Mesh as a story is concerned with the crystallization of womanhood underneath a layer of nominally unwoman flesh. It is also about Paris and about art specifically paintings sometimes music and theater occasionally poetry more frequently its about druginduced fever dreams and general loss of reality as well as that type of loneliness only achieved by surrounding yourself with other bodies. Most centrally though its about holding your breath. Given that Mesh is authored by Moto Hagio it also heavily revolves around sexual abuse and trauma. What Im writing here will be about the woman part and also the sexual trauma part. There are spoilers ahead but honestly anyone whos familiar with Hagios work and the subject matter she tackles likely wont be spoiled here. https://i.ur.com/hATEYPr.jpeg Mesh as a protagonist is unrelentingly abused throughout the entire narrative contorted against his will into a feminized object always by a larger older wealthier stronger more formidable masculine figure who treats him with the same humanity one would treat inflatable plastic sex dolls. On both a physical and psychological level Mesh is bent and twisted every which way to suit the desires of his abusers whose continual sexual objectification necessitates the disappearance of any dimension of Meshs personal identity. His body is appropriated and so is his soul his essence his nature and his being. In the act of bodily dispossession he ceases to exist as a discrete individual. This becomes clear in the second chapter where Mesh is frantically trying to explain his mission of killing his father the first man in his life to abuse him and says this: Even if I go mad or die as long as hes gone its fine. As long as hes still here I cant become a human being. Ill be crushed by him for the rest of my life emphasis mine. This specific facet of sexual trauma this deterioration of distinct human personhood is captured so acutely and so resonantly here. He is impersonalized sense of self eroded permanently barred from being perceived as a member of the universal human condition only permitted existence as the inert voiceless brainless impersonal Thing made for fucking. https://i.ur.com/3ZXNYiE.jpeg The essential condition of Meshs suffering though and the rationale as to why he is treated the way he is is that he isnt a man. His condition is the female condition. The single string which ties it all together is his femininity or rather his feminization. This is not a type of feminization observable in any other manga in this tradition vintage shoujo year 24 and if I considered myself more knowledgeable about other areas of manga history Id probably be saying the same thing there. Sure Kaze to Ki no Utas Gilbert and Serge are feminine Mari to Shingos Mari and Shingo are feminine and even in other Hagio works Jeremey Julusmole Erich etc but not a single one of them bears the quintessentially female mark of oppression carved into their lives so indelibly and so legibly as it is for Mesh. And I mean this quite literally: a slew of characters repeatedly reiterate to Mesh that he is in their eyes a woman. They spell it out clear as day. The question of whether Meshs femininity is truly innate is entirely irrelevant because femininity is regardless imposed upon him forcibly and violently by outside forces for various reasons chiefly as a justification for him being the primary receptacle for their sexual abuse. In fact the methods through which his trauma is explored are all inextricably entwined enmeshed. . . with his gender performance as female. Briefly put Mesh deserves the sexual violence hes subjected to because he is a woman. Several characters literally state this And if it turns out that he isnt a woman he will surely become one through this process of sexual violence ritualized propagandized systematically mandated and specifically designed to orient him towards his rightful position as dominated and never dominator. If he doesnt fit adequately into the feminine mold sexual violence is enforced as a corrective measure to emasculate to feminize to womanize. It actually screams Simone de Beauvoir in the whole one isnt born a woman one is made into a woman I obviously cant prove it but Im at least 80 sure Moto Hagio read The Second Sex. https://i.ur.com/Qnb3hww.jpeg Meshs experience with and relationship to womanhood is regrettably strikingly similar to my own. In many ways reading Mesh feels like staring into a mirror that magnifies all of the most shameful parts of myself. I will not throw a pity party for myself here but the one singular sentiment banging like a gong in my head ever since I was about fourteen is that I didnt voluntarily become a woman nor was it ever an essential characteristic of my being it just so happened that at some point I started feeling less universally human and more like a femininely shaped object which men started subtly asserting ownership to. At some point I began to realize that I was being made into a woman. I want to emphasize I wasnt becoming one nor was I ever one to begin with I was being sculpted into a certain shape a certain form being contorted into an unmistakably feminine pose against my will. Absolutely nothing about womanhood felt natural inherent or predetermined it just felt oddly violent. And ever since Ive kind of been trying to rock with it in a fun way and it hasnt really been working so well but at least I derive enjoyment out of it sometimes