Kyle Marcus 🇧🇷

forsooth, the knights Redde and Blue lie in embrace amid flowers and grass when they are not a-jousting!

Furthermore, I find it confusing that while the three girls knew they would have to pay for their crimes, Nemu stated in Mic As One that she wanted to watch everything unfold until a "new justice" was introduced. Because of this, it doesn't feel like they've actually admitted their wrongdoings, which is incredibly irresponsible considering their status as the government. It was entirely selfish of them to start this whole regime under the guise of their precepts, causing tremendous injuries to citizens by issuing a psychological weapon they claimed was less violent than "man's way." They were well aware of what the Hypmic could do, yet they released it without any proper regulations or policies to mitigate the damage. They only know how to satisfy their own desires without a second thought for the people. They abuse power to get their way, use their ideology to justify their actions, and above all, they are misandrists. Even if some of them don't actively hate men, their policies have caused men to suffer from massive inequalities. Otome’s personal issues are not everyone else's problem; making her trauma the entire country's burden is childish and immature for someone in her position.

I'm saying all this because I find the writing behind their motivation to change the world incredibly poor. Am I the only one who can't empathize with them? They need to pay for what they've done—perhaps by going to jail. The pain and suffering they caused are monumental; we are talking about an entire country here. Yet, Nemu is just getting a new job? Otome still doesn't know what to do next? It feels like the story is treating their massive crimes as if they never even happened. I'm not saying they don't have the right to feel enraged, frustrated, or even dictatorial as women; rather, it's the broader gender stereotypes that I am addressing. I am looking at this from a purely human perspective. I'm sorry, but I just don't find their motivation reasonable. Many people might jump into my tweets and claim that I am mistreating these characters, but that isn't the case. The reality is that most of the fandom tends to defend them. You can have good intentions, but if your methods hurt people—let alone an entire country—then what you are doing is fundamentally wrong. Providing an explanation of your "good nature" does not excuse intentional wrongdoings, nor should it whitewash your reputation. Finally, I feel like there is no safe place for me to express my thoughts. I hope this doesn’t overwhelm you. I don't necessarily expect my thoughts to be answered, but if there is anyone else out there who shares my perspective, it would be a true comfort to me. Thank you for reading my rambling.

In the interest of time, I'm not going to respond to every one of your points, but I also find the Chuuouku characters' writing frustrating. Imo, it's consistently one of the weakest parts of the series, which is a damn shame. Otome, Ichijiku, and Nemu all have the potential to be brilliant characters with compelling personal issues, but their simultaneous need to be plot devices hampers their ability to be characters. That Otome and co. commit atrocities or fail to recognize these things as such aren't issues; that the narrative fails to recognize these things as atrocities is. In some scenes, the narrative asks readers to treat the Chuuouku characters as complex, multi-faceted, flawed adults. In other scenes, the narrative asks readers to treat them like cartoon villains. The audience can easily ignore the ramifications of abuses that come from cartoon villains. It can even be a kind of campy fun. However, it's difficult to then shelve the cartoon villain abuses and pretend they don't exist when it's time for this character to be a complex, multi-faceted adult. It doesn't do the story favors to force the Chuuouku characters to be both.

Another major issue--and again, this is a damn shame, because Hypmic is addressing very real injustices--is that Hypmic struggles to differentiate between personal issues and societal issues. Hypmic is a character-focused story, and most of the stories it tells are personal, man vs. self conflicts. However, even with the male characters, underlying these stories are broader man vs. society conflicts of characters interacting with and suffering under patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Yet Hypmic approaches these societal conflicts as if they have personal solutions. To a limited extent, this works with the male characters because patriarchy and toxic masculinity, in very broad strokes, affect men and women differently. Negative traits or negative emotions that stem from societal patriarchy can be unlearned, but the individual involved will still be subject to other people's policing of societal patriarchy. Because men as a class hold the power in patriarchy, some men can brush off this policing to a certain degree--if, say, present-day Ichirou was told that "men don't cry unless it's for the loss of a family member," he wouldn't place as much weight in it as he did when he was told this a vulnerable teenager at the start of the story. That is, the personal conflict is greater than the societal conflict. Yet the reverse is true for women, the less powerful class in the patriarchal societal structure. If someone tells Otome, "You can't be the prime minister or have a say in government," Otome can't just say, "I don't care what you think" and walk it off. It's not a matter of, what, girlbossing hard enough to be represented in government. Women in Japan aren't disenfranchised in government because they aren't trying hard enough--it isn't a personal issue at all!--but Hypmic refuses to engage with this concept. Because every solution is a personal solution, the only way for women like Otome to have their societal problems solved is if everyone in the world collectively pulled their head out of their ass and treated women with respect. This would be lovely, but so would everyone having a dragon. It's a fantasy-level solution to a real world-level problem, and it's insulting with the unspoken implication that the only reason women face this societal issue is because they haven't made enough effort to solve it like a personal issue.

On the one hand, I do get why the Party of Words' behaviors are either comically evil (brainwashing, the Ichirou/Samatoki TDD breakup nonsense, etc.) or buffoonishly tame (the man tax). A section of Japan's alt right is obsessed with the notion of women being the "real oppressors," and it seems likely that the writers needed to avoid anything even vaguely realistic to avoid the PoW turning into an alt right dogwhistle. In current UsAm political terms, it's similar to writing a story that criticizes the outsized influence Christianity has on American politics by writing a story in which Judaism has outsized influence--you'd have to be damn careful with what you were doing. But I don't think Hypmic is anywhere near as careful as it could be, and I think it unfortunately defangs and belittles the PoW characters by having their party be so inept. The narrative points out that, despite the cartoonish boys-vs-girls segregation of Chuuouku, Japanese society is still fundamentally patriarchal. Non-party women are still disenfranchised in local power structures, women still struggle to be paid as much as and respected as much as their male colleagues, women are still forced into gendered jobs and child-rearing roles... The list goes on and on. By failing to overturn existing power structures, Hypmic argues that hate (misandry) is not the answer, but this argument suffers from the misandry being cartoonish at best compared to the very realistic and very real misogyny.

I get that true societal solutions are outside of Hypmic's scope, but it is frustrating that Hypmic chose to include societal problems in its scope without planning to address it. There's a lot of potential in Hypmic's overarching story and the Chuuouku characters' stories, but too often, I feel that Hypmic undermines itself.