Fascism in the Language of Blood: Feudal, Familial, and Feminized Indoctrination in One Piece's Kurozumi Clan (Part V)
Gendered Double Standards of Romantic Nationalism in Fandom
Modern fandoms often romanticize male-coded, individualistic nationalism while dismissing female-coded, collectivized nationalism as manipulation or hysteria. This double standard can be traced across One Piece, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Undertale.
In Fullmetal Alchemist, Scar embodies the familiar figure of the masculine Romantic avenger: a lone survivor who channels his people's destruction into personal moral struggle. His story, though born of genocide, is told through individual guilt and redemption, not collective ideology.
Scar prays, fights, and condemns his enemies, yet he never constructs a myth of Ishvalan restoration or collective purity. This restraint allows audiences to read him as tragic and human rather than fanatical. His nationalism is abstracted into faith and revenge—a narrative of inner torment rather than social contagion.
By contrast, One Piece's Kurozumi Higurashi and Undertale's King Asgore Dreemurr articulate collectivized, feminized forms of Romantic nationalism. Higurashi weaponizes grief and family honor into a theology of blood and destiny, casting her persecuted clan as martyrs destined for restoration. Likewise, Asgore's cult of the dead fuses paternal mourning with national liberation, sanctifying vengeance through the language of compassion and innocence.
Both Higurashi and Asgore mobilize emotion and genealogy—the affective tools of myth-making—to transform trauma into legitimacy. Yet audiences and critics rarely identify these ideologies as nationalist. Higurashi's rhetoric is dismissed as deceitful witchcraft; Asgore's as tragic benevolence. Their sentimentalism and collectivity, coded as feminine, obscure the political coherence of their visions.
In contrast, Scar's violence—though incoherent and self-contradictory—is gendered as masculine introspection and therefore afforded moral dignity. The result is a gendered asymmetry in how Romantic nationalism is recognized: the masculinized nationalist becomes a tragic rebel wrestling with guilt, while the feminized nationalist becomes either a manipulative fanatic or an object of pity.
One Piece and Undertale both dramatize how grief and purity can become ideological weapons, yet the emotional texture of these weapons—maternal love, ancestral sorrow, collective restoration—renders them invisible as politics. This asymmetry in recognition may not arise solely from narrative framing, but from audience psychology.
Despite the fact that collectivized nationalism has defined the modern West since the 18th century—from the French Revolution's "one and indivisible Republic" to Nazi Germany's Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community")—Western audiences often fail to recognize similar collectivist ideologies in fiction.
Modern liberal and neoliberal cultures have reimagined nationalism as a moral, individual sentiment—"love of country," "personal sacrifice," or "defense of freedom"—rather than as an ideology that fuses individuals into a single purified body of the nation.
This selective memory produces a curious blind spot in fandom readings. The Kurozumi clan's rhetoric of restoration and collective grievance in One Piece and the monster kingdom's cult of unity and vengeance in Undertale echo precisely the structures of nationalist myth that once animated fascist regimes.
Yet, because these narratives frame victimhood and belonging in feminized, communal, and religious terms rather than through the masculine heroism of the lone rebel, they are rarely identified as nationalist.
The rhetoric of the Kurozumi clan and the monster kingdom—the language of collective grief, inherited persecution, and moral restoration—too closely mirrors the affective structures of real-world nationalism: the transformation of loss into legitimacy, of mourning into entitlement.
Their cult-like sentimentalism exposes the emotional mechanisms by which communities rationalize exclusion or violence in the name of purity, family, or home. Such parallels may feel too close to home for many audiences, who prefer to locate fanaticism safely in the figure of the masculine outsider or lone avenger.
Scar's narrative, by contrast, is legible because it conforms to the myth of the autonomous self—an individual moral subject who can choose between vengeance and redemption. The individualized rebel is easier to redeem than the collectivized believer.
What Scar represents as a personal tragedy, Higurashi and Asgore enact as a social system. Thus, audiences recognize Scar as a tragic victim of ethnic violence, but not Higurashi or Asgore as architects of nationalist myth. Their ideologies, feminized through sentiment and community, become invisible precisely because they resemble the unacknowledged emotional foundations of modern nationalism itself.
The Serpents of Deception: The Shahnameh and the Missing Psychological Horror of Wano
The Shahnameh offers a medieval yet strikingly modern portrayal of ideological grooming through the story of Prince Zahhāk and Ahriman. When Ahriman first approaches Zahhāk, he does not command but flatters: he praises the young man's potential, urges him to seize his destiny, and whispers that his father's old age makes him unfit to rule.
Through charm and secrecy, Ahriman transforms filial insecurity into political ambition. He wins Zahhāk's trust through gestures of humble service—as a cook with exotic food, who later requests only a "kiss" on Zahhāk's shoulders. That kiss becomes a curse as two serpents sprout from Zahhāk's flesh.
When Ahriman later reappears as a doctor offering a false solution—to feed the serpents human brains—Zahhāk's body and his conscience become inseparable from tyranny. His regime of mass slaughter is not the expression of innate evil but the logical extension of the psychological and bodily corruption that Ahriman engineered. Each trustworthy guise draws Zahhāk deeper into complicity, transforming him from victim to tyrant.
This episode achieves what One Piece's Wano Arc gestures towards but never dares to confront. Ahriman transforms a young man's desire for validation into divine entitlement, using intimacy and secrecy as instruments of ideological possession.
Higurashi in One Piece follows a parallel but simplified pattern. She first appears to the orphaned Kurozumi Orochi as a wise family elder, claiming authority through knowledge of Wano's history and by feeding him fabricated tales of the Kurozumi clan's lost legitimacy. Later, her impersonations of Kozuki Sukiyaki, Kozuki Oden, and Kozuki Momonosuke allow her to rewrite political and emotional reality itself, weaponizing trust, bloodline, and filial recognition.
Yet where the Shahnameh's narrative treats Ahriman's grooming of Zahhāk as psychological horror—the birth of evil from the seduction of the vulnerable—One Piece reduces Higurashi's grooming of Orochi to a plot convenience. Unlike Ahriman, whose deception dramatizes the seduction of evil through intimacy and reason, Higurashi's guises remain superficial instruments of conspiracy.
Orochi's tragedy is described, not felt; the Devil Fruit she grants him, the Yamata no Orochi, literalizes his transformation into a serpent but never dramatizes its emotional logic. One Piece thus neutralizes what could have been an allegory of psychological and ideological infection—reducing the demonic intimacy of fascist grooming into the mechanical spectacle of shapeshifting.
What in the Shahnameh is a metaphor for internalized corruption becomes in One Piece mere visual spectacle. The contrast reveals how even a premodern epic could integrate mythic imagery with moral introspection, while a modern shōnen manga often avoids psychological realism when it threatens to implicate its own mythic order.
Ahriman's evil is horrifying because it is intimate and persuasive—the predator as mentor, the whisperer who redefines love as loyalty. Higurashi's evil could have served the same function: a portrait of how fascism takes root in trauma, how national myths prey upon the humiliated. Instead, she is framed as a witchly agitator, her grooming stylized into folklore rather than explored as social pathology.
By comparing Zahhāk's serpents—literal embodiments of ideological hunger—with Orochi's eight-headed form, we see the aesthetic echo without the psychological weight. The Shahnameh exposes the human cost of seduction by myth; One Piece merely repeats the myth without confronting its seductiveness.
