Alita, The Strongest Warrior
Or: Is gender a function of perception?
I really got into manga in high school. I spent my days sitting in the back of Spanish class reading Nausicaa, Dominion Tank Police, and Ranma 1/2 and using my quick wit to pass the conversational activities without any prep. It’s in this time period that I came in contact with Battle Angel Alita (known as Gunnm in Japan) and have been fascinated with it ever since.
Alita (who goes by Gally in the Japanese version) belongs to a list of complicated and capable heroines that dominate the manga I love and a more interesting subset of cyborgs for whom gender is wholly divorced from biology. Alita has even more bodies than Matoko Kusanagi*, some little more than vehicles with humanoid form (her Motorball body, for example), so the question bears asking what makes her female?
[A girl with shoulder-length black hair and silver highlights under her eyes looks at the reader. She is saying “I believe that I am human. That is all the proof you need”, Battle Angel Alita: The Last Order Volume 1]
Kishiro’s gender politics are pretty straightforward on some fronts. Alita’s combat-focused jobs (hunter warrior, motorballer, and time as a “Tuned”) put her in spaces dominated by men with a thirst for violence and excess of pride. In all these cases, the intrepid Alita defeats bigger, more powerful opponents mainly with the help of a martial art designed to fight bigger, more powerful opponents**. But beyond that, Kishiro doesn’t really play favorites. Alita’s vulnerability and sensitivity make for a good hero as much as an accurate portrayal of a woman. Moreover, she gravitates towards employment that involves the use of her combat skills and is not really, by nature the nurturing type (arguments could be made that she’s that way towards Koyomi, but it’s a stretch). So where does her sense of gender come from if it’s not signified in a “traditional” manner through characterization that would be incompatible with everything else Alita is?
Two places:
- Her subconscious. As we learn in Last Order, she believes herself to be female. When her body is given shape by the workings of her brain (the Imaginos body), she chooses to be female. For Alita, knowing who and what she is serves.
- Others’ perceptions of her. Figure finds her attractive, most of the motorballers underestimate her, the regulars at Bar Kansas are smitten with her. In many ways, it matters more to her observers that she is a woman than to her. For Alita the path she walks through life is vastly more important than her gender.
I think this is one of the reasons why I find her a delight to read. No matter how picked on or dismissed, she’ll fight for what she believes in. It was refreshing to me that while being a tiny, adorable octo-lips, Alita spent most of her time focused on the bloody and violent path ahead.
* Okay, okay. Makoto ARAMAKI has like a billion bodies, but she’s a distributed machine intelligence merged with a human consciousness, so I think she’s a special case and not the original Major.
** I refuse to call Panzer Kunst deus ex machina when talking about a series that has at least two machine gods.
