Monstress: The Body and Humanity

In Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's Monstress, the body is the main focus.  Our protagonist, Maika, has a complicated relationship with her own body.  She is a Arcanic, a victim of the currently stalled war between the Arcanics and the Humans.  Like other Arcanics, she is a descendent of couplings between Humans and the Ancients, the Ancients being a race with their own history shrouded in mystery, just as Maika's personal history is.  We know very little about Maika's backstory at the beginning of the graphic novel, and even as we move forward and learn more about Maika, we still discover very little.  Maika's memories of her mother aren't fully uncovered until she is trapped inside the Naraka Sarcophagus, her consciousness only awake enough to relive memories buried deep.

As a character, Maika is untrusting.  At one point, she recalls how her friend, Tuya, always told her that she had "to take a chance on trust."  For Maika, though, she has trouble trusting even herself.  She has a hunger inside her that comes out unexpectedly, at one point causing her to consume an innocent young boy whose life she was trying to safe.  This causes others around her to also distrust her, including Kippa.  The only person Maika seems to trust is Tuya, and Tuya is lost to her.  Both Maika's history and her body are mysteries to both her and the reader, and as we discover later, these two are connected through a demon that Maika awakens.

Most Arcanics bear resemblance to different animals, just as the original Ancients did; for instance, Kippa has foxlike features.  Maika, however, is passably human, which complicates her identity further.  Maika believes that the hunger inside of her makes her a monster, and many others around her consider her to be a monster.  To the Humans, all Arcanics are monsters, and since Arcanics can best be identified by their animal features, their bodies are connected to this "monster" label imposed on them by the humans.  The irony is that although Maika looks human on the outside, on the inside she feels like a monster, whereas more Arcanic-looking characters like Kippa are very sweet and do not pose any threat.

Maika's most distinctive body feature is her missing left forearm.  We don't learn how she lost his body part, whether she was born with the missing limb or she lost it in the war, another aspect of Maika's body that is shrouded in mystery.  The demon that Maika awakens often attaches itself to the nub of her missing forearm; since this demon is a mysterious figure, one whose name the reader never learns and whose voice most people cannot hear, it makes sense that it would be connected to a mysterious part of Maika's body (and perhaps this is also symbolic foreshadowing for how Maika did lose her limb).

Monstress does not flinch from body horror; the artist Takeda often shows rather than alludes.  The first scene shows Maika standing naked before an audience, ready to be sold into slavery along with other Arcanics.  We see child Arcanics being tortured and dissected, people of all races being brutally murdered, blood spraying, limbs lost, bodies burned, and other triggering content.  Many characters, like Maika, are also disabled or become disabled throughout the novel.  We have characters who are burned, missing limbs, scarred, and even mute.  As Monstress takes place within the midst of a war, it narratively makes sense for there to be so many disabled characters, but it also highlights to what extent war can change the landscape of the mind and the body.  We are forced to see the horrors of war through Takeda's artwork, both in the ongoing violence and in the war-torn landscapes of the characters' bodies.

War seems to be a large reason why Monstress contends so much with the body.  Often with war comes inhumanity, and as previously described, we see a great deal of inhumanity in the graphic novel.  In fact, calling it inhumanity is almost ironic, as most of the inhumanity we see is dealt towards the partially human Arcanics.  Kippa has a particularly poignant line towards the end of the graphic novel: "Miss Halfwolf scares me.  A lot.  But that doesn't make her a monster.  Don't be like the witches, Master Ren.  They call us monsters because it makes it easier to hurt us.  But monsters are people, too."  Kippa hits on the crux of the graphic novel: because they are only half-Human, the Humans consider the Arcanics to be monsters.  However, we see that the Humans deal as much violence towards the Arcanics as vice versa.  In a world with different races coexisting, some having great magical powers - in a world where having this great power can make one feel like a monster, such as how Maika feels about herself - the question as to what makes one deserving of humanity is maybe the most important one.