cannot imagine being caleb widogast btw and having such a fixed view of yourself as this irredeemable monstrous man who wishes for nothing more than to atone for the unatonable while also questioning whether you even deserve to live long enough to do so and then befriending this girl who is notorious for never sparing anyone's feelings when she has something to say and has, since you've known her, intentionally rebuilt herself from the ground up into someone who is real and direct and honest even when it hurts, and for her to lean forward and look into your eyes and say, with a magnitude of brutal honesty that only she could muster, that it Wasn't Your Fault.
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"Toshiro Is Sexist," "Toshiro Owns Slaves": What's Really Going on With This Guy?
I've seen a lot of debate on whether or not Toshiro is problematic because he's a slave owner or because he's sexist in the context of his crush on Falin. While I do want to examine his relationship to Falin, I'd like to take a few steps back and unpack his upbringing first. We'll dive into the gender and class dynamics he was raised with and how it impacts his behavior in the main storyline.
Like all people, Toshiro is shaped by the environment he grew up in. Toshitsugu, Toshiro's father and the head of the Nakamoto clan, is the most impactful model of authority and manhood in his life. Toshiro does recognize some of his father's flaws and tries to avoid replicating them. But whether or not he emulates or subverts his father's behavior, Toshitsugu is often the starting point for Toshiro's treatment of others, particularly marginalized people.
The Nakamoto clan exists under a patriarchal hierarchy with Toshitsugu at the top. As noted by @fumifooms in their Nakamoto household post, his wife has more authority than Maizuru. She's able to ban Maizuru from parts of their residence, but despite disliking his infidelity, she can't divorce him or stop him from cheating on her. Their marriage is not an equal partnership.
On an interpersonal level, Toshitsugu and Maizuru also have a fraught relationship. While she does seem to care for him, she's often frustrated by his thoughtless behavior.
For example, he drunkenly buys Izutsumi for her — without considering how she'll have to raise this child — and invades her room in the middle of the night. When he cryptically says, "It's all my fault," she replies, "I can think of a lot of things that are your fault." She calls him an "idiot" and "believes that [Toshiro] will grow up to be a better clan leader than his father," implying that she takes issue with Toshitsugu's leadership.
Because Maizuru and Toshitsugu are described as being "in an intimate relationship" and "seem[ing] to be lovers," Maizuru appears to be a consensual participant. Still, this doesn't negate the large power imbalance between them as a male noble clan leader and his female retainer. This imbalance introduces an insidious undertone to Maizuru's frustration with Toshitsugu. Like Toshiro's mother, Maizuru doesn't have the agency to do as she pleases in their relationship; he has the ultimate authority. For instance, she doesn't seem to want to raise Izutsumi, but she has to anyway.
While Maizuru's role as Toshitsugu's mistress is significant, she's also the Nakamoto clan's teacher and Toshiro's primary maternal figure. She cares deeply for Toshiro: tailing him, feeding him, and taking responsibility even for his actions as an adult. While it might seem sweet that she cares for him like a son at first, Maizuru was notably fifteen years old at the time of his birth. In the extra comic below, he's six years old and has already been in her care for some time. Even if we're being generous and assuming that she didn't start raising him until he was six, she was still only twenty-one at the time she was parenting her boss/lover's child with another woman.
Maizuru's roles as mistress and maternal figure, in addition to her role as retainer, demonstrate the intersection between gendered and class oppression in the Nakamoto household. Despite her original role being a retainer trained in espionage, Toshitsugu presses her into performing gendered labor for him and eventually, Toshiro. She's expected to be Toshitsugu's lover, perform emotional labor for him as his confidant, care for his child, and carry out domestic tasks like cooking. She says, "Even during missions, I was often dragged into the kitchen." If she was a male servant, I doubt she would have been expected to perform these additional tasks. She can't avoid these tasks either, stating that her "own feelings don't factor into it."
Toshitsugu disregards his wife's and Maizuru's desires and emotions to serve his own interests. Because he has societal power over them as a nobleman and in Maizuru's case, her master, neither woman can escape their position in the household hierarchy.
