Raye - Tumblr Posts
Let's talk about Raye. Why is he so hated?
I think it’s almost entirely because he comes off quite condescending to Naomi when she tries to bring up a good point to him during his surveillence of Light.
Naomi politely points out that it seems kind of suspicious that the bus Raye was on was hijacked while he was tailing a Kira suspect, and then he replies like so:
I think it’s mostly the way Raye phrases things, like that her shrewd intuition about the case is a “habit” she needs to get rid of, and that little “how about using that brain of yours for more WIFEY things?” comment at the end. Haha, it’s easy to feel like Naomi’s being patronized by him and told to get back to the kitchen where she belongs or something like that, and most people really love Naomi and were very upset that Light killed her so cruelly and so early on. The fandom gets really protective over her and this often leads to anger toward the male characters that didn’t interact with her very nicely (though usually not Beyond Birthday, mostly just Raye and Light).
However, I think Ohba genuinely meant for Raye to be a sympathetic character and for the audience to think of him in a pretty positive way. There is an issue all throughout the manga where the author’s sexism ends up colouring the way he writes all the female characters and their interactions with men, and I think this is just an example of one of those things. I don’t think Ohba necessarily realized that it sounded pretty patronizing, or if he did he probably assumed that most people would automatically agree with Raye in how he spoke to Naomi.
Some other interpretations that could be offered here are:
-Raye means well and is mostly worried about Naomi’s safety. He mentions that he doesn’t want her to do anything that will put her in danger, and reminds her of their original reasons for both coming to Japan. It is a very dangerous investigation, and he obviously is risking his life quite seriously by being one of the people tailing the suspects. It makes sense that he would be worried about her wanting to become more personally involved.
-He mentions that she’s not in the Bureau anymore, and that they’re there to meet her parents, and they plan to start a family. I think Naomi voluntarily left the FBI in order to become a homemaker, and though it’s easy to see this as more Ohba sexism in terms of “women should only be homemakers and that’s it,” I think Naomi probably left the FBI of her own accord and wanted this life for herself. Being a homemaker and a mother and a wife is a totally fine thing to want to be and it doesn’t automatically mean she’s just cowing to sexist ideas or anything like that, so we have to keep that in mind.
-I think Japan maybe has quite different ideas about this stuff in general in comparison to the Western world. It’s almost considered a relief for women to be able to get married and stay home and not work sometimes there instead, I do believe? I watched a little street interview about it once where Japanese women were being interviewed about if they’d rather work or be a homemaker. It seemed like a much more traditional mindset regarding this stuff, and like many thought it would be a luxury for them to not have to do the daily grind of a career at all. It’s also a very socially reserved culture there from what I’ve heard, and that could definitely lead to forming some odd ideas about the opposite sex. I definitely don’t know a whole lot about it myself, but it’s always good to keep in mind that we’re viewing things through the lens of our own culture most times, and our own interpretation isn’t always the objectively correct one.
-That being said, here is a post I made a while back in which Ohba demonstrates some clearly weird and offensive ideas about girls/women in comparison to men in his newer manga Bakuman, in which he almost seems to present them as a separate species entirely. The context of the scene is two high school boys discussing their female classmates, and the whole point of the scene is to show how smart the one boy is who is sharing his rather odd ideas about the girls: (X)
All in all I don’t think Raye is that bad, though I definitely also find it annoying how he words things to Naomi. I can’t remember how he came off in the LABB novel, because I think Naomi had a few phone calls from him in that too, but for the most part that above interaction is probably the one on which most of the fan hate for Raye is based.
started listening to raye out of pure chance stumbling on a clip of Oscar Winning Tears and i think i've found my new favourite musician!! and she's such a precious human being too uGh