right???? The same thing is happening to Mesh though in that he is positioned as a feminized object designed to absorb male violencehes literally made into a woman against his will sculpted into this form by the violent male hand. https://i.ur.com/fQVysVV.jpeg Meshs womanization by his abusers is indispensable to and fully obligated by the law of the patriarchal regime: his rapists MUST sexually differentiate himself from Mesh then inscribe this sexual differentiation into natural law so that a domination model is established and thus create a moral justification for rape as a biological given. In the rapists creation and reification of his own manhood through the dominator/dominated model Mesh is duly reified as a woman as well. If woman was going to be one of the two it was going to be Mesh. Because womanhood and manhood are artificially constructed as asymmetrical categories man as a narrow column and woman as a wide umbrella. Mesh cant be a man because he fails to uphold hegemonic heteropatriarchal manhood and therefore must be relegated into the nonman the other the different the inferior. He fails to dominate so therefore he must be dominated he submits because he cannot conquer the category of other is the category of woman. Defective lacking unfit for centeroftheuniverse status sequestered into the margins. If Mesh as he currently is stayed in the male category he would pose an existential threat to the fabricated and falsified naturalized opposition polarization and antagonization between male and female which is used to justify male supremacy. So in order to reify these sex categories and keep the patriarchywheels oiled greased and turning Mesh must be starkly and distinctly differentiated through rape as female so that he no longer poses this threat. Through the ritualized abuse of Mesh at the hands of men the mark of womanhood is irrevocably branded on his body inscribed in blood puncturing the flesh forever. https://i.ur.com/HIyjAy8.jpeg There is actually a brief twochapter heterosexuality arc or really a lesbian arc where Mesh encounters a girl and they quickly fall head over heels for each other. Funnily enough this is heavily reminiscent of Class S yuri in it being an ephemeral period of dreamlike bliss two women who love each other dearly bearing their trauma together in a warm embrace with a backdrop of flourishing floral imagery melting panels blending meshing together possibly the only time where Mesh is truly happyonly to be tragically cut short by a narrative which refuses to allow them to be together. Its all futile really. Because womanization is both inevitable and inescapable. Meshs attraction to women cannot be feasible because he is too woman himself heterosexuality is evidently something of a prerequisite for womanhood or at least the pure kind of womenlesbians are impure and monstrous because they too threaten false sexual differentiation and must therefore be redirected to their rightful position as blah blah blah if you dont love men youre not a real woman. Heterosexuality is the primary organizing principle around which all social relations under patriarchy are prescribed and therefore its imposition on women is mandated oftentimes violentlyin Meshs case even through corrective rape. And despite Meshs considerable exertions in straining and cringing against the constraints that bind him he is ultimately powerless in the face of Man. He is inexorably hammered down into the ground by the bludgeoning mallet of male violence. The institution of heterosexuality is so indomitable that he struggles to parse which desires actually emanate from his own interior and which ones have been forcibly imposed upon him taking root and flowering in his brain after being implanted through years of abuse. Hes permanently enmeshed lol in a tangled web of trauma grief insecurity search for identity and yearning for belonging that he isnt able to properly interrogate or ascertain his own wants opinions feelings or desires. All too quickly hes apprehended by men who exploit this point of vulnerability. https://i.ur.com/0r3iWQ7.jpeg Initially it read to me as unrealistic that every single man Mesh encountered was secretly gay for him and desperately yearned to fuck him but a switch flipped once I stopped registering Mesh as a single character with the male sticker lazily pressed on his forehead and started seeing him as an emblem of the most unspeakable horrors of teenaged girlhood coalescing meshing into one body and suddenly the way grown men treat him starts to make sense. He imitates Marlene Dietrich who plays as the female lead in the 1930 film Morocco as a cabaret singer. Mesh meticulously studies the film in order to emulate Dietrichs characters looks mannerisms attitude speech etc and once again my teenagedgirlself emerges and feels a twinge of familiarity. While it wasnt the same film teenaged me and probably many others would find versions of desirable femininity to perform specifically by copying celebrities idols actresses etc in order to better package myself as a feminized commodity. This concept of girls spending hours in front of the mirror preening grooming and dolling themselves up to attain the idealized image of feminine perfection is very much normalized and expected framed as one of the central tenets of girlhood to the point that youd feel out of place among other girls your age if you werent doing it. The mirror and the mimicry for me also points