(At risk of being obnoxious, I'm crossposting this comment from the Translations and Summaries forum because it's enough of a long, analytical critique that it seems worth posting as meta.)

I have always been uncomfortable with the element of misogynistic cliché in Sensei's writing of Minako, i.e. the pedestaling of Minako reinforces the idea that "good" women are saints untainted by the messy reality of a human psyche, which is a standard (virtually?) none of us can attain in real life and puts us in the position of constantly being told we're bad (and deserve everything we get) because we're not perfect. This, of course, then justifies the subjection of women in general because women are bad and our badness needs to be kept in check. (It doesn't help that the only other major woman in the prequels is Haruie, whose womanhood is highly atypical and includes a lot of male privilege.)</Didactic Feminism 101>

Minako in this volume is consistent with the main Mirage series and bothers me for the same reason. I wrote a rant about it, but then it occurred to me I might be misinterpreting, so I want to focus on questions instead—and then rant, sorry.

(First a side question: I had had the idea that Nobunaga destroyed Minako's soul, but in the prequel, this doesn't happen. Was that ever implied in the main series, or did I make it up? I might have just interpolated it because Naoe put Kagetora's soul into Minako's body to save it from being destroyed; hence, I assumed her soul got destroyed instead?)

Rina and others have observed that Minako strongly echoes the Kannon Bodhisattva, whom I duly looked up on Wikipedia. And, boy, this is really true: not only her character but a number of her plotlines could be drawn right out of the mythology of this figure/group of figures. For example, she's pushed to marry a nasty man; she instantly forgives and takes on the punishment (karma/death) of a man who kills her.

So here's my core question:

Is Minako literally supposed to be the Kannon Bodhisattva (i.e. the goddess of compassion, Guanyin) or is this just a very good metaphor for this nice girl's behavior?

I had always assumed the latter. Or specifically, when Naoe and Kagetora in the main series talk about Minako as a bodhisattva, I thought they might mean it literally, but in the sense of a bodhisattva who is an enlightened human being who chooses to defer Nirvana to help others, not as an actual goddess incarnate. When they go on about her as the Virgin Mary, I naturally assumed this was a metaphor—but now I'm wondering! Wikipedia says some incorporate the Virgin Mary as an avatar of the goddess Guanyin. If we follow this story, could Kagetora and Naoe actually believe Minako might be Mary, at least to the degree that Yuzuru is Kagekatsu?

If this is the case, that Minako is actually a divine figure, this has a lot of implications. In no particular order:

* The only person in the world who can actually handle the massive psychological needs and insecurities of Kagetora enough to be his girlfriend is the archetype of perfectly selfless, divine compassion herself!! This makes me laugh in the way Mirage does at it's best. It is both absurd and perfectly in character for Kagetora. And if it's true, it ought to terrify him because it speaks to the depth of his insecurities more powerfully than anything that ever goes down with Naoe. It signifies that he needs perfection in others. And as someone who has struggled with not being able to be perfect for others himself, he ought to deeply understand what an unfair and unhealthy burden this is to place on anyone.

Now, there are echoes of this excessive need everywhere in Mirage, most notably in Kagetora's unreasonably high expectations of Naoe across the years. And Kagetora is certainly guilty over Minako's being hurt by their shenanigans. But I don't see real grappling with the ultimate goddesshood of Minako. The sense I get is more like: "She was such a sweet person and we f***ed her over. We suck," just as one might reasonably think about hurting any nice person who clearly didn't deserve it.

So if Minako is literally meant to be this archetypal figure, I think the implications of this for Kagetora are not clearly or adequately explored (unless something is really lost in translation/summary).

* The implications may be somewhat better explored with Naoe. Naoe is in the position of the criminal who is not only forgiven but, in some sense, has his karmic burden taken over by the goddess. In this case, by letting herself be killed (not resenting it), she saves Kagetora for Naoe, allows Naoe to continue his own journey, and gives him a sense of forgiveness to sustain him. But her goodness also sharpens his guilt, which makes for an interesting psychological reading of the further adventures of a person who is given unearned forgiveness in this way.

This tracks pretty well, but if we (and Naoe) are meant to literally think of her in this way, I would have liked it to be a little more explicit and more discussed because…

* Why did this goddess come to Naoe and Kagetora at this particular time like this? There's a reason they're hanging around with Miroku: they've been assigned to help prevent his premature waking. But why would the goddess Guanyin appear in their midst like this? Coincidence (which makes a weak storyline)? Naoe and Kagetora are so amazingly important to the world that they need a goddess to show up and save them so they can continue their important things? This would fit in with the main plot well, but there are two problems: 1) it's never implied that this is why she's there; 2) it seems a bit out of character for the epitome of compassion to orient her action around something as utilitarian as saving people so they can serve the greater good. Or is it because Naoe and Kagetora themselves are so much the epitome of personal suffering that she is drawn to them? This explanation doesn't sit well with me because it's aggrandizing. I love Kagetora and Naoe—but I don't think they're more human than the rest of us. And to present them as so particularly in need of this kind of divine intervention (more than many another person) feels… like hero worship.

