Queer Self-Acceptance in Guilty Gear Strive
Testament, Venom, and Bridget’s growth in their personal plotlines runs parallel to the evolution of LGBTQIA+ representation in games, increasingly offering us a roster of nuanced, happy queer characters.
History Category
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Hagio Moto’s Marginal and BL manga as feminist fabulation
With regards to her own work, Hagio Moto has often talked about how writing boy’s love manga freed her to explore kinds of stories that she felt like she couldn’t tell about female characters, and 1985’s Marginal is a particularly interesting example of how BL comics can be used to talk about women’s experiences of their own gender and the patriarchy.
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Coming of age as a queer teen in Okazaki Kyoko’s River’s Edge
River’s Edge features a range of queer representations within its central cast, from frank depictions of closeted life and homophobia to more ambiguous depictions of attraction, making it a layered piece of LGBTQIA+ media and a powerful time capsule of the state of queer representation and queer life in Japan during the 1990s.
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Social Commentary, Horror Manga and the Left: From Ero-Guro to Junji Ito
Communism is when I write horror manga. This fact has generally been unrecognized in discussions on the subject.
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Evangelion, alienation, and Japan’s 1990s economic crisis
In a time wracked by despair, paranoia, and economic devastation, Evangelion captured the nihilistic zeitgeist of a nation and its citizenry
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From Takarazuka to Terayama: The influence of queer theater on Revolutionary Girl Utena
While the influence of theater on Utena isn’t subtle, knowing what specific strains of theater the show references would likely be lost on most viewers. Yet uncovering those histories can be like finding little Rosetta Stones to help you parse a show that prides itself on obscurity.
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Rainbows and Rollerblades: The queer evolution of the Scott Pilgrim series
This series has always been queer, it’s just been handled in different ways, with earnest character writing that nonetheless reflected the stereotypes and assumptions of the early 2000s, before unfolding into a more careful, nuanced narrative of sexual fluidity and love in the 2020s.
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“An Inner Revolution Of The Japanese Women”: The Rose of Versailles as feminist historical fiction
The Rose of Versailles makes the argument that women’s lives and the romance genre can be radical and revolutionary—and, in fact, they were always central to revolutionary movements.
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Lum Through the Years: Urusei Yatsura’s gender roles, then and now
While Lum herself unquestionably remains an anime icon, looking to the different ways she’s depicted in the older anime versus the new can shed some light on changing attitudes to the genre and archetype she’s so nicely embodied over time.
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Sharp Blades, Soft Frills: Femme rebellion in lolita fashion, Japan.
Lolita fashion has been part of Japan’s rich alternative scene for over 40 years. It is a celebration of self and is intended to provide a ‘hyper-femme space’ away from the imposition of the male gaze. Not to be confused with Vladmir Nabakov’s (1955) Lolita, this movement actually uses the word “lolita” to mean frilly “French-inspired” fashion. A big influence on lolita fashion is kawaii and Japanese “girl culture” which is for anyone of all genders and ages.
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The Journey to Cure Wing: A history of magical boys in PreCure
Soaring Sky! PreCure is the first in the franchise to introduce a boy to the team, with Cure in his name, who isn’t a supporting character or sidekick. It’s been a long journey but this is significant for the show, and also for the genre as a whole, since Pretty Cure is now the dominant magical girl series for Japanese children. How did we get here?
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Higurashi, subversion of moe, and the birth of the modern yandere
Rena and Shion originally appeared in direct counterpoint to the then-oversaturated moe tropes of the time; however, what began as subversion would become an archetype all of its own, for better or worse.
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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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Everybody Loves Bridget: The origins of otokonoko and birth of a trans icon
Amidst of a lot of bad news in summer 2022, one thing trans people found to celebrate was the transition of Brisket—or rather Bridget, an iconic video game character with a fraught history (in the games and in the real world) who came out as trans. But there’s a lot more to this story than many are fully aware of, and the character who defined an archetype so powerful it became a gender identity deserves to have her whole story told.
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The Phantom of Ghost Stories: Double standards in the war on “localization”
Regardless of how anyone feels about the Ghost Stories dub itself, its legacy is virtually inescapable, and it’s had a big impact on how we talk about localization and translation in anime, even to this day.
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Revisiting the Popularity and Cultural Context of Vampire Knight
For better or for worse, there’s nothing quite like Vampire Knight out there. Revisiting the series today—about 15 years after its release—reveals not only a lot of its shortcomings, but a lot about the cultural context in which it was released.
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“If I Was Born As A Girl…”: Transfeminine desire in Stop!! Hibari-Kun
Stop!! Hibari-kun treads plenty of expected ground when it comes to teenage romantic comedy because, at its core, the narrative is cut from the same striped cloth as Urusei Yatsura. However, Hibari isn’t an alien in a bikini or a widowed landlady—she’s a trans teenager.
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Love, Agency, and Androids: A Chobits Retrospective
Chobits uses its post-humanist storytelling to ask questions about the highly personal relationships that humans can develop with something that looks human or shares human qualities, but can never exactly be human. Because the persocoms are almost all built to look like young women, it also creates a space to ask questions about gender roles in relationships and how those perceived as female can be literally objectified. At times, Chobits presents a very compelling and empowering narrative around love, personal choice, and sacrifice. Yet, simultaneously, Chobits fails to reckon with the very questions it raises.
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Reconsidering Belladonna of Sadness: Still powerful after almost 50 years
1973’s Belladonna of Sadness combines a 19th century work’s vision of the liberated witch with second-wave feminist ideology to create a flawed but fascinating work that invites revisiting even all these years later.
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The Metamorphosis of the Magical Girl Genre
As the tone in the Madoka series shifted at the end of episode three, so did the tone of the mahou shoujo genre as a whole, leading to a change in demographic focus that’s still being felt today.
