Mashima Taichi and character assassination via fandom structuralism

[shrimpchipsss]

Every now and again I think maybe I’ll write a Dreamwidth post about how people who hate Mashima Taichi don’t even hate him (or like him, for that matter) for the right reasons and then I remember that this post about how people who hate Jiang Cheng don’t even hate (or like!!!) him for the right reasons exists.

This is that post.

The thing about Mashima Taichi, much like the thing about Jiang Cheng, is that he’s not like, the best guy. He can be toxic and jealous, and he’s insecure and cringe and has tons of internalized patriarchal masculinity, and he knows it, is excruciatingly aware of it. Is embarrassed about it, all the time. He is also, like Jiang Cheng, imminently meow meowifyable.

We all know the scene where he downplays Nishida’s win and immediately feels awful about it, comes to Nishida later to apologize. I love Suetsugu and the narrative for doing that. Notice: I love the AUTHOR and the NARRATIVE for depicting it. More on this later.

But I think scenes like this are an example of how people either become part of an apologist camp (he felt bad and apologized therefore he is good and my poor little meow meow, I will disregard his complexity and flaws) or a hater camp (he lashed out so he is toxic and bad, and to go further, the narrative showing him feeling bad about it is Taichi apologism and propaganda). This caricatures things a bit but you get the idea.

A dichotomy like this sounds silly but is propped up by Taichi being trapped in a “which guy ends up with the girl” love triangle, the most interesting part of which is how completely not normal the two guys are about each other. (Have you seen the way Taichi wants Arata’s approval and how he bullies Arata as a child because Arata is paying attention to his crush Chihaya and both of their attention is not on him? Did you see the way Arata agonized over his rivalry with Taichi and whether or not he was a bad friend for wanting to beat him? The love triangle goes three ways, but of course, the fandom will fixate on the two potential het ships).

That aside, Taichi (and Arata, really) is set up to be misunderstood because of Chihayafuru fans' understanding of the story as a love triangle in which people vie for their “best boy” to win.

Which leads us to our thesis.

Some fandoms are set up for people to be at odds with each other, to need to be right due to the structure of the story (for example, a love triangle with a winning love interest). While some fandoms are set up to encourage multiple and more nuanced interpretations of the text (due to, for example, multiple realities or timelines). (credit to chris roxast for the first half of this)

Chihayafuru is a great example of a story that can be interpreted as a love triangle (hilarious, as I think it’s one of the best sports anime of all time and that the romance is secondary) which means that a large portion of the fandom will read the text looking for ways to validate their preferred ship or gathering hints of a foreshadowed endgame pairing (convo w twt user @nyan_wushi, 2023).

Scum Villain, on the other hand, is a great example of a “yes, and” fandom. The text is an meta satirical narrative that ridicules and makes fun of itself and contains multiple realities and timelines, encouraging readers to pose different interpretations of the story and to ask “what if?” over being defensive about being right (twt user @ever_and_anon).

This does not necessarily mean that people in these fandoms will be more likely to consistently and with textual backing characterize their favorite and hated blorbos, but it does make you think.

Because I think there is confusion about whether people like or dislike characters like Jiang Cheng and Taichi for the “fundamental facts of their character” or for their role in the narrative (tumblr user @whetstonefires).

A lot of the discourse from Taichi haters AND Taichi fans alike is about whether or not he “deserves” to have “gotten the girl.” (This has led to some of the most vile and vitriolic behavior I’ve seen in fandom in all my life.) The other common discourse is about his character arc being unsatisfying, which is understandable.

But these things get conflated into “Taichi doesn’t deserve to get the girl because he didn’t overcome his struggles with himself.” “Taichi doesn’t deserve to be with the girl because he experienced jealousy.” and so on. Which is a kind of take I am cautious of as it is the kind of faulty moral panic literary analysis that has become so common these days. Neither love interest “deserves” or “doesn’t deserve” anything and it’s juvenile to think that an author is always trying to make a point about deservingness or moral purity based on characters who happen to be dating at the end of a story when they are 18 years old. I think there are other really good reasons to dislike the "endgame"  but this unfortunately seems to be a common school of thought.