Thus, while the Shahnameh recognizes that evil's most enduring language is not domination but persuasion, One Piece translates that language back into decorative myth—fascism without horror, indoctrination without intimacy.
It is difficult to argue that One Piece avoided the psychological horror of Higurashi's grooming and indoctrination of Orochi and Kurozumi Kanjuro merely because of its status as a heroic adventure manga.
The heroic epic form is capable of moral and psychological complexity, as seen in the Shahnameh, where Ahriman's corruption of Zahhāk operates as both a metaphysical and psychological seduction—an allegory of tyranny's birth through the intimate violation of human trust and conscience.
Both the Shahnameh and One Piece are structured as epics that trace cycles of power, legitimacy, and rebellion, yet One Piece transforms what could have been a tragedy of intergenerational grooming into a morality play of betrayal and vengeance.
In this sense, the omission of psychological horror is not a matter of genre limitation but of tonal choice: the Wano Arc prioritizes cathartic villainy over the unbearable intimacy of ideological corruption.
Had Higurashi been portrayed as a true indoctrinator and maternal tyrant—one who exploits Orochi's grief, paranoia, and craving for legitimacy—the tragedy of the Kurozumi clan would have mirrored Ahriman's corruption of Zahhāk too closely for the audience to simply celebrate the villains' downfall.
The Myth of Eternal Bonds: The Feminized Economy of Repression in Fruits Basket
The hypothesis that One Piece's Wano arc avoids explicit critiques of fascism or cult-like systems because Japanese creators are reluctant to condemn their own traditional culture does not withstand scrutiny.
The shōjo manga Fruits Basket offers a striking counter-example: it frames the Sohma family as a closed cult whose spiritual mythology—the Zodiac and its "God"—functions as both divine justification and psychological prison. Akito Sohma's role as the "God" who binds the Zodiac is depicted not as sacred but as suffocating and dehumanizing, producing submission, guilt, and scapegoating.
The Sohma family's imprisonment of the Cat (Kyo Sohma's predecessor) and the head maid's declaration that, without their "God," the Zodiac would be "nothing but monsters," exposes the way divinity, loyalty, and tradition can be used to rationalize systemic emotional abuse.
Although the Sohma family are presented within the iconography of a wealthy Japanese household—kimono, tatami rooms, old architecture—Natsuki Takaya turns that aesthetic inward, revealing the cultic control mechanisms beneath the surface of cultural continuity.
Yet the Sohma cult complicates any simple gendered dichotomy between masculinized and feminized forms of fascism. While its rhetoric centers on "family," "bonds," and "tradition," the cult's internal hierarchy is maintained almost entirely through women.
Akito, though she's a woman, is forced to live as a man by her mother Ren Sohma, whose own jealousy and cruelty reveal how feminine authority can reproduce familial control. The Sohma family's most loyal enforcers are nameless maids who embody absolute, self-effacing devotion—the domestic face of ideological violence.
Akito's deceased father, Akira Sohma, represents the opposite extreme: a frail and sentimental patriarch whose apparent gentleness nonetheless legitimizes the cult by declaring Akito "blessed" and "loved forever." In this structure, masculine power is sentimentalized and passive, while feminine devotion becomes militant and disciplinary.
Takaya thereby exposes not only the violence behind "eternal bonds" but the instability of gender roles within authoritarian intimacy: emotional nurture and spiritual imprisonment become indistinguishable.
By contrast, One Piece's Kurozumi clan mirrors the same structural logic—a family mythologized through persecution, divine legitimacy, and intergenerational resentment—but is denied the same clarity of systemic critique.
What Fruits Basket exposes as a form of religious coercion, One Piece reframes as personal corruption. The difference lies not in cultural reluctance but in genre framing and ideological positioning: shōjo narratives, grounded in domestic space and interpersonal introspection, render familial power as psychological violence; shōnen narratives, driven by heroic adventure and collective restoration, externalize power as a villain to defeat.
This genre divide shapes how fascism can be represented. In Fruits Basket, the rhetoric of "eternal bonds" is dissected as the emotional foundation of authoritarian intimacy—love that demands obedience, unity that erases individuality. In One Piece, the same rhetoric reappears as moral idealism: inherited will, loyalty, and bloodline are redeemed as engines of liberation rather than domination.
The aesthetics of kimono and feudal ritual in both texts invoke "tradition," but their ideological work diverges. Takaya uses it to reveal how the sacred family reproduces control; Oda uses it to re-mythologize that family as part of a heroic nation's moral order.
The result is not simply a gendered aesthetic difference but a structural one: while shōjo fiction locates the fascist impulse in the intimacy of dependence and love, shōnen fiction locates it in the villainous misuse of power, leaving the ideology of inheritance itself untouched.
In this sense, Fruits Basket's critique of the Sohma clan's "divine curse" functions as an internal deconstruction of Japan's familial nationalism, while One Piece's portrayal of the Kurozumi clan reasserts that nationalism through mythic purification.
Takaya's narrative ends with individuation and emotional freedom; Oda's with the restoration of a purified feudal order. Both employ the language of blood, but only one interrogates the fascist grammar that structures it. While Fruits Basket invites its audience to name coercion and dependence as emotional abuse within a domestic setting, One Piece conceals similar dynamics within a feudal-nostalgic frame.
In Fruits Basket, the Sohma family's curse is dramatized through visible control—physical confinement, verbal degradation, bodily harm—all legible as trauma. In One Piece, the Kurozumi clan's grooming of Orochi and Kanjuro operates through ideological seduction and affective scripting—a performance of familial devotion that weaponizes grief into vengeance.
Genre expectations condition recognition: what shōjo fiction names as emotional horror, shōnen fiction treats as tragic destiny. The Kurozumi clan's ideology is left half-formed, its theology of blood implied but never voiced.
This omission is not material but ideological: One Piece's sentimental logic cannot imagine family as a site of damnation. To name Higurashi's creed as a cult would demand that the Wano Arc admit what shōjo narratives like Fruits Basket already know—that love, loyalty, and belonging can be forged into instruments of fascism.
The Cult of the Nation: Fascist Self-Destruction in Attack on Titan
In Attack on Titan, the contrast between Marley and the Eldian Restorationists dramatizes how fascism mutates across emotional registers. Marley's ideology is explicitly masculinized: its rhetoric of military discipline, sacrifice, and national duty frames power as a product of control and conquest.
The indoctrination of children like Gabi Braun—who rants that she must kill the "devils" of Paradis to prove herself a "good Eldian"—exposes fascism in its most recognizable form: an industrialized crusade justified through moral purification.
The Eldian Restorationists, however, complicate that clarity. Though their movement speaks the modern language of "liberation," it anchors its legitimacy in victimhood, bloodline mythology, and divine maternity. They worship the founder Ymir as both the mother of civilization and the origin of Eldian identity.
This mythology transforms fascism's masculinized drive for purity into a feminized cult of ancestry and mourning—a politics of restoration rather than conquest. The Eldian Restorationists' longing to "restore the glory of Eldia" mirrors Higurashi and Asgore's rhetoric of revival through inherited sorrow.