And then there's character building…

* If Minako is an incarnation/avatar of this figure, the type of being she is most nearly like is Yuzuru, i.e. Minako is to Yuzuru as Guanyin is to Miroku. If we follow this idea, Minako, like Yuzuru, would see herself as an ordinary person and have no idea her soul is this greater entity. That tracks with what we see. But with Yuzuru it is explicit and important to the plot that his soul has these multiple layers. With Minako, I'm left guessing if this is even the case. Unless something is REALLY lost in translation/summary, there is minimally a lack of development of what this means for Minako as an entity.

This lack of development creates (what appears) inconsistency in behavior. When Miroku intrudes into Yuzuru, it's very clear. Yuzuru behaves like a different person, and even when those two identities merge, it's fairly clear how: Yuzuru's love of Takaya and feelings of rejection over his going off to be Kagetora combine with Miroku's childish acting out to produce various kinds of possessive bad behavior, for example.

If we follow this sort of logic, "Minako" is the girl we first meet who's pluckily doing her best to make her adoptive family proud and sort of having a crush on Kasahara but then falling head over heels for Kase, and so on. And Guanyin is the figure of superhuman compassion who can so readily forgive being brutally raped and impregnated and killed. But there is no bridge between them. There is no discourse that shows the one merging into the other. We are just left with Minako behaving in way that's superhuman (good girls are perfect), and this is a character-building problem because…

* Guanyin and related figures—at least as Wikipedia has reviewed them for me—are not psychologically realistic entities. That's understandable. These are old stories coming out of a non-psychologically realistic mythos. (Though I do suspect that "a good woman is perfect" figures here as well. That burden on us is not new.) Howsoever, we are left with stories of a figure who does nothing but show invariable compassion toward others with no concern for herself—and with no narrative showing how a human being might become that way. She just is that way from birth. She's a goddess. She's an archetype.

This is, indeed, how Minako is presented in the endgame. And it doesn't sit well over the veneer of a human character. Any young woman—however nice and mature—would be powerfully angered (and terrified) by being raped and impregnated by a man she liked and trusted. Her first response would not be "things will get better for you." And her initial response to then being killed would probably not be "Oh, it's okay. I guess your epic love is more important than my life." On its surface, that demeans and dehumanizes her character (in the grand tradition of using woman's virtue to negate woman's value by having woman selflessly agree with her own devaluation).

Now, people are capable of amazing things, especially in extremis. And I actually buy Minako's final forgiveness more readily than I buy her rape non-trauma. But there needs to be some explanation besides "she's a very nice girl." The explanation could be one of two things:

1) She's superhuman—which, as I've argued above, is not adequately clarified or explored or…

2) She is genuinely enlightened as a human being, which is something she might have achieved through the work of her life as Minako (though it's a bit unlikely by her early twenties) or as a result of the work of past lives. This is not explored at all. The past lives would be harder to explore narratively than the psychological journey of Minako qua Minako, but if this is, in fact, the explanation for her inexplicable behavior, the narrative has a responsibility to figure out how to do it. That's not beyond the cosmology of Mirage to figure out.

Female characters are often asked to be perfect. They emerge as one-dimensional figures like Dea in The Man Who Laughs, Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities ("God bless her for her sweet compassion"), Maria in Gungrave, Disney's Snow White. And it's easy to say a woman is this way because she's a saint or a bodhisattva, but in my experience, it's very rare to see a female character actually constructed with the weight of personality and experience that REALLY enables that kind of identity. After some mental searching, I can think of three times I've seen it well depicted: Zhaan in Farscape, Sid in The Fourth Messenger (who is reenacting the life of Gautama), and Rem in the Trigun manga (and I'll give a partial to Delenn in Babylon 5*). Minako ain't these women. She is clearly in the category of Lucie Manette. And the best thing I can say about that is her storyline might have generated some very interesting development if she had been considered worth developing.

* I'm giving Delenn a partial not because she's badly written but because she's not really written to be at "saint" level, more at high good and mature level. I do think Zhaan ends up near sainthood. A related figure might be Lise in The Brothers Karamazov. She's not a saint; she's very flawed, but she's a good, human depiction of a fool for Christ, and evidence that this type of depth can be achieved with quite young characters too.