Numso (ute)

i don't talk a lot about this topic because its very personal to me, but i really love how hand jumper approaches gender.

firstly, gender is not used as a deciding factor in a character's role. female characters are not given extraordinary powers like many fantasy series (cough star wars) out of nowhere. they are treated like real people that have to work for their power. women in hand jumper have a different kind of narrative weight: agency. sayeon lee chooses to rewind. ryujin chooses not to lose her gift. sara chooses to leave for hongsan island. samin chooses to create the crimson society. but apart from that, women are also in positions of power. two out of three known aberrant corps heads were women. sara lee, the almost head of the sea wolves is a woman. heck, even the (arguably) main antagonist, officer ahn, is a woman.

so many impactful choices are made by women, which just goes to show how much the author respects them. secondly, gender is approached with much needed nuance. sayeon lee, the mc, is also an amazing representation of gender norms. pre-corps, she is more feminine. she visibly tries to take up as little space as possible. sayeon is a quiet rule follower who displays surface level kindness to everyone. when she joins the corps, she is presented with a new standard of success that prioritizes the most vicious, machiavellian outcomes. additionally, as an aberrant, she is freed from the societal expectations of a human woman. thus, she begins displaying masculine traits as a form of catharsis.

apart from sayeon being very traumatised, this narratively communicates the way that women are affected by structures and rules. women, and especially disadvantaged women, must often perform femininity to be perceived positively.

big hand jumper dump

Finished 🤔 had something different in mind but I'm not upset by the way this turned out at all. Rendering was getting up my nervesss though omg

Sayeon Lee you are destined for doom

Also here's a (technically not) alt version that was intended to be the original color palette cause I was trying to branch out my coloring styles.. & while I do prefer the dark hair vers. i'm still fond of this one

in hand jumper, sayeon uses trust as a substitution for love.

sayeon lee has never experienced mutual unconditional love. no one truly knew her for who she was as the daughter of a criminal aberrant. the closest she ever got was jaeil, who died. her sister’s love is (arguably) unreciprocated. thus, she doesn’t acknowledge the love she feels for other people (like all her other emotions). sayeon is a utilitarian. trust is directly tied to her ability to manipulate, by extension, mission success. so, it is the only form of affection that she allows herself to have.

additionally, sayeon doesn’t trust people easily. she is a logical person who questions and criticizes everything. in the corps, blind faith could mean death. as a leader, trust is indicative of power and skill, both things sayeon aspires for. sayeon understands the weight trust carries in the aberrant corps, where the survival rate is minimal.

so, she searches for affection through the trust placed on her by other people.

this emphasis on trust is paralleled with love. when sayeon learns her teammates trust her, she starts smiling and blushing, which is a stereotypically romantic reaction. she searches and even craves for trust in the same way many people want affection. in missions, she tries to be as efficient and successful as possible to gain trust. she constantly wonders if characters like min and ryujin trust her. like love, trust needs to be earned. her journey towards gaining trust mirrors a journey towards genuine relationships, albeit a more twisted, complicated version.

but the most compelling parallel is that sayeon lee does not want characters to be forced to trust her. instead, she hopes they will trust her out of their own volition. as ryujin says: “you want me to choose you all on your own”. even absent the obvious romantic undertones, the treatment of trust as something that cannot be forced mirrors the nature of love. in the same way true love is mutual, sayeon wants trust to be real and reciprocated.

that one scene from chp 105 but make em shotgun a cig

the parallels between Captain Han and Sayeon are so much fun. A red tie and blue glasses, red glasses and a blue tie. Schemers. WILL overthrow the system and change status quo. Both have a same sex colleague that is perplexed by their #strange behaviour.

ryujin carries a tremendous amount of guilt for having precipitated the death of her family, yet she is still able to recognize that, ultimately, she was just a child who wanted to do good. what happened to her was profoundly unfair, and not the fault of a well-intentioned child acting with limited understanding. of course that doesn’t stop her from feeling guilt, but it allows ryujin to situate her actions in a broder context and therefore recognise the larger actors at play that are the actual root of why that happened.

sayeon, by contrast, views herself as the sole component responsible for everything that happens. she avoids directing frustration toward the actions of others because, in her view, “blaming others” inhibits self-improvement. as a result, she dismisses the behavior of others as something not worth dwelling on, and instead concludes that she should have anticipated and accounted for their actions in advance. and of course sayeon assumes blame for every negative outcome. because if she’s at fault then the situation must have been within her control; and if it was within her control that would entail she has the power to fix everything. this mindset is foundational to sayeon’s world view. accepting limits to her responsibility would also mean accepting limits to her ability to remedy what goes wrong, something she is unwilling to concede. a good example of this is the juxtaposition of ryujin and sayeon’s approach to the aberrant corps. ryujin views the system itself as fundamentally unsalvageable. conversely, sayeon believes that even a decades-old structure like the aberrant corps system can be fixed, and that she herself has the capacity to do so.

everything sayeon does is fueled by a guilt that has been gnawing at her since she was a child. throughout her life, she has lived with the singular aim of purifying herself of her family’s sins. the irony is that she is not responsible for her family’s actions; she did not make those choices, nor did she participate in them. but she still insists on carrying the weight of it, because in her mind the burden must be borne by someone. and since her family lacks the conscience or willingness to confront their wrongdoings, the responsibility naturally falls on her. and since this is the idea that sayeon has internalised, her identity becomes inextricably tied to atonement for wrongs that were never truly hers.

she did everything by the book, striving to become the perfect rule-abiding, dutiful citizen in an effort to compensate for the wrongs committed by those around her. she dressed in a deliberately feminine and modest manner; she even set her sights on attending law school, pursuing a path associated with order, justice, and propriety. she allowed herself to be pushed around at school and never defended herself against the degradations her classmates directed at her. because this was her penance.