitwhut? The movie actually doesn't award her to him as the prize for most awesome hero or assume that makeouts are obligatory? And it's the most tender and least possessive hug I've seen since I can't remember when. They're Sam and Quorra Mk II, but in this scene, even better.
So I am conflicted.
If I try, I can establish a lot of Mako's submissiveness as connected to her early life. She lost her family very traumatically; I've seen plenty of male anime characters weeping just as hysterically for their dead kin. For all Pentecost's care for her, she refers to him as sensei, not father; I'd even speculate that though she deeply respects and cares for him, he's emotionally entangled with her in ways she isn't with him. He's a hard, uncompromising person, considering himself a fixed point in the lives of his subordinates and keeping his suffering private when one of them falls. In the extended media, we find out that his sister Luna, a fighter pilot, flew against Trespasser and died because she was the sort of person who would throw herself heart first into defending the world against monsters; and his (female) jaeger copilot Tamsin, whom he also cared deeply about, developed cancer from their jaeger's radiation and died, emaciated, in a hospital -- where young Mako, in the tie-in comic, met her. Mako is still very young in a way familiar to those afflicted with tragedy and loss early on. She craves stability in a life that uprooted her, searching for it in those around her, sometimes unsuccessfully, and seeking openness from Pentecost that he was often unable or unwilling to give. He would not have easily accepted Mako's desire to fight the monsters; she would have attended the Academy, racked up her impressive simulator score, and hung around the Shatterdome largely against his will. It would not have been an easy relationship, and, indeed, was not, from what we see of their behavior.
The problem is that none of this was in the movie. Luna and Tamsin? They don't even get a minor mention, not even as faces in old photographs, despite the writer stating that Luna is massively important to who Pentecost is. (And don't get me started on the lack of any reference to Caitlin Lightcap -- essentially Lora Baines reincarnated, who invented the Drift apparatus and was an amazing groundbreaking scientist despite some kind of preexisting neural condition that had left her dependent on medication, and we don't even know what happened to her. And the novelization is the only place where we hear about the existence of Vanessa Gottlieb, Hermann's expectant wife, which would certainly factor into Hermann's characterization if the movie had bothered to mention anything about her at all. Just... really, why?) All we see in the movie is Pentecost as a fixed point and Mako's unwillingness to defy his direct orders as the Shatterdome's commander.
Pacific Rim shouldn't have relied on expandedverse media to tell parts of the story essential to knowing the characters in the movie. It could have been filled with awesome female characters without taking anything away from the male characters, who were also a great deal of fun. (And that's only a couple of the character points that were left out of the movie. Mako's father? Was a swordmaker. It would have been nice to know that when Mako was deploying the giant sword Raleigh didn't know their jaeger had to slice Otachi in two "for my family".) All I know about Tamsin, Luna, Vanessa, and Caitlin Lightcap is from the wiki's references to the prequel comics and the novelization, which I, being poor, have only my dreams on a budget, do not have access to yet.
So... yeah. Conflicted.
I can't blame Mako. She's not a bad character; she's not objectified by the movie (though I hear differently about the novelization); her character history shows great strength that isn't adequately explored in the movie. But when I watched Pacific Rim, all those important things about her just weren't there.
AND YET it's a movie that I like, because music and monsters and mechas and mind-melds and banding together to save the world.
Someone stop me from cosplaying Newt, because I will totally do it.
*The Kaidanovsky's given names are Sasha and Aleksis. Travis Beecham, the screenwriter, is unclear as to which is which. *headdesk* But what's going around the fandom now is that both are short for Alexander ("it's a thing they do").
Originally posted on Dreamwidth. There are
comments there so far.
The Strong Female Character must, by process of elimination, be Mako Mori, since the only other female non-extra has very few lines (in Russian) and then dies. (And is also awesome, FIGHT ME. But Alexis* Kaidanovsky, aside from sashaying around being awesome, has no CR with anyone except her husband, no lines outside of untranslated ones during her battle scene, and then, did I mention, dies. Which is exactly how the movie's three literally identical (o_O) Chinese male characters fare, so yay, equality of one kind or another?) But anyway: Mako. I watched the movie feeling increasingly confused about her, and have still come to no coherent conclusion.
Mako is not objectified. She is not lusted after by the male characters; she is not portrayed in her underclothes for the titillation of male viewers; she is not roped into a relationship with the leading male whom she's only known for a day or two but they have A Bond and they fought monsters together. She speaks Japanese and he responds in Japanese; her language is not gibberish to be othered by Western characters who can't be bothered to learn it. She was in charge of refitting Raleigh's old jaeger, though that was Told Not Shown. She is the movie's "chosen one", inexplicably the perfect co-pilot to Drift with Raleigh, sought after by him not because she's a woman but because her skill and drive intrigue him and they work well together. (I would criticize the strange "I know we can Drift because we sparred for a while" scene, but the bo staff is a weakness of mine, and shonen male characters traditionally bond by fighting.) And she gets the stereotypically male warrior's-journey story arc: family killed by kaijus, raised by a kind but hard and remote warrior, talents trained to a knifepoint in her quest for vengeance, counseled against letting it consume her but burning with it all the way, suspicious of her co-pilot and ready to criticize what she's heard about him, slowly learning to trust her partner, gaining her revenge while losing her mentor at the end.
