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Early in their acquaintance, the arguments between them (mostly over the morality of proposed intervention strategies) were very one-sided.  Tieria would argue his position with calm logic, blocking every single argument Allelujah comes up with, while Allelujah, who ran away from the SSI far too early to have had any formal eduction in such things, just appealed to emotion or attacked Tieria’s character over and over.  But the thing is that Allelujah lacked education, not aptitude.  So after four rounds or so, he started picking up Tieria’s tricks, but doing a lot better at mixing emotion into the arguments.  Even four years later, Tieria doesn’t realize that Allelujah more-or-less learned rhetoric from him.

 

Since both of them are sheltered in different ways, neither realizes that the other’s coloring is odd until other members of Celestial Being remark on it.  

 

Allelujah wasn’t quite sure what to make of the Tieria who rescued him from A-Law prison.  The Tieria he knew before would have left him behind, found a new, better, pilot…clearly, something had changed.  He was curious, from the moment he emerged into Ptolemaios II, about exactly what that was.

 

Tieria is much quieter about it than, say, Milena, but he enjoys seeing Allelujah and Marie happy as much as anyone else.  It’s nice to see their laughter chase away the ghost of Allelujah wandering the ship with shadow-ringed eyes, rubbing at wrists just now freed from a straight-jacket  or standing alone in shadowed rooms, clutching his head.  

 

Allelujah, in turn, spends a lot of time among the reformed CB smoothing things over behind the scenes for Tieria, who has gotten a lot nicer but still has some issues with sounding vaguely dismissive almost all the time.  Tieria is trying something other than blind devotion to Veda; Allelujah figures that he deserves the time and space to figure it out without having to smooth out a dozen interpersonal conflicts.

 

So, the thing is that while the Powers That Be, so-to-speak, seem very much in favor of Tieria being non-gendered, series dialogue seems to contradict that a little.  Not just the English (which, of course, calls Tieria “he” and “him”) but the Japanese as well.

 

But, as some people have pointed out in the tags when reblogging previous posts, at the beginning of the anime, Tieria uses “ore” [俺] as his personal prounoun (i.e., to mean “I”).  “Ore” is very strongly gendered; it is only used by men.

 

Later in the series, he switches to “boku” [僕], which is also gendered as male.  Toward the end of the first season, he starts to use “watashi” [私], which is gender-neutral.  

 

These switches are very explicitly part of his character arc, as they coincide with character development.  There’s good meta about this out there on the internet somewhere, but I’ve completely lost the link.  In any case, the changes aren’t necessarily about Tieria’s gender identity–though you could definitely headcanon a relationship if you wanted to.

 

Recall again quantumseraph‘s discussion of the fact that the modern Japanese language doesn’t distinguish between “sex” and “gender.”  I’ve been using “gender” a lot because I’m more comfortable with the word, but this kanji, [性] could refer to either gender or sex.  The only way to know is context, and that passage I translated wasn’t giving me much.

 

That said, it’s not as if characters who present as different genders from their biological sex are unheard of in anime, manga, or Japanese entertainment in general, so Japanese authors obviously do have the ability to get around this linguistic inconvenience.  It’s a shame that they couldn’t have done so a little more explicitly with Tieria, because it would be really nice to know whether there’s a canonical difference between the character’s biology and self-image.

Originally posted 8/3/2015 with 7 notes