What Attack on Titan achieves—unlike One Piece—is an explicit acknowledgment of this fusion. The series recognizes that fascism's power lies in its emotional versatility: its ability to shift from the spectacle of strength to the tenderness of grief.
The Eldian Restorationists expose how nationalist mythologies feminize the past to justify masculine violence, sanctifying blood with the language of birth and love. Where One Piece refuses to confront the inner horror of fascist ideology by displacing it into the theatrical villainy of the Kurozumi clan, Attack on Titan makes the psychological machinery of nationalism its primary subject.
Attack on Titan transforms the rhetoric of blood, redemption, and sacrifice into a cultic system that consumes its followers from within. Both the militarized fascism of Marley and the hybridized, pseudo-liberatory fascism of the Eldian Restorationists depend on collective guilt and inherited trauma: the demand that "true" Eldians prove their worth by destroying or redeeming their own kind.
This double bind—where salvation requires self-annihilation—is precisely what One Piece avoids naming in the Kurozumi clan. Hajime Isayama's willingness to depict fascism as a psychological religion—a faith of purification through destruction—allows Attack on Titan to explore the emotional and cognitive appeal of indoctrination.
Marley's Warriors like Gabi Braun are not merely "brainwashed soldiers" but participants in a total system of moral inversion, where obedience feels like virtue and dissent feels like betrayal. Similarly, the Eldian Restorationists turn victimhood into sanctity, sanctity into vengeance, and vengeance into destiny.
In both movements, the ideal of national rebirth culminates in mass death and the erasure of individuality: fascism as shinjū on a planetary scale. In contrast, the Kurozumi clan's tragedy in One Piece halts at the threshold of such horror.
Kurozumi Kanjuro's willingness to die in the name of the "perfect performance," and Orochi's annihilation in defense of ancestral pride, could have formed the foundation of a true fascist cult narrative—a family of believers whose ultimate loyalty is to their own extinction. Instead, the manga reframes them as personal villains, avoiding the unsettling possibility that their ideology mirrors the same collective delusions that drive nations to self-destruction.
By explicitly linking fascism to the religious logic of collective death, Attack on Titan achieves what One Piece cannot: a portrayal of indoctrination as both a tragedy and a horror. Its world recognizes that the real evil of nationalism is not the existence of tyrants, but the way ordinary people learn to love the system that consumes them.
The Modern Cult of Liberation: Team Plasma and the Masculinized Language of Fascism in Pokémon Black and White
If the Kurozumi clan in One Piece represents a feudalized and feminized form of fascist myth-making—a persecuted bloodline redeemed through its matriarch's divine vengeance—then Team Plasma in Pokémon Black and White demonstrates how the same authoritarian grammar can reappear in modern, masculinized rhetoric.
Both systems transform suffering into moral legitimacy and purity into political destiny, but their stylistic difference determines whether audiences perceive them as oppressive or righteous.
Team Plasma's rhetoric of "liberation" is unmistakably cultic because it borrows the recognizable idioms of modern ideology—activism, justice, destiny—while the Kurozumi clan's rhetoric of "family honor" and "divine right" is absorbed into the Romantic language of tradition.
In Pokémon Black and White, Team Plasma is structured explicitly as a cult disguised as a movement for moral progress. Its public doctrine—"We must liberate Pokémon from humans"—invokes the modernist logic of purification through separation: to create a world purified of suffering, one must sever bonds deemed "impure."
Within this moral theater stands N, the isolated and indoctrinated child groomed to embody the cult's prophecy. Raised among abused Pokémon to develop an idealized empathy untainted by human corruption, N is crowned the "Hero" destined to commune with a Legendary Pokémon and "change the world." His life is an engineered scripture.
Ghetsis, his father and the movement's architect, embodies patriarchal totalitarianism disguised as paternal care. Like a priest or fascist propagandist, he weaponizes language, isolation, and guilt to produce a son whose purity validates his own authority. The tragedy of N is the tragedy of the manufactured messiah: sincerity and innocence instrumentalized by ideology.
The cultic structure of Team Plasma is transparent to players precisely because it is modern and masculinized. Its symbols—banners, uniforms, speeches, rallies—evoke political movements rather than domestic intimacy. Its vocabulary ("freedom," "truth," "ideals") mimics enlightenment and revolution, and its leader's manipulation is overtly paternal and hierarchical. In this frame, fascism is legible as a political pathology: an authoritarian system masquerading as liberation. Players are invited to recognize, reject, and defeat it.
By contrast, the Kurozumi clan's myth in One Piece conceals its fascism behind feudal and feminized language: bloodline, honor, and revenge are presented not as ideology but as emotion, heritage, and tragedy. The cult's founder, Higurashi, is a matriarch rather than a patriarch—a figure of survival and bitterness rather than power and command. Her rhetoric appeals to wounded lineage, not revolutionary destiny.
Where Ghetsis manipulates a child to build activism, Higurashi manipulates a memory to rebuild a clan. Yet both enact the same logic of fascist reproduction: the subordination of the individual to a sanctified myth of purity, guided by a parental figure who claims to protect the innocent from corruption.
This gendered inversion reveals how aesthetic framing governs ideological visibility. Team Plasma's modern, masculine, and institutional fascism is easily recognized as dangerous; the Kurozumi clan's feudal, feminine, and emotional fascism is naturalized as folklore. One speaks the language of progress, the other the language of blood. In both, paternal or maternal authority transforms private trauma into collective destiny.
The difference lies in perception: when fascism dresses as revolution, it alarms us; when it dresses as family, it consoles us. Fascism adapts its language of legitimacy to the emotional and aesthetic codes of its genre—modernist and activist in shōnen adventure (Pokémon), feudal and tragic in heroic epic (One Piece), domestic and relational in shōjo melodrama (Fruits Basket). What changes is not the structure of control but the mode of affect through which obedience is sanctified.
The Underground of Grief and Flowers: Feminized Fascism and the Politics of Moral Innocence in Undertale
If Higurashi's rhetoric in One Piece transforms humiliation into holiness, Asgore's ideology in Undertale transforms grief into moral authority. Both systems emerge from victimhood and clothe vengeance in the language of love.
Higurashi, the matriarch of a disgraced clan, reinterprets her family's persecution as divine injustice; Asgore, the king of imprisoned monsters, turns his people's trauma and his children's deaths into a sacred duty of liberation through human sacrifice. Each constructs a theology of suffering in which purity is proven by pain, and moral legitimacy arises from exclusion.
Despite their gender difference, both figures enact a feminized fascism of care. Higurashi's rebellion is maternal and restorative; her cruelty is couched in the language of survival and protection. Asgore's rule is gentle, apologetic, and grief-stricken; his tyranny is that of the compassionate father who kills for his people's dreams of national liberation.
Their authority depends on the emotional economy of mourning: "we were wronged, therefore we are righteous." This is fascism stripped of its masculine aesthetics of domination and recast as a domestic morality of healing.
Undertale makes this structure visible through tragedy and choice: players must confront the contradiction of a benevolent ruler whose grief justifies hatred, war, and genocide. The game exposes the self-destructive logic of redemptive vengeance.
One Piece, by contrast, allows that same logic to dissolve into mythic revenge and national restoration. Higurashi's ideology of grief is never interrogated as a system; it is absorbed into the heroic narrative of Wano's liberation. In this difference lies a revealing asymmetry of genre: Undertale treats compassion as a potential vehicle of totalitarianism, while One Piece sanctifies it as the moral core of feudal justice.
