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(Original Twitter thread 1/30/21)

bald ginkotsu truther thread

 

another point: his skull is uniquely cracked, seemingly even before his first death (note that kyoukotsu also has a large fracture in the same place his jewel shard is later put to revive him)

i mean obviously there would have to be a few cracks, given that renkotsu apparently just stapled a big metal plate into his skull (out of love)

*after staring at this for five minutes* oh my god..... he doesn't have his hairpiece in the grave...... renkotsu had to go out and make him new hair when they were revived...........

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Okay so, following up on this short thread, I wanted to point out the apparent injuries Ginkotsu has gone through during both lives. Given that the two versions of his cracked skull are drawn some chapters apart, I think we can take the inconsistent fractures as a simple continuity error, not a sign that he was healed by the jewel shard, and then injured again in a different way.

First of all, the extent of his injuries is obviously completely ludicrous, and not a realistic depiction of a disabled person. We never see the Band of Seven before their deaths in the manga, so it's possible he wasn't quite as ridiculous before he got the jewel shard that keeps him alive as a head and partial torso. However, in the anime, he's shown looking exactly the same 10+ years ago.

Mukotsu and Kyoukotsu are also shown with minor damage to their skulls: Mukotsu is missing quite a few teeth, presumably from age... although that's quite a few missing teeth for someone who seems spry enough to keep up with the rest of the gang as they wander the countryside... and Kyoukotsu has a fracture in the center of his skull, the same place where his jewel shard is inserted to revive him. Jakotsu and Bankotsu's skulls aren't shown onscreen at the time of their deaths, and Jakotsu's is also obscured inside the grave, but I think we can assume the four younger members have pretty standard skulls. Ginkotsu is the major point of interest here, as he has:

1. Several unhealed skull fractures
2. A metal plate (visible from the outside) that's either covering or replacing some kind of damage to the right side of his skull. It's not clear how extensive the damage is, but his right eye is definitely missing.
3. He's missing at least one tooth on the upper jaw, and his teeth on the bottom jaw are oddly spaced (likely a couple of spaces from multiple missing teeth), with a very pointy chin that can be seen sticking out even underneath the..... I've never known what to call this.... jaw-covering thing. Let's call it the "metal jaw" even though he still has a regular jaw and this is just something covering his face.
4. The "metal jaw" doesn't fall off along with the hairpiece, so it's most likely welded on in some way, similar to the eyepatch. This suggests it's not just decorative, but has some function that is most likely holding the skull together somehow. It's also not present in the scene showing their mass grave, so it may have been added by Renkotsu after their revival....?? It doesn't move when he speaks and is possibly connected to...
5. ...the little horns in between the hairpiece and the metal jaw. We never see for sure, but it seems very likely that his external ears are just gone, since the horns are exactly where they should be. (The horns aren't there in the mass grave panel, so they too may have been added later.)
6. As I've pointed out previously, that's not his real hair. It's shown attached to the metal headband, and it stays behind after his flesh has disintegrated. (Also it survives that huge explosion???? Did Renkotsu invent plastic?!?!?!?)
7. The "gishi" / "grrsh" is somewhere between a speech impediment or other speech restriction consistent with a TBI, and general anime bullshit where people just say weird things for no reason. In the manga it's closer to a speech restriction, as he never starts speaking normally again, and even in the anime his speech is definitely more strained when he's saying his final lines than it was in his first appearance.

All of this was seemingly present before his first death, and was considered his natural state by the jewel shard when it was regenerating his flesh. When his body is destroyed by Inuyasha, the shard keeps him alive but doesn't regenerate any flesh as shards are shown doing for lesser wounds on other characters, likely because the bones were completely obliterated and there's no base left to heal on top of.

The anime version of his skull is, um... depressing, but at least they gave him some more lines to make up for it.

Let's..... not get into the anime version of their grave.

Please.

Next time: a diagram of Ginkotsu: Meat Vs. Metal, probably

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After examining the manga more closely (through cell phone pictures of the physical volumes rather than tiny scanlation images)....

The first thing I noticed is that the manga shows significant scuffing on Ginkotsu's armor and mechanical arm in his initial appearance. This is unique to his design (and not shown consistently even in this first appearance). It's possible that this was intentional. In the manga, we never see what any of them looked like before their death. So the other members of the Band of Seven may have changed their armor after coming back to life, since it had been sitting in the grave for 10+ years, but Ginkotsu's armor is shown to be built into his body, so he wouldn't be able to do that.

