chainsawmascara | Questions meme

Oh, why not!

ASK A QUESTION it can be anything CFUD related, OOC, IC, Relationship, psychology, thoughts, whatever. I.E. My character's opinion of your character or maybe what you have been wondering about this behavior or that, or general thoughts on my characters or canons or what, who I might consider topping you into apping, etc.

WHEN I REPLY I will also ask you a question in turn!

I play: Umeda, Riku Replica, Heat, Sakubo (can ask individually or as a pair), Minato, Soubi, Tsukihiko, Cheryl, Grelle, and Mutsu.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lunettic.livejournal.com

WE SHOULD DEFINITELY PLAY YES.

...Belatedly, I feel I should warn for Soul Eater spoilers in all of Justin's question answers. This has particularly major ones though!

So, Justin has always worked on his own in the sense that he has never fought with a wielder. This is unusual both because it means he is extremely powerful - most weapons in Soul Eater are pretty useless in a fight without a partner, while Justin made Deathscythe at 13 alone - and because a lot of the point of attending Shibusen and working for Shinigami is learning about respect and teamwork. The only other weapon we know of who fights alone is Giriko, who is as I mentioned above crazy and homicidal, and never worked for Shinigami to begin with.

DESPITE THIS, no one seems particularly concerned about Justin's mental state, even in the face of the big bad (the kishin) being released and driving everyone in the world slowly insane, because of Justin's deep religious devotion. This is a mistake, as it turns out his deep religious devotion is to the big bad who is driving everyone in the world slowly insane. :'D Oops. Anyway, Justin murders a Shibusen internal affairs agent whose soul perception skills were getting good enough that he might have been able to find the kishin (who is currently in hiding), and eventually the good guys figure out he did it and Justin has to go on the run.

He is still not really "on his own," though - he is just currently on Team Evil, which consists of Justin, a Clown (an avatar of insanity that guides him), Giriko (who Justin picked up :3), and two other guys. Their goals are to kill Maka Albarn, whose soul perception skills are also getting dangerous, find the kishin before Shibusen does, and possibly something more wide-scale and sinister too idek canon is still coming out.

Basically what it means is that Justin was only working for Shinigami as a means to an end and as a spy to start with, and now he is showing his true crazy colors. But in a focused way.

I have read your gender/sexuality essay post, but I would totally be interested in hearing you talk more about how Grelle views women as a whole!

From:

chainsawmascara

ohoho that is EXTREMELY intriguing to me!

God, Grelle and women. Okay. Obviously I want to start this that she self-identifies female; from her opinion, she views being a woman as a perfectly admirable thing to be and something she is, body aside. However, her standards are... absurd, like I said. Grelle has no patience for what she perceives as flaws among women and picks and chooses what stereotypes are ‘flaws’ quite liberally. She totally sympathizes with Madam Red’s pain over being unable to bear children and appreciates that Madam Red expresses this rage through murder; these traits make her declare that she loves Madam Red. And she shows her appreciation by joining her and helping her out by loaning her powers. Yet (spoilers spoilers) the moment Madam Red can’t kill someone -- her own nephew, Ciel -- Grelle loses patience with her and kills her. And then when she sees Madam Red’s cinematic record (in which the inability to have children takes a big backseat to her sense of sentimentality; how she’s looking for vengeance on a world where the man she loved could marry the sister she loved, where she’d have to settle for a man she didn’t love but liked and lose that too, where her sister and the man she loved could die) Grelle has nothing but disgust for her. Which seems odd because Grelle LOVES romance! She LOVES drama and of course she herself talks about wanting to get married and have a stereotypical relationship! But for Grelle, none of this can ever take a back seat to the violent drive. Even then, Grelle’s fine with the fact that Madam Red was acting violent out of a sense of being denied these (so-called) ‘typical’ female desires; it’s not as ideal as acting that way alongside it, but she was aware of that up front. But the fact that these desires -- that ultimately, Madam Red couldn’t push herself to destroy the last vestige of these people she loved (Ciel, their child, who she viewed like the child she couldn’t have)... THAT’S what disgusted Grelle. And Grelle couched that in the terms of ‘not knowing you were such a pathetic, stereotypical woman’ and considering it a ‘cheap drama’. Because once the ‘feminine desires’ hamper someone from committing violence, she considers them, well, unworthy of her standards.

I mentioned before that Grelle logic always works FOR Grelle. Recently in a thread with Tyki she climbed in through the window, and Tyki was like “That’s not very ladylike,” and Grelle answered with, “Of course it’s ladylike. I just did it!”. Grelle will gladly redefine a ‘proper’ lady to her standards, and that includes being, well, of the “female of the species is more deadly than the male” variety. A good woman, in her mind, is clad in blood red and dyed in the blood of others; she’s a poisonous snake who’s welcome to as many feminine desires and feminine wiles as she wants, but if she lets any of these hold her back, then she’s ugly, stupid, useless, and a discredit to the sex.

Which of course is HORRIBLY MISOGYNISTIC! But Grelle doesn’t see it that way, partially because Grelle is psychotic.