toward the men watch while women watch themselves being watched John Bergertype pampering framework which would firmly place Mesh in the female category of a sight/object of vision rather than the male who looks at the sight. Having mentioned Morocco though its of note that Hagio envelops Mesh in a highart hodgepodge of visual art theater dance music poetry etc. as she usually does with her other series this time heightened by Mesh having to live with a professional art forger whos constantly rambling about the paintings hes forging conveniently serving as somewhat contrived metaphors for Meshs eternal predicament. Chapter 1 presents Goyas Saturn Devouring His Son as an iteration of Meshs relationship with his dad chapter 2 ruminates on the song Seguidilla from the opera Carmen wherein the heroine is murdered by one of the twelve men romantically pursuing hernone of whom she actually wants to be withand chapter 5 shows Mesh climbing into Marc Chagalls The Wailing Wall painting in hopes of asserting a mark of identity into the sprawling dingy oblivion of the wall ultimately scrawling notes illegible to everyone else blissfully unaware of the sacrilegious meaning of this action. Metaphors like these are omnipresent throughout the manga and always incredibly on the nose I think Hagio hates subtlety. Mesh even performs in a play acting as the grim reaper that delivers death unto the ailing heroine unsuccessfully trying to cope with her own trauma symbolically killing himself in the process. Sometimes in his dreams Mesh is soaring through blue eternity on shining feathered wings only to be captured time and time again by his father depicted as a literal monstrous creature continuously reemerging dragging Mesh downwards severing his wings mutilating and permanently disfiguring Meshs only bodily vehicle for escape through flight. Mesh as a work of art tends toward the unreal whether it be Mesh stepping inside a painting sprinting through the city of Paris as a court jester who melts in and out of buildings conversing with talking eagle/ostriches climbing a ladder up to the moon teleporting to a North African desert etc. I personally feel as though these exist as moments of levity and though theyre never humorous they manage to briefly pluck you out of the traumatic misery hellscape and allow you to observe Hagios talent for spellbinding art. Sometimes the story takes a break to focus on words songs poems or a rumination on life in Paris as a prostitute/actor/dancer/assistanttoanartforger whos always on the run from something or other. Though it isnt my focus here I feel compelled to mention that there is a marked effort on Hagios part to prevent the sexual abuse from being the sole facet of the story worth remarking. There are entire chapters that are almost slice of lifeesque or episodes that exist blatantly so that Hagio can nerd out over her knowledge of foreign art and Pariss layout as a city. https://i.ur.com/U9Vs0Ji.jpeg https://i.ur.com/vyfPTOB.jpeg Given the incongruence between Meshs gender as described by the narrator male and his gender the way it is experienced both internally and externally female there is a conspicuously obvious trans reading to be found here. Basically everything surrounding the crystallization of womanhood beneath a malelabeled layer of flesh points toward a transfeminine Mesh the transmasculine reading will come after this lol but I want to point to a specific scene here: the type of anger that Lucien loser side character who appears in chapters 1213 feels toward Mesh and the way he punishes Mesh for that anger. When Lucien begins his assault he reiterates over and over that Mesh is a dirty female seductress who lures innocent men towards her and corrupts them a temptress of the streets who smothers men in her sinful taintin a way Mesh is being metaphorically scorned for not being the right kind of woman. It is Meshs specific way of being a woman that is so dishonorable to this man and perhaps his rage is geared toward the fact that Mesh even attempts to be a woman at all the idea that doing so inevitably results in such wicked degeneracy. Because how dare you shirk the proud role of soontobemisogynist and don yourself in feminine attire how dare you be a woman how dare you trick me how dare you seduce me it is your fault that my own sexual attraction to you threatens the houseofcardsandthroneoflies mirage Ive built up for myself I must punish you for this brazen act of defiance I will rape you and put you in your place Ill teach you the consequences of this outright treason etc etc etc. I would additionally like to point to the female prostitutes position in society Mesh at one point working as one and how this figures into Meshs experience with transmisogyny: the prostitute is so violently degraded and dehumanized by johns who at the same time fetishize and hypersexualize her Sex with prostitutes is illegal and this constitutes prostituted women as illegal women. They are not real women and they are certainly not good women unfit for reproduction marriage family they are defective girlthings left to the margins of society ostracized othered alienated simultaneously reviled for their odious monstrous nature because they are prostitutes and relentlessly erotically fetishized and salivated over by swaths of men also because they are prostitutes only spoken of in hushed tones in the dark hidden from polite society while also being the everpresent