Character Autopsy: Benio Adashino

This is the character autopsy, where I take a character that I adore and force them down onto the cold and metallic table and cut them open, exploring what about their character that resonates with me and how I can use it in my own writing. Today it is the yokai exorcising warrior Benio Adashino from Twin Star Exorcist.

On the weekends, my wife and I will occasionally try to find a movie to watch together, but we often end up scrolling for several minutes and then giving up and reverting to whatever show we were watching last. Recently, my wife saw the trailer for the action movie Gunpowder Milkshake by Navot Papushado and she was interested so we watched it. We lasted about half an hour, though we had hoped more of the movie had passed. Now I am not going to critique the whole film, we did not even bother to watch it all, but what I want to focus on is my particular problem with the protagonist, Sam. I didn’t really like her, not that I hated her, but she just didn’t seem… human. What I mean is, she is meant to be a stoic tough character who defeats everyone she comes across, she is so powerful that all men fear her kind of thing, but I didn’t care about her and why would I? All I had seen up to this point is this woman murder people and then suddenly decide to care about a little girl because the script said she should. I got far enough in the story to see the primary antagonist wish to seek revenge on Sam because she killed his son. I mean, obviously, why wouldn’t he want revenge, she did, it makes perfect sense that he would want revenge. Now, you might be reading this wondering why I am talking about a movie and have gotten this far into the discussion without mentioning the Benio character, but it does make sense to me, that’s why I wrote it. You see, what Sam and many other female characters suffer from is their lack of femineity, that is they feel like the typecast action man in a woman’s body. This is the problem I have with some of these powerful female characters, they don’t seem like they are actually women or humans, that is where Benio enters on the metal bench.

You see Benio is a powerful character, she is still in high school while also managing to be the strongest exorcist. This might not seem much different from the above-mentioned Sam but there is a crucial difference, she is strong and also a teenage girl. She has insecurities, she gets embarrassed, falls in love, she acts like a human. When she gets hit, she falls; she doesn’t take a bullet to the arm, not wince and then claim it is only a scratch. Benio balances being strong with her humanity because her humanity, her womanhood is what makes her interesting, not her ability to defeat her opponents. That is what I want in a character, I want the humanity. Making a character that is basically invincible has never been interesting and what I take from her character is that I need to develop the human element more. I have created characters that are meant to be the incredibly strong hero who defeats many foes because I like action scenes and it makes sense to have a character who thrives in them, but I also try to add the traces of humanity. Like with Cree from my story Tawny & Cree: Schinas Saga where we find that Cree has actual fear of Thane, the character who is hunting him or even why I gave him a reason to not transform. These elements of humanity ground him and make him more relatable and that is what I love about Benio. Whenever I encounter a character that is just a robot in a skin suit, I always wish they could be like her. I am not interested in the arguments surrounding female action heroes in general but when a character is missing that human element, there is no wonder that many people fail to connect with them, and I feel that is a valuable lesson that I will take into my own practice.