The guard at the front of his chest is one of the few items of armor we can see in the grave, and it's very scuffed and scarred in his first appearance. The main things we see are related to their weapons, like Jakotsu's scabbard and Mukotsu's poison tubes (though these are colored blue and orange in the anime version, probably mistaken for Renkotsu's guns by the animators). Bankotsu is fully naked when he's revived. So most likely they did all have to go find new clothes. Ginkotsu's face guard, ear horns and headband aren'tt shown around his skeleton, so those could be entirely new. (There's no dialogue from Jakotsu and Mukotsu in the manga about how Renkotsu is supplying Ginkotsu with new guns and such, but presumably he'd be responsible for any new decorations in both versions of canon.)

^ Visible near Ginkotsu are his chest guard, the wrist of his mechanical arm, and his and Kyoukotsu's shoulder guards.

Despite what the animators thought, Renkotsu isn't the skeleton with the tubes; process of elimination puts him at the far left in the manga, next to what might be the remains of his bandana. The tubes are Mukotsu's poison tubes. And the object next to Jakotsu's sword is, of course, the snakeskin texture of its scabbard, not Renkotsu's clothing.

(Sorry I was gonna put these panels in but I really don't wanna go back and transfer more pictures just for Mukotsu's bald head lmao.... just trust me)

In Mukotsu-related news: as he's dying, half of his head covering flips up to reveal that yes, he is confirmed bald. However, Kyoukotsu seems to have his real hair; while he has the same type of headband as Ginkotsu, his hair vanishes immediately after his death. Its unnatural color could be from eating demon flesh (although I think it's just a fan theory that his size and appearance are because of eating demon flesh.) Kyoukotsu's headband also isn't shown in their tomb, but I guess both of those could have just fallen off and been hidden from view, without any flesh to attach to. Much more suspicious is the fact that Ginkotsu's face guard is nowhere to be seen. It's not like that's gonna travel behind his skull somehow.

Anyway, back to Ginkotsu's flesh: one other thing I noticed is that his chin is much more prominent in the manga. Some panels even imply that the natural shape of his face is very long and narrow, which is the opposite impression you get from his face guard!

In his first appearance, his jaw seems to be much more in line with the shape suggested by the metal attachments, but just before his death (second panel), a completely different picture starts to emerge. I can't tell whether this is an evolution of his design or just inconsistency, but after checking the anime, it's clear that the animators stuck with the initial design where his jaw is more less consistent with the face guard.

Probably for the best (don't talk to me about my display name, this is Ginkotsu's moment).

There's an unbalance to Ginkotsu's original form in the manga that suggests his appearance was already unusual before he started getting repaired. His torso is completely out of proportion to his head and arms, and since he still has one flesh arm left at that point, this would seem to be how he was born. His arm is almost as long and thin as the mechanical one, and his shoulders and the back of his neck seem to bulge out. The anime has to show him in motion, so his design was made into something that could be shown moving with a normative human gait. However, I think the manga is hinting that he was born with some level of physical difference that was only accentuated further by his mechanical upgrades.

On closer inspection, it doesn't seem like there are teeth missing on his bottom jaw—we see on the top jaw what a missing tooth looks like. They're just oddly aligned, rather than something that could be traced to an injury. And again, his chin is quite prominent compared to the others. So most likely Ginkotsu was someone with both craniofacial and bodily anomalies even before he acquired his metal parts. The fractures in his skull also point towards traumatic brain injuries that realistically would have affected his cognition and functioning to some degree. (Not to mention the huge chunk of skull that's apparently gone or so badly damaged it's non-functional.) But it's hard to say how much Takahashi would have taken this into account when writing.

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So there's a character in the preview for episode 19 of Yashahime who is a blatant, glaring invocation of the "okama" stereotype. That would unfortunately be par for the course if this were, I don't know, the year 2000. Or a completely different series. Except Inuyasha already did this shit with Jakotsu, and Jakotsu debuted in the anime in the year TWO THOUSAND AND THREE, and, visually, was less of an offensive stereotype. So where the fuck does that leave Yashahime, a series that started out in 2020 with characters openly decrying gender stereotypes, and is now here, in 2021, with "haha queers are gross and look weird!!!"? Nowhere good!

Jakotsu, bless his soul, was part of a long tradition in anime and manga that looks, from the light of 2021, like the shallow offering it was. But at the time, honestly, just speaking for myself... that tradition meant a lot. Every so often an anime or a manga would give you a character who was openly gay or gender-nonconforming. Usually an effeminate man who was mistaken for a woman, sometimes even disguising himself as a woman in order to trick straight men into being attracted to him. Very occasionally a character who defies the gender binary and can be read as transgender today. These weren't characters from the BL or yaoi genre, but from more mainstream titles. And as much as they were often violent, sadistic and predatory, they were what we had in the mainstream. And, crucially, they did defy stereotypes from Western media at the time, because they were often imbued with a humanity that was never given to the sassy gay man who showed up for a few seconds in the romantic comedy movie of the week.