ghastly specter that haunts the bedroom and looms over the familys nuclear structure. Mesh is subjected to the highest degree of misogynistic violence while simultaneously being denied status as a real woman only permitted existence as a slab of meat for male consumption though hes still penalized for this as well. But its also part of what enables these men to NOT view themselves as incorrigible sexpest demons they arent doing this to a pure innocent virtuous woman after all. Mesh is just a petite soft sexually arousing femininelyshaped Thing to be used and thrown away without concern. On a more meta level perhaps this transmisogyny is also what allows Moto Hagio to write these series of neverending trauma and sexualized violence without being labeled a misogynist herselfits not like its happening to a real woman12 Mesh will experience an intensified augmentation of misogyny not experienced by the vast majority of women alive and yet will never be granted recognition in the experience. Mesh will only be recognized as an unsightly sexual deformity further rationalizing his oppression enabling heinous sexual violence to be enacted upon him with impunity. The narrative declares him male and uses he/him pronouns despite the fact that quite literally every single fiber of Meshs being screams otherwise. https://i.ur.com/ejXCSa0.jpeg On the other hand theres another section that points towards a decidedly transmasculine reading this being the very last chapter. This was also the most perplexing part of the manga for me as it involves Meshs motheron whom I wont be spending too much time for fear of it reading like archaic sexologist bullshit about blaming every single sexual peculiarity of a child on his mother and also because she is almost certainly a reflection of Hagios own mother she has literally admitted thisMeshs mother also being written in such an imperceptibly opaque way exhibiting symptoms of like several dozen mental illnesses who bitterly loathes Mesh shuns him views him almost enviously as competition has a severe memory problem and thus also acts infantile and most importantly fully believes that Mesh is a woman. The transmasc reading lies in the way she consistently tries to reorient him towards womanhood to groom him into the daughter she always wanted the one she gave birth to treating him as her lost little girl who happens to currently be confused and rebelling. This also opens up a more tedious line of what if his mom isnt the crazy one and she actually did rear a girl child and the narrator is unreliable because its Mesh asserting his true self which does actually have ground to stand on given his mother named him Franoise Mesh choosing to forgo it in favor of adopting a nonfemale name of his own choosing and having his mother repeatedly deadname him when he visits her. Theres also this idea that Mesh in leaving the bustling city life of Paris to head to the quiet French countryside where his mother resides might be persuaded to live out his biodestined submissivebreedingcattle life in domesticity etc. Mesh describes performing womanhood like reading off lines in a play a role arbitrarily assigned to him. But because of how desperately he longs for her approval he says he would become anything that his mother wanted if it would make her love him again even if that meant becoming her daughter I am paraphrasing but this is nearly verbatim. This is one of the few times in the manga that he expresses NOT feeling like a woman but since everyone around him looks at him and automatically reads him as a woman insisting that that is what he must logically be he reluctantly acquiesces and lives out the female life he was conscripted into at birth. Although to be completely honest the reading lines from a play/assigned roles lines doesnt only match a transmasc reading it realistically could match any identity that at any point must conform to patriarchal standards of femininity which brings us back to square one. Mesh is everything at the same time whether its woman in a purely allegorical sense alone or cis trans masc fem inbetween etc they all intertwine mesh together. Note for claritys sake: this does not mean transmasc = woman I am using Woman as an umbrella term for the political category of basically anyone oppressed solely on the basis of gender. Whatever Hagio is doing here whether consciously or unconsciously is definitely not writing a cis male character. She always has something bubbling beneath the surface aching to overflow and spill all over the pages. https://i.ur.com/jR5I5BC.jpeg https://i.ur.com/Eo1ITed.jpeg At some point Meshs entire life begins to feel like a miserable prechoreographed routine of endlessly circling the drain he shrinks inside of himself attempts to wait it out in the most dysfunctional impassivity lifeless ragdoll he is for the dregs of his body and soul to finally be vacuumed down into the sewer and disposed of. This is the final stage of dispossession through patriarchal violence the unpersoning of woman tending towards death. Nearing the end of the manga Meshs spirit is so thoroughly decayed and ground into the mud that hes lost any remnant of identity and fight he used to possess. He is a decomposing corpse shuffling through the motions of life waiting standing by long and drawn out anticipating an expectation for that nightangible something ever out of reach. A glittering shard of desperation a key granting him escape incorporeal