Both stories show that fascism need not appear as cruelty or strength—it can emerge from the tenderness of protection, the sanctity of family, and the longing to heal the wounds of the past. This feminized moral fascism, built on love and loss, is the most insidious form of all, because it transforms empathy itself into an instrument of control.
Both One Piece and Undertale construct what might be called cults of the dead—ideological orders founded on the sanctification of loss. Yet the emotional registers of these cults diverge sharply. Higurashi's clan venerates the last Kurozumi daimyo, whose failed coup becomes the sacred wound that justifies generational vengeance. Here, grief is reframed as ambition and duty; the sentimental is displaced by a rhetoric of feudal loyalty and familial honor.
Asgore's kingdom venerates Asriel and Chara, two children transfigured into symbols of innocence and martyrdom. The rhetoric surrounding their deaths—"pure love destroyed by human cruelty"—anchors a collective faith in redemptive violence: the promise that Asgore's grief will one day free his people. This is the maternalized form of fascism, where nationalism is expressed as the protection of purity, youth, and the memory of love.
Yet despite these differences, both systems translate death into moral order. Whether expressed through Higurashi's ancestral zeal in One Piece or Asgore's paternal sorrow in Undertale, both cults weaponize memory to erase moral accountability. The dead become a source of unchallengeable legitimacy, transforming private emotion into public ideology.
That both narratives escape the label of fascism reveals a persistent aesthetic bias. Audiences instinctively recognize militarized or masculinized authoritarianism—marches, uniforms, ideological slogans—as "fascist," but fail to perceive its sentimental forms when dressed in the imagery of grief, family, and innocence.
Gihren Zabi's oratory in Mobile Suit Gundam is instantly recognized as fascist, his cult of martyrdom and revenge framed through militarized masculinity. By contrast, both One Piece and Undertale present fascist or cult-like systems cloaked in the language of grief and restoration rather than conquest.
The very affect that makes these systems emotionally resonant also renders them ideologically invisible. Higurashi's rhetoric of avenging a persecuted clan and "restoring rightful rule" in Wano, and Asgore's rhetoric of avenging a fallen race and "liberating monsters from human oppression," share the same emotional grammar: loss reimagined as purity, vengeance moralized as love.
Undertale buries its most unsettling themes—the patriarchal worship of King Asgore, the sanctification of Asriel and Chara, and the rewriting of genocide as collective redemption—beneath the surface of humor, nostalgia, and kindness.
Rather than confronting fascist ideology through overt imagery of war or discipline, Fox situates it within humor and the domestic and sentimental aesthetics of a fairytale.
The monster kingdom, trapped underground, transforms its failure and humiliation into a sacred narrative of innocence—Asgore as the benevolent father-king and Asriel and Chara as the child-saints whose deaths justify eternal mourning.
By masking horror in the emotional codes of "love, hope, and compassion," Fox exposes how easily grief becomes the moral engine of authoritarianism. The monsters' culture teaches that "love, hope, and compassion" are redemptive virtues, even as they reproduce the cycle of hatred and erasure.
This intertwining of tenderness and cruelty mirrors how fascist and nationalist ideologies transform personal affection into collective duty—what might be called a feminized fascism of the heart.
The fairy-tale style, with its innocent monsters and child protagonists, becomes the perfect camouflage for a study of historical revisionism: the story of a civilization that turns its own trauma into sanctified myth.
Yet, because One Piece and Undertale frame the rhetoric of collective restoration through feminized or sentimentalized imagery—the aesthetics of family, mourning, and duty—they are rarely recognized by audiences as depictions of fascism.
This blindness is intensified by visual theming. Both Wano's Edo-period motifs (kimono, kabuki, shamisen) in One Piece and the monster kingdom's medieval European iconography (castles, crowns, robes, tridents) in Undertale evoke cultural nostalgia: the imagined harmony of "traditional" societies before modern corruption. These nostalgic aesthetics act as moral camouflage, translating fascist structures into familiar fairytale language.
Fans who easily identify Team Plasma's masculinized cult of "liberation" in Pokémon Black and White as fascism often interpret Higurashi's and Asgore's regimes as tragic or noble. The difference lies not in the severity of their ideologies, but in the gendered and aesthetic coding of their violence: grief appears pure, and restoration appears righteous, when wrapped in the imagery of the past.
Even Team Plasma's medieval imagery—its knightly uniforms, N's coronation, and Ghetsis's clerical robes—does not feminize its fascism. These symbols are re-coded as masculine through their association with rationalized hierarchy, moral absolutism, and public spectacle.
The organization's doctrine of "Pokémon liberation" operates not through the intimacy of grief or family, but through the discipline of crusade. What distinguishes "masculinized fascism" from its feminized counterpart is not the time period of its imagery, but the affective register through which power is justified.
Team Plasma transforms medieval iconography into the language of ideological order and collective purification, whereas Higurashi's Kurozumi clan and Asgore's monster kingdom transform familial grief into the language of moral innocence and restoration. Consequently, audiences more easily recognize Team Plasma's rhetoric as fascist because it speaks in the tones of conquest rather than care.
The Blood of Demons: The Masculinized Fear of Contamination in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba
Among Weekly Shonen Jump manga, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba stands out for depicting trauma and familial control through the language of purity, blood, and hierarchy. While the series appears on the surface to reproduce the aesthetics of nostalgic Japan—kimono, katana, and traditional decorum—it operates as a psychological allegory of a cult obsessed with purification and transcendence.
In contrast to One Piece, which evaded sustained critique of the Kurozumi clan's ideology, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba exposes how patriarchal authority, narcissism, and self-hatred fuse into a closed religious system: Muzan Kibutsuji's demonic order.
As the progenitor of all demons, he embodies the paradox of immortality as decay. His blood promises transcendence but spreads corruption. He promises "life" to the weak—those who are dying, ill, or desperate—only to enslave them to his will. His rhetoric of "perfection" and "the ultimate being" parallels fascist and cultist ideologies where salvation masks domination.
What makes Muzan strikingly modern is not merely his monstrous power but his fear of contamination. He demands purity from his followers, destroys any demon who fails to embody strength, and conceals his own weakness behind constant metamorphosis—into a woman, a child, a nobleman.
His shape-shifting feminization is not liberation but terror: the anxiety of a patriarch who must become what he fears in order to survive. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba externalizes this as the horror of the body and the self—how authority born of insecurity consumes itself.
Muzan's control over his progeny resembles a cult leader's manipulation of disciples. Through the telepathic "curse" embedded in his blood, he surveils, silences, and annihilates dissent. His inner realm—the dimensional "Infinity Castle"—is less a palace than a distorted church, where disciples worship, fear, and await arbitrary judgment.
The hierarchy of the Twelve Kizuki functions as a theology of strength and obedience: those who devour most, rise highest. Muzan's world literalizes the logic of a fascist patriarch—where to be weak is to be unworthy of existence, and to exist is to serve.
If Muzan represents the father-god demanding purity, Doma is the saint who proves that purity annihilates empathy. Doma's backstory transforms Muzan's cult into a mirror of human religious institutions.
