gk meta: who gets to be a victim? is purity required?
alternatively, how fandom enacts the very concept the manga condemns.
it's a striking concept but, bear with me. usami is no less pure than asirpa when he was her age. he was just as twelve as she was. from what we can infer, the usami family is a loving one; mother, father, and children who love one another and get along. poor and hardworking, sure, but nothing to suggest that tokishige is missing anything. unlike the others who come into the fold, tsurumi plays no fatherly role to usami; the "love" that he is "missing", as tsukishima tells koito tsurumi is good at finding, is not familial in any way, but purely romantic.
in fact, the lack of familial issues is why ogata seeks him out in his quest for proving his own delusional worldview about guilt & love - while ogata had no loving family, he ended up the same as usami, which must mean that love means nothing at all. (unbeknownst to ogata, usami is simply Built Different.)
but back to asirpa. her feelings for sugimoto parallel usami's for tsurumi. an attractive older man who shows them attention and makes them feel special, spurring a developmentally normal crush. to both of them, their happy ending is having their crush at their side forever. asirpa is sugimoto's partner, usami is tsurumi's number one friend (or person, depending.) asirpa's animal motif is the wolf, usami the loyal seta dog. these two are foils, and so are their relationships with that older figure they love so much.
and yet, the idea that sugimoto and asirpa may end up as romantic or sexual partners is met with a sort of violent disgust that usami and tsurumi's coupling simply isn't. the same people who say "DNI if you ship freak ships (namely yuuo and sugisirpa)" will have dozens and dozens of tsuruusa images & fic on their page. now, why is that?
I can think of a few reasons.
first, framing comes to mind. we spend most of the story with asirpa at 12/13, and usami at 26/27. we meet them as child and adult respectively, with usami's backstory coming in the final third of the story when we finally see him as a child in a flashback. in this way, it makes the fandom's stomach turn to think of asirpa as a sexual being because all of the art & story we have of her is as a child- whereas we see usami as a full-fledged adult for 90% of his appearances, and a violent and sexual one at that. asirpa is thus locked in as an eternal child where usami is forever a young adult.
second, there seems to be an implied pass given to tsurumi and usami because they're villains. they are sadomasochistic antagonists who care only about their own desires. of course, the ship is permissible - they aren't the good guys, they don't have to be morally righteous. they are expected to be sexually deviant and repugnant in this way. (A pass that is not extended to yuuo, which is also textually evident, a coherent reading of the themes, and also centered around, at least in part, a selfish sexually perverse antagonist with a complex even freud wouldn't touch. i digress.) sugimoto, however, is the bastion of morality; he only kills because he must, he is virginal (implied), he is in his own way pure. to have any change to his dynamic with asirpa, even those in line with the time period or culture, is to strip him of his good boy status, even in a future exploration of their relationship. therefore, it's hot and taboo when usami & tsurumi do it, and disgusting and taboo when asirpa & sugimoto do it.
however, i think the last point is the one i find more worth discussing. and that is that asirpa is seen as pure, and usami is seen as not. while asirpa's purity is a long debated & grappled with thing - a standard forced upon her, until she takes destiny into her own hands, fires the arrow that kills ogata - usami is simply never seen as pure, not even as a child. usami is aggressive and volatile in a way asirpa is not at the same age, and he is much, much more sexual.
asirpa blushes and turns red at the thought of her feelings towards sugimoto. she has a natural childish interest in penises - she is curious to see them given she lacks one, she thinks they are funny, it is a cute and amusing topic. she does not have a genuine interest in sex - which is normal for her age. she has much more important things on her mind that command her attention & are the focal point of her turning from sad and naive child to a mature leader as a teenager/young adult. her coming of age does not center a romantic or sexual experience to have her cross the threshold from child to adult.
