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Sometimes I think about Marcille's tendency to infantalize the people around her, specifically tall-man (human) women. I believe it's because she's an elf, so it plays into how she has developed that little piece of the ageism that a lot of long living races have. For instance, she began her friendship with Izutsumi seeing her as not just a cat but a kitten. To explain this "neko no ko" = kitten/child cat because "koneko" and "nekonoko" are functionally the same thing in Japanese (according to native speakers). In this specific context "ko" is utilized to refer to kitten rather than woman (as people seem to like to argue). She is infantalizing her, implying she is is a kitten, unable to make her own decisions and taking away the idea that she is autonomous being from her, which she does learn from over the course of the manga (past chapter 60). Another (much earlier) example is when she supposed that Laios had kidnapped Falin at first when meeting him and starts to scold him for doing si. Falin can make her own decisions and can choose to leave places on her own, but Marcille viewed her in a lens that contradicted this truth. This is just a flaw she has and it's part of how she deals with the mortality of her friends, which she grows from and works on through the plot and especially the climax of the manga. Honestly, I think about it so much which makes me feel like an insane person because I know if I tried to discuss it, a lot of people would be like "uhm actually you're wrong because Marcille could never do anything that bad, even as a mistake," which flattens her very three-dimensional character! The issue is that people have a tendency to fandom-ificate her, if that makes sense. In a way, its a method of making her more palatable to the reader. It makes me sad because people don't realize that part of her character development is that she grows from her previous views of Izutsumi — seeing her as her own person more than a kitten/child — and Falin — seeing her as an equal to degree of understanding that she has her own wishes and desires — rather than viewing them exactly as she did previously. This isn't to make her out to be evil, since I think characters can have flaws without inherently being horrible people, its to show her arc with viewing the mortality of her friends because its connected to her view of age and how she infantalizes shorter lived races. Genuinely, it makes me antsy that saying anything about her character arc or previous traits makes some people turn off their brains a little. Part of her being an interesting queer character IS her flaws as a character because they make her realer to us. (06/21/2024) — Mars ᓚᘏᗢ |
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♡ Mars/Nini(妮妮) 🇹🇼 ♬
also woah 15 entries... I'm like a real blogger... ignore that these are a day behind and I've been playing catch-up...
— Mars ᓚᘏᗢ