Warriorcatsftw - WarriorcatsFTW

ko-fi request: "Can you please draw Sans Undertale eating guacamole? :)"

Demon Slayer Characters as Textposts

feelings about trauma therapy, day 1

I saw Kakashi at Graffiti Alley in Toronto

Mizu, femininity, and fallen sparrows

In my last post about Mizu and Akemi, I feel like I came across as overly critical of Mizu given that Mizu is a woman who - in her own words - has to live as a man in order to go down the path of revenge.

If she is ever discovered to be female by the wrong person, she will not only be unable to complete her quest, but there's a good chance that she'll be arrested or killed.

So it makes complete sense for Mizu to distance herself as much as possible from any behavior that she feels like would make someone question her sex.

I felt so indignant toward Mizu on my first couple watchthroughs for this moment. Why couldn't Mizu bribe the woman and her child's way into the city too? If Mizu is presenting as a man, couldn't she claim to be the woman's escort?

However, this moment makes things pretty clear. Mizu knows all too well the plight of women in her society. She knows it so well that she cannot risk ever finding herself back in their position again. She helps in what little way she can - without drawing attention to herself.

Mizu is not a hero and she is not one to make of herself a martyr - she will not set herself on fire to keep others warm. There's room to argue that Mizu shouldn't prioritize her quest over people's lives, but given the collateral damage Mizu can live with in almost every episode of season 1, Mizu is simply not operating under that kind of morality at this point. ("You don't know what I've done to reach you," Mizu tells Fowler.)

And while I still feel like Mizu has an obvious and established blind spot when it comes to Akemi because of their differences in station, such that Mizu's judgment of Akemi and actions in episode 5 are the result of prejudice rather than the result of Mizu's caution, I also want to establish that Mizu is just as caged as Akemi is, despite her technically having more freedom while living as a man.

Mizu can hide her mixed race identity some of the time, and she can hide her sex almost all of the time, but being able to operate outside of her society's strict rules for women does not mean she cannot see their plight.

It does not mean she doesn't hurt for them.

Back to Mizu and collateral damage, remember that sparrow?

While Mizu is breaking into Boss Hamata's manse, she gets startled by a bird and kills it on reflex. She then cradles it in her hands - much more tenderly than we've seen Mizu treat almost anything up to this point in the season:

She then puts it in its nest, with its unhatched eggs. Almost like she's trying to make the death look natural. Or like an accident.

You see where I'm going with this.

When Mizu kills Kinuyo, Mizu lingers in the moment, holding the body tenderly:

And btw a lot of stuff about this show hit me hard, but this remains the biggest gut punch of them all for me, Mizu holding that poor girl's body close, GOD

When Mizu arranges the "scene of the crime," Kinuyo's body is delicate, birdlike. And Mizu is so shaken afterward that she gets sloppy. She's horrified at this kill to the point that she can't bring herself to take another innocent life - the boy who rats her out.

MIZU'S ONE MOMENT OF SOFTNESS AND MERCY, COMING ON THE HEELS OF HER NEEDING TO KILL A GIRL TO SPARE HER THE WORST FATE THAT THIS RIGID SOCIETY HAS TO OFFER WOMEN, AND TO SPARE A BROTHEL FULL OF INNOCENT WOMEN WHO ARE THE CASTOFFS OF SOCIETY, NEARLY RESULTS IN ALL OF THEIR DEATHS

No wonder Mizu is as stoic and cold as she is.

And no wonder Mizu has no patience for Akemi whatsoever right before the terrible reveal and the fight breaks out:

Speaking of Akemi - guess who else is compared to a bird!

The plumage is more colorful, a bit flashier. But a bird is a bird.

And, uh

Yeah.

I like to think that Mizu killing the sparrow is not only foreshadowing for what she must do to Kinuyo, but is also a representation of the choice she makes on Akemi's behalf. She decides to cage the bird because she believes the bird is "better off." Better off caged than... dead.

But because Mizu doesn't know Akemi or her situation, she of course doesn't realize that the bird is fated to die if it is caged and sent back home.

Mizu is clearly not happy, or pleased, or satisfied by allowing Akemi to be dragged back to her father:

But softness and mercy haven't gotten Mizu anywhere good, recently.

There is so much tragedy layered into Mizu's character, and it includes the things she has to witness and the choices she makes - or believes she has to make - involving women, when she herself can skirt around a lot of what her society throws at women. Although, I do believe that it comes at the cost of a part of Mizu's soul.

