randomly woke up wanting to write about mimi and how she's handled, so let's talk about mimi, i guess! and also this series' handling of female characters in general, because it's kind of impossible to talk about mimi without getting into that. blanket spoiler warning for the entirety of shoubu-era duel masters manga (and a bit of the OG anime and charge), as usual when i talk about this series here.
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in a vacuum, i actually like mimi's character arc a lot. she's an ambitious girl into a hobby that's evidently more of a "guy thing" in-universe (more so earlier in the series), and while people recognize her as competent (to the point of having a reputation as a 逆転王 prior to joining the White Knights - can't help but to notice how even that title uses 王 and not 女王, incidentally...), her dream to strive to become a world-class duelist alongside the one she admires is taken seriously so rarely that it's something she can outright weaponize by playing up her status as a "dueling girl" and hiding her more assertive side to get her opponents to let their guard down.
but as ambitious as she is, her ambition is interwoven with her desire to stand alongside hakuoh, who's... well, frankly a whole lot more serious about striving to be the best there is for very personal reasons, and that discrepancy between the two of them starts creeping to the forefront pretty fast as the story focuses more and more on people with ever-increasing skill levels. as she becomes aware of this gap, mimi puts an incredible amount of effort into trying to catch up, and it pays off with her reaching the skill level of a true duelist and ending up with a(n admittedly more onesided) rival of her own - but ultimately hakuoh just climbs the stairs of glory at a much faster pace than she can, reaching heights she simply can't.
nowhere is this showcased clearer than in SX, when the conditions for mimi's duel against terror essentially amount to "if you want to keep your friends safe, you have to duel the way hakuoh did in the past, without losing your composure or a single shield, not just win" - and she proves to have become skilled enough to win against someone as good as terror, herself one of the scarier duelists in the series as one of adam's guards, but not only does she fail to keep her shields from being destroyed (and thus her friends from being dropped into the chasm), her winning strategy actively sacrifices all her shields. she's good, no doubt, but there's a limit to how far you can get with diligence and practice alone, and past a certain point you just run up against a wall compared to people who have that and are better at keeping their composure, or predicting ahead, or accounting for as much as possible.
and, ignoring how insanely high the stakes get in SX for a second here, that's fine! i'd even argue that it's good for a competitive hobby series has a character arc dealing with the fact that sometimes you'll just plateau earlier than others no matter how much effort and ambition you put in. everyone's got their own limits, but just because you can't keep pace with the best of the best doesn't mean you can't still have fun and accomplish a lot.
the problem... is that mimi's character arc does not exist in a vacuum.
for starters, she's the sole female main cast, and she's the only serious duelist in the main cast whose character arc focuses on how she's just not good enough to keep up with the others and achieve her dreams. rekuta likewise struggles with being outright bad at dueling, but his arc revolves primarily around his friendship with shoubu and the skill gap between them is a footnote that amounts to rekuta being sad his friend can't really duel him for fun anymore. amachi seems like he was introduced to have another "weaker" duelist in the cast, but he doesn't get enough time to develop much of an arc, and what little he does get still hits differently because he recognizes from the start that he's the worst in the group. meanwhile with mimi, her inability to keep up with the protagonists (and later antagonists) as a duelist is arguably the core focus of her character arc. in mimi's case, it's bad enough in the manga that, off the top of my head, she only actually wins three duels: her duel with terror on-screen, and her duel with one of the black knights as well as her one of her training duels against robo-mimi off-screen.
then there's the fact that a good chunk of her screentime - when she gets screentime - has her acting as either a supporting role/cheerleader to one of the others, or a fanservice vehicle. the stuff in the OG series is well-known enugh, but FE notably doesn't even let her duel on-screen, let alone participate in most of the plot; even in the finale where the tournament duelists are holding off the garde crew, she's the only one never shown mid-duel even after mikuni's speech pulls her out of her grief. she's largely just stuck on the sidelines for that entire second part of the series, waiting for shoubu to come back from his journey hopefully with hakuoh in tow, and this sidelining is arguably exempified by one of her biggest moments in FE being... showing up to the airport in a wedding dress because of the chance that hakuoh might be back with shoubu. it's not great!
