Lacerta

She/Her my sibling is so cute you should follow them I love them so much.

[chaos-night]

"Gintama is so slow!" Actually it's paced really beautifully and the buildup to the touching moments is spaced out nicely and increases as each episode continues. It feels slow cus we're used to being slammed with character and plot information in the span of single episodes whereas gintama spaces it out. You get an understanding of each character as they're introduced. It's not overwhelming or confusing. It's done wonderfully. It makes those touching moments more meaningful.

[courtesanofdeath]

"These women have come to topple a nation!"

happy international women's day ♡

[courtesanofdeath]

Happy Valentine's Day ♡

[dadtoki]

[sernediptitty]

He ran out of money…

[salty-sleep]

"the idiot's flying in the sky"

"yeah, it's a great view. the idiot can see everything from here."

[nnemori-deactivated20241222]

[lacerta123]

Yo happy Halloween!

[muimira]

[mudanonaito]

watch an episode of gintama a day to keep your sorrows away

[nessieartss]

that’s it that’s the whole show

[lacerta123]

This but make it Kondo and Sougo/Hijikata

[courtesanofdeath]

Who are you calling a regular cabaret girl? Get on your knees! I am the Queen of the Kabuki District!

happy birthday otae ~

[nat-but-free]

he likes cute things

[kokii-omii]

dungeon meshi ah dungeon meshi

[lacerta123]

I’m going to go follow all the Gintama blogs

[lacerta123]

The content I wanted to see in the world was people ranting about Gintama, apparently.

[lacerta123]

Also I responded to someone who found the Gintama girls stereotypical.

I don’t think the women of Gintama are just stereotypes. We get to see into their thought processes and inner lives and all of them are distinct and interesting. Like in Benizakura when Otae is watching over an injured Gin on Shinpachi’s request, she’s balancing a bunch of conflicting obligations in a really elegant way. She knows Gintoki and can see he needs to go help, but she can’t just tell Gintoki to go because she promised Shinpachi. So she pretends to let Gintoki sneak out. But she also genuinely wants him to be safe, even though she agrees with him going out to fight. So she leaves her umbrella with a note to return it, subtly making him promise to return alive. And what stereotype is Otae supposed to fill? She’s the violent woman of the cast. This kind of complex character work is not typical for this stereotype. There’s too much thought and work put into Gintama’s female cast for me to consider any of them stereotypical.

[lacerta123]

This was a post I made on Reddit in response to someone saying Gintama was sexist because the women need rescuing every other arc. Which is nuts to me because it’s not even true.

Gintama has its issues, but it also has some pretty explicitly feminist themes in its writing. I love the fact that the male and female cast get equal attention during the serious arcs. It means the female cast is extremely well developed. Both Gintoki and Kagura got their own final arcs which is so cool (Shogun Assassination and Rakuyou respectively). Gintama regularly portrays its female cast as equal to its male cast in terms of dignity, importance, and often strength.

Also the character designs in Gintama are not overly sexualized, and the camera never leers at their bodies in uncomfortable ways. And Kagura, who is 14 years old, is never sexualized. She is always portrayed as a child, and even when she tries to look sexy, it’s always portrayed as humorous, like a kid playing with makeup.

The female cast of Gintama never gets underused. Even in arcs that arnt explicitly about the female cast like Yoshiwara in Flames and Courtesans of the Nation, they still play important roles and get considerable screentime (Sa-Chan in shogun assassination arc, Nobume in Farewell Shinsengumi arc (tho that’s 1/2 her arc)) And don’t forget Otose! She’s the beating heart and soul of Gintama and I will die on that hill.

Here’s a spoiler-y breakdown of the arcs, with a good deal of focus on refuting the idea that the Gintama girls are “damsels in distress”.

I clicked ask a question on accident.

Oops

Sorry

How do you delete these I don’t wanna start over

Voting ended onNov 8, 2024

Harusame Arc - Kagura refuses to be a used as a hostage and kicks off the side of the ship, which feels like a refutal to the women as weak hostages that need protecting trope. Both her and Shinpachi were kidnapped, and in no way was she portrayed as a damsel in distress

Benizakura Arc - Matako is portrayed as a threat, and a capable member of the Kiheitai. Kagura goes off on her own and drives the plot forward by herself. She does get captured, but is portrayed as difficult to contain because of her strength, and her vulnerability isn’t exploited against the rest of the cast. She’s hardly a prop getting tossed around by the plot because of her femininity, like how Nami was in One Piece’s thriller bark. Tetsuko goes to the Yorozuya to ask for help, but it’s because she’s a non combatant and it makes sense to hire someone who knows how to fight. She meaningfully contributes by crafting Gintoki’s sword for that fight. She’s portrayed as the more skilled sibling in a traditionally male dominated craft. And the arc is an ideological battle between her and her brother which she wins.

