i’ve been thinking about your bfish meta ever since i read it 😫 do you have any thoughts on blanca &/or his relationship to ash?
YAYY i’m honored!!! lmao when i finished (like a week or two ago) i had no thoughts on bfish at all but sitting w it has rlly stirred up my brain since then. anyway yes ofccc i have blanca thoughts he is so fucking interesting though i think they are all somewhat surface level observations, so bear with me :p i think it’s interesting that we can see him as this legitimately positive force in ash’s life, but also as the person who maybe most severely “failed” him as he had the most power to meaningfully help ash and actively chose not to. while ofc also understanding the flaws in the concept of “failing” itself here bc in reality blanca successfully performed exactly the role he was meant to—as both a mentor hired and constrained by the parental golzine, and as the semi-paternal figure he becomes (as much as he seems to superficially resist that dynamic or prioritize professionalism). and as bfish seeks to explore found family dynamics so critically, i love the understated “dad who didn’t step up and didn’t come back” vibe here to blanca’s relationship w ash, not just as blanca’s personal failure but also as a natural function of family. bc one of my fav things abt bfish was that it DOES understand rlly intimately how the socially constructed family functions as a system of control. but i think ive probably mentioned that by now or somethinf.. 😅 (guy who’s only seen utena this is really giving me critique of the family vibes)
so yeah blanca is def the most interesting of ash’s little lineup of father figures to me bc he kind of encapsulates the problems with all of them. golzine literally being called papa and later trying to adopt ash is very unsubtly talking abt parenthood as a system of control over children both socially and legally, max is so very sincere but kind of unprepared & helpless in the face of ash’s trauma and how it intersects with his own, ash’s biological dad is…. you know i don’t even want to get into it i have more thoughts abt him outside the scope of this ask but. you know what i mean. that alongside ash and yut-lung’s “brothers of different mothers but from the spirit of the same womb” thing (the brutus amv is fully formed in my mind) makes blanca as a fatherly figure literally so crazy to me. GET YOURSELF A MAN WHO CAN DO IT ALL (and by all i mean be an ineffectual but well meaning father in all its iterations). while also rlly starting to articulate WHY bfish is so interested in proxy familial roles as symbols of the tension between fearing and being desperate for connection in a world where souls cannot truly touch.
but re: professionalism, the way he acts with yut-lung (which … that whole relationship is honestly even more interesting to me like yesss u can see exactly how blanca & ash’s relationship might have happened bc the way blanca treats yut-lung makes it clear he is a v caring person who chooses to suppress that instinct for a whole concoction of reasons yet kind of fails to do so and ends up fostering love there anyway) rlly shows to me that he uses it as an emotional distancing tool, ljke i don’t think it’s something he values on its own, but he can use it to pretend he’s not as intertwined with these kids he can’t stop animal pack bonding with, bc blanca & ash & yut-lung are all connected by this desperateness for human warmth… ok srry not to be wuthering heights posting about it but he’s so nellycoded…. TO ME.!!! i love when people are hired to mentor/care for kids in bad situations & they do care abt them but internalize their own powerlessness real & imagined, actively in denial about their tangible involvement on a person-to-person level/their complicity in those kids’ continued misery. yay <3
but also thinking abt how blanca’s narrative relevance centers on ash & yut-lung as extremely traumatized disenfranchised children, obv it works out this way bc the story is about those two and blanca is meant to deliver like the thesis statement of the story and all, but likkeee the fact that blanca’s interiority is articulated so much by ash & yut-lung being almost co-opted as mirrors of blanca’s observations about love & the world is. kind of a wtf moment for me.. GUY WHO HAS A SUPER NORMAL RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS NOTCHILDREN. i’m not sure how immediately intentional it is and i wouldn’t die on the hill of this take but: it reads a bit uhh vaguely subliminally emotionally metaphorically incestuous (guy who’s only read umineko voice…….) that ash in particular reflects both blanca’s memory of his wife AND of himself. ITS. AM I CRAZY OR IS THIS ACTUALLY CRAZY. like he very clearly does see ash as his own person in a way that very few adults in his life do (and i think blanca asking ash to come with him to the caribbean at the end represents him finally dropping some pretenses and allowing himself to see ash as what a son ““should”” be rather than as an extension of himself, which ofc ash immediately challenges bc parenthood itself is so problematized and a healthy version of it is made mythical/maybe impossible within the series’ logic). and the love there is very genuine, but like everything else warm about their relationship, it is sharply contrasted by the realities of how blanca actually, like, literally sucks
blanca’s introduction into the story was genuinely so gamechanging to me i think none of what ive said here is like a super deep cut but he just brings in a rlly necessary complexity to bfish’s themes & assertions about like, what it means to care for someone, to be responsible for them, especially someone you have like structural power over, and how all that can be subsumed into or expressed by the desire for eternal familial love. man bfish is kind of stupid sometimes but it IS a really fucking good interpersonal drama & tragedy with a lot of complexity & thematic ambition. yay blanca