That aside, I think what people are really frustrated about is Taichi's character growth being frustrating and unsatisfying, and it being annoying that a character whose interiority we get a front row seat to is never punished for his actions other than his own self flagellation, and the protagonist happens to ends up liking him.

But these are just things that happen to be true at the same time and not a cause and effect. The "endgame" is simply what Chihaya decided for herself on her own time. But the interpretation of Chihayafuru as a love triangle in which one boy will “win” begets an attitude that overshadows that.

Anyways.

Taichi.

For many who find themselves above the fray of meow meow fundamentalism on the one hand and demonization on the other there then remains whether or not you are satisfied with Taichi's character arc. And here's where I think some of the really interesting divergence in takes appears.

It seems that either people find the frustrating endless cycle of backtracking and doubt to be frustrating, unsatisfying character development, or to find the terrible bad unsatisfyingness to be delightful and interesting.

This occurs likely from the expectation that a character arc should be somewhat linear and that by the end of a story, a character will have worked through some of their issues and be on their way which. Is maybe the expectation of many shoujo and shounen manga readers. But this is neither the only kind of character arc to exist nor should it.

Self-doubt and being trapped in himself is one of Taichi’s defining struggles and the structure of his arc, and it’s really down to personal preference whether you find that satisfying or not, but who said that "good" character development had to be linear or make a character better? It is one thing to say "I found this character's arc unsatisfying" and "this character's arc was bad." 

Regression? Now that’s what I call //interesting// character development.

Which brings me back to Scum Villain and the way some fandoms are characterized by a pursuit of interestingness over correctness. Which isn’t to say that the text is thrown out the window. I’ve found it more common to casually stumble upon more nuanced interpretations of a text in such fandoms because people aren’t as concerned about agreeing and are more open to considering different views and circulating those posts. Seeing a ship or a character they don’t care about or might even dislike and going “not my favorite hentai of pennywise but ok!” and moving along.

I’ll end with this.

Sometimes people hate or like a character for their actual character traits and actions, and sometimes people hate or like the way a character is being used by the narrative. These things get conflated and some fandoms almost provoke that conflation if popular interpretations of the structure of a story are such that people want to be right. On the other hand, the total irreverence and meta narrative of some stories cultivate a collective attitude of freewheeling speculation and theorizing where nothing is sacred and everything is up for grabs. And these things sometimes have more to do with the way fandom develops than with the original text itself.

If you haven't read it I recommend Chihayafuru (top sports animanga of all time next to Haikyuu) with all my heart, both the manga and the anime. For context on Taichi, someone said he's like if you put a Riverdale character back into the Archie comics. I wish that it was a findable retweetable tweet but it was on a private account. I think about it all the time.

If you haven't read Scum Villain and you think you'd enjoy meta satire about a bad porn webnovel, like if that sounds funny to you, you may have a good time. Also if you enjoyed reading TV Tropes as a teen. You might enjoy Scum Villain. Ok peace out would love to hear your thoughts if you want to share them!

Comments

you only love what splits you like a rotten fruit

[fizzpop]

lol .. i saw imminent & long be put next to each other to describe styles' career today and had to giggle .. who needs enemies when your fans will make you look bad. i can't comment on mashima taichi but i did have several tangential thoughts when i was reading this for the second time again

I’ve decided to find takes that his constant self-doubt and regression is “bad” character development amusing.

sorry to completely hijack this thought but it made me think of this fic where sephiroth ends up being a farmer in stardew valley & he ends up dating elliott but elliott ends up breaking up with him after sephiroth talks abt his past & cloud is also there. like obviously the fic i'm talking about has linear & morally correct character development, at least for the part i read up to because i got bored of sephiroth's straightforward .. maudlin reaction. good writing, of course, but i need emotional grist to be really self-involved about it.

your thoughts about fandom formation being sometimes more important than the original text is so interesting. and it is true. in the late 90s, exports of books through official channels totaled 3 million. the article was written in 1998. & now i recall mxtx selling half a million units through localisation in her first few weeks, twenty and some odd years on. genzaburo yoshino's how do you live? has sold over two million. these facts aren't important besides the fact i've taken a pecking of an interest to publishing and they're just--there. the reason why how do you live? got a reprint is because miyazaki is going to make an adaptation for it dedicated to his grandson. mxtx's overseas success can be, in no small part, be attributed to fan community and engagement and wholesale support for the books being officially translated and something they can hold.