Raised from birth as the child-god of a sect, Doma is adorned, obeyed, and adored by followers who project divinity onto him. Yet he feels nothing. His parents' hypocrisy—preaching purity while indulging in vanity and suicide—reveals that faith itself can be a theater of narcissism.
Doma's detachment becomes his only truth: he kills not from malice but from emptiness, performing devotion to Muzan with the same apathy that once sustained his human cult. Doma's aesthetic refinement—his poise, elegance, and constant smile—disguises the horror of emotional sterilization.
He is the perfect disciple because he no longer distinguishes affection from annihilation. Through him, the manga links charisma and cannibalism: the idolized figure who consumes his devotees to fill the void left by worship.
If Muzan and Doma embody the construction of cult authority, Obanai Iguro exposes the child survivor's perspective. Born into a family of female bandits who worshipped a serpentine demon, Obanai was imprisoned, overfed, and destined to be sacrificed in exchange for wealth. His eventual rescue leaves him alive but "impure."
His cousin's accusation—that he "stole" others' safety by surviving—encapsulates the perverse morality of closed families: to live outside the ritual of death is betrayal. Obanai's later life as a Demon Slayer is marked by guilt over "tainted blood." He disciplines himself through devotion and self-denial, mirroring the very repression that once bound him.
In him, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba transforms cult horror into a gendered allegory of shame and control—the masculine demand to purify oneself from inherited corruption, to redeem one's existence through martyrdom. His tragedy lies not in victimhood but in internalization: he continues the cult's theology under the name of duty.
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba fuses horror with morality play: it aestheticizes trauma through the motif of purification. Death and redemption coexist within the same act—slaying the monster and releasing its soul. The sword and the kimono, emblems of Japanese tradition, are recoded as instruments of exorcism: cutting through lies, cleansing inherited guilt.
In contrast, One Piece's heroic adventure structure prioritizes liberation through friendship and discovery, softening systemic horror into allegory. Wano's feudal tragedy is thus contained within nationalist nostalgia rather than dissected as a cult of purity.
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba's brilliance, and its danger, lie in its ability to turn the trauma of familial cults into ritual spectacle. It shows how the desire for strength, beauty, and endurance can mirror the ideologies it seeks to destroy. Its demons are not invaders from outside but extensions of human repression—disciples of an order that devours itself in pursuit of perfection.
Critics have noted that Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, despite its status as a mainstream shōnen manga, shares thematic affinities with shōjo Gothic works such as Moto Hagio's The Poe Clan. Both explore immortality through Romantic imagery—blood, family, and eternal youth—as psychological and spiritual contamination.
In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, these Gothic and shōjo-derived sensibilities allow the narrative to confront the cult-like structures of loyalty, grief, and abuse embedded within familial and martial traditions: the demon hierarchy functions as a perverse mirror of samurai virtue and filial piety. By contrast, One Piece refrains from using its own feudal imagery—the kimono, clan system, and succession politics of Wano—to evoke comparable psychological horror.
The difference suggests not a genre boundary between shōnen and shōjo, but a selective ideological one: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba uses Romantic-Gothic pathos to expose how traditional virtues conceal trauma, whereas One Piece stops at preserving those virtues as aesthetic decor.
The Kingdom of Silence: Biological and Spiritual Fascism in Hollow Knight
Few works of interactive fiction have articulated fascism's theological and biological ambitions as lucidly as Hollow Knight. Beneath the elegiac quiet of Hallownest lies an empire built upon the Pale King's obsession with purity—of mind, of body, and of lineage. His creed—"No cost too great. No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering."—functions simultaneously as scripture and eugenic manifesto.
The Pale King's utopia of silence is founded on the annihilation of individuality. All life is measured not by its capacity to feel or remember, but by its ability to contain infection—an infection that is itself the repressed residue of history and faith: the Radiance.
The Radiance, a forgotten goddess of light once worshiped by the Moth Tribe, represents the pre-modern and mythic foundation of Hallownest's spirituality. When her worship declined, displaced by the Pale King's promise of "enlightened civilization," her anguish took biological form as the Infection—a golden plague of memory and devotion, spreading through dreams and flesh alike.
The tragedy of Hallownest arises precisely from this dialectic: the Radiance embodies the fascism of spirit, the Pale King the fascism of body. The Radiance seeks unity through ecstatic possession; the Pale King seeks unity through surgical excision. Both envision salvation through submission, and both deny the sanctity of the individual will.
The Pale King's solution to the Infection—creating the Vessels, children bred from the Void and stripped of selfhood—literalizes the fascist fantasy of a perfect subject. These beings are born in silence, discarded in silence, and buried in silence, their corpses forming the foundations of a kingdom that claims to transcend mortality.
The Pale King's "White Palace" glows with the sterile luminosity of fascist architecture: immaculate, symmetrical, and haunted by the labor it erases. The Hollow Knight, chosen among the countless failed siblings, becomes the ultimate vessel of denial: an heir defined not by lineage but by its obliteration.
When the Infection inevitably returns, it is not a failure of biology but of ideology—the impossibility of erasing desire, grief, and memory from living beings. In contrast to the Pale King's authoritarian paternalism, Hollow Knight's protagonist—an unnamed wanderer and one of the failed Vessels—embodies the subversive persistence of will.
Though "born" to be empty, the Knight acts and chooses, gradually recovering what the Pale King sought to suppress. The player's silent journey through the ruins of Hallownest thus becomes an allegory of resistance through empathy and recognition. Each fragment of story, each mournful NPC, exposes the cost of the Pale King's delusion: a civilization that traded love for order, truth for obedience, and life for silence.
That Hollow Knight renders this fascism visible despite its elliptical storytelling is remarkable. The game never uses the vocabulary of ideology, yet its world design and environmental storytelling speak it fluently.
The Radiance's Infection mirrors religious totalitarianism—salvation through submission, purity through light—while the Pale King's empire reflects bureaucratic fascism—progress through hierarchy, purity through blood. Their conflict annihilates the very subjects they claim to save, leaving only echoes of prayer and the ghosts of children.
The recurring motifs of motherhood, sacrifice, and silence—embodied by the White Lady, the Pale King's consort, and the countless Vessels—reveal that even love is weaponized into eugenic devotion.
In this sense, Hollow Knight's world is not post-apocalyptic but perpetually fascist: a system that continues to reproduce itself through the erasure of voice. The candor with which Hollow Knight presents this biological and spiritual fascism stands in stark contrast to the muted treatment of ideological pathology in One Piece's Kurozumi clan.
Where Hollow Knight transforms fragmented myth into an indictment of purity ideology, One Piece's narrative of persecution stops short of confronting the Kurozumi clan's self-radicalization under Higurashi.
The Pale King's authoritarian eugenics are named and embodied through the very architecture of Hallownest; Higurashi's rhetoric of "survival," "destiny," and "restoration" echoes the same logic yet remains unexamined as fascism within the text.
Hollow Knight dares to name its silence; One Piece preserves it. Ultimately, Hollow Knight's kingdom of silence is less an allegory of decay than a confession of complicity. Its beauty is inseparable from its cruelty, its order from its rot. To play the game is to traverse the ruins of a fascist theology that sought to fuse faith and biology into eternity—and failed.
The silence that remains is not peace but the echo of a question: how many gods, kings, and parents must erase their children before they recognize the horror of their own reflection?