yet holding his breath in hopes of its burgeoning materialization. It will be the only thing to save him from death he simply must keep waiting for it to appear perennially holding his breath waiting holding his breath waiting holding his breath. https://i.ur.com/le5zVHu.jpeg https://i.ur.com/YVUTGly.jpeg Up to this point Ive tried to avoid speaking directly on Moto Hagio because I think its usually a fools errand to try to derive meaning from a work of art through the words/experiences/recountings of the artist themselves as art exists independently from that relation and creates infinite numbers of new relations situating it in infinite different locations in time and history blah blah blah we get it BUT The problem is that Im obsessed with Moto Hagio as a person and wish that I could put her in a little observation jar and study her with a magnifying glass and that this piece Im writing while being about Mesh is equal parts about Hagio herself. Because Mesh isnt the only piece of hers that does the stuff Im referencing here in fact she almost exclusively uses predominantly male characters/casts in order to 1 NOT explore masculinity and/or what it means to be a man and 2 instead explore femininity and/or what it means to be a woman. Sure its done much messier weirder and with more womb symbolism in Marginal and in A Cruel God Reigns the gender commentary is secondary to a narrative centering the bending and breaking of familial dynamics dealing with abuse and Heart of Thomas is more focused on poetry flowers and strictly adhering to the rules of Shukan Shojo Comic where it was nearly axed early in her career. Not to mention all of her scifi/fantasy work has gender stuff going haywire in other ways that I wish I had time to detail here but dontwhat Im trying to illustrate though is that she keeps trying over and over again to explain her fraught relationship with her own gender through each story she puts out. I think this is most discernable through comparison with some of her contemporaries firstly Keiko Takemiya. Takemiyas stories centralize sensuality the characters sexual attractiveness in a readerconscious manner and pedestalizing their physical beauty her pen lingering on the shapes of their bodies. Takemiya also emphasizes the transient beauty of youth her stories as the laceembellished tragedy of the bambieyed porcelain doll being ruthlessly brutalized and violated wafting a distinctly rosescented sentimentality. The tragedy lies in the defilement of beauty and the loss of innocence in the Death in Venice type way. Hagios characters/stories are tragic in a separate realm outside of age or beauty. They are harrowing demoralizing and markedly unsensual in their depictions of sex they hone in on the more existential and psychological implications of rape and sexual trauma on the human conditionalways with distinctly female characteristics. Takemiya and Norie Masuyama and several others as well actually criticized Hagio for supposedly misunderstanding yaoi/bl because of this. None of this is to disparage Takemiya or others like her if anything it legitimizes Takemiyas work as the true founder of bl/yaoi while Moto Hagio was on an entirely different track. This is also exemplified through Hagio changing her art style and arguably her writing style as well as soon as she finally garnered enough popularity recognition and industry trust to the point where it wouldnt be risky for her career. She moved on from the Macoto Takahashi/Junichi Nakahara pioneered dolllike proportions with enlarged/shrunken features to match and honed in on realism. Hagio actually cites Mesh as the work that signified this turning point which conveniently fits my reasoning as to why shes more explicit about Meshs womanness than any works preceding it. Regardless it was eminently clear that Hagio and Takemiyas goals in portraying similar subject matter were in actuality vastly different. https://i.ur.com/6rHWQKt.jpeg I need to talk about Riyoko Ikeda or I will die. Though never being close with Hagio the way Takemiya was and arguably not a part of the year 24 group I find it sooooo endlessly fascinating to compare the two of them since they both clearly have Issues with their own gender. Hagio writes about men but she has never written about becoming a man in the way Ikeda has i.e. she kind of almost selfactualizes in her manga: Rose of Versailles The Window of Orpheus Claudine and maybe Dear Brother if we stretch it contain initially female characters who become men live as men or otherwise act/perform as men in some way form and maintain relationships with women relatively successfully yes they basically all die at the end Ill get to that later the point is that they do get a periodregardless of how briefto selfactualize and most of them arent ravaged by sexual trauma. Hagio on the other hand seems resigned to a fate of misery eternally locked away in her female prison cell peering out at the world of men from her secluded den womanhood reinforced on all the stick figures she draws. If Ikedas writing strategy is: I dont like being a woman I will write about women becoming men then Hagios writing is: I dont like being a woman I will write about men as an escape My experience of womanhood is so totalizing that I end up unconsciously imparting it onto my male characters They are now female characters Shit Im right back at where I was trying to escape from. https://i.ur.com/DhoSbKF.jpeg This is