As a result, Toshiro grew up within a structure where men and male nobility, in particular, wield the most societal power. The hierarchical nature of his household and society discourages everyone, including him as a clan leader's eldest son, from questioning and disrupting the existing hierarchy.
The other Nakamoto household members also internalize its sexist, classist power dynamics.
For example, Hien expects that she and Toshiro will replicate the uneven dynamics of the previous generation, regardless of her personal feelings. She sees her and Toshiro's relationship as paralleling Maizuru and Toshitsugu's relationship; she is the closest woman to Toshiro and his retainer, so she's shocked when Toshiro doesn't attempt to begin an intimate relationship with her. Notably, she doesn't have actual feelings for him. Her expectations are centered around the household's precedent of placing emotional, sexual, domestic, and child-rearing labor onto the female servants without any regard for their personal desires.
Hien also probably knows that her position in the household will improve if she is Toshiro's lover because she's seen it improve Maizuru's position. However, the fact that being the future clan leader's lover is the closest proximity she, as a female servant, has to power further reveals the gendered, class-based oppression she and the other women live under.
It's important to note that the Nakamoto clan bought Benichidori, Izutsumi, and Inutade as slaves, so they have less power and agency than Maizuru and Hien. The clan further dehumanizes Izutsumi and Inutade as demi-humans; their enslavement contains an additional layer of racialization.
Toshiro isn't oblivious to the gendered, class, and racial power dynamics of his household. He tries to distance himself from participating in its exploitative power structure. He walls himself off from Hien, who he's known since childhood, to avoid replicating his father's behavior and making his servant into his lover. He disapproves of his father's enslavement of Izutsumi and Inutade, and he lets Izutsumi go when she runs away in the Dungeon.
But does any of this absolve him of his complicity in his household's sexist, classist power dynamics and racialized slavery?
The short answer is absolutely not.
Despite his distaste for his father's exploitation of his servants and slaves, Toshiro still uses them. He refers to his party as "his retainers," and he has them fight and perform domestic tasks for him. You could argue that Toshiro doesn't like to and thus, doesn't regularly use his servants and slaves. In the context of him asking his retainers to help him rescue Falin, Maizuru says, "The only time he ever made any sort of personal request was for this task." But it shouldn't matter whether exploitation is a regular occurrence or not for it to be considered harmful. Toshiro asking Maizuru to cook him a meal still constitutes asking his female servant to perform gendered labor for him. He's also very accustomed to her grooming and dressing him.
Maizuru sees feeding, washing, and even advising Toshiro romantically as fulfilling Toshitsugu's orders to care for his son. They aren't fulfilling a "personal request." But just because her labor has been deemed expected and thereby devalued doesn't mean that it isn't labor or that she isn't performing it.
Maizuru's dynamic with Toshiro is also complicated by her role as his maternal figure. She loves him and wants to take care of him, and she doesn't have a choice in the matter. During Toshiro's childhood, the onus was on Toshitsugu to cease exploiting his lover and release her from servitude, but Toshiro is now an adult man. Seeing as how Maizuru defers to his wishes and calls him "Young Master," they still have a power imbalance that he's passively maintaining. Ideally, he would not ask anything of her until he has the authority to release her from servitude.
Throughout the story, Toshiro acts as if he has no agency and quietly disapproving of his father's actions absolves him of his participation in maintaining oppressive dynamics. While his father still ranks higher than him, he's essentially his father's heir. He has much more power than Maizuru, the highest-ranked servant. At the very least, he could leave his slave-owning household.
Unfortunately, his refusal to confront injustice is consistent with his character's major flaw: he does not express his opinions, desires, or needs. While this character trait obviously hurts his friendships, it also furthers his complicity in the injustices his household runs on.
Toshiro's relationship with eating food — the prevailing metaphor of the series — also parallels his relationship with confronting injustice. Maizuru mentions that he was a sickly child, so the act of eating may have been physically uncomfortable for him. As an adult, his refusal to eat crops up during his rescue attempt of Falin. Denying himself food might have been punishment for not accomplishing important tasks like rescuing Falin and/or a way to maintain control over something in his life when he felt like he'd lost control over the rest of it, again in the context of losing Falin. (Note: I suggest reading this post on Toshiro's disordered eating by @malaierba.)
