The Strong Female Lead of Netflix's "Blue Eye Samurai"

stylized action sequences creatively bloody fight scenes heavy thematic elements actual storytelling and characters that are brilliantly portrayed with depth and relatability all of that is present in blue-eyed Samurai and we're going to go over why I think this is such a fantastic show if you look at Rotten Tomatoes it's 100% with the critics like 97% with the audience that's not a gamed metric this show deserves every bit of credit and and praise that it's gotten and I'm going to go exactly why it surprised me and why I think it's so good this is comparable at least in the quality and depth of the storytelling to like the first two-thirds of Game of Thrones the only thing Game of Thrones has is that it was bigger and more epic and there were more characters more things going on but the layering of themes on top of a story that's interesting along with the style and pacing it's like this is unlike anything I've ever seen so let's start with the plot like I said there is one and apparently these days people think that is an optional feature of Storytelling which is kind of bizarre the main complaint I hear about the Marvels that just came out is people are like I'm not really sure what this thing was about like I can tell you what happened but it's very this and this and this and this all the way to the end which is horrendous storytelling I mean that's like 101 the premise of blue-eyed Samurai is you have misu who is a half breach he is half white half Japanese 1600s Japan only four white men in Japan at that time because Japan was closed off to the rest of the world it was very isolationist and she being so bitter about what happened to her mother about how she was raised and and treated and how she was bullied and seen as a monster for having blue eyes being half European your [ __ ] mother killed herself because your father is a white devil she seeks out to kill the four men each one of which might be her father and as she goes along she meets interesting characters each one is represented with depth and care and creativity and the circumstances they find themselves in are not only kind of realistic as being a byproduct of everybody's actions it's not just some random [ __ ] happened but also they have to engage with the things that happen and it reacts onto them and it affects how they go through their Arc there are Stakes here which is really fantastic the Thematic elements in this like I said are densely packed I mean again she's biracial in this really closed off ethnos State and this hit me for a couple of reasons because we've dealt with this in American Media trying to kind of drive home to the audience what it's like to be looked at differently or discriminated against it's very interesting to see it so thoroughly represented in another culture that is very ethnocentric in its traditions and the ways it sees the outside world and the way we relate to it is by seeing how this exists in so many other cultures where the society is is rigid and oppressive and it hates and rejects anything that looks different to where she's not only bullied and beaten and mistreated and neglected but actively called a monster by people that are actually close to her by people she has relationships with we see a blue-eyed mixed European Japanese Samurai you know female badass were like well that's kind of cool but you realize that in a lot of these rigid cultures not so much seeing it kind of inverted that way from how we normally approach that in American Media uh makes me wonder how other people who might have been numb to it or kind of rolled their eyes when they see these types of portrayals of a discriminated figure if they relate to it differently now that somebody being discriminated against because of their whiteness that's kind of interesting to me but also the way that they're able to handle it given how severe things were in that time and the thing she has to go through is is heartbreaking I mean right off the bat you relate to the underdog character because of how poorly she's treated and how singularly motivated she is she also has and this is the thing that that makes my hair stand on in it's the self-loathing she hates this part of herself like in Her Bones she considers herself a monster she says I need to get to the men that made me a monster and I mean it's heartbreaking but you see that as part of her character and as far as she develops and grows forward um there's typical arcs in these type of things like loyalty to honor and principle and to each other there's this samurai code that's very pervasive and you see how enemies interact there's formal duels I mean she has a contract to a duel that she's supposed to uphold with a samurai whose Pride she took and they want to work hisra to fight to the death but then they have to like they have to like engage with each other and they have responsibilities aside from that and there's this is very weird like the alliances are all formed by not just what suits them in the present moment but also this commitment to like this formal system and then as she goes along she picks up a an understudy somebody who wants to be an apprentice who's kind of the goofy Ringo who gives just the right amount of comedic relief here it's not so over the top as you might see in a lot of anime properties and um he's kind of the simpleton and she has to almost end up kind of earning his respect because she's so dark and jaded but as an apprentice he also has expectations of her as this Samurai that he's trying to follow and that changes her as she goes on anything so I can learn to be just like you like me you're deformed but you're still strong um not losing yourself to vengeance is a big one um obsession is another one because she is so singularly obsessed and there's a point where you see the cost of diving into to this type of thing full boore where it ends up costing your soul all of these themes are very heavily presented and then there's more that bleed into all of these characters specifically a lot of the women that have to survive in this