lunaamatista:

The Lovers:

Amon and Akira, to nobody’s surprise! 

For m/f ships, I tend to like pairs where women can challenge men. Artificial indicators of hierarchy, such as ranks, lend themselves perfectly for this kind of dynamic. In the case of Amon and Akia, I think it’s even more interesting because their push and pull is a subversion of the designs that would actually present them them as very masculine and feminine, respectively. 

To elaborate on each, in the case of Amon, it’s no surprise we’d have a character like him in a series targeted towards a male demographic. Men are ubiquitously represented as powerful, and Amon’s design is an expression of that: tall, wide, handsome; and outside of design, smart (top of his class!) and driven. His quinque is a weapon that is only powerful through blunt force. No wonder he’d be so admired at an institution like the CCG. He has all the characteristics that could position him him as the protagonist of a story…

And yet he’s not. He’s a huge man who likes sweets,

who is teased for crying,

who can come off as pretty innocent, and who doesn’t get the position of a protagonist. Arguably, he gets the position of a deuteragonist in the fist part, but it amounts to nothing the moment he acts like a Man™

and fights with Kaneki instead of talking to Kaneki. In the second part, he’s even futher deprived from that role, with his physical prowess itself turning against him and him motivating people by being good at talking instead. 

Wait, talking? Isn’t that what women do? 

In the world of strict gender binaries, yes, but talking happens to be the weakest point for Akira, who’d rather bottle everything up until she explodes. Akira’s design is everything feminine: short, slim, and mostly always wearing a skirt, heels, and braids, which is doing more for her hair than just about any other character. The quinque she is introduced with is a chimera, mutable; a trait often associated to feminity (it also happens to be a primary trait of her sign, Gemini). 

Yet she talks back, doesn’t address her superior in the way a woman should and teases him relentlessly, she’s a capable fighter, she likes spicy food, and is confrontational. Plus that huge issue with talking and feelings, in that her outward expression of them seems masculine, but that’s just because she was raised to join the Boys Club that is the CCG. No wonder one of her strongest confessions in the series comes when confronted by Misato, a woman whose primary trait has to do with love, which is often associated with feminity in fiction.

This leads to an interesting dynamic where the both start out by trying to be more masculine than they really are. In the beginning, Amon tries to be a Man™ and assert his rank over hers by persuasion of Shinohara, when in reality he seems to hold some admiration for her and doesn’t really see as any less. Amusingly, it’s only when Akira is trying to show that she won’t be one-upped by any

Man™ and prove herself over that unexistent prejudice that she gets in trouble – for instance, facing Naki alone or drinking with two men. 

The former leads to being told by Amon that he won’t let her die, something that she probably hadn’t heard even from her father, because he was too preoccupied with exacting his revenge on Owl and letting his daughter risk her life while helping. Because sure. Why not. 

The latter leads to Amon seeing her for what she is, not what she is trying to be. He understands that she needs a companion, but what he decides is that he will be with her by guiding her as her superior. When they’re at the graveyard and Amon suggests that she might do something reckless without him, Akira senses the perception that puts them at an imbalance. By pulling him into an act of intimacy such as a kiss, and forcing him to look at her as a person, Amon’s resolution falters, because while he understands that that part of hers is there, he isn’t ready to confront it yet or show that part of himself. That’s why it’s so important that when Akira herself doesn’t know who she is as a person anymore, Amon is the one to confront her: instead of guiding he’ll support her, not as a superior but as a companion by her side. And this time, outside of the Boys Club of the CCG, they’re both done pretending they’re The Man™, and they can just talk and have feelings and see each other without a rank. By closing off their reunion with a kiss, they’re both finally ready to see each other as a person and expose that part of themselves, as empty and imperfect as they might find it. 

At this point this pretty much a meta so I’ll add the other two answers in a reblog, oops.