But he cannot and does not avoid consuming food forever.
Similarly, Toshiro keeps his distance from his retainers and tries not to use them until the Falin situation occurs. His efforts to avoid exploiting his retainers amount to inaction — things he doesn't ask of them or do to them. But his inaction does nothing to dismantle the existing hierarchy that places his retainers under his authority, denies them agency, and often marginalizes them as not only servants or slaves but as women, and he ends up using them as servants and slaves anyways.
Returning to the narrative's themes of consumption, Toshiro cannot avoid eating just as he cannot avoid perpetuating the exploitative system of his household. The Nakamoto clan consumes the labor and personhood of those lower in the hierarchy. The retainers' labor as spies and domestic servants is the foundation of the clan's existence. Thus, the clan consumes their labor to sustain itself.
Within this hierarchy, the retainers' personhood is also consumed and erased. As Izutsumi describes, they are given different names and stripped of their agency to reject orders or leave. Maizuru and Hien also say their feelings are irrelevant in the context of Toshitsugu's and Toshiro's wants and needs. Both women are expected to comply with whatever is most beneficial and comfortable for the noblemen. Clearly, despite Toshiro's detachment from his household's functions, these social structures remain in place and harm the women under him.
Although we know the Nakamoto clan has male retainers, the choice to highlight the female retainers seems intentional. We're asked to interrogate how not only being a servant or a slave in a noble household impacts a person's life and agency, but how being a woman intersects with being a member of some of the lowest social classes.
Toshiro only distances himself from his father's behaviors of infidelity and exploitation so long as it doesn't take Toshiro out of his comfort zone. He doesn't free his slaves. He's far too comfortable with his female retainers performing domestic labor for him, and he barely acknowledges their efforts; they're shocked when he thanks them for helping him save Falin. He hasn't unpacked his sexist (or classist or racist) biases because he perpetuates his household's oppressive hierarchy throughout the narrative. Considering all of this, he inevitably brings this baggage to his interactions with Falin.
Falin is presumably one of the first women he's had extended contact with that isn't his relative or his family's servant. Because of his trauma surrounding his father and Maizuru sleeping together, he understandably falls for a woman as disconnected as possible from his father and his clan. He seems to genuinely like Falin, respects her boundaries, and graciously accepts her rejection. His behavior towards her is overall kind and unproblematic.
But if Falin had gone with him, she would've likely been devalued and sidelined like the other women of the Nakamoto household. No matter how much he loves Falin, simply loving her cannot replace the difficult work of unlearning his sexism. Love, of course, can and should be accompanied by that work, but by the close of the narrative, we gain little indication that Toshiro acknowledges or seeks to end his part in exploiting and devaluing women and other marginalized people.
A spark of hope does exist. Toshiro expressing his feelings to Laios and Falin suggests that his time away from home has encouraged him to speak up more. Breaking his habit of avoidance may be the first step towards acknowledging his complicity in systems of injustice and moving towards dismantling them.
Special thanks to my very smart friend @atialeague for bringing up Toshitsugu's relationship with Maizuru and the replication of dynamics of consumption and class! <3
smth about steph being so determined to prove herself to all the other bats during her beginning as batgirl and yet still so cripplingly insecure about her capabilities...there are so many instances of her undermining herself ("in a shocking twist, totally on purpose" "i can do things on purpose every now and then, you know" "i'm almost fifty percent sure nothing could go wrong"), and it's played off as her joking, but also with a thread of truth underlying it all. steph's so overly conscious about what she can and can't do, especially when she's with other vigilantes, and she's not even wrong for feeling that way! every single one of them questions her abilities and judges her based on her past mistakes (which were rarely ever fully her fault anyways but Whatever...) and refuses to believe in her—which she is fully aware of and outright acknowledges multiple times—unless she proves herself to them to them in the field, over and over and over again. her entire start as batgirl is haunted by the ghost of the girl all of them believe her to be, and nobody is quite able to look past it for a while, including steph herself.