usami, however, is the opposite. usami's coming of age has everything to do with sex (and violence.) in his first appearance as twelve, his eyes are drawn much like asirpa's; big and round and with sparkle. innocent. its not until he has his meltdown and kills tomoharu that he gets the eyes we know him with. (eyes say a lot about a character; not just in golden kamuy either. a similar example is in "the phantom of the opera", when christine descends with the phantom; in the theatrical version, her eye makeup changes to show she has become sexually mature and lost her innocence.) usami immediately connects the murder of his friend - his first kill - with sexuality - his first time, his loss of virginity. he sees it as an act that he and tsurumi did together, and remembers it fondly and as explicit masturbation material.
usami does not see himself as a pure being. very explicitly, he calls even his child self a pervert when he likens his own repeated masturbation with that of the Sapporo serial killer. "he's a pervert who will return to the scene of the crime to jack off over and over. i'd know all about that!" usami is not, in his own mind, traumatized by what happened. usami is happy and content and in love. this is normal for him, but not what we would call normal for anyone else. but the fandom, yet, labels him a freak, a creep because well, tsurumi didn't make him that way, tsurumi didn't explicitly hurt or abuse him, usami was just born like that. he was always rotten.
sure, tsurumi fed him all of the classic lines, whether to his face or to us, the audience. you're special to me. you are not like the other sheep. you are different. you are my number one person. we are partners in crime. i will wait for you. we as an audience know that tsurumi knows exactly how usami feels about him, both as that child at twelve, at fourteen, and as an adult, dying in his arms.
"you will live on inside me as the one i hold dearest."
"i'm so happy i could come."
if tsurumi means it, and has meant it all along that he loves usami in this way, he is a pedophile. if he doesn't, then he is an opportunitistic predator like he is to everyone else. no reading really looks good for tsurumi, and yet that does nothing to curb his fanbase or the shipping community.
it makes me cringe inside, just a little, the implications that are made therefore.
usami isn't a victim or isn't worth protecting because he isn't pure. because he asked for it. because he wanted it. because he's happy. because he's a pervert. because he's horny and deviant.
when i was the age of asirpa and usami, i was not like asirpa. i was like usami. i was horny and hypersexual and unlike my peers. i had early exposure to sex and erotica and porn. i had a frequent masturbation problem (that led to a lot of shame and i hid it well.) an older teen took advantage of that. she told me all those things, too - I was special, I was her number one, she used special foreign love words that she taught me for me the way tsurumi cannibalizes usami's fingers (equating usami to his wife and child all at once.) for years, i considered her my first love. she was my first kiss that i didn't have to ask for or initiate, among others I don't want to get into here. (and I shouldn't have to.) i told people about our escapades like funny party stories as an adult, once i didnt have to hide anymore (my partner in crime.) she said she would wait for me too. i didn't find what she did to me as traumatic until i was in my mid twenties and someone else had to show it to me. even now, i struggle to really condemn her. how much is she really at fault if i asked for it, wanted it? how bad was it if back then i had always fantasized and wanted more? i, too, was rotten.
i don't write this this to guilt trip or persuade one way or the other on a ship. quite frankly, at least in the circles i run in, i look at shipping dynamics with more nuance than just "this is hot"; my circle of fandom is full of nuance and dynamic thought and depth beyond aesthetics. i don't condemn anyone for this ship or that ship; there's often a lot going on under the surface, and i never know why someone might like something. furthermore, golden kamuy is a deep story with lots of meaning and exploration into the human experience and all of the nasty fucked up things that come with it.
that being said. i am open about my story because usami was one of the first times I felt seen. he is an unsympathetic victim. he is not cute or waifish or sad; he enjoys everything that happens to him, quite literally to the end. and this essay is meant to ask this; when you condemn one dynamic and not the other, what message are you sending? when one has a victim and the other an accomplice, what are you saying about the "bad" and "impure" victims and survivors? are you upholding the idea of purity - the very one the source material goes out of its way to criticize and condemn? what does that say about you and your ideas about victimhood, grooming, abuse, etc?