obviously all alleged and Im not trying to armchair psychologize Hagio but it just seems so blatant to me. She has admitted that her male characters are standins for herself. She has admitted that the words she wants to say come out more easily from a male characters mouth than they do a female character. She has admitted that becoming boys is what she thinks all girls aspire to. She is very clearly misogynistic in a lot of ways and I am not going to post that one interview quote that everyone loves to rag on where she basically says that she tried to write Heart of Thomas with a female cast but couldnt do it at some point using the words giggly cheeky and nasty to describe girls nor the one where she says boys are nonsexual implying women exist as wholly intrinsically unavoidably sexualized beings in contrast. Everything Im paraphrasing here is from Rachel Thorns The Moto Hagio Interview and from Aniwa Juns Aniwa Jun Taizen. Tokyo: Meikyu 11 article This is likely the reason so many of her characters are teenagers. In Hagios view flawed as it is young boys in their ephemeral freedom from the prison of material societal expectations which arrive after the onset of puberty are wet cement malleable yet not having hardened and taken shape in the irrevocable masculine form. In this period of youth they are invariably more androgynous than adult men thereby being better receptacles for Hagios own experiential projections boy and girl are interchangeable while man and woman are disparate. Once these boys are marked by oppression sexual abuse feminization they depart from their adolescence and the cement dries in that newly disfigured state irremediably marred by the handprints of their abuser and solidifying into a female shape what are women if not malformed men? they can no longer be adequately male ever again etc. Also the idea that these characters sort of cease to exist beyond the ending of the manga only truly alive in the blossoming of their youth aging to be ignored forgotten exiled also reads as extremely femalecoded to me in terms of women losing their youth and beauty through the aging process and supposedly no longer retaining anything valuable or worthwhile. https://i.ur.com/QkBOA1k.jpeg So this is deeply fucked up right? Absolutely everything about this framework for womanhood manhood sex sexage abuse and trauma is so excessively cynical pessimistic and downtrodden. Just to make it crystal clear: I do not want to believe in the vision of womanhood that Ive mapped out here. Obviously I dont want womanhood to be defined by oppression and nothing else. It is so utterly depressing and offers no pathway into a better future for women at large or even women like Moto Hagio alone. There must be some sort of alternative ending where we turn towards ourselves as women and begin to love one another reconceptualize our views of desire and embodiment and sex ripping it away from the hands of the masculine sculptor and grasping it firmly within our hands negotiating and renegotiating our everevolving position within a heteropatriarchal regime surrounding norms/roles/expectations socially materially economically politically and metaphysically digging nooks and crannies to nestle in and claim as our own and slowly widen them andand ? . Moto Hagio literally cannot envision that. She has diagnosed the problem and expounded upon it in her art fervently viscerally sometimes beautifully more often brutally but when it comes time to find a solution she throws her hands up and shrugs. And for claritys sake again I do actually appreciate the raw unpretentious honesty of her never pretending to have all the answers. This is why Mesh ends the way it does in those last few pages: Mesh standing in the center of the train station entangled enmeshed? within a buzzing swarm of people profoundly alone wind blustering his bewildered face as two trains pull out before him in opposite directions deserting him. In the very last page the chaos evaporates people are erased no trains in sight Mesh is turned away from the reader overlooking a blank ocean of white nothingness on the empty page. https://i.ur.com/NiTkoLT.jpeg https://i.ur.com/k3cculZ.jpeg Where can he possibly go from here? Do you think hes still holding his breath? This ending is the literal embodiment of Hagio not being able to come up with an answer to the eternal question of Woman she poses in all her series. Every time I read her I feel that she intimately understands my own trauma and captures it so piercingly so palpably so poignantly ah she understands SHE GETS ME Except she stops right there. Right at the pain part with no indication that it will ever abate no hint of resolution in sight. My own personal solution to pain/trauma regarding my position in society is reading yuri and becoming hopeful again Im not even joking but it seems Hagio is content to wallow in that suffering rather than swim through it. And I tend towards this too admittedly as I always prefer Utenatype the horrors of womanhood traumaslop stories over cute fluffy slice of life any day. But I have never read a more miserable mangaka than Moto Hagio. Her lack of faith and inability to even fathom women as subjects/agents rather than objects is so pointed that shes almost unable to write them as characters the only prominent women in her stories being deranged evil selfinsert mother figures and they are certainly never protagonists. Her vision of womanhood is so