Greetings! The name is Time Lizzy, or Time as my friends call me. They/Them pronouns. I love to try new things, draw, sing, dance, garden, and I do some witchcraft in my free time. I'm a Hetalia role playing partner if you guys are interested.
We need to have a nomination for “Stupidest thing Tumblr.com has ever believed” and just move into an official Top 10 List.
For my nominations, I’m putting up:
If you eat a chocolate bar a very specific way, you will break physics and get infinite chocolate.
or
It is impossible that you spelled “Berenstain Bears” wrong and is, instead, more likely that the universe fractured into separate, overlapping realities in the last 20 years.
I can’t decide which is more beautiful. It’s why we need a vote.
this is a picture of the human brain at the moment of death. tragic and beautiful
Fuck. That is a damn good nomination.
if you close your eyes when the train hits your brain will assume you are dead. Some find this comforting.
We’re getting into the good ones now. This is some classic Tumblr.
Since the fandom’s fixation with Levi calling Eren “shitty brat” hasn’t completely dissipated yet, I took it upon myself to check how many times Levi calls him that in the manga. You’ll be surprised by what I’ve found out (I certainly was).
Levi refers to Eren a grand total of 81 times in 103 chapters. Here’s a detailed list nobody asked for:
エレン “Eren”: 45 times お前 “You”: 21 コイツ・ヤツ “Him”: 13 グズ野郎 “Scum”: 1 (this is the first time he addresses Eren, in the dungeon) クソガキ “Shitty brat”: 1 (during the Female Titan arc, in the forest, when they’re under pressure, he refers to Eren like this, when he is confirming with his squad that their mission is to protect Eren from harm, not kill him) 俺の敵じゃない “Not my enemy”: 1 (in the courtroom scene) 奇跡 “A miracle”: 1
Let’s see for comparison how he calls some other characters, just to check if he holds some particular grudge against Eren.
エルヴィン “Erwin”: 28 お前 “You”: 15 ヤツ “Him”: 2 団長 Commander: 1 (sarcastically) エルヴィー “Erwi—”: 1 (interrupted by the shock regarding Erwin’s grin) 気持ちの悪い奴め translated as “You’re gonna make me sick” by CR, but lit. “What a disgusting guy”: 1
Petra, Oluo, Eld: a couple of times each by their names
＊ Names are used both to address the person and when talking with others about said person.
I also checked how many times (and how) Eren calls Levi, and I was surprised to find out that it’s not that many (compared to how many times Levi uses Eren’s name/talks about him). I had an impression Eren was the Mikasa of the situation, always saying “Captain Levi!”, but that’s not the case, apparently. I am curious to know how many times Mikasa actually says Eren’s name, too, but I grew interested in it when I was already at about half of my skimming of the manga. Hit me up if you know.
Eren calls/refers to Levi as:
リヴァイ兵長 “Captain Levi”: 11 兵長 “Captain”: 16 人類の最強の兵士リヴァイ兵長 “Humanity’s strongest soldier Captain Levi”: 1 (the first time he talks about Levi) チビオヤジ “Little old man”: 1 (referring to Rod Reiss, but Levi got concerned Eren was addressing him as such) 自由の翼 “Wings of Freedom": 1 (i am a sap) just “Levi”: ??? (i’m still waiting)
So, my conclusion is: Levi called Eren “shitty brat” just one (1) time. Levi doesn’t hate Eren and isn’t set on verbally insulting him. Eren is a beautiful name. Let Levi call Eren by his name, please. Also, Levi is a lot more fixated on Eren than vice-versa, who would have thought, hah!
I wrote a college paper once about gender dynamics in Disney films, and part dealt with the emphasis of androgyny in this film. Mulan is an outsider and unsure of her position of the world when she is adhering to both a total feminine role (the matchmaking scene) and a total masculine role (disguised as a male soldier) and it’s only when she’s able to embrace both sides that she is able to fully showcase her abilities and ultimately save the day.
The entire climax, from climbing the poles using sashes, counting on Shan Yu’s complete dismissal of women to get the Emperor to safety, to this scene where she literally uses a symbol of womanhood (within the movie at least) to disarm the villain of his symbol of masculinity and beat him at his own game, shows Mulan relying on the aspects of her femininity that she has grown up adhering to and adapting the tactical knowledge and fighting skills that she learned disguised as a male soldier to those aspects. The result is a unique and innovative view of the world and her course of action that leads her to save the day when the male soldiers failed and the women wouldn’t even have been allowed to try.
This commentary is so curious to me because it’s such an excellent example of white/western cultural bias in portrayals of other cultures. Because fans by themselves are a gender neutral object in Ancient China, especially the large type that Mulan uses in this particular scene is actually masculine if you must code it historically, and in Chinese hands would be used as a tool to support her masculinity and not the other way around. These paper fans are used in general by (male) scholars and artists who decorate its surface with art and calligraphy. It is a symbol of (masculine) intellectual power and the intellectual elite. And if you look to Asian martial arts films, they are a common and almost exclusive weapon of men.
Yet the movie takes this deeply cultural object and either willingly or ignorantly makes it an object of womanhood or femininity. To the extent of my knowledge, this is mostly reflective of western social history. And draws from the coquettish ways Georgian? Ladies would use the fan to signal their romantic interest and all the history and influence around it. The equivalent object for the Chinese lady would in fact be the handkerchief, or a hairstick if you want something pointy.
And it’s all the more curious because at the end of the day it’s a western depiction of a foreign story made for western consumption. It is not a story made by and for Chinese little girls, but to empower and inspire those in the West. Which provides the context for the above (excellent) analysis. It does not need to fully take Chinese history into context because it was never made for us, despite being explicitly about us.