The fandom's general recognition of the Radiance as a tyrannical figure demonstrates how Hollow Knight exposes a form of fascism that is rarely gendered feminine. The Radiance is not a general or a father-king; she is a forgotten mother-goddess who seeks remembrance at any cost. Her Infection does not march; it spreads like grief, illuminating the mind until it burns away individuality.
She commands devotion, not discipline—yet the effect is the same: the erasure of will in service of unity. The Radiance's maternal and spiritual vocabulary—light, warmth, memory, prayer—transforms tenderness into domination.
In contrast to the Pale King's masculine fascism of order and hierarchy, the Radiance enacts a feminized fascism of emotional totality: the demand that love and faith be absolute. She enslaves the minds of bugs out of longing, but her love consumes as completely as the Pale King's reason represses.
Hallownest thus collapses between two absolutisms: one clothed in enlightenment, the other in divinity. That the fandom readily identifies the Radiance's horror, despite her maternal framing, speaks to Hollow Knight's clarity of design. The game refuses to romanticize feminine divinity or maternal power; it shows how even remembrance and devotion can become instruments of erasure.
This thematic precision highlights what One Piece's portrayal of Higurashi lacks: an acknowledgment that the rhetoric of loss, nurturing, or restoration can itself be fascist when it demands total obedience to a myth of collective injury.
The Radiance and Higurashi represent opposing but complementary forms of feminized fascism—one born of divine remembrance, the other of historical grievance.
The Radiance is named for light: her Infection spreads through illumination, burning away will and individuality in the name of collective memory. Her radiance is both literal and ideological—one that blinds through its own brilliance.
Higurashi, by contrast, bears the name of darkness and consumption: Kurozumi, "black charcoal," evokes fuel already burned, the residue of what once was. If the Radiance is the light that consumes, Higurashi is the ash that clings.
Their aesthetic difference mirrors their ideological modes. The Radiance demands to be remembered as a lost goddess; Higurashi demands vengeance for a lost lineage. One weaponizes nostalgia, the other resentment; both disguise domination as restoration.
Yet Hollow Knight explicitly frames the Radiance's light as infection, while One Piece never names the Kurozumi clan's grievance as ideological corruption. This asymmetry reveals a broader tendency in shōnen narratives: light and holiness can be interrogated as totalitarian, but darkness and victimhood are still often treated as morally transparent.
The Curse of the Zen'in Clan: A Selective Critique of Hierarchy in Jujutsu Kaisen
If Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba turns the patriarchal family into a religion of purification, Jujutsu Kaisen transforms the aristocratic family into a bureaucratic cult of bloodline and talent. The Zen'in clan—one of the "Three Great Families" of the Jujutsu world—presents itself as a bastion of tradition, discipline, and lineage. Yet its true ideology is neither noble nor spiritual; it is eugenic and sexist, bound by the logic that power and worth are inherited, not chosen.
At the heart of the Zen'in ideology is the worship of Cursed Energy as both currency and creed. A person's value is determined by their innate ability to manipulate it. Toji Fushiguro, born without any Cursed Energy, is treated as a genetic error—his physical strength reframed as monstrous deviation.
Maki Zen'in, who rejects her family's control and pursues mastery despite having little Cursed Energy, becomes a heretic in their eyes: a young woman rebelling against the destiny ordained by blood.
This fixation on inheritance mirrors the internal logic of fascist purification. The Zen'in clan does not defend tradition to preserve wisdom but to preserve hierarchy. Their obsession with purity of technique and pedigree produces a social ecology where deviation is criminalized and empathy is extinguished.
The Zen'in clan's violence is thus not only physical but ideological—every act of humiliation reenacts the cult's central doctrine: that belonging is conditional upon conformity.
In Toji and Maki, the manga portrays what happens when individuals born into this machinery attempt to escape without replicating it. Their rebellion is existential rather than heroic; it reveals the impossibility of moral purity within a contaminated lineage.
No character exposes the clan's depravity more clearly than Naoya Zen'in. His open contempt for women—summed up in his remark that "a woman who cannot walk three paces behind a man should be stabbed in the back"—is not merely a sexist insult but a ritual affirmation of power.
Naoya's fixation on hierarchy and control over women reduces familial bonds to performance and ownership. The Zen'in clan, filled with favoritism and ritual humiliation, becomes a theater where violence masquerades as tradition.
When Maki massacres the clan after years of subjugation, her vengeance is framed not as sadism but as exorcism: the purging of a family that has turned its ideology into a curse.
Toji's rejection by his clan is not only a personal tragedy but an anthropological key. His humiliation for lacking Cursed Energy exposes how patriarchy—in its original sense—operates as a total system of household governance, not merely the domination of men over women.
In premodern societies, including Japan, the ie structure bound every member by obligations of labor, duty, and loyalty: fathers ruled not as autonomous "men," but as stewards of ancestral continuity; sons were valued only insofar as they reproduced the household's name and capital; matriarchs could exercise harsh authority within this hierarchy.
As Ruth Benedict noted in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Japanese kinship norms often placed mothers-in-law above both sons and daughters-in-law, revealing that "patriarchy" was never simply the reign of males, but the rule of the household itself as a living institution.
Modern discourse, however, has abstracted this term into a moralized metaphor for universal male privilege—an ideological flattening that erases the economic and genealogical mechanics of the system. By treating patriarchy as a static synonym for "sexism," critics overlook how such hierarchies devour their own sons as readily as their daughters.
Toji's abuse embodies this forgotten truth: his worthlessness in the clan's eyes stems not from gender transgression, but from functional failure within a sacred economy of inheritance. The patriarchal order demands continuity, not compassion; power, not humanity. Its cruelty is systemic, not sentimental—and Jujutsu Kaisen briefly exposes that cruelty before modern language conceals it again beneath the euphemism of "male dominance."
The narrative exposes the Zen'in clan's obsession with hierarchy and power through Naoya's open misogyny and the rejection of both Toji and Maki who lack Cursed Energy, but it avoids a full depiction of the Zen'in clan's class stratification or the concrete kinship structures through which families maintained authority and continuity.
Naoya Zen'in, Ogi Zen'in, and Jin'ichi Zen'in each articulate their self-worth through the framework of succession—as heirs, as rivals, as resentful subordinates—yet Jujutsu Kaisen never articulates what lineage actually means within these families. Historically, the authority of a house head was not only symbolic but genealogical: every member's rank and legitimacy derived from their proximity to the head's bloodline.
Supplementary materials state that Jin'ichi and Toji's father was the 25th clan head and the older brother of Naobito Zen'in, the 26th clan head, yet no one in the manga comments on this or treats Maki and Mai as daughters of a cadet branch with specific marriage or inheritance expectations. The narrative frames Maki and Mai merely as "disobedient girls," not as feudal princesses bound to reproduce the clan's prestige.
Naoya's attitude towards Toji offers one of the most revealing omissions in Jujutsu Kaisen. Naoya respects Toji's physical strength, yet Naoya never mentions Toji's seniority or Toji's lineage from the 25th clan head. In the traditional Confucian hierarchy that the Zen'in clan supposedly imitates, such seniority would have commanded automatic respect and, at least in theory, political precedence.