abjectly deadendedly miserable it reaches a point where she has no vision for women as human beings that have concrete existences. They start to blur out of focus fade from view perhaps disintegrate entirely. Hagio is practicing the Fiona Apple theres no hope for women quote as a competitive sport. Fiona Apple revoked the statement but Hagio never really did. She genuinely doesnt seem at least through the lens of her manga to see any brighter future for any woman anywhere. https://i.ur.com/YEJkt2K.jpeg Another thing I really shouldnt point out out of respect for length but will point out anyway because Im crazy is that she actually does have some series that do indeed present a more positive outlook on love sex gender and sexualityfunnily enough those are all her science fiction works. She theoretically does possess the capacity to envision something more sex positive but only within the bounds of a world slightly or significantly different from the one we live in now. These arent high fantasy thoughtheyre science fiction meaning its really not so far a leap from where we currently are. Have I mentioned that like 80 of her scifi protagonists are canonically intersex? Whereas in her contemporary realism her characters are de facto cis although I dont usually read them that way they are confined within a cage of flesh incongruent to the types of subjugation they experience. Scifi is actually Hagios favorite genre which she had to fight with her publishers for many years to be allowed to write. She has mentioned before paraphrasing from an interview with Masami Toku that conjuring a world with a set of rules only slightly removed from this one allows her to uncover and reform certain aspects of the real world she struggles to grapple with in her life. In other words an unreal fabricated world is the only one where she can envision a brighter future for genderoppressed people at large and when it comes to pieces like Mesh she sinks that much deeper into her own despairing hopelessness of our unfortunate reality. This pessimism is probably the sole driver of the narrative in MeshCruel GodThomas type stories by her which I dont like admitting because its kinda femcel adjacent. The entire first half of what Ive just written here was me doing a shoddy Wittigan materialist feminist analysis of Mesh even though I am like 99 sure that that is not the angle Hagio was consciously was going for at all. There is nonetheless an avenue for that sort of analysis though which is partly the reason for the longevity of her work and why it plucks at so many heartstringsthat camouflaged potential for a spark of something more the infinite pathways it leaves in its wake. https://i.ur.com/R5BTIyT.jpeg And the spark which reignites that miniscule glimmer of hope I promise this is the last fucking paragraph is the fact that Hagios characters never die at the end. Nor are they hurriedly married off and reintegrated into the heterosexual regime. Which is profoundly unlike the works of quite literally every other vintage shoujo mangaka having depicted queer stories I promised I would get back to this omg. Hagio is one of the only if not the only one that continually allows her characters to survive into an imagined future beyond the printed pages of the tome. Her works are steeped in tragic elements but quite fundamentally are not tragedies. Instead she shrouds her main character in a hazy ambivalent fog as they stand on the precipice of an indiscernibly vast unknown seconds away from careening off its edge and she slams the book shut right in front of our faces. Complete and utter irresolution Thank you Ms. Hagio youve done it again. Once more a huge departure from the vintage shoujo standard nonyear 24 of wrapping stories up in a neatly folded little bow regardless of how gruesome or tragic. Hagio doesnt call in the clean up crew When Mesh is stranded at the platform the question where can he possibly go from here is in a way a positive affirmation that he can go somewhere. He wont be decomposing in a coffin nor will he be sequestered into a nuclearfamily shaped jail cell. I will also add another fact about the ending one which I have so surreptitiously concealed earlier when I was describing the last scene in order to do this mega epicsauce awesome sauce reveal: Mesh ending up alone at that station was 100 a decision made of his own volition He was supposed to board a train with his mother and stepfather but at the last minute decides to get off. There is no forgone conclusion or guaranteed survival but at least the prospect of this new chapter of Meshs life will be asserted by him as a subject as an agent as a person. Moto Hagio may not know how to hope but Im continuously swept up by the art she produces the harmonizing resonance of everything it gets right and the jarring dissonance of everything it gets wrong. In that way she does manage to capture something penetrating about the contradictions inherent to the human experience. She knows she cant muster any actual hope but she leaves a small morsel of something resembling it towards the ending for the impassioned reader to cradle tightly to their chest the reader who finds solace and catharsis in Hagios merciless violence who senses something more lurking beneath her dreary bitterness and of course for the reader who is to this day holding their breath. May her word etchings one day grant us the peace of exhalation https://i.ur.com/qcPbc0n.jpeg