In the previous part of this analysis, I examined the circumstances of Sakiko’s death and how they, combined with the circumstances of Riber’s death, triggered a cascade of events that demolished Misa’s perception of her enrollment in the Far East Officers’ Academy. Here, I’ll discuss how the effects these events had on Misa impact whatever plans her father may have had for her future. This post will be one of the longest in this series, because it discusses one of the most pivotal parts of the narrative in White Reminiscences, where the foundations for the uneasy relationship Misa has with her father in SDFM.

Post-Melissa Misa

While Ōnogi says nothing about the admissions procedure in UN Spacy Officers’ Academies, the novel hints at an enrollment procedure that is normally merit-based to a certain degree; after all, Misa’s portrayed as sincerely believing she could attribute her entry into the military to her own academic performance. Melissa’s nepotism allegations, however, tore this belief down. Now, no one can convince her that her place in the academy was earned and not bought with her father’s political influence.

A jarring element of Melissa’s attack is that, although she names the “famous” Takashi Hayase as the perpetrator of the nepotism she – rightly, if unwittingly – alleges, she doesn’t accuse him of this nepotism. Instead, she chooses to attack Misa, framing her as the beneficiary. She says so outright, after all: “[w]ithout him pulling strings,” a “silly kid” like Misa would never have been able to enroll. In a few short minutes, Misa’s sense of achievement, self-worth, and even self comes crumbling down: the one possible self she came up with by herself, even if it was a romantic teenage dream, is no longer hers to claim. She didn’t earn it. It was handed to her, irregularly and illegally. Neither the novel nor other sources tell us conclusively if she finds out why her father did it.

Although Melissa was right to imply that Misa’s admission to the military academy wasn’t meritocratic, her assessment of Misa’s character was unfair. Misa is neither weak nor silly, and this becomes very obvious later, both in the novel and the series. At the end of Melissa’s barrage, she hides in the restroom, seeking shelter from the storm of bile that was unleashed upon her. A teenage girl put in this situation could move in any direction: she could report the incident to the administration of the academy and demand to know the truth about her enrollment; she could go back to the bunk and essentially surrender to her bully; she could quit altogether; she could persevere and try to prove Melissa wrong; and so on.

Many youngsters in her situation would have dropped out – after all, unlike compulsory basic and lower-secondary education, being trained to become a professional soldier isn’t mandatory anywhere in the world. Besides that, no one could blame Misa if she dropped out. Who would want to continue sharing a bunk with a person who so easily and eagerly attacks an emotionally vulnerable comrade? Who would want to continue sharing the same space with someone who so easily makes allegations like the ones Melissa made? And who’s telling Misa that Melissa hasn’t already spent these two years in the academy spreading nepotism rumors behind her back?

Having been subjected to this utterly unfair treatment, who could seriously blame Misa if she opted to abandon the military and do something else, completely outside of this system where people would always be whispering that she owes her career to her father and his connections?

Declawing Misa

Of course, we know Misa from the TV series as a very competent military officer. So, it’d make no narrative sense to have her leave the military in White Reminiscences. Ōnogi tells us that Misa chooses to stay in the academy, framing it as an attempt to reclaim her path in life, her sense of self-worth and achievement, and her agency. The way she goes about it, however, is not what I’d expect from a teenager who’s just been bullied for the “crime” of being miserable after two tragic losses and accused of being an ungrateful nepobrat who wouldn’t be there without her father pulling strings. From a literary perspective, it’s even underwhelming and anticlimactic.

Having read my fair share of teenage and coming-of-age literature (Bildungsroman), I’d have expected Ōnogi to have Misa respond differently to Melissa’s attack. He had options – and I’m not talking about options that include even mild violence: he could have Misa report the incident to the academy’s higher-ups, for instance. But let’s pretend this course of action isn’t “proper” and that she fears being construed as a snitch. He could have her report the incident and confront the higher-ups, demanding they tell her the truth about her admission. He could have her skip the reporting bit and just ask them for the truth. He could have her contact her father and demand he tell her the truth. He could have her take both the academy’s administration and her father to task for all this.

No reader could blame him for showing Misa react in such a dynamic manner; after all, she is portrayed in the series as a pretty dynamic and brave woman who had the badassery to face down the Zentradi Supreme Commander Boddole Zer himself. In fact, no reader would think less of her if she demanded answers – quite the contrary. Furthermore, any of these options would have been consistent with Misa’s canonical characterization in the series and with how a bold, proud teenager – regardless of gender – would react in circumstances like these.

