Why Oh Why, ‘Blue Eye Samurai’?

It’s been over a month since Netflix started streaming Blue Eye Samurai on November 3^rd, the brutally violent animated historical Japanese action show struggling with much of a marketing presence ahead of time. But the algorithm smiled on this strange project and in the weeks to come as it started to appear in recommendations, people started watching it. Not a whole lot, mind you, official Netflix figures only confirm 30 million viewed hours. Compare to zero for the actual anime Pluto (Netflix only gives official figures for shows that appear in the weekly top ten).

If there’s any word to describe Blue Eye Samurai, it’s anime, in that this show is trying very hard to be an anime. Specifically the overly pulpy, violent, sexual fare that was popular in video stores back in the nineties, charming a whole generation as idiot parents assumed cartoons are inherently for children and blew off warnings from store employees that children probably shouldn’t be watching Ninja Scroll. As formulas go, Blue Eye Samurai follows a fairly logical one. Another wannabe anime (albeit for a completely different genre of anime), Avatar: The Last Airbender, has long been a popular worldwide staple of Netflix as the premiere of its live action version draws ever nearer.

Anyway, Blue Eye Samurai stars Maya Erskine as the voice of Mizu, a literally self-hating and largely self-taught swordmaster in seventeenth century Japan who’s sworn to murder her white father. While the script tries very hard to pretend as if Mizu’s gender is a plot twist for the first episode, the voice mostly ruins it. Other voices you might recognize include George Takei as one of the show’s handful of non-raging misognyist men, and Kenneth Branagh who apparently took as his motivation: what if Brian Cox was a psychotic Irish white supremacist?

 That’s Abijah Fowler, by the way, the nominal villain of the season and one of Mizu’s potential fathers. Mizu’s similarly nominal motivation, revenge, seems to get more incoherent the more we learn of her backstory. Only the finale does the show find a somewhat better motivation when Abijah Fowler attempts to coup the Shogun. This is only a somewhat better motivation because the world of Japan that Blue Eye Samurai presents is a remarkably bleak, violent, racist, and misogynist place to the point it’s difficult to imagine why Mizu or anyone else would want to save it.

Blue Eyed Samurai is clearly trying to use its genre format to tell a story about mixed-race identity. But in practice, when you analyze it in any level of detail, it delivers mixed messages, and not in a good way. For instance, “Irish white supremacist” is an apparent contradiction in terms, as no one considered the Irish people “white”. Of course, if we really want to be pedantic, there wasn’t really such a thing as “white supremacy” in this time period either.

White supremacy as a philosophy posits that white people are naturally superior to other races as an explanation for and apologism of colonialist empires…which don’t really exist yet. Abijah Fowler’s climactic monologue references the Spanish conquest of the Americas as if it were the most easy thing in the world for white people and their inherent superiority to accomplish. He’s probably supposed to be wrong, although given that his goofy plan to conquer Japan only fails because a half-white person interferes. But either interpretation still supports the factuality of the idea of white supremacy and only really claims to disapprove of it morally.

 Indeed, aside from Abijah Fowler being outrageously evil, Blue Eye Samurai doesn’t present very many reasons why Japan under his rule would necessarily be worse than the version that already exists. Mizu, our main character, clearly suffers from the negative physical and emotional consequences of living in a society that’s prejudiced against people of Caucasian ancestry. As a woman her plight is even more awful. Mizu herself evades the worst of it by masquerading as a man, but other female characters suffer from forced male relationships and sex work. Somewhat counterintuitively, Blue Eyed Samurai also depicts forced male relationships and sex work sort of positively, provided that the men involved demonstrate some form of disability that marks them as marginalized and non-threatening.

Men lacking in disabilities are at worst bloodthirsty thugs and are at best…competent bloodthirsty thugs. Blue Eye Samurai is clearly aiming at some sort of criticism of patriarchy with these portrayals but like most contemporary discussions of patriarchy, fails to really appreciate that patriarchy isn’t really good for men. It’s good for men with elevated social standing but most men cannot, by definition, have elevated social standing, which is how so many of them end up dying so horribly to Mizu’s blade in the service of such dubious goals.

The many classic grindhouse anime series which had inspired Blue Eye Samurai had similar logical and historical issues. The fetishization of those stories are less bothersome than Blue Eye Samurai, though, because these were explicitly weird stories that used specific settings because they looked cool. Blue Eye Samurai tries to do more, and opens itself up to criticism for the sheer quantity of paradoxical racism in its obviously antiracist framing. Consider how Abijah Fowler’s almost successful plan to topple the Shogunate revolves around guns produced with nineteenth century scale and quality, wielded against a Japanese force that doesn’t appear to even know what gunpowder is. Both are common white supremacist tropes–the notion that white people have held the same consistent, undisputed power for several centuries, and also that non-white peoples were simply too stupid to mount an effective resistance.

This is doubly ironic for Japan, the main country that did mount an effective resistance against Western colonial domination that slowly conquered every other corner of the globe. Unless you count the post-World War II era, which Abijah Fowler’s monologue seems to directly reference, filling Blue Eye Samurai with still more mixed messages. Blue Eye Samurai argues that brutality and oppression are human nature, and this is how prejudice can both be morally wrong and also mostly correct.

For its ideological messiness Blue Eye Samurai isn’t exactly a bad show, in that its throwback nineties video store anime style with incoherent liberal political messaging certainly appeals to people who like both of those things. That’s not much of a target audience, though, is likely why Netflix hasn’t yet renewed Blue Eye Samurai. Amusingly enough, FlixPatrol figures show that Blue Eye Samurai has been most popular in random countries like Bulgaria, Jamaica, and Nigeria with subscribers who like the action but probably couldn’t care less about the politics. In the United States, Blue Eye Samurai had a single day in eighth place. In Japan? Never even charted.