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birdmenmanga · 2 years

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Pride Flag Iconography in BIRDMEN

There’s one motif scattered throughout official BIRDMEN illustrations that haunts me to no end, appearing in not just throwaway holiday illustrations, but also in chapter title pages and most significantly, on the final volume cover. It is, of course, the striped banners.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with pride flags will recognize the horizontal, multi-colored, and evenly spaced stripes, present in nearly every iteration of the pride flag. Juxtaposed with the midair setting that these illustrations all take place in, the link to the rainbow flag, the most well-known of the pride flags, is undeniable.

What stands out to me especially is the tangibility of these banners. See the way Kamoda is grabbing it? The way it sags under the weight of the birdmen sitting on it? It’s easy to forget in the digital age, when so many pride flags have been turned into abstractions of color, that the hex codes are meant to represent a real, physical object.

Of course, there’s a reasonable in-universe explanation for this, see, every character has a color associated with them, and it’s just a simple and convenient way to show a particular group of characters. In the first two illustrations, for example, there are five stripes, one for each member of the Bird Club. In the final cover illustration, the stripes are meant to represent the Seven of Beginning.

Even when I read through BIRDMEN for the first time, it struck me as peculiar that the Seven of Beginning didn’t quite follow the rainbow color scheme. Gayness aside, it’s a reasonable choice that creators have chosen over and over again. I mean, what’s with the indigo and the violet. They’re WAY too close. Why isn’t there a red. And turquoise, of all colors? What kind of weird and fucked up choice is that? And from the start Karasuma’s black stripe had already thrown a wrench in things. But then I realized… it’s not this pride flag. (Which has 6 stripes instead of 7, anyways.)

It’s this one.

If we include the prophet, Takayama, as the 8th stripe, taking the red slot, and replace Karasuma’s black stripe with the pink, it’s almost precisely the original, 8-striped Gilbert Baker pride flag. (If we’re going to be technical, the orange and yellow stripes are slightly off– Raphael and Malaika’s colors are more desaturated than the colors in the flag. These colors are actually closer to Robin and Arthur’s colors, which… hm… food for thought…)

Well, alright. Depending on how strict or lax you are with the cutoffs, maybe these aren’t statistically significant enough to you. Maybe it really is a genuine, honest-to-god coincidence and Tanabe just happened to pick these colors, completely independently of the Gilbert Baker pride flag. The probability of this happening is pretty low, but certainly not impossible. If we factor in the meaning of the stripes, however, it reveals this to be either the greatest string of coincidences known to man… or the alternative— that Tanabe chose to correspond these colors with their respective characters on purpose.

Let’s put aside the hot pink stripe for now. (There’s a lot to unpack there.) Takayama’s red stripe represents Life– fitting for a Birdman who can hear the voices of the dying despite not being a Linker. Even from the start, Takayama’s opening line forced our characters to confront death, and is a symbol for their will to live.

Orange for Malaika is perhaps one of the clearest connections. Her ability as an Eraser is to lift the emotional burdens from the mind– to restore the mind to a state of peace. It’s pretty clear that her ability is one of healing.

Yellow for Raphael might be hard to argue– but fascinatingly enough, the motif of sunlight has followed Gabriel since her very first introduction. (It’s a motif that has also followed Arthur and Wang Guang Feng… interesting, hm?)

Green, then, is Ende’s color— not only were they born in and raised by the Amazon jungle, they also claim to actually be the forest… “nature”, indeed.

Saqr’s color is turquoise for magic and art, and looking at his Phantom Master ability, which conjures illusions from thin air, I’d say that’s a pretty reasonable match, whether you want to interpret those illusions as magic or art (really, I’d argue it’s both).

Serenity for Barbara might seem difficult to interpret— isn’t agitation, at its core, the absolute opposite of serenity? However, the indigo stripe doesn’t stand only for serenity, but also for harmony (included in the French and Chinese wikipedia pages, but not the English or Spanish one, for whatever reason)— and from that perspective, it’s much easier to see how her Agitator ability exemplifies the concept of “Harmony”. When Barbara was introduced, Adler says this about her ability, in contrast to Karasuma’s Bellwether capabilities:

Not a controlling ability, but one which encourages teamwork and cooperation without coercion— an ability of harmony.

And finally, we have Eva as spirit. This might seem like a difficult and abstract concept to embody in the text, but thankfully BIRDMEN is chock-full of Christian references, and in particular, Ende, Takayama, and Eva are very clearly alluded to as the Holy Trinity— The Father, The Son, and finally, The Holy Spirit, respectively, tying Eva very closely to the concept of “Spirit”. (Personally I think the Holy Trinity deserves its own essay, which is why I’m not expanding on textual evidence. I’ve seen enough people nodding their heads about this interpretation so I don’t really feel the need to expand at the moment.)

Obviously I’m at the mercy of confirmation bias, but I feel like these are reasonably well-backed rationalizations, and while I think individually these arguments may not be the strongest, the fact that all of these arguments coexist is extremely telling.

So then we return to the pink stripe. The pink stripe, which is definitely not black.

