Dang, I love Akiva! Little spitfire. Her partial nudity is interesting. She’s exposes the tattooes her parents gave her as a form of self-defense. Being naked since a child it’s completely natural to her. Most indigenous cultures have less puritanism than we do around exposing the female breast. Akiva’s possibly the start of reverting to the natural state of who we once were. But it’s confronting for Finn. Later, when Father encounters Akiva they have this exchange;
Akiva had loitered at Hog’s with me, unsettling the covers of madness with a barrage of questions, until, exasperated, I’d asked her to stop needling me. ‘Not a tattooist. Can see the similarities though,’ she’d said, and hugged me. Completely unaware of her nakedness, of how confronted I felt by our physical proximity, an aging man alone with a naked young woman. I’m from a different era; I’d need to adjust to the new.
Father’s decision to accept, rather than fight, change and recognise the norms from his era needs adjusting, rather than forcing Akiva to adhere to his own – it’s a barely touched on thing. But I found it touching. How much hell on earth have we created by insisting people adopt our beliefs rather than honour people’s right to have their own? Assuming, of course, no one is harmed by them.