Fuyo Arc - Fuyo could be considered a damsel in distress, because she’s in trouble and needs help. But I don’t think a female character needing help automatically turns them into a damsel in distress. She ends that arc with her own two hands. I’m a big fan of giving female characters the agency to finish their own stories. Her being in danger was not used to aggrandize the male cast, if Gintoki had finished the fight for her while she cried in the distance (arlong park) then I’d have a problem.

Yagyu Arc - Otae is a damsel in distress in this one, because the whole point is to rescue her from a bad situation. But a lot of respect is given to Otae’s agency. Gintoki says he’d respect her decision to marry whomever she wants, but seeing her cry makes him think it wasn’t really a decision made with her happiness in mind. Basically the arc is about convincing Otae to choose her own happiness over her sense of duty. We get full insight into Otae’s thought process and the arc only ends when she changes her mind. Kyubei says she loves Otae because of the fact that she has strength as a woman, something appealing to Kyubei who was raised to believe you can only have strength as a man. While fighting Kyubei, Gintoki and Shinpachi don’t hold back on account of her sex, and remark that whether you’re a man or a woman, you can still be an asshole. Kyubei remarked that Hijikata holding back was disrespectful to her efforts as a martial artist.

Mitsuba Arc - This arc actually is sexist though, but I read somewhere that Sorachi expressed some regret over not making Mitsuba more of a character.

Hasegawa Prosecution arc - This one was also bad, not because of how women are portrayed, but because of how sexual crimes are portrayed, which is a problem I have on a whole with Gintama. Sorachi writes his women strongly, but doesn’t give things like stalking, voyeurism, ect. a lot of narrative weight. They’re hardly endorsed, but they also arnt taken seriously.

Yoshiwara in Flames - Explicitly feminist. The story of a bunch of female sex workers rising up to violently overthrow their male oppressor, and reclaim their own identity as women. This is made very clear when Tsukuyo joins the fight vs Hosen and asks Gintoki where that Fire he was boasting about is and he says it just got here [referring to her and the Hyakka]. This line decentralizes Gintoki’s importance and makes the arc explicitly about the women of Yoshiwara overthrowing their oppressor rather than a story of Gintoki overthrowing Yoshiwara’s oppressor for them. Hosen and Kamui both express dehumanizing views of women that are opposed by the narrative. You might see Hinowa as a damsel in distress, but like Otae she has agency within her imprisonment (that’s kinda the point of her character) and she ends her own battles, narratively speaking. The violence against her (the reveal that she was hobbled) furthers her story rather than just existing so a male character can look good by getting outraged about it. You might find her comforting Hosen at the end to be a “forgive your abusers” type deal, but I didn’t. Since her narrative was the sun shines on everyone, and Hosen was trying to crush that sun and destroy her spirit, her shining for him at the end was her ultimate triumph over him. That he never broke her. She never forgave him though. The story is about women who’ve had womanhood defined for them through their usefulness for men standing up and redefining it on their terms. They define that through something they take pride in, motherhood. They declare every last woman in Yoshiwara to be Seita’s mother, and they are proud of that. Also in the ending, most of the women of Yoshiwara are still sex workers, just self employed and with the freedom to leave. That’s an explicitly pro-sex worker sentiment. Also Kagura, when Shinpachi says he’ll protect her, he ends up snapping her out of her rage, protecting her personhood rather than her physical body. That’s a subversion of a sexist trope.

This is as far as I’ve gotten in my rewatch, so I’ll give it a rest. But Courtesans of a Nation arc is also explicitly feminist in its messaging.

Actually I’m not done yet, I changed my mind. Even though Hinowa is almost certainly getting raped by Hosen, the anime doesn’t show any of that. Sexual violence against women isn’t sexualized or romanticized unlike in other shows (One Piece panning over Nami’s body as she’s being assaulted). Also, when Hinowa asks Seita to let her down and for him to go with Kagura and Shinpachi to open the sky hatch, she says they both have their own battles to fight. That Hinowa needs to fight. Hinowa is not powerless and weak just because she is a victim.