War & Peace Quote by Chiaki Kuriyama

There is a small act of rebellion tucked into Kuriyama's casual phrasing: "probably" and "like" soften the sentence, but the idea lands hard. She is naming a demand the audience often pretends not to have. People "like seeing women fight" not just for spectacle, but because it flips a default setting in pop culture where female bodies are framed as decorative, vulnerable, or narratively secondary. The pleasure comes from contradiction: strength appearing where the script says it shouldn't.

Kuriyama's "we're generally not thought to be strong" is doing two jobs at once. On the surface, it's an observation about perception. Underneath, it's a diagnosis of the market logic that turns stereotype into a selling point. If women aren't assumed to be powerful, then a woman who is powerful becomes a novelty, and novelty becomes a hook. The line quietly admits complicity with that hook while also reclaiming it: if the culture insists on underestimating you, then your competence becomes a jump-scare.

"Especially in the case of this movie" points to the early-2000s moment when female violence was often stylized into fetish or fashion - blood as accessory, vengeance as choreography. In that context, the female fighter can be liberating and limiting: liberation because she gets agency and physical authority; limiting because her power is still packaged as an exception, a spectacle to be consumed. Kuriyama's intent feels pragmatic rather than academic: she understands the audience's appetite, and she understands what it reveals about the baseline sexism the film gets to exploit - and puncture.