Sailor Moon From Manga to Anime: What does systemic villainy look like?
In effect, Sailor Moon’s narrative asked if individuals commit acts of evil or if evil is an inevitable force, and came up with two separate answers.
Posts by Anthony Gramuglia
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Ai Yori Aoshi at 20: The harem anime that almost broke the mold
Ai Yori Aoshi in many ways feels distinct from the tropes established in titles like Love Hina, despite being a contemporary of it. When revisiting it twenty years later, is this some diamond in the rough, or a relic of an era long past?
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Queer media, escapism and self-discovery in Sasaki and Miyano
While the series itself is a sweet, wholesome story about self-discovery, it also offers an incredibly potent metatextual analysis of how queer media can help LGBTQ+ teens come to understand themselves.
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Love Hina and the Normalization of Male Abuse
The abuse women can inflict on their partners is a topic taken seriously by intersectional feminist discourse, but often dismissed and even normalized in mainstream media. In anime, this was especially prominent in the world of harem anime. The wildly popular 2000s series Love Hina is a useful emblem of this, as it showcases normalized abuse directed by women toward its male protagonist.
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Misato Katsuragi lives an existential millennial nightmare
Evangelion takes place in the year 2015. Misato, 29 at the start of the anime, would have been born in 1986. With this knowledge, both American millennials and the members of Japan’s Lost Generation who came of age following Japan’s economic recession in the ‘90s may joke about how Misato is a millennial stereotype. However, this goes beyond a meme and into a message about processing pain, pressure and grief.
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Youth in Revolt: How the late-80s/early-90s celebrated the young rebelling against their elders
For every manga and anime from the 1980s and 1990s that promoted conformity to society and obeying the rules, there were many others that instead featured delinquents as protagonists and found popularity among readers who inherited an economy pulverized by their parents.
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Dumbbells, Katsudon, and Fat Gum: Fat-shaming and body positivity in modern anime
Anime (like media in general) has a rough record when it comes to body positivity. Fat-shaming is frequent and even stories that attempt positivity often fall into fetishization. Fortunately, there are bright spots as well, particularly in series that integrate fat characters without drawing attention to it.
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How Dragon Ball Z helped me fight back against toxic masculinity
While Dragon Ball Z is best known for its epic battles and power struggles, the series has meant much more to me than that. It helped me as a man address problematic aspects of my life and expectations placed upon me that I had up until that point either neglected or outright ignored.
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Go For It, Nakamura! is the throwback gay rom-com we always needed
Seldom is gay manga as wholesome as Go For It, Nakamura!, but this eleven-chapter manga is as soft and sweet as it gets. The comical hijinks and silly conflicts resemble the older romances of the ‘90s anime scene, becoming a window into what could have been if LGBTQIA entertainment had become more mainstream way earlier.