and this is exactly why i love the ending of batgirl (2009) so, so much, because the last issue shows just how much she HAS proven herself (even when she arguably didn't need to). at this point, bruce has given her his stamp of approval, something she's never earned before, and steph's grown so much that she doesn't even need his respect to be confident anymore. in the last issue of her run, crystal discovers her identity and tells steph that she's proud of her. there are little girls who look up to batgirl waiting for her to recover so they can tell her that gotham will never give up on her, damian's been hovering on a nearby roof so he can check up on her, and barbara tells her that steph saved her. and of course, the series ends with what might as well as be one of the thesis statements for steph's entire character:
(batgirl 2009 #24)
like. wow. what could possibly be a better ending? here is this girl who's been through so much and failed by others so many times, constantly having to save herself again and again...she's been spoiler, she's been robin, she died and she came back, and in spite of everything life has thrown at her she's part of something even bigger—she's batgirl, and there's nobody who can doubt her or take that away from her again.
list of things i absolutely love about rogue's design aka design analysis (ft. spoilers/leaks, son of wu propaganda, and incoherent yapping <33)
uhh all undercut
the base of his outfit is 1:1 his trainee gi. i did not fucking realise that theyre Identical until i saw these side by side. DOWN TO THE BELT AND BANDAGE/UNDERSHIRT. WHAT THE FUCK.
what i meant to say was its not a kimono+trousers combo but a body suit!! which makes a lot of sense since its less sewing and theres like 90% chance this outfit is handmade.
along with the rope and some sort of emblem except its mirrored. which is excellent because rogue like character-growth wise is at the same level pilot!jay was. hes at the beginning of his journey into the 'save-it-or-end-the-world' scene.
another thing is its masterfully coherent?? like the 70-20-10 rule of colour in design with 70% being blue 20% gold and 10% red.
whats also awesome is that if you look at his dojo design the last one weve seen him wear as our jay??
rogues base colours are the same jay's 'undercolours' - hes been stripped bare to nothing but his nature with any nurture left behind; the red only being an accent colour of a side effect/scar - the shattered goodness/soul and all that.
whats also super important to me is that both of the blues Are Not Any of The Jay Blues. even though jays signature blue has changed across seasons from in both hue and value its always been far more vibrant. both the tones are lighter AND darker than any of the others weve seen on jay. theyre new.
rogue is slightly shattered and different and changed. hes figuring himself out as he goes and his outfit doesnt represent any shame in my opinion - rather his desire to let him discover himself privately and in peace.
after all he did spend like half a decade being told who he has to be with no chance to figure out who he was and no choice to choose who he can and/or will become.
PLUS jays initial in the dojo kimono is embroidered, something thats been meticulously put there while on rogue BOTH initials R and J are on keychains (for the lack of a better word) that are put in the same nook/ring of the rope with the J one actually being tiny bit lower and behind, which is telling.
not to mention THERE IS A 'J' on his back.
hes not completely abandoning his previous name, he probably hides it in plain sight for 'stop people from annoying me and keep me from doing my job' purposes. and all the crimes.
these are post DR faceprints and rogue faceprint which is definitely me reading too much into this but the fact rogue has a single faceprint instead of two?? that reads to me like a solidifying of his identity where he once again embodies the 'if you cant change your surroundings change yourself' philosophy. 'the only eternal state is the state of change' if you will.
i am 99% sure you can find screenshots of ras AND lloyd doing These Exact Poses. and 100% sure the two lower screenshots are straight up wu poses. which is fucking awesome.
There Is Not An Ounce Of Insecurity In His Body Language. and when he tilts his head down the hat makes it look like hes squinting which is awesome.
and if you look closely his face/head is completely blacked out which is an amazing fucking choice and im obsessed with it.
his design tells me hes not scared of being jay walker, but that by wanting to discover what being jay walker means without outside influence, rogue is doing the exact same thing jays been doing for years - recreating himself to fit his circumstances. the only difference is that rogue is putting on the one mask hes always had - unshakeable confidence and anger, when jay lived long enough to be able to take off any of the masks hes picked up along the way.
rogue is still jay, just a little mirrored and a little different. and he doesnt even know it.
thinking about "and everyday that raven comes to visit"...
at the time it felt like such a heartwarming note to end on, this idea that a piece of vax would always be with keyleth — but I adore the way this episode in particular has recontextualised it. what once felt sweet now feels selfish, what seemed kind now seems (unintentionally!) cruel.
of course keyleth is still hurt. of course she's totally unable to move on. how do you mourn someone who isn't truly dead? how do you mourn someone who sends daily reminders that they aren't even truly gone?