kind of isolated like feudal era Japan where things are extremely patriarchal the style is worth noting because the artwork I'm in love with the artwork I'm I've never been a fan specifically of manga anime or even like samurai or martial arts movies as a genre anyways I've enjoyed plenty of them but I've never been really just over the moon for that uh particular type of style especially with animated stuff I was raised on Disney movies and then through the 70s and 80s there's so many like good detailed handdrawn western movies that they don't do anymore that had so much character and so much texture and detail into the way the characters were written and their expressions and then when I got a little older and I started seeing what a lot of my friends liked which was anime and manga it was hard for me to cross over because the artistic style is so much more simplified angular cartoonish uh washed out and it does what it does well in its own right it was just bridging that Gap is really hard for me and there have been uh examples that are more detailed that are more like gritty and and textured that I have come to like but generally as a style I've never really jumped in this I don't know what the actual artistic process is it looks rotoscoped which was an old school method where you would like film people live action and then the lines and artwork would go over like liveaction references so it made the lines look almost alive um where everything was a lot more fluid um but it's a very distinct style this is this is all certainly computer generated and you know that for no other reason that the the characters don't look like they're voice actors but it looks so real and it has that fluidness that realism that detail that heart that expression that can be easily missed in most animated representations especially when you have a lot of people working to turn out a lot of frames really quickly um so it does look liveaction but also the artistic aspect the the painting The Colors the the texture the abstract features of it are not gone and they can use that in a really interesting way to create really compelling scenes but also have characters that are so vivid I I really love this it's like Arcane um just a little more clean kind of classical look I guess to to fit the style of the era that they're talking about now with the style the way it approaches a plot it the beats are again similar to like those anime or like Samurai type of uh mediums where Western culture and this has been a point of contention for a while is like Western mediums like television movies comic books have just lost the plot no pun intended as to what writing and storytelling and plots are and how you're supposed to evolve a character over time they've been so fixated on featuring their type of character and I don't want to get into the activism theme but trying to feature a specific type that's important and that mission is more important than the craft itself and writing tends to go out the window and then there's confusion as to why hey I'm giving you this new inclusive thing that fits all the Beats of modern society why aren't you over the moon about it it's like well because the story kind of sucked I don't know why I'm supposed to like this thing other than you think it looks a certain way or performs some task for representing a group of people to this day one of the reasons like manga continues to be so popular ahead of modern comic books is the writing the storytelling the way that it it engages with characters those beats are present here and it is all the better for it um it's not afraid to take risk with characters it's very dramatic there's a purpose to the characters being there besides their name or what group they belong to and it adds the depth um it gains an extra element of realism it treats a character seriously who they are what their motivations are why they behave the way they do and how that works out when you put a bunch of them together there's a consistency the characters feel real and there's no point where a character does something and you're like that doesn't make sense based off what you just told me and their interactions seem to just bounce off each other flawlessly which stands out that used to be just good storytelling now it stands out because it's so few and far between now there is an interesting aspect of this I want get into which is the fact that all of the the voice actors uh that play Japanese characters are in fact Asian I wanted to point out the voice actor thing the voice actors were chosen correctly 100% this is the most well-cast array of voice actors in any animated property they all do exceptionally well and there are people you know and like George teai is in it you have Brenda Song Randall Park MSI Oka and they're all very distinct they're all very skilled and they all do everything exceptionally well I just have to point out the fact that they are all Asian actors which I find interesting for a couple of reasons I mean one they're not all Japanese you have the voice of tigan is a quarter Japanese and then you have Randall Park who's Korean and I point this out because this is such a new standard and people buy into it so much and I have to push back against it because it used to be that it's a fictional character you're creating hand drawing writing for by a team of people and the voice is just part of it and human voices are interchangeable I mean aside from some style notes we don't think like oh these Asian people have an Asian to their voice that we need to capture would make sense I guess if they were speaking Japanese or speaking in an accent to like not be offensive but all these characters most of them anyways are speaking regular ass American English so it's really bizarre to me that they went out of their way to cast uh Japanese voice actors but only kind of and it's like what is the important factor of that is there something unique in their voice you need to preserve um why is it okay to have a Korean portray uh somebody who's Japanese or somebody who's only a quarter Japanese portrays somebody who's