And yet.
She and Alexis are the only non-generic-extra females in the Shatterdome. She defers to Pentecost almost religiously. Raleigh, despite counseling that "the Drift is silence", can't let a minute of their Drifts go by without telling her what to do, while she scarcely speaks at all. Raleigh prevents her from striking Chuck when Chuck insults him and then she stands by, barely even in the frame and showing little expression or reaction, as Raleigh, without waiting for her thoughts on the matter, beats Chuck to a bloody pulp for insulting her. She panics and weeps, begging him not to leave her, when she thinks he's dead.
A lot of her Strong Female Character points, as seen onscreen, have very little to do with her character and more to do with the way people treat her.
(I'm not surprised. Writers attempting, possibly for the first time, to avoid all the objectification pitfalls often have very little idea what else to do with a character who uses female pronouns. Much of the time, absence of objectification and camera time to equal the male lead is all a viewer can hope for, and the movie delivers that in spades.)
But then they have the We Won Let's Hug scene, and they don't kiss, and waitwhut? The movie actually doesn't award her to him as the prize for most awesome hero or assume that makeouts are obligatory? And it's the most tender and least possessive hug I've seen since I can't remember when. They're Sam and Quorra Mk II, but in this scene, even better.
So I am conflicted.
If I try, I can establish a lot of Mako's submissiveness as connected to her early life. She lost her family very traumatically; I've seen plenty of male anime characters weeping just as hysterically for their dead kin. For all Pentecost's care for her, she refers to him as sensei, not father; I'd even speculate that though she deeply respects and cares for him, he's emotionally entangled with her in ways she isn't with him. He's a hard, uncompromising person, considering himself a fixed point in the lives of his subordinates and keeping his suffering private when one of them falls. In the extended media, we find out that his sister Luna, a fighter pilot, flew against Trespasser and died because she was the sort of person who would throw herself heart first into defending the world against monsters; and his (female) jaeger copilot Tamsin, whom he also cared deeply about, developed cancer from their jaeger's radiation and died, emaciated, in a hospital -- where young Mako, in the tie-in comic, met her. Mako is still very young in a way familiar to those afflicted with tragedy and loss early on. She craves stability in a life that uprooted her, searching for it in those around her, sometimes unsuccessfully, and seeking openness from Pentecost that he was often unable or unwilling to give. He would not have easily accepted Mako's desire to fight the monsters; she would have attended the Academy, racked up her impressive simulator score, and hung around the Shatterdome largely against his will. It would not have been an easy relationship, and, indeed, was not, from what we see of their behavior.
The problem is that none of this was in the movie. Luna and Tamsin? They don't even get a minor mention, not even as faces in old photographs, despite the writer stating that Luna is massively important to who Pentecost is. (And don't get me started on the lack of any reference to Caitlin Lightcap -- essentially Lora Baines reincarnated, who invented the Drift apparatus and was an amazing groundbreaking scientist despite some kind of preexisting neural condition that had left her dependent on medication, and we don't even know what happened to her. And the novelization is the only place where we hear about the existence of Vanessa Gottlieb, Hermann's expectant wife, which would certainly factor into Hermann's characterization if the movie had bothered to mention anything about her at all. Just... really, why?) All we see in the movie is Pentecost as a fixed point and Mako's unwillingness to defy his direct orders as the Shatterdome's commander.
Pacific Rim shouldn't have relied on expandedverse media to tell parts of the story essential to knowing the characters in the movie. It could have been filled with awesome female characters without taking anything away from the male characters, who were also a great deal of fun. (And that's only a couple of the character points that were left out of the movie. Mako's father? Was a swordmaker. It would have been nice to know that when Mako was deploying the giant sword Raleigh didn't know their jaeger had to slice Otachi in two "for my family".) All I know about Tamsin, Luna, Vanessa, and Caitlin Lightcap is from the wiki's references to the prequel comics and the novelization, which I, being poor, have only my dreams on a budget, do not have access to yet.
So... yeah. Conflicted.
I can't blame Mako. She's not a bad character; she's not objectified by the movie (though I hear differently about the novelization); her character history shows great strength that isn't adequately explored in the movie. But when I watched Pacific Rim, all those important things about her just weren't there.
AND YET it's a movie that I like, because music and monsters and mechas and mind-melds and banding together to save the world.
Someone stop me from cosplaying Newt, because I will totally do it.
*The Kaidanovsky's given names are Sasha and Aleksis. Travis Beecham, the screenwriter, is unclear as to which is which. *headdesk* But what's going around the fandom now is that both are short for Alexander ("it's a thing they do").
Originally posted on Dreamwidth. There are
comments there so far.