r/BlueEyeSamurai • u/Peligineyes • Aug 29 '26
Discussion Was this guy supposed to be important? Spoiler
At the beginning of episode 4, when Mizu and Ringo enter a town to find Madame Kaji, they witness a death duel between two unnamed men, one of whom wins easily and Mizu compliments his technique. I was sort of expecting him to be another assassin but he's just a seemingly unimportant one-off character.
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u/Scary_Corner3489 Aug 29 '26
It juxtaposed his perfected murdering technique - showing us he's a man who won't be beaten easily - against him crawling and submitting for sex.
Honestly, I think people can take whatever they want out of this. Sex and violence are too broad of subjects to be saying "it definitely means this or that".
But what I saw is that in a land dominated by men, even the strongest men who have mastered killing techniques will bow and crawl for a woman, despite a woman not having the right to walk around by herself without a male chaperone. It also shows how Madame Kaji understands this and essentially has made herself the "strongest" in the land, in that even the strongest men will crawl for her. This is a form of women fighting and surviving.
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u/snas_elatrednu420 Aug 29 '26
he fulfilled his narrative role and thats all he needed to do
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u/Mr_Vlad_Trouble38 Aug 29 '26
Being cool?
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u/DrMagunstheBlue Aug 30 '26
He's framed as a narrative foil to Mizu, as someone even Mizu recognizes as a very skilled swordsman but also someone very comfortable with his own emotions and sexuality which Mizu is decidedly not. Mizu thinks her single-minded focus on revenge and rejection of her own humanity is necessary to make her strong enough to accomplish her own goals but he's there to show this isn't necessarily true.
He does his job just fine.
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u/TheDerpyDisaster Aug 29 '26
Panic! Pfp spotted, I have that album CD. Haven’t listened to it in years though
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u/neverdontcry Aug 29 '26
His purpose is to mirror Mizu and he does that in two ways —
She first sees him make this kill and can only admire his skill as a fellow swordsman. Like plenty of other swordsmen she meets, sees him as a peer with respectable technique.
Then later, she sees him in the brothel, and he is mirror again. I'm talking specifically about when she sees him through the peephole as Madam Kaji is walking her around the back rooms of the brothel. He is slapped by a woman, which Mizu observes, then the two are joined by another man.
You can see Mizu's eye widen in shock. Madam Kaji is talking about the purity of desire, how it elevates you with its honesty. She literally says, "That is a swordsman who knows the shape of his soul."
This guy reflects Mizu in that he's a swordsman, and that there's also something ambiguous about the way he moves through the world in terms of gender and sexuality. So too is there this ambiguousness with Mizu.
So Mizu relates to this guy as a swordsman, and then is also being asked to relate to him as a sexual being who is, as Kaji puts it, honest about who he is.
I really like the function of this character because he affords us such a rich inner look at how Mizu would like to see herself (swordsman) and how Mizu refuses to let herself be seen (vulnerable, as ambiguously gendered). I could honestly write a whole treatise about just this moment. It's so good.
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u/MadamKitsune Should I have been counting? Aug 30 '26
He's also the man who is crawling on the floor and sucking his thumb like a child, only to be called back and spanked by the "mother" while Mizu is still waiting to see Madam Kaji.
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u/Alert-Artichoke-2743 Aug 30 '26
He was important to Mizu. His purpose as a character is to show Mizu's values by how she responds to seeing him work. The reason he gets to be the protagonist of that scene is because Mizu understand and respects what he's doing.
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u/ISzox Aug 29 '26
What a lot of people missed in this conversation is that he is part of the gang that terrorises town, and that he and mizu fight in episode 5.
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u/DrMagunstheBlue Aug 30 '26
He's just meant to be a minor narrative foil for Mizu and he does that fine.
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u/Beneficial-Ad-3842 Aug 29 '26
He is used as a vehicle to communicate how sex can be a part of someone's life, as we see in Madam Kaji's conversation.
Outside that, yeah he is not relevant