i always come back to the idea that love is sincere and real and good. i've properly hijacked this comment now LOL

but i guess i'm engaging with the idea that fandom formation is sometimes more important than the original text itself. mxtx & chihayafuru & hdyl could not exist if it were not for fan devotion and love and fandom formation that emerged from the soil of that affection. the text-as-cocreation, i suppose. a text is only as alive as it exists in the chamber of the heart, or as an affliction of the mind.

sometimes i really don't get it, the faulty moral panic literary analysis. i'd like to say it's just on the internet and that nobody really walks around thinking like that, that people grow out of it and realise it's all a bit silly and that they'd rather apply harsher judgement when it is warranted, when material reality is affected and not the immaterial they can only engage with in the theoretical of fiction. but it's not. it is so strange to talk to someone who is so palpably shaped by the mental gymnasium of social media morality. and it's a miserable experience, from what i can see from the outside. it wouldn't be nice, really, if this was what made that person happy but i wonder what would precipitate long-standing development that would end in something sustainable and positive.

i wonder, sometimes, what invigorates people to such lengths, and to argue along the lines of fandom formation, what ships this or that person likes, and in what iterations. i wonder if this is correlated with formation of the self as arbiter of fate, individuality beyond all else, if it is shaped by the language in which the fandom is formed in. english makes you have to stay in the sentence, really be there, and doesn't have the ambiguity that other languages allow.

all of this to say that i pity those who linger in the fault lines of moral panic literary analysis. it seeps into everything else. it occludes perception of another person. it's that conversation about fandom where it's not about having conversation in fandom at all--everyone in it already knows the reply and answer to every conversation or polite inquiry about this or that factoid, conversation becomes dialogue and could be played out on a wikipedia page instead of between people. i'm talking about two separate groups of people here, but there is remarkable overlap.

the pandemic has enabled a worsening of this effect. but enough of being landmined abt some people i've encountered who demonstrate the characteristics mentioned here.

actually i do want to dig into a bit more. there isn't a real distinction, or rather to be more precise, it's the distance that disappears between the author and the narrative. the narrative is regarded as an unqualified extension of the author. this slippage can be partially attributed to visual media like films and tv shows but thornier factor is social media & it's immediacy on the mobile phone. it's ultrapresent and cuts through the distance that film and tv could afford. i felt it, really intensely, when i followed an author and they followed me back within the day. i was trying to find someone to interview for a deadline and it felt cool but flattened the authorial landscape from a distant vista into sharp relief of, like, this person is a person and not bigger or more important than me. i was being in my head.

but that moment doesn't occur in the occluded vision of someone who's received positive messaging for faulty moral panic literary analysis. it staggers in the shadows of mountains of morality. they think they've tripped over the pebble that signifies a mountain of misery and terribleness, endless fighting that they can win and affirms their identity marker of authenticity over some other person interested in the same thing. it's a mole hill. yes i looped back to this turn of phrase because it works.

sometimes i wish media analysis was something compulsory. but it is difficult to implement into curriculum and what to excise to make room for it? teachers are overworked as it is. delivery looks different on the ground level unless a government was out of touch enough to order teachers to teach to government-made lesson plans. those do not work. they do not. they do not account for a class size, the classroom environment, accessibility of resources, the funding for the school, ability level of a student, the individual characteristics and interests of a student. it is a waste of time.

i don't like complaining without reaching for a solution and trying to understand how the problem came to be. that way, you can excise the problem at the root. but the thing is, for the people who default to this literary analysis, they are underequipped to critically engage with a narrative as a story and not an extension of themselves. they see a problem with how another person engages with their favourite character and they will weaponise the language they use to argue with a stranger on the internet onto other people close to them. it is a vicious cycle. they socialise within a reactionary environment about a topic they're highly interested in and they learn the ins and outs of acceptable social behaviour. they learn what separates a friend from foe and use that reactionary language to affirm their identity. the internet is skewed towards ragebait and endless scroll. they use that reactionary language to argue and establish a moral hew to their identity. they lean into literary analysis because that's the subject matter they engage in.