then you look at the rest of the female characters in the series, and you kind of start to notice that it's not just mimi that has this specific problem:
yuu has a strong start with her antagonistic introduction (even if the fact the manga hadn't actually settled on what her character would be yet results in some awkward after-the-fact downplaying), but ends up sidelined (and seemingly lacking her early-series powers?) afterward, with either bucketsman protecting her, or her being outplayed (as in her duel against pixie). while i like her relationship with bucketsman, there's also something to be said for the fact that she ends up sharing basically all her post-intro arc screentime with buckets, who gets a boost in relevance via the identity reveal in SX. (if we assume that U was supposed to be her, then that also kinda makes the fact that an after revolution member is supposedly a worse duelist than someone 9 ranks lower stick aka kirumii out too...)
mai loses both of her on-screen duels against shoubu, although she's at least noted to be genuinely good... as a result of having been a dueling partner to shouri, but still. given shouri's own skill level, at least being able to keep up with him is still pretty significant?
kirumii gets all of one on-screen duel in the OG series where she loses a 2-vs-1 as part of the 2 before she's unceremoniously killed off in FE, then gets the same unceremonious fate as the rest of garde following her revival with hardly any screentime in the meantime.
shizuka's short arc, while it's a key point in it that she's very skilled... pretty much revolves around her relationship with rich and how them joining garde because she wanted stronger opponents affected it, and due to plot necessities she loses the one duel we actually get to see. then, following their revival, she just kind of doesn't get to exist on-screen at all despite how said arc ended with her and rich essentially quitting garde via lovers' suicide. zero follow-up on that even though you'd think she'd have something to say about being dragged back into that group.
esmeralda bounces between being treated as a gag character and being one of the more serious child DMs (and her serious moments are pretty great), but long-term ends up landing more on the former, with SX only showing her on-screen once from the back while the other DMs got a bit more on-panel time (and were less hidden). she also loses her one on-screen duel, though it's at least a close call against zakira of all people. more annoying is that her puppycrush on shouri (and later shoubu) ends up at the crux of her serious moments even when it should've been easy to focus on her backstory as her motivation and not just her feelings for someone. she's also the female duel master despite there being seven DM mark fragment holders. if we count adam, yaesaru and shoubu too, that's a 1-in-10 ratio. that's... not great!
X is one of the more dangerous antagonists, but loses her one on-screen duel (against zakira again, so fair, honestly) - and more critically, her whole plan gets undermined by the reveal that zakira was playing her for a fool all along, and she's so unceremoniously evicted from the story after zakira forces her to bring him to adam's floor that it's not even clear if he killed her or she fled. the original X, meanwhile, is just straight up a non-character we know nothing about.
looking at the greater picture like that, mimi's arc starts looking less and less like a well-intended subplot about how sometimes there's just a limit to how far you can improve in a competitive hobby compared to others and more like... well, like a symptom of the series as a whole not being great with female characters. unfortunately that's not something particularly surprising considering the series started around the turn of the century when that was a rampant problem in animanga, but the fact it arguably gets worse as the series goes on (though at least the fanservice angle gets dialed back by SX) kind of makes it sting a bit worse than usual, at least for me.
the original anime + charge address this stuff somewhat in mimi's case, with her getting more opportunities to show her actual dueling skills including a few more on-screen wins, dialing back or removing some of the worst fanservice moments (although the first season also adds the hotel moments, which aren't exactly great either...) and most of the outright leering at mimi from certain characters (which really shouldn't have existed in the first place given her age), even giving her a chance to go up against hakuoh where just how close she gets to winning despite their skill gap ends up having significance to the plot via breaking through his brainwashing for a moment... but there's still only so much an adapatation from the early-mid aughts can do when the issues with the female cast are this deeply baked into the source material.
i think a theoretical remake/redo of the series that can work with a fully planned plotline and cast from the start could probably iron a lot of this out. mimi's arc would feel a lot better in context if, for example, she got more time to show off her skills on-screen like in the original anime, but the series also gets to give rekuta's struggle to keep up more focus, lets amachi get more buildup as a character so his own skill struggles can share the spotlight and make it feel less like an unfortunately gendered plot element, and/or more of the female cast as a whole got fleshed out and allowed to shine a bit more often. the elements to polish things up are all there! it's just the execution that needs work. a lot of work, sure but it's doable.
do i expect a remake/redo like that to happen? not even remotely. but it's nice to dream sometimes.
i guess tl;dr: i like mimi and i would like her character arc a lot... if it wasn't stuck in a series that constantly seems like it refuses to let its already small female cast shine the way the guys get to, because it makes it feel a lot more... targeted, for lack of a better word, than it should, and that results in her character arc leaving a really bad aftertaste for me. it's not an unfixable issue by any means, but it's a little disheartening as things stand, especially in a series that has no qualms about taking a more encouraging stance with its male characters.