Pulling our heads out of the text for a moment— let’s look at the work as a real and tangible thing in the world, shall we? BIRDMEN was a monthly publication in the Weekly Shonen Sunday, which is a relatively mainstream, family-friendly manga magazine. I think even if Tanabe intended to gun for the queer metaphor from the very beginning (which, for various reason, I do believe), even if color matching the Seven of Beginning with the Gilbert Baker pride flag was in her plans from the start, she still would have had to take out the pink stripe.

Like obviously the most immediate issue with assigning Karasuma the pink stripe is that he, uh… He’s just a middle schooler? Like he’s a kid. But even if we dodge the faux pas of associating a minor with sex by giving the sex stripe to an older character, like Eva, I still think it’s playing with fire, because I think the concept of sex itself is still very much a cultural taboo.

Hopefully everyone’s seen the post about how everything is pornographic and nothing is erotic, and the decoupling of sexiness and desire, because I can’t find it in my tumblr backlogs LMAO if anyone has that post on hand please give me a link <3 thanks <3

That is to say, for media that is aimed towards a shonen audience, you can have fanservice, you can have the occasional tit or ass as a treat, and maybe there are characters who have sex (Milan and Gabriel, for instance), but like. That’s in the gutters, in the fade to black, something done offscreen. We don’t show it, and more importantly, we don’t fucking talk about it. (This is meant to be more of a blanket statement, by the way. They did talk about it eventually in BIRDMEN and I liked what Miguel said. Good for Milan indeed…)

Not to mention that queer sex is, if possible, even more taboo than just, oh, you know. “Regular” sex. “Normal” sex. BIRDMEN is acutely aware of the persistent reputation of queer people as predators [insert The Battle Against the Press, Pt. 1 whenever I finally finish writing it], and the author is more than aware of just how easily things could be misconstrued if she chose to delve into this topic at length. Better to leave this unspoken than to make things worse.

Though I think there’s definitely something to be said about putting the sex stripe back on the pride flag, that even queer folks these days sometimes seem afraid of gay sex and sexuality, I view the deliberate exclusion of the pink stripe as a choice made out of safety. That in the absolute worst timeline where BIRDMEN is widely and negatively interpreted as a queer metaphor by the public, both the author and the magazine can, at the very least, duck out of the worst of the scrutiny by avoiding the, you know, the s-word altogether. That it’s actually fine if it doesn’t make things better for queer people, so long as it doesn’t make things worse.

So whatever. I can respect this choice. It’s a mainstream publication, neither Shogakukan nor Tanabe want to die on this hill; fine. But now comes the hard part of the essay, the part that made me drag my feet about this for ages: if Karasuma doesn’t represent sex, what exactly, then, is he meant to represent?

Well okay obviously the first thing I did was pore through all the major pride flags containing black stripes to see if I could find some type of connection there. Obviously I had to tread with caution because some of these flags are actually younger than BIRDMEN, but here’re some things that the color black stands for: genderlessness, asexuality, the sexuality spectrum, and people of color. Nothing in particular really jumps out at me— the sexuality spectrum, maybe, but the aromantic flag was created in 2014, so I’m inclined to disregard this particular piece of evidence. People of color? I mean I suppose he is, but the connection kind of falls short when he’s from such a homogenous society. I’m happy putting this down here just for the sake of saying I did look into it, and also that I personally feel like this is a dead end.

Because really, this approach feels like I’m really letting confirmation bias do the heavy lifting here, which in general is not good practice, so I’m also going to examine this question from a canon-centric point of view, rather than just a irl-queer-iconography point of view.

What I find interesting is how Karasuma defines his own color in New Gear:

Here he’s assessing his color black based on the Hue-Saturation-Brightness model (HSB, better known as HSV model, for value instead of brightness). He says nothing about hue here, because regardless of what the hue is, it still doesn’t matter if the saturation and brightness are zero. In a sense, one could say that black encompasses all the different hues… which certainly ties into his role as the Everyman protagonist. This too deserves its own essay, but once again I feel like most of us can agree on this. In one sentence, his cynicism paired with how lost he feels is easy for many people to relate to.

But more than the fact that he simply stands for all of us— I think he stands for the potential we all have to make a change. If there’s a little text caption next to Karasuma’s black stripe, I think it would say “empowerment”. It’s not the first time I’ve made this claim, but this whole story is a tale of empowerment for queer youth, in my opinion. That if we were willing to link hands and unite, we could achieve anything that our hearts dream of.

#birdmen #birdmen meta #just thinking thoughts...#jesus CHRIST it's not everything I hoped this essay to be but it's already almost 2k words and is almost CERTAINLY insufferably long #idk. NOT sold on what the black stripe means #BUT I'M SO SERIOUS ABOUT THIS ESSAY GUYS. I REALLY THINK SHE DIDN'T DO IT ON ACCIDENT. WHAT ARE THE ODDS #I wanted to talk about probability in the essay so bad.#what's the probability of birdmen ending up like this with this cast and these colors. GIVEN she was gunning for a queer metaphor #et cetera et cetera #versus if she was doing this on accident. argh.#augh.. the end of the essay is kind of weak sauce. I don't know. Although I really believe in the queer metaphor I also think like. idk #maybe it's all in my head. LOL #what if I AM delusional. did you think about that #EVEN THOUGH I FEEL LIKE THIS EVIDENCE IS?? INSANE ? ? ?#yeah idk. guys be nice to me. give me a pat on the head for this one idk #lol this is a long post innit #long post

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