Toji's defiance would thus have represented not merely personal rebellion but the collapse of the clan's eldest branch—an event that should have shattered the Zen'in clan's order. By omitting this dimension, the manga transforms a conflict of generational legitimacy into a purely psychological drama of pride and resentment, narrowing the scope of its critique from social structure to personality.
A similar flattening occurs in the treatment of Megumi Fushiguro, Toji's son. The manga depicts the Zen'in clan's hostility towards Megumi as rivalry between potential heirs, yet it never clarifies that both Megumi's juniority and his lineage undermine his claim. Because Toji abandoned the Zen'in name and took the Fushiguro name from Megumi's mother, Megumi is technically outside the Zen'in lineage.
In a feudal family system, this would have rendered him illegitimate—especially as a child born after his father deserted the clan. Naoya's hatred, then, should not simply stem from envy but from the fear of a bastard heir reclaiming lost prestige.
However, Jujutsu Kaisen avoids these historical nuances and frames the conflict instead as personal: the Zen'in clan's leaders are against the idea of an outsider becoming the next clan head, yet no one cites Megumi's birth order or his legal status as the basis of that disagreement.
The manga states that the Zen'in clan deliberately obstructed Maki's promotion to grade 4 Jujutsu Sorcerer, with the implication that she was denied advancement solely because she was a woman without Cursed Techniques.
Yet the text itself notes that the rank of grade 1 Sorcerer entails missions of much higher danger, secrecy, and compensation. In a clan modeled after a traditional Japanese family informed by Confucian hierarchy, the refusal to promote Maki could easily have been framed not only as misogyny but also as a generational judgment—that she was too young and too unskilled to be trusted with dangerous work or privileged information.
Such rhetoric would have been consistent with the logic that tied authority to seniority, legitimacy, and ritual propriety. Instead, Jujutsu Kaisen flattens this complexity, depicting the Zen'in clan as a caricature of "sexist aristocrats" rather than an internally stratified social organism.
By avoiding any explicit acknowledgment of how Maki's subordinate generational status intersects with her gender and her lack of inherited ability, the manga turns the Zen'in hierarchy into a simplified moral allegory of patriarchal oppression, losing an opportunity to critique the deeper feudal and bureaucratic structures that define power and exclusion within hereditary systems.
Equally absent is the figure of the matriarch as enforcer, a role central to the historical Japanese ie (household) system. As Benedict observed, Japanese families often revolved around mothers-in-law who controlled finances, marriage arrangements, and domestic discipline with "as firm a hand as if she had never been, for half her life, a nodding violet."
In the Zen'in clan, women are depicted only as victims (like Maki and Mai) or servants (their mother, who dies as a brief moral footnote), never as agents who maintain the very order that subjugates them. This omission curiously ignores the full generational and gendered stratification that historically structured such families.
As Benedict observed, the subordinate status of daughters-in-law in Japanese families was rooted less in universal male dominance than in their position as outsiders entering their husbands' households and their juniority to established matriarchs.
Authority was thus not exclusively masculine but generational and positional: mothers-in-law could wield substantial control over their households, while younger women remained voiceless until they rose in status through marriage or motherhood.
In this sense, Maki and Mai's position as young, unmarried daughters would not merely make them "untalented" or "unworthy" as Jujutsu Sorcerers, but nonentities within the generational order of the household—a nuance the manga elides by reducing their subordination to misogyny and their lack of Cursed Energy rather than to the broader feudal logic of seniority, lineage, and succession.
This distortion erases the gendered complexity of feudal power. By denying matriarchal complicity, Jujutsu Kaisen reimagines patriarchy as a one-directional tyranny rather than a network of obligations, debts, and enforcement shared across generations and genders.
It simplifies what in historical reality—and in Benedict's anthropology—was a total social structure binding fathers, sons, wives, and servants alike into a moral economy of hierarchy and shame. The result is a critique of patriarchy purified of its ambiguity: a spectacle of female liberation rather than an autopsy of the family-state.
The Kukuru Unit—composed of Zen'in men who lack Cursed Techniques but compensate through discipline and numbers—serve as the clan's foot soldiers for their superiors. They are the male equivalent of the obedient wives Naoya idealizes: loyal, nameless, and expendable.
Yet no Zen'in ever voices explicit contempt for them as a disposable lower class. This omission seems deliberate. To have Naoya openly declare the Kukuru Unit to be expendable "meat shields" or "fake Zen'in" would have risked shifting the reader's sympathy.
It would reveal the clan's cruelty as systemic rather than personal, extending beyond gendered abuse to the exploitation of loyal but powerless men. Such a portrayal would undercut the manga's cathartic framing of Maki's revenge as the righteous destruction of "patriarchy."
By isolating tyranny in the figure of Naoya—the perfect embodiment of misogyny and arrogance—the story allows Maki's rebellion to feel pure and unambiguous. The broader, more uncomfortable reality of a stratified, self-devouring house—where both men and women enforce and suffer under hierarchy—remains buried.
This silence reveals Jujutsu Kaisen's selective critique of patriarchy. The manga readily portrays misogyny, cruelty, and elitism, but it refrains from acknowledging the more intricate and impersonal systems of Confucian seniority, bloodline legitimacy, and property succession that historically structured Japanese families.
No one in the Zen'in clan remarks that Megumi Fushiguro could only inherit the family name through mukoyōshi (adoption by marriage into the family), nor does anyone expect Maki or Mai to fulfill the conventional duty of daughters in elite households—to marry strategically and reinforce clan alliances. It divorces the Zen'in clan's hierarchy from the economic and reproductive politics that historically sustained such lineages.
By omitting these mechanisms, Jujutsu Kaisen renders the Zen'in clan's toxicity as a psychological rather than systemic phenomenon, reducing a historically specific network of Confucian kinship, property, and duty to a modern moral narrative of individual rebellion and abuse.
In doing so, it converts "patriarchy" into an abstract moral problem—one that can be heroically "destroyed" by Maki—rather than a concrete social formation bound by age, obligation, and inheritance.
This choice preserves catharsis at the expense of realism: the Zen'in clan becomes an allegory of individual pride instead of a historically recognizable kinship economy in which every member, male or female, is simultaneously oppressed and complicit.
In doing so, the story flattens the Zen'in clan into a collection of individual abusers rather than a dynastic organism. It also strips Maki and Mai of the structural role that would explain their oppression: they are mistreated not because they threaten the reproductive or political order of the clan, but simply because Naoya and Ogi are misogynists.
The result is an oddly depoliticized portrayal of patriarchy—one that substitutes emotional cruelty for systemic reproduction, and personal resentment for hereditary ideology. By erasing the clan's matriarchs and their authority, and by suppressing the logic that Maki and Mai are low in status because of their age and marital status, Jujutsu Kaisen reframes the Zen'in clan as a caricature of masculine tyranny—an object that can be easily destroyed for catharsis rather than analyzed as a microcosm of Japan's intertwined familial, gendered, generational, and class systems.
The result is a "symbolic patriarchy" emptied of its material logic: gender oppression without marriage politics, lineage without adoption, inheritance without ritual. To show the Zen'in clan as openly policing lineage, seniority, and generational purity—as a Confucian household might—would make its structure resemble the broader Japanese family-state system that Jujutsu Kaisen otherwise avoids critiquing.
