Bear with me, I'm still new at this

The longest panning shot. XD

Things I liked about the Mission 06 chapter in the Preventer 7 manga.

Written in response to https://www.tumblr.com/ikuzeminna/718480468058718208.  I didn’t want to add this to @ikuzeminna’s post in case it wasn’t welcome.  Hopefully this doesn’t kick any hornets’ nests…  😳

Since we’re talking about women being used for manpain and to further men’s storylines, I think the women of the Winner Family deserve an entire post of their own.  While I don’t blame Quatre for this at all–he’s a character ffs, he certainly doesn’t get to control how the writers choose to write other characters!–it does seem to me that the women in Quatre’s family only exist to further the stories of the men connected to them.

First, there’s Quatre’s mother Quaterine.  She seems nice enough, and I’m sure fandom could build up a solid character for her, but the simple fact is that she’s never given the chance to be an actual character in the source material.  She serves no purpose in the story other than to deliver us a male protagonist; then, task completed, she promptly dies and never even rates a mention in the original tv series. You can’t even say she dies for Quatre’s manpain because in the original series he never thinks about her so he CAN feel manpain about her.  She is never brought up at all.  Thus, unlike Relena choosing to carry on her father’s legacy or Wufei choosing to carry on Meilan’s, and regardless of the alleged similarities between Quaterine and Quatre, Quatre isn’t motivated to carry on Quaterine’s legacy.  She doesn’t inspire him.  Think of it this way: Quatre could have actually been born from a donor egg in a test tube (as he was told happened) and the story would have turned out the same.  Quaterine could have just as easily never existed–and in the original tv series she basically didn’t.  Like Meilan, Quaterine only appears in Episode Zero, where the only one who thinks about her as a person is Quatre’s father Zayeed.  Even then Zayeed seems to get more emotional mileage from his relationship with Quatre than from the dead wife to whom Quatre is compared.

The same is true of Quatre’s 29 sisters.  They are less characters of their own than they are an informed trait of Quatre’s (much like having a character say “X is very smart” but then never actually showing X saying or doing anything smart).  Only one of Quatre’s sisters ever appears or is given a name in the text.  You could cut the mention of the other 28 sisters and it would have zero effect on how the story plays out.  Irea, the only sister that matters in the slightest, exists strictly to further Quatre’s story: to help heal him up physically and mentally, to transport him to the male character (Zayeed) that is Actually Important™ to Quatre’s story, and then to get hurt/seemingly killed so Quatre can have his big meltdown over her injuries and over Zayeed’s death (but really mostly over Zayeed’s death).  Such a glorious role.

Note also that Quatre has seemingly never even met any of his sisters.  Quatre doesn’t know who Irea is until the conversation with Zayeed.  It’s very telling that Zayeed keeps only his male heir on the same colony with him and sends all of his daughters away.  Zayeed’s desk has exactly ONE photo on it, featuring only ONE child: the child he actually gets to see on a regular basis rather than all the ones he sent away to live on other colonies.  I would like to think that the absence of Quatre’s sisters is a result of Zayeed removing them from his presence because his daughters all painfully remind him of his dear dead wife, but the original text doesn’t support that conclusion.  Rather, in the text Zayeed only ever thinks of QUATRE as being similar to Quaterine (calling both Quatre and Quaterine “the strongest and most noble of all” in Episode Zero).

I’m gonna be honest here, I completely forgot about the Winner women. Which perfectly proves your point about how utterly unnecessary to the plot and their relationship with Quatre they were written. His mom more so than his sister.

As you said, Quatrine provides a tragic backstory for Quatre because every pilot needs to have one apparently. Except that Quatre is unaware of it. Which renders the whole thing pointless. I know the writer was going for dramatic irony because Quatre believes himself basically a clone and the truth is that he is the only one born naturally, which is nice for the audience to know, but, as you said, it adds nothing for Quatre. He has a great appreciation for life in the series which provides the drama during his Zero rampage, but since his mother’s sacrifice is never explained to him, that thread is left hanging. Quatrine ends up a footnote to Quatre’s character, nothing more.

Irea in the series is handled a little better in my opinion since her purpose seems to be primarily shedding a light on the Winner family dynamics. This is the first time I hear the take that Zayeed basically banished all his daughters though. lol We learn they all are working in different places but I don’t remember Quatre saying he met none of them. I always assumed he grew up with 4 or 5 who were closer to his age and didn’t meet the rest because they were already off doing their own thing, being much older. Interpretations vary, of course, but to me Quatre acts like he’s the youngest (and the only boy, and thus privileged), not like he grew up as an only child.

And definitely as a boy who grew up surrounded by women and one dad, explaining why he gravitates so much to the other pilots.

It’s still weird he doesn’t know all his sisters, but that kinda was the point, wasn’t it? (No idea what to do with that info but I guess it’s supposed to make Quatre more interesting? Or maybe it was meant to further the “I’m a pawn to my dad” thing he clung to during his EZ.)

Frankly, I dislike what a convoluted mess Quatre’s EZ is. The circumstances of Quatrine’s death are so mind-bendingly dumb that I ignore the whole thing. The richest people in the galaxy have reproductive issues from living in space too long? When Quatre had a whole villa on Earth? And test tube babies are fine but natural births kill you, so Quatrine decides to eff it and leave 30 children without their mom just because? Couldn’t she just be terminally ill and deliver her last baby herself before her illness claimed her??

(Actually, this whole “I must bear my love’s child in an ultimate show of love” nonsense is something Sumizawa wrote with other female characters in FT, too…)

Source for the cut out close ups: 01 02

Grace

Duo pauses at the main entrance, fists tightening in resolve as he pivots back toward Heero’s room.

He is not going to run. If Heero is awake, he might have questions or maybe Heero had been too far out of it to even remember – equally likely Heero will be as oblivious as ever.

If Heero asks, though, Duo is prepared to give him answers – regardless of whether the other man is ready to hear them or not.

It never occurred to him that Heero understood, but Heero’s glance toward the open doorway where Duo stood told Duo that he did.

a bunch of self-indulgent little charms i’ll have up for preorder this coming week :’D