Freeballin

I have to mention Naruto’s master Jiraiya, whose design, antics and speech are all based on Kabuki. Jiraiya’s rough, broad and bombastic way of speech and body language is a style used in kabuki for masculine, heroic characters. These type of characters take a lot of space and use flamboyant and exaggerated, even aggressive body language.

I have seen a claim that Naruto is the “opposite of traditionally masculine” because he’s flamboyant while Sasuke is traditionally masculine. Sorry but that’s not what Kishimoto was going for:

He draws Naruto in a similar manner to Jiraiya whenever he wants to bring “Kabuki” into Naruto’s character. Notice the crude facial expressions, the face paint and the same, reoccuring hand move.

Jiraiya and Naruto’s sage mode “makeup” is also a nod to the exaggerated face paint used by these hero characters in Kabuki plays. Which is why it makes perfect sense Naruto is wearing the intimidating “hero makeup” when arriving as a hero to save everyone.

So what about Sasuke? Sasuke’s look is more soft, fluid and not exaggerated (including facial expressions). I don’t bother with too many individual pictures so that this doesn’t become too long but Kishimoto spends time portraying Sasuke as poised and graceful in comparison to Naruto’s brash and exaggerated appearance.

Here as well you can see Naruto’s body language being the same type of brash and exaggerated, taking a lot of space, while Sasuke is calm and beautiful and expressionless. . Sasuke is the yin to Naruto’s yang.

But nowhere is Kishimoto’s intention more evident than in this illustration he drew in 2018.  Here they are complete opposites. Sasuke’s stance is graceful and closed, his back is straighter and his shoulders are down. Naruto’s is more assertive and open (arrogant). Sasuke is delicate looking, feminine (has some makeup), his build is slightly smaller than Naruto’s (look at the wrists). Sasuke uses the back of his hand to hold back the sleeve, unlike Naruto. Sasuke’s face is smaller and more slender than Naruto’s while Naruto’s features are squarer and not polished. Even the patterns and colors of the kimonos follow. Sasuke’s blue and white symbolise calmness and passivity, Naruto’s colors and patterns symbolise aggression and war (notice the lighting and thunder clouds). The sheer attention to detail!

i saw both birds of prey and the witcher with my bff, who is a straight cis man, and in both cases he enjoyed them because i enjoyed them so much, and god bless him for that, but when i asked him what HE thought of them, he said he didn’t particularly like them. and we had a long discussion about how the plot comes secondary to the characters “so it’s like the story doesn’t even matter” he said. and i told him, do you know that’s how most fanfic is too? and character-driven stories where the plot and stakes are less important than the growth of the protagonist are often the kinds of stories women are drawn to??

and i asked him, who is the audience? he didn’t know. i asked, do you think this is a story made for you? and he said, i guess not. (i should pause here and say we have these kinds of discussions a lot; i’m not like baselessly interrogating him. he made it clear he wanted to be having this conversation.) and then i said, if it’s not made for you, how can you enjoy it? he said he didn’t know.

and then i told him this is what it’s like to be a woman watching media made by men, that “ehh, it was alright but it obviously wasn’t for me” feeling he had while watching birds of prey and the witcher is threaded through every second of our lives. and so we’ve had to develop the tools to find ourselves in stories, to empathize with people who aren’t like us. this is true for queer people, people of color, and disabled people too. 

i told my bff he would like these things if he watched them through a woman’s mind. he said he didn’t know how to do that. and i told him that i have to watch everything to a man’s mind all the time. i know how to see through a man’s eyes in order to enjoy stories that are by and for men, but men have never been tasked with seeing something through a woman’s eyes in order to make it for them.

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

guys shut the fuck up this is the only thing im gonna talk about for the rest of all time 

Her specialty move? Breaking peoples knees by jumping on them?

This is a woman who knows her body and how it produces the biggest punch. She compensates for her size using momentum.