[Anime, Manga] Gender issues in Tite Kubo's Bleach
Tite Kubo's Bleach is a shounen manga--I think the first shounen I've discussed here, with the questionable exception of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. "Shounen" means "boy"; like its counterpart "shoujo," the genre is technically defined simply by its target audience but also tends to feature some common tropes. The plot is usually action-centered and involves fighting, sports, or a competitive endeavor; the panels tend to be more strictly defined than they are in shoujo, and are more often square or rectangular (although the layout still looks very different from American comics), and there isn't the same kind of frequent image bleedover from panel to panel; the character designs tend to be quirkier, more angular, and less deliberately pretty than shoujo designs are.

I picked up Bleach for the character designs, actually; I wanted to try shounen and of the series I checked out, this one just looked the most interesting. The art had so much energy it practically bounced off the page, and the characters were very clearly distinguished from each other, not just from the character types drawn by other artists. It was also a plus that most of the female characters had breasts smaller than double-D, which cannot be said of all of the series I flipped through.

I picked it up for the art, but I kept reading for the writing. Bleach is funny and smarter and more moving than you'd think. The fight:character development ratio is higher than it would be in my ideal series--but not as much higher as I expected and, frankly, a hell of a lot better than it is in Tsubasa, not least because Kubo is better at using fights as character development and not just cool visuals than CLAMP are.

Fifteen-year-old Ichigo Kurosaki has always been able to see ghosts. It runs in the family; one of his eleven-year-old sisters can see them, too, and the other can sense them. This turns out to be a mixed blessing, because "high spiritual energy" attracts Hollows--souls whose lingering attachments have chained them to Earth too long and turned them into ravening monsters. Fortunately for Ichigo, shinigami (usually translated as "death god," but Viz is using "soul reaper") track down and purge the Hollows--which he discovers when he finds a girl in samurai gear standing on a table in his bedroom. She ignores him because she thinks he can't see her, he kicks her, he ends up thrown on the floor and immobilized by a spell, and this may be my favorite violent meet-cute since Farscape. The shinigami is Rukia Kuchiki and she's considerably older than she looks.

During the struggle, Rukia ends up having to give her power to Ichigo in order to save his life and the lives of his family. She's stuck on Earth, masquerading in a temporary body until her power returns--and she needs a substitute to do her job while she can't. Fortunately, there's one close at hand.

Ichigo is great: he's cranky, perpetually scowling, unafraid of anything, and underneath a metric ton of attitude, he hates seeing the weak bullied or harassed. I like him plenty. But I LOVE Rukia. She is sarcastic, smart, dedicated, and heroic, and capable of doing a not-quite-right imitation of the typical shoujo sweet innocent schoolgirl that really freaks Ichigo out. She has truly terrible drawing skills, which are in fine display when she draws teddy bears and cute fluffy bunnies to illustrate some point of shinigami lore. She and Ichigo snark at each other like mad, and their not-romance is a thing of beauty--because it's really not a romance for most of the storyline. The interaction isn't about courtship, it's about partnership.

I could be critical of a storyline that empowers a boy by disempowering a woman--but I think that would be taking what happens out of context. The change is depicted as unintentional, unliked, and the result of heroic sacrifice on Rukia's part--and she deals with her situation quickly and capably. And because Kubo actually has a variety of female characters who are a hell of a lot more interesting than the impossibly sweet and good-natured girls than the ones in most of the manga I've been reading. Even the girl with huge breasts (I suppose it's not reasonable to begrudge Kubo one) has a character and is much more interesting than the standard sweet-natured airhead she at first seems--and, perhaps most significantly, there's a female friendship treated as seriously as any of the male friendships we see, and is as profoundly transformative; the girls' devotion to each other and mutual attempts at protection lead to the development of unexpected strengths.

That's the first seven volumes. Volumes 1-6 are available from Viz; later volumes are scanlations. The series is still ongoing, so it's premature to come to a definite conclusion, but in the later volumes the gender dynamics get ... iffier.

Bleach vols. 8-18
Giving powers to a human, it turns out, is regarded as a felony by shinigami; and trying to cover it up is worse. Rukia is taken back to the Soul Society, the shinigami's home, and held pending trial and execution. Ichigo and a bunch of his friends go after her and meet lots more people, most of whom they end up fighting or allying with, usually in that order.

The good about this plotline: Among the characters introduced are many women, all of whom are distinctive and most of whom are forceful, intelligent, and good fighters. (Although several of them are ... pneumatic and under-dressed. Did his editors suddenly tell Kubo he had to appeal to a slightly older and presumably drooling male audience?) The bad is that Rukia, independent cranky glares-bloody-murder Rukia, is suddenly the damsel in distress and spends nine volumes passively awaiting death. Or rescue, but mostly it's death.

And we get backstory that explains some of this, and arguably in manga the person with the most painful backstory wins is the coollest, and ... I can come up with excuses, and I'm reserving final judgment pending later developments, but I remain troubled by the containment and suppression of the strongest and most independent woman in the first half of the series.


On the anime
The anime adaptation is reasonably good, and I very much approve of the voice actors. I'm just sad they altered one sequence in Volume 3 I thought was brilliant. It reads as very cinematic on the page, actually, but I'm guessing it didn't play as well on the screen. Fansubs only, but I expect it'll be licensed soon if it hasn't been already.