This is a partial re-post and continuation of a meta I started back on my Tumblr about Ronin Warriors/ YST and how despite being a shounen/ sentai series, aimed primarily at 8-13 year old boys, the point of view character is a seventeen year old girl. Nasutei was unique in her place as a female main character, who in the beginning gets typical 80's token female treatment, but also grows out of that as the series goes on.

The narrative decision to give her the amount of agency she had (acting as Ryo's guide and quasi-mentor in the beginning, bringing him to her grandfather, not staying behind when Seiji tells her to) was a gamble, because there were a lot of ways in which that could have fallen flat with the target audience of young boys. Having a "cool" female character, willing and capable of holding her own after a point really set the show apart, especially the decision to not give her a love interest (unless you feel like reading into her time with Shuten and why he ends up giving her the jewel of life in the end. Personally, I've always believed it was more mutual respect than love, and I never shipped her and Seiji. He was just too proper, and again, it was a relationship of respect after she proved she was willing to risk as much as he was in tbe Fight For Good.)

In so many ways, having the point of view character for a Shounen series be a teenage girl was a bit of a smack in the face to most other series with male heavy casts, where the token female character existed to be this soft, genteel counterpoint to the male main characters, someone who was to be treasured and protected, and rarely got their hands dirty.

Nasutei was none of this. The narrative couldn't let her occupy that role for long if her presence in the story was really going to mean anything. So the creators made her smart, brave, even recklessly so at some points (going out to distract Anubis when they were trying to revive Shuu might have been necessary, but it was still insanely dangerous. Arago already marked her as a target all the way back in episode two. He wanted her dead because he never expected anyone to know anything about the Youjakai or his plans, or the armor.)

So it's not like she expected Anubis to spare her, and she gets waterboarded in a waterfall for her trouble and almost frozen to death.

And you can't convince me that Kaos wasn't watching this go down, judging how she handled the situation, in an attempt to see just how far she was willing to go to see Good triumph.

None of this was typical or expected from a female character in a shounen narrative--token female characters were never meant to be shown to suffer, hurt, strive and fight as hard as their male counterparts--but Nasutei did, and it was part of what made the show as special as it was. Nasutei feels more like a Ghibli protagonist than a shounen protagonist, and you have to wonder how that decision was eventually made. Was it a question of wanting to reach across the gender gap and give female viewers a relatable character or was it just a function of how the main story was going to play out? Personally, I feel like if you watch the series start to finish, you can see how much the creators and writers adored Nasutei as a protagonist--how much attention they pay to her in the second season and how she continues to be herself through the OVAs. We see a young girl become a genuinely strong, brave, beautiful young woman.