there's no reaching for a lasting solution. it's immediate. here and now and perpetuity. to contend with the idea of a solution would be to end the feedback loop of arguing and satisfaction and identity affirmation.

god this is simply a description of how people become radicalised. they become radicalised along cracked fault lines of media illiteracy and antisocial behaviour. recently talked to someone who engaged with the internet in a superficial manner and every second phrase was a SEO buzzword. they are interning at a news organisation and deeply boring. ott reactions and talking at people rather than to them. something behind the eyes but nothing to it.

This is an insecure guy who can be jealous and has some internalized toxic masculinity, who represses until something breaks and he lashes out. He knows this and is mortified about it constantly, and the defining structure of his character arc is that he is stuck in a cycle of backtracking and doubt.

this is so meaty & so fun .. i love insecurity. i love repression. i love being self aware and not being able to stop it from happening. i love regression and mortification and being in lock-step with the past.

i don't know if i talked to you or talked at you ..or replied at you or to you .. something. i want to watch more f1 but i have deadlines :( & not enough time for any of it, i'm afraid. i hope this is interesting to read at least ..

Re: you only love what splits you like a rotten fruit

[fizzpop]

actually i want to come back and say i am insane about jiang cheng. to any reader who stumbles across this post i want you to know i am obsessed with him and like him a lot. he is my favourite. he is so full of grief and terrible and shaped formatively by love that he cannot give and stymied by his role that he cannot give up. he loves and loves but it cannot be enough, by his own standards, by those around him, by the narrative itself. he loves but it's never enough and that is so zesty in terms of the character development(? more like regression to himself, if he lets himself think about it in those parameters but time is measured in the turn of the seasons and when it is time to liaise again with merchants and festivities and and. time isn't his. it has never been his. it is structured at the behest of the needs of the people around him and he is their servant even as he is their leader. he can't sit up high like jgy with the luxury of distance because lotus pier was on hobbling legs in terms of rebuilding and resource deficient and they were not rich.) because he considers himself third fiddle to everything. his nephew and lotus pier come first. his coping mechanisms being terrible are so interesting. he is so raw all the time and it is so interesting to see narratively because wwx's love for him is fundamental to the story. to divest wwx of his love for jc is to fundamentally misunderstand mdzs and what precipitates the narrative from the beginning mxtx starts at. i don't care if you hate him, just hate him and not what the fandom necessarily thinks he is. consider him through the narrative and make a judgement off of that. or don't. i'm not your parent or any authority in your life. i'm just a random commenter talking to the absence of an audience. ah, this was nice. i haven't thought about jiang cheng properly in a while.

Re: you only love what splits you like a rotten fruit

[shrimpchipsss]

MAN okay thank you for reading this as a person who did not know Taichi. but I know you like Jiang Cheng... I have a feeling you'd enjoy Taichi as a character

"who needs enemies when your fans will make you look bad." laughed a lot at this

"fandom formation is sometimes more important than the original text itself" !!

I think the moral panic literary analysis stuff is maybe more common than we think. I understand wanting a sense of justice or triumph from a narrative, but also there's the... growing up with aesop's parables or if you're in the US, cultural christianity and white christian nationalism which pervades everything and makes people think there has to be an enemy to condemn and a good person to uphold as a paragon of virtue. people growing up with bible stories being used to condemn and assuming that's the main mode with which you're supposed to engage with literature. hilarious when that is not remotely what christianity is supposed to be about but ah well. our reality. but yeah I think there's something about the assumption that a story has to have a lesson that is very appealing! especially if it makes the reader feel moral superiority about themselves

"endless fighting that they can win and affirms their identity marker of authenticity over some other person interested in the same thing." YES this exactly, and YES about how this is just how people become radicalized. I keep seeing people talk about how we don't really know how to critically think because it's not how we're taught in school, but then neither are we given the chance to really practice it for ourselves as adults unless the person makes a concerted effort about it. I feel like online I've tried to follow people across platforms that make me think, and I know lots of people do this, but none of our platforms are really set up to encourage that so it has to be a conscious thing...

anyways enjoyed reading your additional jiang cheng post, his coping mechanisms are so terrible and delicious the man is a live wire. I live for good characterization of the guy

Re: you only love what splits you like a rotten fruit

[fizzpop]

ur welcome? i'm glad you know i like jiang cheng! he's fundamentally extremely sweet to me. i'd like it if that was what you thought of first when you thought of me. to be defined by my affection for him, that would be very nice.

