‘Blue Eye Samurai’ Knows Good Sex is a Warrior’s Vocation
Over the last few years, even more depressing than the dearth of frank depictions of human sexuality onscreen has been the strangled conversations surrounding it. A certain subset of (often youthful) so-called “critics” will have you believe that all sex scenes are problematic, as though weird shit isn’t going on in most people’s bedrooms at least semi-frequently; as though actors aren’t shooting scenes knowing full well what they’re getting into.
Enter Blue Eye Samurai, a criminally under-marketed new Netflix series that improbably, via the animation medium, threads its high-octane heroine’s revenge narrative with the most densely sexual plotting I’ve seen since Game of Thrones turned fucking into mundane exposition. It’s a welcome refutation to the sexless content deluge we’ve lately been subjected to.
In Samurai, our main character is Mizu, a mixed-race swordswoman who has spent much of her life disguising herself as a man because of the danger posed by her identity. Mizu is brought to life by PEN15’s Maya Erskine, who does a killer job pitching her voice down to a gravelly, quasi-dude register rife with one-liners. Mizu’s mother is Japanese and her father is white; he’s one of just four white men living in Japan during the Edo period, the time of her birth.