It would also undermine the manga's simplified moral framing of Maki's revenge as the destruction of "patriarchy," because the real system being mimicked is not a monolithic patriarchy but a multi-generational web of subordination in which both men and women, elders and juniors, enforce hierarchy.
The inconsistency becomes even clearer when compared to the manga's portrayal of the Kamo clan. Noritoshi Kamo's status as an illegitimate child—born to a concubine of the clan head—receives explicit attention in the story.
The manga shows how both Noritoshi's lineage and his inherited ability place him in a paradoxical position: expected to become the next clan head yet burdened by his mother's marginalization. His backstory dramatizes the cruelty of a patriarchal lineage system that prizes "pure" succession while exploiting illegitimate children as useful heirs.
This makes it all the more striking that no one in the Zen'in clan ever voices the obvious: that Megumi, born after his father Toji renounced the Zen'in name and adopted his first wife's surname, is an outsider by law and custom.
Within the same narrative universe that emphasizes the politics of legitimacy and maternal stigma in the Kamo clan, the silence around Megumi's illegitimacy is conspicuous. By erasing this aspect, Jujutsu Kaisen converts a potential critique of hereditary purity and patriarchal lineage into a simpler moral tale of meritocracy and resentment, avoiding the full implications of the feudal hierarchy it claims to portray.
Both Jujutsu Kaisen and One Piece selectively borrow the aesthetics of the feudal Japanese family while evading its ideological and institutional logic. The Zen'in clan, though styled after a traditional household bound by rank and bloodline, lacks the structural features that historically sustained such systems: no matriarchs who administer wealth, discipline, and marriage alliances; no explicit rhetoric of adoption by marriage, strategic unions, or class contempt towards internal labor units such as the Kukuru Unit; and no recognition of generational or genealogical seniority as the true axis of power.
No one comments on Toji's lineage from the 25th clan head, or on Megumi's illegitimacy as a child born outside the Zen'in name, or on the Confucian logic that would place Maki, Mai, and Megumi at the bottom of the hierarchy simply because they are young and unmarried.
Likewise, One Piece's Wano Arc frames the Kurozumi clan's collapse through the visual language of Noh and Edo-period vengeance plays, yet reduces Higurashi to a wicked witch rather than an authoritarian matriarch—one who might have embodied the full horror of a Confucian cult of filial piety twisted into fascism. In both series, the feudal family becomes an aesthetic backdrop for individual drama rather than a living system of belief, authority, and reproduction.
The House of the Broken Sons: Feudal Fascism and Familial Indoctrination in Dororo (2019)
If the Kurozumi clan of One Piece embodies a theater of grievance, masked in revenge and resentment without ever confronting the internal mechanics of indoctrination, then the Daigo family of Dororo (2019) exposes those very mechanics as a form of feudal fascism.
Both narratives descend from the shōnen tradition and draw upon the language of premodern Japan—One Piece from the performative Edo ideal of stability and hierarchy, Dororo from the raw, uncertain violence of the Sengoku period.
Yet where One Piece flattens Wano's feudal world into a spectacle of rebellion and restoration, Dororo pierces through the surface of its mythic past to reveal how families become laboratories for authoritarian virtue, how parental love can be reprogrammed into a ritual of sacrifice, and how salvation is indistinguishable from corruption when the collective ideal devours the individual.
Kagemitsu Daigo, the daimyo who gives his name to his clan, enters the story not as a tyrant but as a desperate man. His domain is collapsing under famine and plague. The people are dying; the land refuses to yield. In the face of annihilation, Daigo turns to the Great Hall of Demons and offers the body of his unborn son as a living contract.
This opening act collapses the distinction between statecraft and sorcery: Daigo's political rationality becomes religious devotion, and the body of his child becomes the currency of power. The pact succeeds—Daigo's province flourishes—but the price is a son born without eyes, ears, skin, or limbs. What remains is the template of fascism in its purest form: the sacrifice of the private, the intimate, and the innocent for the preservation of the abstract collective.
This structure of belief—sacrifice for the "greater good," love subsumed under loyalty—infects every member of the Daigo household. Nui no Kata, Daigo's wife, begins as a figure of maternal tenderness and ends as a ghost of grief, caught between faith in her husband's duty and guilt over her firstborn son's mutilation. Her piety is not imposed by brute force but by emotional paralysis: she internalizes Daigo's logic of necessity, converting her agony into silent complicity.
Their second son, Tahomaru, grows up within that silence, absorbing the doctrine that his father's cruelty is patriotic and that the older brother who returns from exile is a threat to the land's prosperity. Daigo does not groom Tahomaru through affection but through deprivation: withholding empathy until the boy learns to align love with duty, and duty with violence.
By the time Tahomaru leads soldiers against his brother Hyakkimaru, the Daigo estate has completed its transformation into a fascist cell—the family as microcosm of the authoritarian state. Dororo renders this ideological infection with psychological intimacy.
It does not hide the fact that Daigo's decision is motivated by despair as much as by ambition. His fascism is born of hunger, not hubris; of the belief that a ruler's worth is measured by the fertility of the soil, the number of lives preserved, the quantity of rice harvested.
The horror of Daigo's world is therefore not supernatural but moral: the ease with which necessity becomes justification, and the suffering of one child becomes a rational expense in the ledger of national salvation.
The demons who devour Hyakkimaru's body parts are literalizations of the same hunger that consumes Daigo's conscience. The narrative dares to show fascism not as the intrusion of evil into the world but as the exhaustion of alternatives.
In contrast, the Kurozumi clan of One Piece is motivated not by desperation but by wounded pride. Their ancestor's failed bid for the shogunate brands them as traitors, and their descendants—Higurashi, Semimaru, Orochi, and Kanjuro—inherit the persecution of their name.
The Kurozumi clan's corruption begins as a longing for restoration, for the reassertion of legitimacy and lineage. Yet the narrative treats that longing as mere villainous obsession, not as a study of how humiliation breeds ideological fanaticism. Higurashi's grooming of Orochi echoes Daigo's indoctrination of Tahomaru, but One Piece refuses to stage her manipulation as psychological horror.
Where Dororo traces each character's descent into complicity—the wife's silence, the son's confusion, the father's self-justification—One Piece converts the Kurozumi family's trauma into a cautionary tale without interiority, denying the viewer any sustained view of what it feels like to live inside a house where love and loyalty have been weaponized against each other.
The difference between the Daigo and Kurozumi narratives is therefore not simply historical or generic but moral and epistemic. Dororo asks what it means to rebuild a nation upon the mutilation of a child and insists that the question must be answered by the living. One Piece, by contrast, aestheticizes its feudal tragedy into kabuki spectacle, absolving its victors through performance rather than reflection.
The Daigo family's downfall is a tragedy because every participant understands, too late, the logic that destroyed them. The Kurozumi clan's destruction is a pageant because their logic is never made intelligible enough to terrify.
Ultimately, Dororo's feudal fascism is terrifying precisely because it is sympathetic. It begins in the universal wish to protect one's people, one's home, one's future—and ends in the obliteration of the very humanity that made such protection meaningful.
One Piece gestures towards similar anxieties through the rhetoric of "honor," "blood," and "inheritance," yet it stops short of following its own metaphors to the psychological depths that Dororo explores. In the language of fascism, both families invoke blood and duty; but only Dororo dares to show how those words dissolve into the blood of one's children.
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