However, Ōnogi denies Misa any such reaction, even though they’d be in line with who she is in SDFM. Instead, he tries so hard to maintain a sympathetic portrayal of Takashi that he declaws Misa’s responses into quiet perseverance mixed with implausible second-guessing and pseudo-philosophical overtones. Narratively, there are two scenes that provide Ōnogi with a solid foundation: one is the scene where Misa, having hidden in the restroom to cry in private after her public humiliation at the hands of Melissa, has no more tears left; the other is her decision to stay in the military and double down on her efforts to excel in the academy and prove herself.

The restroom scene where Misa, with her pride “in tatters,” wants to cry, but can’t, is a scene for which I must give credit to Ōnogi: it’s actually a very plausible outcome. It’s something that can and does happen under intense shock. Here, we see Misa being unable to access her own grief. What Ōnogi shows us is her emotional armor forming in real time, fueled by the way her father failed her with his seven-month absence and the humiliation and shame she was just subjected to. It also makes her decision to persevere more plausible, and it’s a pity that Ōnogi doesn’t leverage this scene to the extent he could.

Misa had just been publicly humiliated and accused of being a nepobrat – and an ungrateful one, at that. It would have made perfect sense for Ōnogi to tell us that Misa’s resolve to excel in the academy had – at least in part – to do with Melissa’s attack. Misa would be justified in wanting to prove Melissa wrong. Ōnogi doesn’t leverage this, contradicting Misa’s canonical portrayal as someone who goes to great lengths to counter criticism. The strongest example is SDFM episode 10 “Blind Game”, where she embarked on an avoidable reconnaissance mission after being accused by Hikaru Ichijyo of not understanding the risks he and the other pilots face in space.

Instead, after her attack on Misa, Ōnogi has Melissa disappear from the story. Misa doesn’t think of her words and actions anymore; Melissa doesn’t appear again to taunt Misa or to apologize to her. She’s effectively a throwaway character to whom Ōnogi affords narrative impact disproportionate to the ink he spends on her: a character we know next to nothing about detonates the nepotism Takashi had planted in the foundations of Misa’s military education and career. She then vanishes, while Ōnogi turns the spotlight back onto Takashi and Misa’s feelings towards him.

Ōnogi chooses to describe Misa’s resentment of her father as “childish”, but he’d already given her several very valid reasons to resent him, as we’ve already seen over the course of this series of articles. Now, on top of everything else, his actions caused her to be publicly humiliated and lose her sense of achievement and self-worth. As Ōnogi himself puts it, “her graduation diploma felt like nothing more than a cheap piece of paper, no weight to it, just a bunch of words.”

This makes his dismissal of her feelings towards her father seem like it’s veering from typical coercive writing to authorial insolence. Even worse, he portrays Misa as not really knowing “if her father had been right to use his influence to enter her in the academy.” This self-doubt Ōnogi inserts here, though, can only be construed as an authorial contrivance to make her declawing more thorough: Misa already resents her father for failing her so badly when she needed him most. Therefore, adding the humiliation, shame, and erosion of sense of self-worth, achievement, and competence she got from his machinations would only be plausible to cause her to resent him even more – not wonder if he had valid reasons to pull strings to secure her enrollment.

Furthermore, in his attempt to deflate Misa’s grief-anger-shame combination, Ōnogi portrays her as thinking in a manner implausible for a sixteen-year-old whose general secondary education was cut short when she was fourteen. In fact, even if Misa had completed all of her secondary education and had enrolled at the more normal age of eighteen, it’s unlikely that she’d be able to think about her circumstances, adulthood, the fact that “even without her, the world would continue on turning,” and the life-death boundary in the abstract, convoluted, quasi-philosophical manner the novel has her think.

This is not to say that Misa isn’t intelligent – if anything, she’s one of the more intelligent, thoughtful, and perceptive characters in the entire franchise. But her age and her woefully incomplete general secondary education deny her the tools to articulate the thoughts Ōnogi portrays her as having. For her age and educational status, grief and resolve are plausible. The quasi-philosophical articulation of her wanting to pursue her father’s and Riber’s world, the world “on the border between life and death,” is not. That’s Ōnogi inserting his own register and belief of what Misa’s motivation for persevering should be.

Besides, presenting these thoughts as Misa’s right after telling us she understood “the futility of death on the battlefield” injects two thoughts that contradict each other and are very hard for someone in Misa’s emotional, developmental, and educational position to reconcile for any meaningful amount of time.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll present Takashi’s possible plans for Misa’s future and how they were all thwarted; some by war-related developments, some by the consequences of his own meddling – a meddling alluded to by Melissa in her attack on Misa.

Bibliography

1. Ōnogi, H. (1984). Hayase Misa: Shiroi Tsuioku [早瀬未沙 白い追憶; Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences]. Animage Bunko. Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten. (In Japanese.)