It’s hard to say if Grelle would view weak-willed (or men with traits she’d percieve as weak-willed, more likely; Madam Red was anything but weak-willed) men similarly because we never see her dealing with any of them. The only people we have seen her interacting onscreen with are Will, Sebastian, Ciel (who she considers a dismissable child), and Madam Red. Technically speaking, she’s also in the same scenes as Lau and Ranmao but this is when she’s playing meek butler and always hovering in the background -- there’s no honest exchange ‘as she really is’. But I think that she would judge men less harshly, partially because she -- through her own extremely biased lens (and given her internalized misogyny it’s even more biased, in a way) -- views them as the lesser sex, so she wouldn’t hold them to such exacting standards. And partially because even if she thinks that way, she also tends to view men as the ‘intriguing other’ and doesn’t react as if she’s trying to identify with them.

From:

chainsawmascara

And that is actually part of the key to why Grelle has this weird misogynistic approach to women even though she identifies as one and even though she wants to physically become one. Because she cannot identify with men. She just can’t relate to them! She can be attracted to them and she can enjoy their reactions, but she doesn’t mentally associate herself as being ‘like’ them at all. And Grelle obviously wants to relate to those around her -- she’s drawn out of her work, steps forward, and identifies herself TO Madam Red entirely because she thinks she sees a kindred spirit. But the thing is... Grelle is, you know, psychotic. Killing isn’t just a job to her, it’s a lifestyle and a fetish. And the number of people who will share this are, obviously, very low to begin with. The number of people who will share it to her degree and while fitting all of her ‘standards’? Probably non-existent!

But she still wants. Her relationship with Madam Red is, I believe, sexual (she does, after all, say she’s doing it all “because she fell in love with a woman”) -- but at the same time it’s written up-front as being about her identifying with Madam Red. The key image is of her draping on Madam Red (who is numb and kneeling over the corpse of a woman she just murdered), cuddling her, and agreeing, “Yes, yes, I know, I can’t have children either, because men suck.” Her passion for Madam Red falls into that archetyped theory of homosexuality where lesbians are drawn by seeing the ‘same’ in each other. It’s a combination of attraction to traits and *identification* with traits. (I mentioned this before and that I personally don’t buy the theory by itself, but it looks to me like it’s something being played with here).

And the other side of this is that there are many, many, many women she can’t identify with, and this is disappointing, and disgruntling, and dissatisfying, and makes them ugly bitches! Again, misogyny. She refers to the murders she does as “making over those ugly whores”. She sees nothing worth identifying with in these prostitutes and so she both violences them and dismisses them. I don’t want to go into the psychological theories actually used in the Jack the Ripper murders, as in this universe it was primarily Grelle acting on Madam Red’s behest and/or in tandem, and the emphasis is not on the sexual element of the victims but of the childless outrage reflected in the uterus removal. But the fact that she refers TO the prostitutes like this still gives insight into her viewpoint. (In contrast, Ciel humanizes them as victims -- he makes a grave for Madam Red and Grelle’s last victim, and lays flowers on it, because he views her as a woman he could have chosen to save and instead prioritized catching the killer. Where Grelle and Madam Red -- who, frankly, are kind of both monsters, let’s face it; they’re Jack the Ripper -- dehumanize their victims, Ciel humanizes her even after sacrificing her. So it’s not something the manga itself is, hmm, buying into? She’s human. She’s worth a grave, she’s worth flowers, and she was worth saving and that’s why Ciel is pained about the scenario.)

Obviously she’s not going to kill every woman who disgusts her -- the killings she DOES commit outside her work are all structured into Madam Red’s choices, and ultimately Madam Red herself for letting her down personally. She’s got perfect control and ability to choose her victims where she sees fit. But, you know, if she’s got the opportunity and no reason NOT to, she’s still going to be very tempted.

Anyway, tl;dr but basically comes down to “Grelle identifies female, wants to be physically female, and puts ‘female’ as a state of being on a pedestal, but in order to relate that back to herself, any woman who doesn’t match her personality isn’t worthy of the pedestal and is discrediting her views of womanhood. Men aren’t worth as much to her personally, and she’s got no reason to try to see herself in them, so she’s much more tolerant of their flaws.”

IIRC I've harrassed Raven with Grelle before. How does he feel about that

From:

notmakingout.livejournal.com

ALL SUPER INTERESTING.

Mostly Raven feels awkward! So, Raven is really close with Naoto, which means he's been trying to learn more and be more understanding about gender identity being flexible, so when Grelle was like "I'm a woman really!" Raven's reaction was "...Okay! She's a woman! Yes! I can do this!" Of course, how Raven deals with women is... flirting! Especially dangerous women. So he did that!

But the thing about Raven's flirting is that it is not meant to win people over, it is meant to put people off. Even normally, it throws him when people react positively to it. So he had no idea what to do with Grelle responding in kind. So he was SUPER AWKWARD and pretty relieved when telling Grelle that he didn't really like fighting disappointed her.

Shorter question this time! Which of your other characters should I play with?