After all, I'm gonna be haunted for the rest of this show by Mizu's very first prayer in episode 1:

"LET" her die. Because as Ringo points out, she doesn't "know how" to die.

Kind of like another bird in this show:

My father was a talker and a storyteller. Because of this, there was no time when we, his children, did not know we were Palestinian. The stories I remember about his boyhood in the 1930s and early 1940s were nostalgic, both comic and bitter. But there were more political stories that began to teach us what it had meant to be Palestinian under the British Mandate. According to my father, people were barely aware they were on the eve of disastrous events that would make them refugees. They did not realize that the Zionists, not the British, were their real adversaries. Yet, while I was growing up, I don’t recall hearing his stories of 1948, the last months before the fall of his hometown, Jaffa. Were we too young to be told? Did it not mean anything to children who had never seen Jaffa? What happened when my father returned to Palestine was that his memories now became the guide to a living history and a real place. And he told the stories to me and to anyone who would listen. Jaffa was the heart of my father’s Palestine. On the wall of his apartment in Ramallah when I came to stay in 2001 was a large sepia poster: a historic photograph of an Arab man staring wistfully out to sea with a large town in the background. At the top, in Arabic, it said, “Jaffa 1937.” On my first visit to Palestine to see him in 1993, I sensed the thrill he felt at having mastered the new situation. The good part was embracing and being embraced by the community he had found, whether in the West Bank or in various other parts of pre-1948 Palestine. The anxiety of being there was betrayed by his dry mouth and the beads of sweat on his forehead as he drove us around, approaching Israeli military checkpoints or getting lost because he couldn’t read Hebrew. For me, the landscape was familiar from Lebanon and Jordan, which I had known well growing up. The barren highways and the cities branded by Hebrew sounds and sights were menacing, though, especially when combined with the heavy presence of Israeli soldiers, reservists, and guns. He was eager to show me and my small family the whole of Palestine, from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, Nablus to Nazareth, Jericho to ‘Akka. His tour of Jaffa, the same one, I was a little hurt to discover later, he gave to many others, was about claiming and reclaiming the city in which he had been born, the sea in which he had swum as a boy, and the home he had been forced to flee in 1948. On his own first visit in 1991, he’d asked friends to take him there. Initially he was disoriented. Most of the landmarks weren’t there. The neighborhood by the sea where he’d grown up had been razed by then, though twenty years earlier his brother had done what so many Palestinians have done and described: knocked on the door to find out which Jews—Russian, Moroccan, Yemeni, Polish—were now living in their old family homes. Suddenly, my father said he had spotted the Hasan Bek mosque where he had made the call to prayer as a boy. Bit by bit, circling more widely around the mosque, he began to find his way. It was a former student of his who had made him rethink his refusal to go back. She often traveled to Israel and the Occupied Territories. He recalled that she had told him once, “Ibrahim, Palestine is still there.” He was happy, he said, to find this true. There is an image in one of Doris Lessing’s African Stories (1981) that has never left me. A young girl, a white settler living in southern Africa, looks out over the savanna and acacia trees and sees the large gnarled oak trees of her English fairytales. My father did the opposite. Where I, who never knew anything else, could see only the deep gouges in green hillsides made for Israeli settlements with garish red tile roofs, or miles and miles of highways criss-crossing the rocky landscape and claiming it with modern green signs in Hebrew and English, or non-native evergreen forests to hide razed villages, my father saw beyond, between and behind them to the familiar landscapes of his youth.

– Return to Half-Ruins: Father's and Daughters Memory and History in Palestine by Leila Abu-Lughod.

Happy Pride Month

A comic commission for the wonderful @scepticalbutterbutt

Commission|Twitter|Ko-fi

Oh God I'm never going to heal

I'll never be okay again

I'll always be that sad, broken child looking for a caretaker

But nobody came

Nothing really matters anymore, does it?

i can't help seeing the concept of "coming back wrong" as reflective of the aftermath of attempted (and unsuccessful) suicide. whether you gratefully accepted death at the end, or you struggled in terror in your final moments and wished you could somehow twist out of the way of your oncoming fate, the choice to die was taken from you. you failed to achieve the inevitable. how wrong must you be, to be unable to even die properly? how horrifying - and how utterly infuriating - would it be, to have everyone around you expressing gratitude or disgust at your resurrection, while you cannot even begin to articulate the depths of your own conviction that death, the inexorable maw itself, must have decided there was something just not right about you, and spat you out?