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EP. REVIEW: 86

No offense, but you seem to be taking this WAY too out of proportion. If something this trivial ruins entire scenes for you, then I dont know what to tell you. You are reacting like the show had random ass and panty shots. News flash, well written female characters are allowed to be sexy too.

Dress uniforms can look pretty silly to contemporary eyes (look at all the braid and piping and dangling cords on European cavalry uniforms from the Napoleonic era).

Lena's uniform is pretty silly. It probably tells you something about the sexual politics and patriarchal nature of the Republic that the dress uniform for women looks like that. She has high heels on her boots, too, doesn't she?

I doubt that a woman who expected to wear it on a daily basis in which she expected to be doing anything other than a desk job would design a uniform like that.

dm wrote:

Lena's uniform is pretty silly. It probably tells you something about the sexual politics and patriarchal nature of the Republic that the dress uniform for women looks like that. She has high heels on her boots, too, doesn't she?

I don't know if it's so much something we can tie into the politics of the Republic per se rather than just the visual conventions of the genre...I mean, I guess the Republic could be a kind of society where women are more expected to dress that way from an archaic view of women and because they don't take the military seriously, but we do see enlisted women and Lena was able to become a major at 16 on her own merits.

I don't think we see enough to really judge for sure one way or another, but we also should take into consideration that the author is a woman who likes garter-belts.

MFrontier wrote:

dm wrote: Lena's uniform is pretty silly. It probably tells you something about the sexual politics and patriarchal nature of the Republic that the dress uniform for women looks like that. She has high heels on her boots, too, doesn't she? I don't know if it's so much something we can tie into the politics of the Republic per se rather than just the visual conventions of the genre...I mean, I guess the Republic could be a kind of society where women are more expected to dress that way from an archaic view of women and because they don't take the military seriously, but we do see enlisted women and Lena was able to become a major at 16 on her own merits.

Well, if you look at the work on its own, you are free to ask why they're doing things the way they are, and what the audience reads in the imagery on the screen. This is especially true of animation, where everything on the screen was put there by the creators' choices.

So, Gina says, "Lena's uniform really takes me out of the serious mood the series seems to be aiming for". So, the artists are screwing up if they're trying to send a serious message to audience members like Gina.

Gina got me started thinking about what Lena's silly uniform says to me, and it causes me to wonder: what does it say about this society that they put women into dress uniforms like that? Is it saying they should be taken seriously, or is the expectation that they are purely decorative?

As to Lena's meteoric rise, didn't we see in one of the early episodes how some of the not-much-older officers viewed her in a pretty patronizing way. Not so surprising given the fact that her uniform makes her look "cute" and "sexy" instead of serious and diligent doesn't help her make her case for being taken seriously.

MFrontier wrote:

I don't think we see enough to really judge for sure one way or another, but we also should take into consideration that the author is a woman who likes garter-belts.

Whether one takes authorial intent into consideration is a choice of critical stance. To a degree, what the author means may be different from what they actually end up saying.

You're free to say that this is more consideration than you really think this aspect of this cartoon (a) deserves, (b) wants from you, (c) is going to get from you, and that's fine.

pikrodafni wrote:

It's not like it ever really focuses on that particular aspect of her

No, of course they would never sabotage an emotional scene by focusing on that.

We do get some comments in-universe about how Lena's job as a woman is to get married (from her uncle iirc), but I'm not sure if that's meant as anything deeper than the line itself

killjoy_the wrote:

We do get some comments in-universe about how Lena's job as a woman is to get married (from her uncle iirc), but I'm not sure if that's meant as anything deeper than the line itself

IIRC in the LN it was also about Lena being kind of nobility, and noble women should get married instead of working, but that just confirms sexism even more, as nobility woman has most opportunity for good education so leaving them out of workforce leaves women in general as "lower level" workers - nurse instead of doctor, school teacher instead of professor, etc.

There is also the plot with her friend having to deal with whole procession of over- and under-aged suitors, so there is definitely something about "woman's role is to get married" in Alba Republic's society, which would explain sexy uniforms - after all they could help women like Lena get a husband in a military, which is their proper role /s.