Your Jakotsus, your Fisheyes, your Hakus and Zoicites—they were on the side of evil and they had a habit of dying tragically, but in that death they often found more redemption than their straight and gender-conforming comrades. Their designs were effeminate not because they organically chose that for themselves, but because it was part of the trope. Zoicite's lover Kunzite is more butch by the standards of shoujo manga, but Zoicite himself was probably chosen to be gay in the adaptation because his design already fits the idea of the effeminate gay man. His personality, too, is changed from the manga version and made more dramatic and flamboyant. He, not Kunzite, is the one who gets dubbed as a woman to disguise their relationship. Fisheye would receive the same treatment a few seasons later: all three of the Amazon Trio were given "okama-style" speech and affectations in the anime adaptation, but Fisheye is the only one attracted to men, and is the one who dresses up as a woman in pursuit of his interests. And in this conformity to the stereotype, he was given the redemptive role compared to his friends. He develops genuine feelings for a man he can't have, and starts to question his role in the world and the work he does for the bad guys. Ultimately his feelings redeem him, and by extension his two comrades, who arrive at redemption not through their attraction to women, but by showing true affection for their man-loving, gender-defying friend.

(See my translation on Tumblr of a pair of contemporary articles introducing the Amazon Trio in the Sailor Moon anime and interviewing the actors portraying them for more about the "okama" tropes that were applied to their characters.)

Like Fisheye, Jakotsu is cast in the role of the predatory, effeminate character who's attracted to the male love interest of the series. Of course, neither of them can have him, because he's A) very taken and B) straight. Well, Mamoru had Fiore, but let's not get into that right now. At the very least, he's taken. Unlike Fisheye, he exists in a series with no other gays at all, except for the time Sunrise ripped him off later in the series. So everything is a whole lot worse. But, as I said, Jakotsu has a memorable personality. He dresses strangely, and he acts strangely, and the anime makes damn sure you notice how big his hands are compared to the "normal" kind of person who wears lipstick and is attracted to men. His attraction to men is directly conflated with his sadism and murderous tendencies. But he's the most purehearted of the Band of Seven, and his genuine friendship with Bankotsu is fondly remembered by a lot of people. Hell, the episode where he dies is called "Jakotsu's Requiem".

As a ripoff, Suzaku has basically none of Jakotsu's redeeming qualities like "being an actual character", so I'm not going to discuss him here, except to note that he's presented as both sillier and more sexually dangerous: he's attracted to a male character who can't fight back like Inuyasha can against Jakotsu, and Inuyasha is (somehow) left untraumatized by his encounter with Jakotsu, whereas Guy (I'm not watching or looking up that arc again just to write this essay lol) is so distressed by his brush with Suzaku that he has his future wife change her name when it turns out to also be Suzaku. Meanwhile, Jakotsu comes pretty close to actually violating Inuyasha, but Inuyasha spares him and doesn't look back. It's left to another, less sympathetic member of his villain group to dispatch him, and that's treated as a betrayal and act of evil. And how long has it been since all this was written? It's been twenty years, folks. BL and yuri is more mainstream, manga from those categories are much more likely to get anime or even live-action adaptations, and you don't even have to be a BL or yuri character to be a major capital G-gay or capital-T trans character anymore! Or, you can be in Yashahime and not be a "character" at all.

Right now, it looks like the stereotype character is going to be very background, and not necessarily Evil evil. But that design is more hateful than either Jakotsu or Suzaku's by an order of magnitude. Both Jakotsu and Suzaku are feminine, Jakotsu wears makeup, etc. They, however, have actual designs that aren't just "Whaaaaat?! Gross!!!" That cleft chin isn't an innocuous design choice, it's a deliberate signifier that This Character Is A Funny Freak. See this post (not by me) on Tumblr for some other stereotypical designs from anime more recent than Sailor Moon, Inuyasha, and early-period Naruto. The chin and the exaggerated makeup are a conscious decision to make this character a stereotype, a weirdo who doesn't quite have permission to wear makeup like normal people (cis women) do, but we'll allow it as long as he acts goofy. To me, the design recalls Bobby from Macross Frontier, which I haven't watched, but from his wiki entry he certainly seems like he was at least allowed to have a personality. Like those earlier gay/gnc characters, and most likely unlike this upcoming character in Yashahime.

The thing is, this probably isn't going to be a very important character. They're not a deliberate "fuck you" to gay and gender-nonconforming men, or to trans women, or to whomever it is Sunrise is trying to ape here. It's a thoughtless invocation of a stereotype, for no reason whatsoever. It's totally unconcerned with the fact that this trope is a reference to any real people, and it's just fucking mean.