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you. i have no goddamn idea who or what your blorbo(s) is/are other then they are iirc pokémon-related, BUT here is a question anyways (apologies in advance if it absolute dogshit): how does your blorbo deal with trauma? minor or major, large or small, how do they cope? do they rage, do they go quiet and cold/hot, do they go blank, do they just get the urge to start screaming?? do you have any headcanons for how they cope, or does their canon alr cover it – and if it did, then what's your opinion on that canoninity??
commiserations about the update & have fun with the blorbo posts that are (hopefully) to come!! when in doubt write whump, as they say, lmfao.
first thing, YAY FOR STAFF REVERSING THE UPDATE (at least for now, though tbh i am feeling a little cynical given how they phrased their announcement, lol. but i guess we'll see what happens!)
this is the least dogshit question ever, i actually was so delighted by this ask i started feeling like a cartoon evil villain about it, tbh. THANK YOU. very up my alley!!!
okay, first of all, obligatory blorbo intro: goh is my funky little abandonment issues dude. yes, he is ten years old. yes, i am infinitely more interested in the version of him i lowkey made up in my head that is minimum 13 years older than that and has really grown into those abandonment issues, as those of us who are little freaks about attachment from a young age tend to do.
what's his deal? parents didn't love him enough </3 felt that. anyway, i already wrote my essay on him being a parentified child so i won't rehash the whole thing here, but it is definitely relevant to this topic, as is my powerpoint presentation i made diagnosing him as borderline, which i have never made public but WILL share a couple slides from for My Thesis, here. hem hem
as some may recognize, the scene clipped in the second slide here is from jn003, when goh tells ash they can't help the ivysaur because then they'll never learn how to help themselves if humans intervene. i think i mentioned this scene in the linked essay above, so, again, i won't get it into it, but something something "over-indentifying with pokemon to avoid acknowledging his own problems with other people" and yeah
re: the other part of that slide, this is obviously over-simplified for the sake of my silly little powerpoint, but it is worth saying that, like, goh's goals are canonically unrealistic and superfluous. even though everyone treats his goal of "working his way up to mew" as admirable, i think the show is actually self-aware enough to also...kind of show that characters' disbelief about his goal isn't stemming entirely from a place of admiration (because that'd be kind of weird, anyway. he's just some kid, be so for real). frankly? he does not know what he wants, because the only thing he actually wants is for mom and dad to love him and that's never going to happen but by god will he try to fill that void with EVERYTHING else first (oh, wait, this is just that scene from entanglement. POST CANCELLED, EVERYONE GO HOME)
ok, so anyway, what does this have to do with his trauma response? well! he is already very traumatized. but he absolutely refuses to admit it, because admitting he's hurt means admitting his parents have done something to hurt him. he does this in all his relationships - the only difference is that with ash in particular, he isn't able to curb his emotions well enough to avoid them being confronted (it is so, so, SO telling to me that he doesn't get mad at or about his parents, ever, even though he is actually very quick to anger and such with pretty much everyone else. but bro's entire tragic backstory is his parents being like "we're too busy to spend the holidays with you" and "let's go on a family vacation" and then zonking out and leaving their Literal Child to fend for himself - like even when you factor in the "horace abandoned him" backstory, that literally only happened because of his parents - and his refusal to talk to them about anything probably contributed to the fact that he never reconciled with horace, because i'd imagine his parents would have been able to like, figure out where this local kid lived and introduce themselves to his family and explain the situation, haha). SO HOW DOES HE MANAGE THAT???