"laughed a lot at this" hehehe love being funny. you used imminently correctly & i was tickled for it.

"I think the moral panic literary analysis stuff is maybe more common than we think" no, you're right. it's really interesting that you described aesop's fables like that, as parables, when they're fables, no? fables are stories designed to deliver morality, and then you described it with parable which i've only ever associated with christianity. feels a bit like easter being known as a christian holiday now.

"but yeah I think there's something about the assumption that a story has to have a lesson that is very appealing!" it is really appealing. we're taught from them, a lot of the time, and where else are we meant to learn? letters for learning, the purpose stitched into the seams of context and hammered in over a decade of compulsory schooling. but it's not--i wish people were more aware of different ways you could engage with a text. and it says nothing unless you want it to mean something. people can generate their own meanings.

i'm engaging with different parts of your comment & like .. gack .. linear nature or wtv doesn't behoove me.

"or if you're in the US, cultural christianity and white christian nationalism which pervades everything and makes people think there has to be an enemy to condemn and a good person to uphold as a paragon of virtue."
this sounds profoundly isolating. to look for an enemy to condemn is to live in a state of fear, to either purposefully generate it or to sit from a distance and think of oneself as a predator or a warrior and it is--like even for the paragon of virtue, it is isolating. a good person--look i've wrangled with the idea of a good person & then saw xl in tgcf and decided to sidestep the whole issue. it's not worth it to be so deeply invested in the self to the supplanting of everyone else, as though any issue could be solved with a single person and not a concerted effort by a thousand working in tandem. it sounds like some people are not taught to love what they protect before they are taught to love the fight. it is sad. it sounds like people are not taught to love the world, to see its goodness, to see interiority in another, that to love is to be stronger for it. or maybe i am ascribing more to it than is really there. maybe people are happy, living like this. maybe conspiracy theorists are happy and i am the one who is strange.

it sounds tragic.


"YES this exactly, and YES about how this is just how people become radicalized." i'm glad i made sense ! i love talking to people about this. i like talking to you because i have the sense you'll meet me where i'm at even if i'm not particularly articulate or have any conclusions about any of it. this is about the human condition. i'm not expected to have conclusions. i am just a random comment ^__________^ it just sounds like people without purpose who want purpose. who are lonely and it is--sad. but i can't fix that. it's all structural. it's people who cling together because being alone is worst of all. i wonder about some of the people i know, and i wonder if they will be happy a decade from now. where they would be in thirty. whether they would have changed for the better or taken a skew for the worse. it's strange to see a friend exit a relationship that would've turned ten and to realise i'll have friends who exit twenty year marriages later on. that it'll be good for them but i can't help, again, and i wonder at how much we can do for each other, really. i wonder what happens to radicalised individuals. whether they come back to themselves or lose themselves in their belief. all of it is so murky and i can't grasp a bit of it. it feels like a quiet death. and i wonder what people do with that quiet grief, because the person has become a ghost. radicalised people seem to be like ghosts, repeating the same old haunts and saying the same old things.

"I keep seeing people talk about how we don't really know how to critically think because it's not how we're taught in school, but then neither are we given the chance to really practice it for ourselves as adults unless the person makes a concerted effort about it." i've also seen that! but i wonder how do you even define critical thinking? and i wonder if i am engaging in that, because it seems flimsy and linkedin doesn't say anything useful about it. i just jam experiences on there and look at people's profiles and see the high-achievers there, and it is deeply abyssal, nothing on nothing in an absence of honesty. and i know some better funded schools do it, but they're for the people with money to move countries and travel on yachts and ski in the alps and have connections in the industry or scholarship kids who have talent enough to merit a position. i know a kid who goes to one and it's slightly absurd the things they work on at school and it makes me think, ah, money makes that material of a difference. and you wonder, sometimes, how you could have turned out if you had been dealt different cards. but not all kids are engaged or care or make use of what they are given either. but you do wonder, what might have happened. what could have happened. but dwelling on possibilities is far more fun for fictional characters than yourself. gets a bit morose. hope these meanderings were interesting lol. i just wonder a lot--whether people move with purpose, whether they're unable to out of circumstance or a choice, whether they go about in life motivated by fear or wonder or repetition.

tl;dr am i really critically thinking? what could have beens.