Japanese how does this math work and the only reason I say this is because people get really dogmatic about this stuff and they get really up in arms when the representative thing is flipped a little bit it really just seems like the rules are made up it's really performative and it doesn't make anything better a great example in watching this I was thinking about Samurai Jack it was a really influential cartoon that was voiced by really famous voice actor and comedian Phil Lamar who's done a bunch of Voice work um it's not obvious that it's just going to be like white people benefiting by taking all of the jobs filamar was a great voice actor could voice Samurai Jack today based on these rules probably not and what if you're part of a minority group that rarely gets represented are you just pigeon hold into that group and you have to wait if that representation happens it's it's a really bizarre thing I just have to point it out that it's a very small complaint I mean for people that are going in looking for woke thumb prints that just seems to be it's like an industry standard now but again I have to say the voice acting was fantastic from a delivery point of view the qu quality was great and then you also do worry that if this is a precedent people fold themselves in half to cast the the right group of people that quality might suffer that thankfully did not happen here um now I want to get into the bloodiness the the gore of the horror because that is a huge part of this uh it has a very much of a killbill feel in fact one of the scenes it was great starts off with a killbill theme songs and there's like Japanese covers of Metallica songs it's the the sound the score is insane but when you pair it with the creative violence I mean really creative choreography with the swords it was like they sat in a room with like the mythbuster uh like ballistic gel shaped like a person and just had a sword and we're like how many different ways can we slice this like okay if we cut it here this Bone's going to stick out this way then we can take that leg and use it as a dagger to stick in somebody's ear it goes over the top and I love that I love like Grindhouse I love practical effect like really corny over the toop like 80s horror movies I'm a big fan of to the point where I'll torture myself with something like terrifier that's more disturbing but part of me still gets some enjoyment out of like over-the-top creative displays of violence and the fact that they incorporate that into really artfully done fight scenes there is a bit of disbelief that has to be suspended it's a bit girl bossy so of course it has misu the main character as a female who is representing herself as a man to not be uh taken advantage of or to also get access to other places she couldn't as a woman um doing all kinds of things that you just kind of roll your eyes like obviously not but when she's scaling a tower with 180 lbs of her buddy on her back and her fingernails are pulling her up in the cracks of the brick and she slips and Falls but saves herself with one hand without losing him and you're like okay yeah like not real but In fairness it's a samurai flick and I just saw her fight like a 100 ninjas by herself and like dominate all of them this type of show requires suspending that disbelief which you should do cuz that's part of the genre and if you can do that you're going to have a blast with it that's that's not the aspect that you're supposed to fixate on because the realness of the characters why it's relatable and why it hits home is the depth of who they are why they do what they do the relatable emotional stuff we want the over-the-top action and this delivers it in some really insane ways but the reason it works so well and this is something I've been saying for a long time the point isn't to get rid of wokeness there's people that don't like stuff because it has woke stuff in it and they're not woke so I don't like that just like if you're an atheist you see a Christian property you're like well I hate that and it doesn't speak to the quality or the mechanics of the thing that you're watching I've always said that it's when the craft takes a backseat to the message you're trying to beat the viewer over the head with that it becomes bus stop advertisement after school special uh cheesy Public Service Announcement propaganda and that's when people hate it and then they try to use their ideology as a shield to like deflect criticism and it's like no it's like it's not the strong female lead it's that you don't know how to write a strong female lead it's that your principles are corrupt your approach is corrupt and you created somebody with no Arc who's not flawed who's started overpowered and goes through no change and we're supposed to care about it and it it's silly this does the opposite of that misu is overpowered 100% but not to the point where she doesn't suffer and that's one of the beautiful things about this the fight scenes show Strain it's not just jumping and slicing and cutting it's like bloody in yourf face bare knuckle you see bruises after every punch you see stab wounds every time she takes on damage she limps there's times where she just gets beaten and battered and still goes for more and the strain calls back in every single scene why she is doing what she's doing it's it's one of the most brilliant applications of action in any movie or TV show I've ever seen you feel it it's like your eyes are lighting up by the flipping and spinning and slicing and dicing and the creative colors and scenery and and all of this is over the top but then at the same time that like back of your brain the emotional part of your brain is like feeling with your heart everything that she's feeling as she's forcing herself to go through there is there are no like easy fights as overpowered as she is and there's also times where she has to turn and and Tuck tail and run and recover and come back and there's like lessons in evolution and it it's it's fantastic so really all the female characters because she's not the only one that show strength show strength