My reaction to a panel on shonen bodies is basically that in my icon: giant pink hearts in my eyes as I plot bank heists for con airfare.
I am also fascinated by the shonen physicality of Claymore precisely because the tropes are so seldom applied to women. One of the bits that sealed it for me as Shonen To Watch was when Clare loses an arm, the subsequent training sequence with Ilena, and Ilena's own arm-sacrifice for Clare and Clare's revenge. It's SUCH a quintessential shonen sequence and yet I've never seen it applied to women like that: it's usually a Big Thing in shonen when a woman just cuts her hair. It cemented for me that oh hey, it's not okay for the Real Hero to ride up on his white horse and save the girl at this point, because the real hero is already present, well into her 3rd or 4th Shonen Power-Up, and not in need of rescuing from anything she can't handle with PROTAGONIST CHARISMA POWER.
And it's all about power...power vs control, yoma vs human, beautiful vs ugly, while it's blurring the dichotomy. The Claymores in full control are humanly beautiful; the fully Awakened Claymores who've lost control are beautiful in a separate (naked, prominently-breasted) species way; the Claymores in-between riding the control or fighting it are mutantly hideous. And then out the other side you've got the Awakened Ones so monstrously powerful they can look human, and could presumably stop eating human guts, but seem to have gone past human morality. They remind me a bit of the youkai in Saiyuki Reload who have gone through the Minus Wave to regained sanity but a new willingness to chomp humans.
The Claymores' level of power is directly linked to both how strong they are fighting monsters and how quickly they become the monsters they're fighting; it's power given to/forced on them by the patriarchy the organization and the best power they can use to fight that organization. The yoma power's also linked implicitly to the Claymores' sexuality: the sexualization of the physical act of Awakening and of male Claymores' inability to handle it, the Awakened power couples apparently being the only people in open sexual relationships, etc. But it's also pretty explicitly not condemning female sexuality as the Root Of All Evil, unless it's also putting it as Our Last Best Hope in the same breath.
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I am also fascinated by the shonen physicality of Claymore precisely because the tropes are so seldom applied to women. One of the bits that sealed it for me as Shonen To Watch was when Clare loses an arm, the subsequent training sequence with Ilena, and Ilena's own arm-sacrifice for Clare and Clare's revenge. It's SUCH a quintessential shonen sequence and yet I've never seen it applied to women like that: it's usually a Big Thing in shonen when a woman just cuts her hair. It cemented for me that oh hey, it's not okay for the Real Hero to ride up on his white horse and save the girl at this point, because the real hero is already present, well into her 3rd or 4th Shonen Power-Up, and not in need of rescuing from anything she can't handle with PROTAGONIST CHARISMA POWER.
And it's all about power...power vs control, yoma vs human, beautiful vs ugly, while it's blurring the dichotomy. The Claymores in full control are humanly beautiful; the fully Awakened Claymores who've lost control are beautiful in a separate (naked, prominently-breasted) species way; the Claymores in-between riding the control or fighting it are mutantly hideous. And then out the other side you've got the Awakened Ones so monstrously powerful they can look human, and could presumably stop eating human guts, but seem to have gone past human morality. They remind me a bit of the youkai in Saiyuki Reload who have gone through the Minus Wave to regained sanity but a new willingness to chomp humans.
The Claymores' level of power is directly linked to both how strong they are fighting monsters and how quickly they become the monsters they're fighting; it's power given to/forced on them by
the patriarchythe organization and the best power they can use to fight that organization. The yoma power's also linked implicitly to the Claymores' sexuality: the sexualization of the physical act of Awakening and of male Claymores' inability to handle it, the Awakened power couples apparently being the only people in open sexual relationships, etc. But it's also pretty explicitly not condemning female sexuality as the Root Of All Evil, unless it's also putting it as Our Last Best Hope in the same breath.