discoursetothevoid - Tumblr blog

discoursetothevoid · 3 years

Text

JJK-Nobara

JJK is well known for well written and non-sexualized female characters. A lot of people point to the fact that they don’t wear super revealing clothing, or have giant z cup tiddies. This is true, but I think the bar is absolutely on the floor, and doesn’t appreciate Nobara, one of the best written female characters since Riza Hawkeye.

The first reason is that she is explicitly against the normal tropes female anime characters are often pigeon holed into. She is the woman with two men on the team, but doesn’t default to either healer who needs protecting or feelings no jutsu for the main character. Sure, she supports Itadori, but it’s as a friend, not an emotional doormat. (JJK also does a good job with the “female in the group is the healer” with Shoko, who isn’t the cutesie defenseless love interest in waiting, but instead an exhausted temperamental smoker whose time around dead and dying colleagues seems to leave her pretty dead inside but that’s a different topic.). Make her a male character and call the anime “rise of the hammer hero” and it would totally fly as a shonen anime.

She also avoids both the “women are weak” and what I call the “kill bill feminism” tropes. She’s obviously pretty strong, but she isn’t just masculine violence, but do it in a tighter outfit. Look to her speech in the school competition, where she basically shoots down the idea that her being a woman means that she has to look cute all of the time while also being strong, but ALSO refutes the idea that being strong means that she can’t be feminine. She just doesn’t have to play male gaze respectability politics as well as being strong. This scene basically seemed like a total callout to most manga artists (and frankly writers in general) for saying that a woman has to choose between being a cute girl who happens to be strong, and being strong while happening to be female. She is one of few characters who actually is a strong female character.

She also doesn’t fall into the very easy trap of the Mary Sue either. A lot of writers will create a character that isn’t like other girls and it ends up being more Not Like Other Girls. But Nobara has well written and subtly shown flaws as well.

For one, she says that she cares about very few people, saying that Yuuji is one of them now. This gives her the flaw of being quite closed off and even cold hearted, without her just being the stone cold bitch or worse, the tsundere who doesn’t mean it. She’s careful with her feelings, because she’s been hurt before. Not by some ex boyfriend or abusive father, but by the circumstances of the world, outside of her control. She exists in a world and acts on it as well as being acted on by it. She doesn’t exist as an NPC for the male characters to click on when needed. This shows why she would adamantly defend Maki and cry over Yuuji’s “death” but have no problems just roasting the fuck out of Mai on sight.

Now, you might be saying, What about the “woman dies/gets hurt for man pain” trope huh? The fact that she gets got by Mahito to make Yuuji sad isn’t very subversive is it?

Well, here’s the thing. I don’t think she does get hurt to make Yuuji feel bad. She gets hurt for her own character arc. Nobara’s a little in her own head, meaning she can be inattentive AND a little egotistical. In her first introduction, she looks down on Yuuji, but overlooks that a city curse may not be the same as the ones she’s used to in the country and needs him to save her. Not because she’s a damsel in distress, but because she needs to start to learn the lesson of being more cautious. When Mahito gets her, it’s not because she’s too weak, but because she gets overconfident after hitting him the first time, and doesn’t notice that it’s a different Mahito than the one she was fighting. (Side note: I really hope she survives and learns this lesson. Maybe her unique ability to link cursed energy to the user lets her even manipulate souls like Mahito does in some way?)

Overall, she’s written to have detailed reasons for her personality, that personality isn’t just “have boobs and inspire the men to do all the work” as many anime trio girls are, and even in her flaws she has chances for growth, some of which she takes and some of which she doesn’t. She’s a complex person whose motivations lay in herself and her interactions with society, not just her interactions with the male characters (like some female characters who control gravity and wear pink we could mention. “What would Yuuji do?” would never cross her lips.)

I would even argue that she’s more well written (which does not mean that I like her better or prefer her or think she IS better) than Maki, but that’s another post.

#jjk #jjk discourse #discourse #my thoughts #I just want to put my opinions out at this point.#cause y'all say some crazy shit #please take an english class I'm begging #which I know will be ironic when I misspell half the words in this post.

4 notes · View notes