Ξανάρχισα να διαβάζω στο laptop τα θαμμένα Claymore Chapter αφού η σύνδεση εξακολουθεί να έχει πρόβλημα και μάλλον θα την αλλάξω. Sorry όσοι δεν είστε σχετικοί με
Manga και αγγλικά, ισως και να ήρθε η στιγμή να αρχίσετε με Claymore ;-)
(τονίζω ότι υπάρχουν Manga για
όλες τις ηλικίες)
CLAYMORE – sex, bodies, and monsters
Disclaimer: by writing this I’m not endorsing Claymore as a work of high sophistication. It just happens to be a thing with a particular fixation, and being a visual medium it lends itself very well to this analysis.
Claymore is a story about monsters. It is obsessed with the female monstrosity; it is obsessed with the edge between the monstrous and the human the female protagonists walk; it is obsessed with control and, despite featuring characters who for the most part express no sexual desire, it’s a manga which is visually and deeply fixated on sex.
In Claymore the mysterious “organization” selects orphan girls, genetically engineers them with monster flesh, and turns them into living weapons. But once upon a time, orphans of both gender were taken in, but by the time the story proper begins the shift has gone all-female: male warriors, releasing the energy that transforms them and allows them to harness superhuman strength and speed, experience sensations similar to orgasms. So addictive is this release that the initial generations of men all stepped over the threshold of humanity, upon which point they turn into monsters with a ravening hunger for human flesh. In this way the male libido is othered, punished, made forbidden–it is unquestionably condemning for a warrior to “Awaken” into monsters. Those that do become the organization’s greatest enemies, and must be subjugated and killed.
Of course, much the same applies to the women, most of whom don’t experience the same orgasmic sensations when tapping into their monstrous nature (one of the female protagonists Helen, however, is said to be “like the men” in this regard). Notably, however, that once they “Awaken” male and female monsters behave more or less the same: they see it as a liberation from the strictures imposed on them by the organization, they become freer with their basic wants, many of which are sexual. There’s a lot to say here, mainly–
1. All of the male “Awakened beings” reached their state by uncontrolled excess of power; their transformed bodies are not sexualized. Rigald is leonine; Isley is a giant, weapon-wielding centaur.
2. Some of the female “Awakened beings” reached their state by uncontrolled excess of power; their transformed bodies vary widely, but a fair number are sexualized. They almost always retain prominent breasts and hips.
3. Some of the female warriors shift only parts of their bodies into “Awakened” state; some of the female warriors have been trained specifically to control their change, allowing them to remain intelligent and human. These tend to look more aesthetically controlled, more like weapons than eldritch breasts.
4. Some of the female warriors have reached their monstrosity threshold, but are able to revert back (generally with the help of other female warriors).
It plays into the idea that male sexuality is more aggressive, more uncontrollable, whereas female sexual appetite can be held back–that women are, so to speak, in better control of their libido (or detached form it entirely, if they even have one). This is an obviously sexist idea, shored up in-story with the concept that the latest generations of women are newer, improved versions (and thus exercise finer control: some of them are engineered specifically to control each other’s transformation). In addition to this, it is notable that all the powerful male Awakened beings are in control of themselves, able to strategize and lead (apart from Dauph, who isn’t so much not-in-control as merely stupid), many of the female ones are not–Priscilla regresses to an infant state and in current timeline is an inscrutable killing machine who goes out slaughtering everything for no apparent reason; several of the resurrected Awakened warriors are unhinged; Ophelia, Luciela, Agatha and many others become ravenous monsters who can’t think beyond their hunger for meat.
The first is a body that undergoes controlled transformation; the second is one that bursts out of control. One is aesthetically purposeful, made entirely of blades that outsize and outscale the human torso, and bipedal; the other is bestial, distorted, on all fours–and much more emphatically sexual. It’s no coincidence that Isley is literally eaten alive by a swarm of naked zombie women.
The Awakened bodies of women and the stitched-up zombies code a deep horror of female sexuality: the zombies are female appetites unleashed, mindless and driven only to consume flesh. The controlled Awakening of some of the women suggests, perhaps, that female sexuality is all right only if it’s restrained, kept proper–and, of course, in-story the women express little sexual or romantic desire. The only ones who do are the “bad” ones, the monsters. The protagonists are strictly celibate or asexual/aromantic, outside of Tabitha’s crush on her captain Miria and perhaps Clare’s thing with Raki.
But, to be sure, outside of Raki’s crush on Clare, none of the important men has much of a sexual or romantic desire either outside of the nameless, less-powerful male monsters who have now and again been shown as rapists. While Isley’s and Rigald’s transformation to the monsters they become may have been attributed to men’s addiction to orgasmic sensations, both characters are just as celibate (or aromantic/asexual) as the female primary characters: they are not a sexual threat to the women they fight. The men who lead the organization are extremely patriarchal and exert direct control over the transformation from human to monster (they are themselves monstrous, with physical suggestions that they’ve been augmented or genetically altered), they do not engage in gendered abuse.
The women, then, are like Commander Shepard: they are entirely unconcerned with performing femininity, they do not (outside of one instance with Teresa being threatened by bandits, whom she casually grosses out) fear sexual assault, and the only times we see them give attention to their aesthetics it is only to their “sense of style” in combat–Galatea dislikes unleashing her power because it mars her face (but she does not perform this before men, nor has she ever expressed romantic/sexual interest in men) and Roxanne doesn’t like certain fighting styles because she prefers to be elegant as well as powerful: a running theme for many of the fighters, but one that has less to do with them being women and more to do with a certain shounen trope of the elegant fighter (usually a long-haired pretty boy: warning, transphobia). In short, they are divorced entirely from femininity; like Shepard they are narratively treated precisely like male characters.
But there’s a dissonance: all the boobalicious monsters, the basic uniforms the women wear–
Which has a line down the middle that points directly at the cameltoe. The men’s uniform, while sometimes skintight around the chest and lets you admire every muscle if that’s your kind of thing, is very loose around the crotch. It’s a small mercy that the female uniform comes with those useless skirt plates, which thankfully prevent ass-shots but mysteriously leave a convenient gap to expose the cameltoe. Later on, some of the protagonists having deserted the organization put together some black leather and end up with these:
Which is some improvement, but some of the designs–see rightmost–are still questionable and don’t look even a bit comfortable. While within the narrative the women are almost never sexually threatened and seldom encounter the male gaze, the way they are presented both human and monstrous very much panders to it and a terminal fear of female sexuality. So: Claymore’s women–textually freed from performing gender, visually constrained and shaped by the male gaze. A very strange tension.
