A man named William Mastrosimone once wrote a play that I have been asked to rehearse in my Acting class at Kinkaid High School. The play is called Extremities, and I play the part of Raul, the only male character, who attempts to rape a woman named Marjorie, and Marjorie, in the final moment of the first scene, with a desperate act, manages to grab an aerosol can of insecticide and spray Raul in the eyes. Thus blinding him, she is able to knock him unconscious and tie him up, putting him in the fireplace. With no physical evidence of rape, in fact, the rapist the one showing physical beating, Marjorie’s two friends, Terry and Patricia, both doubt her sincerity about the terrifying ordeal that took place that morning. Terry, who had been raped before, feels no sympathy towards Marjorie:

TERRY: You didn’t get raped so don’t tell me you can do something because you can’t because I know because I got raped once and it was all my fault because I was dressed up like Tinkerbell in pink tights one size too small and half shot in the ass on beer and grass and my best girlfriend’s father offered me a ride home and he took a shortcut through a cemetery and stopped behind this mausoleum... (pause) So what could I do? Tell? Ruin everybody? What for? You can’t undo it. It’s over. I lived. Besides, you know what they’d say. I asked for it. So I went to bed that night and made believe it was just a bad dream. (Extremities, p. 45-46)

In doing research for this play, the writer confronts a lawyer who was at the time defending a rapist:

Q-How do you defend a man who’s been charged with rape?

A-Of course it’s always different, but there’s a certain recipe that helps put as many women on the jury as possible.

Q-Women? Don’t you mean men?

A-Women. Women attack other women... a woman... lives in constant fear of rape. I don’t know if a man can really understand it. She tends to distance herself from the victim... She thinks, There, but for the grace of God, go I... Why didn’t she lock her door? ... What was she doing there? ... Why was she dressed like that? ... Women tend to blame other women for being raped because most women have accepted the male myth that some women like it, want it, crave it, in fact. (The Making of Extremities)

As a male fan of Fushigi Yuugi, I find the fandom of FY living proof of the fact that women hold less sympathies for other women in the situation of rape. I speak of course of the case of Hongo Yui. But I am moving forward, when I have not presented the relevant issues of Mr. Mastrosimone’s story.

Mr. Mastrosimone continues:

As a man I have been reeducated about rape. The most dangerous teaching is the unconscious acceptance, the insidious little assumptions one makes while growing up. I have, through the play, freed myself from two lethal myths. One, that women cause rape, and two, that rape is for sex. A woman can never cause rape. That is a male excuse for the desire to rape projected into the victim. Rape is done to degrade, humiliate, and intimidate. It is a confusing issue because the tenderest act of man and woman is used to disguise the most brutal and sadistic. The extremities of the spectrum are brought together. Based on interviews of victims, the worst part of rape is not the physical. It is the fear, the threats, real and imagined, the degradation, the helplessness. ‘Extremities’ has focused on the latter. Audiences often have to be reminded that no rape occurs in ‘Extremities’. But audiences often think that a rape has occurred because of the mental cruelty of the first scene. We see Raul tossing Marjorie about like a tattered doll. We cannot know what is happening in her head. We can only surmise. We can only do that by giving something to the play, by investing emotion, by empathy. A play can only work when the audience is willing to project themselves into the protagonist in order to understand the character’s thoughts and emotions. The audience must pay twice: once to get past the box office, and again to get beyond the footlights. When empathy becomes easy, that is what we call a commercial play. ‘Extremities’ is not a commercial play. There is no initial sales pitch to get empathy. But the audience gives it voluntarily. (The Making of Extremities)

The goal I am trying to establish with this evidence, and my argument, is not to make Yui everyone’s favorite Fushigi Yuugi character. She may not even be my favorite character when putting her up against Nakago. Yet it’s easy to defend the "good guys", the guys who fight for the "commercial" empathy, the ultimate battle between "total good", and "total evil". Miaka and Tamahome: protagonists. Same with Hotohori, Nuriko, Chichiri, Tasuki, Mitsukake, and Chiriko. Any fool can go up and give them a decent argument for why they mean good, because the premise lacks any intentions to harm inside any of those characters. The Seiryuu Seishi, now those are hard to defend. Americans, maybe the world as a whole (most likely the latter) has a predisposition to sort people in a story to "the good guys we like" and "the bad guys we hate". Nakago, Yui, Soi, Amiboshi (until the later part of the storyline), Suboshi, Ashitare, Miboshi, and Tomo. Those are the people it is hard to defend, because everyone has the basic idea of "Suzaku is good, so Seiryuu must be evil" implanted in their minds.

