just realized something really fucking sad about mizu and how she parallels/contrasts fowler.
one of the things that makes abijah fowler such a fantastic villian is that he isn’t uniquely evil when compared to other people in the show, right?
he’s racist? so is nearly every other character.
he’s abusive to women? so was boss hamata, hachiman the flesh trader, heiji shindo, and plenty of other men because their society was disgustingly misogynistic.
he killed his bastard children? society didn’t even consider them human in the first place.
he overthrew the shogunate? he didn’t work alone.
he’s a sadist? madame kaji says it herself- “if you killed every man i’ve seen who couldn’t cum til someone bled, you’d wear your blade to a stump.”
he murders, he abuses, he lies and manipulates, he gets off on seeing others suffer. the only uniquely awful thing about him is that he doesn’t hide it. we can find all of his abhorrent behavior in the words or actions of other characters. which, tragically, includes mizu for one specific reason.
if you remember during fowler and mizu’s fight in episode 8, fowler tells mizu that her “bones break like a woman’s”, which carries the terrifying implication that fowler has killed so many people with his bare hands that he knows the difference between the feeling/sound of men’s and women’s bones snapping.
and i realized what makes this line worse is that mizu is the only other character we know of who has killed a women with her bare hands- when she snapped kinuyo’s neck. of course the difference is that abijah is just evil while mizu did it as a mercy killing on madame kaji’s behalf, but it’s still so tragic to me that kinuyo’s death unintentionally brought mizu closer to abijah in a way.
they are the only ones who know how it feels to break an innocent woman’s bones.
