#given that both have extremely gendered worldviews and attitudes (mob’s idolization/teru’s precocious dating)

[daisyachain]

Hmmmm how to say. There’s a certain peerhood of character dynamic that comes from two people in a work being both girls/both boys/both neither. That isn’t to say that life isn’t fluid or that you can’t build a dynamic between male and female characters that ignores this divide.

To take an example at random—MP100. Emi, Asagiri, Tsubomi all interact with Mob as Girls. They’re foreign, agitating or destabilizing elements in Mob’s world (the audience’s world) as non-peers. His interactions with them are always in the context of Gee I’m Talking to a Girl. Mezato is an edge case but still Girl. Mob ends up misinterpreting her journalistic curiosity as interest in the Divine Tree arc, which only makes sense if she’s viewed as Girl before Classmate. Tome, on the other hand, is fully a Peer character. She’s Mob’s closest friend from what we see in-canon, they go on what he describes as ‘dates’, but she’s so far out of the Girl social role that Shigeo never associates her with the fresh intrigue of the Girls. Instead she’s a comforting, reassuring force on the story in the way that Reigen and Ritsu are. She even steps into Mob’s shoes for the oneshot! There are gendered roles and non-gendered roles and actual gender doesn’t have to define them. Tome is a girl and not a Girl.

So, it’s interesting to play around with his characters’ genders can shape even non-romantic dynamics, or how dynamic is itself gender. People who are similar feel kinship. A tomboy will hang out with boys on the playground or a kid bullied for being a sissy will be part of the girl group. That gets complicated when genders bend around in-story.

Specifically DGM Alma Karma was born from the transmigration of a woman’s soul into an an artificial male-assigned homunculus. Her/his/their key dynamic is with Kanda as two-of-a-kind. Both experiments, both exorcists, both (assigned) boys growing up together. The sense of sameness and equivalency is important to that relationship. They have no one else in the world like them except each other.

PastKanda’s dynamic with PastAlma also fits into a strictly gendered structure: Kanda is a brooding gruff man searching for a lost cheerful kind woman. They’re the action hero/deadwife cliché. Kanda has abstracted PastAlma away from any semblance of personality because he doesn’t even know her, he just has a vague impression. The woman is separate, unknowable, distant, and though Hoshino is a lady herself, the trope is a misogynistic one that relies on the idea that women are mysterious creatures rather than human beings with thoughts and dreams.

By then transposing the somewhat gendered relationship of childhood friends-twins-equals-peers on to the irrevocably gendered trope of sadman/deadwife, Hoshino then challenges the way that gender informs the whole story. Kanda’s view on Alma is wholly interior. Alma is himself reflected, openly expresses what Kanda feels and hides, is the one person who truly knows and understands him. Then his view on PastAlma is entirely exterior; she is an inscrutable ghost, an invisible gap in his life. Kanda has idealized PastAlma and resented Alma for a decade only to find out that they’re the same person. Which begs the questions: did he think of them differently just because he thought Alma was a boy? Was PastKanda even a man? Do we the audience read PastAlma as opaque just because she’s a woman, where Alma is such a lively screen presence? Would Alma present as a woman if she weren’t trying to go incognito, or did they genuinely identify with the boyhood he was assigned?

Who knows. Social pressures always weigh on the edges of a story. Even if they’re not obvious, they inform how events unfold and how audiences interpret them. Gender (patriarchy) is such a pervasive hierarchy that a writer/reader’s got to consider how it influences plot events. Alternately, ignoring it has got to be a deliberate choice and you’ve got to think hard to keep gender from sneaking into the reading (eg a perfectly neutral interaction between girl characters will read as misogynist between a girl and a guy).

#kelsey rambles #brought to you by a post I should reblog talking about how Alma Karma is both feminine and masculine #but only in the ways that clash. their rough rage and destruction is their womanhood while their sociability and their grace is masculine #character study aside Alma plays the role of both a girl and a boy in the series. Kanda’s view of them (the lens through which we watch) #is defined by thinking of Alma as A Boy Like Me and by thinking of PastAlma as Divine Feminine #complicating it further. purely from a trope standpoint you can’t unpick one from the other #also. regret to say that I think it’s an important aspect of Kanda’s character that he only finds out about Alma at the very last second #he goes through that entire arc believing Alma to be a) a guy b) a stranger #or going to MP100 I see a lot of girl Mob which is great adorable interesting canonically resonant #but I also see a lot of girl Mob and boy Teru which feels so at odds with their entire thing of Teru being Mob’s foil/reflection/equal/peer #girl Mob must compare herself to alpha bitch fashionista girl Teru. just as guy Mob has to compare himself to suave bully boy Teru #their entire dynamic is rooted in comparison so you can’t just have them be different #or if you do have girl mob and boy teru then you’ve got to create a reason for them to view each other as competitors #given that both have extremely gendered worldviews and attitudes (mob’s idolization/teru’s precocious dating)