This idea is in direct conflict with Watase Yuu’s intentions in creating Fushigi Yuugi, in my opinion. At least, in the cases of the Seiryuu Seishi, Watase Yuu meant to establish the conclusion that there is no ‘evil’: everyone’s trying to do the right thing. It just depends on what sort of trauma’s the Seiryuu seishi underwent in the past that defines their bases of good and evil that sets Seiryuu in conflict with Suzaku, or rather, Nakago in conflict with the rest of the world. I say Nakago against the rest of the world because basically the Seiryuu Seishi acted as ciphers for him, especially Seiryuu no Miko, Hongo Yui, who was rather, being turned into him.

Enough about the others, though. I have been asked to give a personal, subjective account of Hongo Yui, my purpose not being to make you like her over the others, as I have mentioned, but simply for you to understand her, to sympathize with her, and, hopefully to forgive her.

In this case, as you have figured out by now, my main premise to change your mind about her is the rape she thought she underwent. As I have said, being a FY fan myself, my experiences with other fans proves the fact that women sympathize less with the rape victims. Most FY fans are women, I have noticed, and Yui has shown herself to be incredibly hated throughout FY circles, with epithets toward her ranging from simply and harmlessly "naive" to "pathetic psycho-bitch" (actually said over the FYML). Despite the lengthy preamble, I hope you’re willing to read further and understand her side of the story.

Hopefully you understand that since I intend to focus on the rape incident, the entire first page or so has not been for waste. I am proving a point with the words of a man who did extensive research on the subject. Now let’s talk about Yui’s specific situation. While Yui was not actually raped, she had believed she had been raped until the last few episodes, where she realized what Nakago was doing to her. Nakago is someone we have to talk about in order to define Yui’s placement in the series. Nakago had a goal, and we all know what it was and why it was. His goal could only be obtained through Seiryuu no Miko-Yui. Thus, he had to have total control over Yui in order to acquire his goal. His method was to make her depend totally on him so that whenever he told her to give an order, she would assume that the order was for "good", so to speak. That is why Nakago paid her so much attention, to make her his puppet. Nakago made Yui depend totally on him by taking that psychological state Mastrosimone mentioned..."the fear, the threats, real and imagined, the helplessness..." and kept them alive in Yui for as long as she was under his thumb. That led her to rely on him for help. Let us talk about Yui’s fears, threats, and helplessness.

Yui’s fears were simply that Miaka had betrayed her: Nakago’s first insinuation that convinced her to depend on him. Miaka, Suzaku no Miko, Seiryuu no Miko’s adversary, was set up as Yui’s enemy simply because of her status, not because Nakago had anything personal against her. Yet in Yui’s case, Miaka and Yui were best friends, so Nakago had to make something personal between them. We can assume that Yui told Nakago about Miaka, how she first got into the world, her fleeting experience with Tamahome, etc., because of the flashbacks in episode 36, when Nakago told Miaka about how the first three months he had practically waited at Yui’s bedside, telling her over and over that Miaka betrayed her. Even then, however, Yui stood her ground and her faith in Miaka (hence her happiness when they first saw each other in episode 10). Now then, since Tamahome had saved the two in the first episode, he becomes a psychological factor for Yui. An infatuation, a symbol of protection, if you will. Her "love" for Tamahome is simply the fact that he saved her from what she later experienced when he wasn’t around. That’s a strong psychological factor, and though it wasn’t love, it was the factor Nakago used to manipulate Yui, telling her that Miaka had only come back for Tamahome. Yui did not believe, however, until the words came from Miaka herself. As Yui inadvertently, and, most unfortunately, caught the conversation between Miaka and Tamahome in episode 11 (just after Yui got the Shijintenchisho back from Nakago), Miaka told Tamahome that she couldn’t stop thinking about him, and in fact, he was the reason she came back. Thus, the overheard admission from Miaka’s own mouth finally turned Yui. It was the single statement that made all of Yui’s hopes false and Nakago’s soft words true in her own mind. Yui had depended on Miaka to save her from the hell Yui was living, and since Miaka happened to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, Yui’s world became a total world of betrayal, where only Nakago cared for her well-being. In such a psychological self-destruction, one becomes so vulnerable that one has to be helped by the only person one depends on. Yui, in fact, until the brief moments Miaka came and went from her life, still believed her life was ruined, her entire being soiled and worthless, and at one time both wanted to disappear, to die, and needed to be healed, helped, known that despite what she had gone through, her life could come back to her.