LIKE A PRO: BY RUNNING THE FUCK AWAY!!!!!
goh's trauma cope is 100% just avoidance. not even necessarily of the "not acknowledging the problem" variety - just of the "not acknowledging that this is bad/upsetting/dangerous for me" variety. he is fully aware when something is wrong, but where he trips up is in identifying how he feels about any of it or why. so he puts all of that in a little box and then goes "i can deal with this problem on my own," because that's the only way he's ever known how to deal with anything.
(tangentially, i've said before that the original japanese for his farewell with ash is really, really well-worded - the fact that he puts the agency for their friendship in ash's hands, rather than his own, is SO meaningful, especially when contrasted with the beginning of their friendship, when goh "accepts" ash as his friend (and then later feels the need to ask him to be friends, even!). this is the one thing the writers really did right about the end of his journey with ash, imo. UNFORTUNATELY, the dub fucking butchered it, but that's just typical anipoke dub fare, tbh. but the phrasing "thank you for reaching out to me" is a really beautiful ode to his development as someone who really, truly believed no one else could ever or would ever help him with anything.)
anyway, back to his avoidant tendencies - how does this actually manifest? in the moment, obviously he is shown to actually physically run away when confronted with upset. he does it like. a lot. LOL. i do not need to cite my sources here there multiple episodes where this is a Major Thing that Happens! but those are all interpersonal conflicts. if something happened that didn't involve another person, how would he react?
well...i think canon shows us that, too. in the way he avoids acknowledging his parents' absence by taking a tunnel vision approach to his research on mew, as seen in jn015. the benefit of a dream that is probably genuinely unattainable is that he'll never have to stop striving for it. he can always fall back on that, pouring all his effort into research for the sake of that lofty goal of his. even when he changes gears and starts catching other pokemon, he uses that as a distraction, too. imo jn032 is the best example of that, but iirc there are other times where we see he's upset about something and the solution is to go catch pokemon about it.
but all of this is pretty minor stuff, at the end of the day. if he had to go through a really major and abrupt trauma, i think that would fail him really quickly, because he's not good at regulating his emotions as it is. at some point it would be too much, and he is 100% an externalizer (in good contrast to gary, imo, who while relying on similar methods for coping fights a much more internal battle with it. he's not really the type to yell and cry about stuff if he gets pushed past his limit, but goh definitely is. i think that's part of what i like so much about their dynamic! and especially that, by the time they meet, gary has already kind of found better ways of navigating his own issues, a lot of which he sees reflected in goh - but as similar as they are on the surface, they're different deep down. i've definitely written about that here before though, so i won't get into it again now :p). but he also feels an obligation to not burden others with his emotions, which is why even though he is emotionally wired for "fight," his base instinct is actually "flight."
so, all that is to say - he punches walls. i don't know what else to say here. he is a wall puncher at heart. he would be hesitant to punch a wall because he knows it will hurt, a lot, but he has that impulsive streak in him too and, at some point, surely, he Will punch a wall because of it. and he will hurt his hand. and he will want to die about it. that's it. that's his coping strategy. lash out, then hate himself for it. and god forbid anyone come around and offer him first aid for his mangled hand. then he'll just lash out again, because can't they see he can do this on his own??? can't they see how competent he is?!?! can't they see how hard he's trying????!!! but, oh no, what's this...?! beneath it all........the real emotion driving his refusal for help is actually the guilt of a child told his needs are secondary to his parents' work...? gasp... yeah, he's never gonna see that for himself. maybe he should punch some more walls about that, tbh
One of my favorite contrasts between Marcus and Coriolanus as narrative parallels is how a major thing for Marcus is the way he repeatedly refuses Sejanus’s help (maybe even stubbornly) and how this speaks VOLUMES about his character, the way he’d rather starve than take food from someone he believes to be a traitor to his people (which is entirely not true but that’s the whole tragedy).
Meanwhile Coriolanus also resents Sejanus for completely opposite reasons but he, unlike Marcus, doesn’t even have the decency of being upfront about his dislike. He takes and he takes from Sejanus and Ma Plinth while thinking horrible stuff about them in private.
And it’s such a fascinating contrast because Marcus is not willing to sacrifice neither his pride nor his morals by accepting food from a “traitor”, while Coriolanus is such a snake that he’s willing to keep faking a friendship with someone he hates if it’s beneficial to him.