"I feel like online I've tried to follow people across platforms that make me think, and I know lots of people do this, but none of our platforms are really set up to encourage that so it has to be a conscious thing..." same .. it's also that i genuinely get bored. i feel like, sometimes, that i get too bored too quickly. that i'll get bored and nothing will perk my interest ever again. the platforms are not set up for it, at all, and it's really. .. i would like to see the different permutations of lives other versions of me have lived. to see how i could have been formatively shaped and whether i would've grown into what i am, what part of what makes me me does not change, what things do, and how .. you know. it would be so nice to see everything everywhere all at once. i did see your previous post and did have thoughts about it but i don't think they're that interesting since i did like the movie.

wah i'm glad you enjoyed the additional jiang cheng post ..... his coping mechanisms are so terrible! i love him. he is so sweet. i wrote a piece on him, would you like to read it? it's on ao3 somewhere :3c (i do believe i did some part of him justice)

Re: you only love what splits you like a rotten fruit

[shrimpchipsss]

FABLES. NOT PARABLES that was a slip of the tongue hahaha telling!!!

i think what you said about people without purpose who want purpose is where the whole thing of needing to have a bad guy and an enemy comes from. where instead of doing the hard work of critical thinking and understanding things for yourself you just use a scapegoat instead.

I saw the musical Parade recently and it takes place in the US in the south, 50 years after the end of the civil war, and a Jewish man is wrongly accused of a horrible crime and it's about the spectacle around the court case and its aftermath. and at work the next day I was telling my coworkers about how I felt like the story was about how the south has all of this unprocessed shit and an identity crisis regarding its horrible wretched history and instead of facing itself it needs "bad guys" to crucify and be able to say we are moral and good and pure because we stand against evil! they need a scapegoat. the moral panic literary analysis!

laughing at your comment about linkedin being abyssal... linkedin is the abject...

yes i'd like to read the jiang cheng piece! could I get a link?

Re: you only love what splits you like a rotten fruit

[fizzpop]

i love seeing where religion & the self intersect. the crunch of it.

im coming back to this 21 weeks later. sorry. #YAOIZINE2_IS_OUT. please read it. shrimp wrote things in it.

you're spot on with that. like it's the self & the other. self = good, other = bad. simple equation that has never led to anything bad ever.

moral panic literary analysis. i read this article where the researchers realised there were similarities across civil wars & the factors precipitating them & you didn't need to be an X specialist. you just had to recognise the factors and study them rather than the country/culture specifically. humanity. but this is related to that--kind of, if you squint, lol, in the sense that people will unify across specific immutable factors irrespective of culture/country/etc because they overrode everything else. now i really want that article cos i'm abbreviating & probably damaging nuance in the process. but it's the recognition of the self vs other that people unify under. like we have to be good because i see myself in you and i can't be bad.

& oh yes! the unprocessed trauma. i'm reading a book on it & within the first 30 pages i realised why i couldn't be a mental health practitioner/psychologist/counsellor/psychiatrist/etc. it's great. no it's not. but the identity crisis goes back to 'we have to be good because i see myself in you and i can't be bad.'

thank you .. i feel so crazy abt it. linkedin is so silly!! i liked it when i wrote the comment because i wanted to poke arnd in people's business but now it is so uniformly dull that i'm like. this is shlock.

i sent u the link! on twt. a while ago. it was an eon ago. but i can reply now!

Re: you only love what splits you like a rotten fruit

[shrimpchipsss]

" it's the recognition of the self vs other that people unify under. like we have to be good because i see myself in you and i can't be bad." So real so real

and yes dw I got it! glad to see you replying from the futurepast though:)