The fact that Yui didn’t know she wasn’t raped was also key to Nakago’s plan: it kept her thinking herself soiled, as I said, and unconsciously attaching herself to the one person it seemed still found any worth in her. The extreme vulnerability is what made Miaka’s words dig so deeply... the fact that Miaka did not say them in Yui’s presence, said them matter-of-factly to Tamahome, earnestly, as if she had, indeed, returned only for Tamahome, is what made Yui believe them, in an entirely different fashion. Naturally, had Miaka known how Yui felt, she would have said different words, something about Tamahome being part of why she came back. Had Yui simply been able to feel at the time that Miaka truly cared for her well-being and truly had come back for Yui, than everything would have been better. In fact, Yui’s infatuation for Tamahome had no weight on her decision to become Seiryuu no Miko... Tamahome was incidental compared to Yui’s hopes, her belief, that Miaka had not betrayed her. You’ll notice that in episode 10, where Miaka and Yui meet after Yui’s ordeal, Yui does not even think to mention Tamahome until Miaka brings him up. The feeling that Yui is overcome with when she sees Miaka in the throne room to Kutou is surely indescribable, and has nothing to do with the Suzaku Seishi. She simply feels that her life has some hope, if Miaka still cares.

Miaka and Yui are a lot alike, a lot more than the story says in obvious words. Though they were set up to be exact opposites, the underlying similarities are there. Miaka’s hopelessness after she believed she had been raped by Nakago in episode 36 reflects that of Yui’s: Miaka runs away from one of the two people she cares most about in the world, simply because she thinks she is worthless, as did Yui. Later in the series, when Miaka is in Amiboshi’s household, Miaka sees a picture of her and Yui in her wallet and, still believing she herself was raped, thinks to herself that she now understands Yui’s pain, Yui’s sorrow, Yui’s anger. In the end, not even Miaka can admit that had their places been switched, Miaka would have acted differently.

To conclude, I would like to clarify the reasons I had many of the quotes from Extremities in the first bit of this article. To work from the back, I obviously had the quotes about rape not being about sex, but the psychology of rape, to clarify why the psychological effects on Yui were so strong. Secondly, the interview with the lawyer I brought up specifically to bring doubts to the minds of all those fans who immediately figured, "I wouldn’t turn psycho on Miaka if I had been in her position". An informed, experienced lawyer admitted that through some method of fear or feeling threatened, women tend to feel less sympathetic to rape victims, perhaps to protect themselves psychologically, since the mental effects of rape are so profound that they effect the people around the victim as well as the victim herself.

Thirdly, Terry’s monologue from Extremities seems to be ill-placed in this article. I have, however, quoted her for a reason. I’ve spoken to people who have been raped before, and have seen Fushigi Yuugi. There are two basic types of personalities from rape-victims I have seen: those that sympathize with Yui, sharing the experience, and those that feel they "got on with their lives" as Terry did and feel no sympathy towards Yui. To speak in a politically incorrect and basically tactless manner, I admit that my feelings as to the latter group is that they are deluding themselves. I sympathize, however, with their situation and know that how they feel is yet another possibility of the endless psychological effects: turning the situation into what they feel is "positive", making themselves out to be heroines and feeling so impressed with how they handle it that they look down on other rape-victims that have ended up in basic mental pain that can and has led to suicide.

I understand that what I have just said seems incredibly heartless and cruel, but I think that the actions these people have taken against people that they should be most sympathetic to is equally cruel. And if I provoke a reaction because of my words in the last paragraph, in my opinion that only proves that they are not so strong about "putting it behind them" as they thought, they only mean to preserve their sanity by turning themselves into said heroines.

Looking back, I realize that this article sounds preachy and in many places some will think irrelevant, but had I simply analyzed Yui’s character in this article, explained why she was ‘better’ than everyone, this would not accomplish a true expression of my feelings. I don’t feel that Yui’s entirety was set in Fushigi Yuugi, I in fact feel that people focus on the one-dimension nature of characters that they are not supposed to have. Nakago’s villainous nature. Yui’s vengeful nature. Suboshi’s equal feelings of vengeance. None of these make a small fraction of what the character truly was: the Fushigi Yuugi characters are so well-written because they are not one-dimensional, that they contain a myriad of facets to their personality, some wonderful and some terrible. They all try to do good based on what they have been convinced of to be good and evil. Those of us that think only in terms of one-dimensional personalities start sorting characters out into "the good guys" and "the bad guys". Those that think in every facet can finally understand the motives, the good intentions, the pain and suffering of the worst villains. That is good writing, and I stick by it.

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Article copyright 1999 Sephiroth