that is a result of the harsh area that they live in they show that they are strong and resilient they Thrive because of the way that they engage so it selects for them it's not that all women are just strong most of them aren't we're following the ones that had the traits that allowed them to thrive they got selected for and there's something brilliant about that and it shows them all using strength in different ways too and it's in ways that are believably feminine um not just take this female name and put it on a masculine archetype and call it good so in that way you can take the most like brain rotted uh Maga Republican like I don't like woke anything get that out of my schools whatever however extreme you take that however much of a visceral vomit reaction that person gets to anything that looks Progressive that person can watch this have a blast but still be exposed to these basic human ideas of strength and perseverance and and be shown a strong female lead and have a great time with it and guys take notes this is how you [ __ ] win this is how you do it the fact that that wasn't the standard before shows that people weren't concerned with the outcome they were concerned with lecturing people and that's a big problem because that tells me that you you want to feel right more than you want to actually change anything or get your point across to the other side um and it's also not just women at the expense of men because a lot of this strong female character stuff it's really just the woman is strong because she's punishing men and all the men are just goons um these men a lot of them in the show are excessively evil cruel cowardly Petty power hungry as you would expect throughout so much of History especially when you're Rising through the top of any political or governmental system and it's with all films in this genre it's the same way you have it very obvious big bad um but there's male characters here that are treated with great respect I mean you have the closest thing she had to a father when she was abandoned and orphan as a half breed nobody wanted to be around uh the blind sword maker and he is treated with great respect he taught her structure and discipline and it shows him hitting her on the head when she makes a mistake expecting her to be structured riment disciplined that's where she learned that you have Ringo who like I said is like just the right amount of goofy he has no hands which I'm sorry it's just never not funny because he has to like tuck a a knife into his wristband to like make noodles and like stab people and he's a little bit goofy simple but he's a type of simpleton who exists to serve a point that it really is like ego and intelligence that leads to a lot of corruption because Ringo is that type of he's the guy who when misu makes a misstep his simple brain is saying but wait you're a samurai you're supposed to be this he's good and he's loyal and he's treated fondly and he's enjoyable to watch then you have tyan who's like a rival Samurai um who is also treated with a lot more respect even though he starts off as just a pompous arrogant prick and I was really surprised the direction they took that as well well um and that actually goes to show the show does really interesting stuff with the characters that I didn't expect there might have been some things I assumed about misu that weren't maybe correct and that was refreshing to see because it tells you that these characters aren't tropy they were invented from scratch not to fit the same mold we've been fed a 100 times um also there's there's Stakes things can happen to characters they can get mistreated and even misu uh is not exempt from that and because people suffer you know that nobody is safe so not only does it connect you to the themes does it connect you to the meaning and who the characters are and why they're doing what they do but you don't know what's coming next guys this is good storytelling I don't know how to describe it any other way I was really thrilled with the way this came out uh I recommend everybody try uh try this show out even if you don't like the genre my wife decidedly doesn't like anime she doesn't like cartoons she cringes every time I have to get nostalgic by turning on Batman the Animated Series or dragging her to yet another Marvel movie uh like I am tonight when we're going to expose oursel to the Marvels because we hate ourselves she loves this movie more than I did she loved this show more than I did we still have two episodes to go by the way we're almost all the way through it and I had to force her to stop because we're running out of shows because we've been doing too quick anyways I am so over the moon with this show for so many reasons I I really have a hard time believing that anybody who would be inclined to watch a samurai show to begin with where you would find fault with this where you wouldn't have a good time where you wouldn't be entertained where the story would fall short where the style would fall short I mean if this show isn't the byproduct of just exhaustive Research into Japanese culture to just give the most authentic feel you still have to tip your hat because that means they engage in some of the most convincing World building that has ever happened on a TV show off of field and either one is commendable so I really strongly recommend you guys check this out thanks for watching let me know what things you want to see me review I'm bouncing around between different ideas and genres so let me know in the comments you can also follow me on my other channel if you want to know anything about weightlifting that's my primary channel it's primarily what I do you can find that at my name Alexander Bramley thanks so much for watching guys till next time this is Bramley I'll see you

Channel: Bromarama

Views: 62,212

Keywords: blue eye samurai, mizu, netflix, samurai, manga, anime, woke, nerdrotic, critical drinker, the quartering, strong female lead, writing, character, story telling, plot, fiction, fantasy, japanese

Id: H1Fn-RMs6GA

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023