Reclaiming the Witch Through Magical Girls
There comes a time in every girl’s life where she’s obsessed with one thing: the occult.
History Category
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The Transcendent and the Perverse: Sexuality in Apollo’s Song and MW
Tezuka Osamu’s gekiga show some artistic experimentation, but also dig further into his conservative ideas about gender and sexuality, which were more ignorable in titles aimed at wider audiences. Two stories in particular, Apollo’s Song and MW, hammer in how much of his work was steeped in heteronormativity and homophobia.
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FAKE and the Found Family: The ’90s BL cop drama that influenced a genre
FAKE is a BL mystery-drama manga originally published between 1994 and 2000. The dominant emotional line throughout the series is the evolving relationship between detectives Dee and Ryo. However, just as important as the mysteries and the growing romance is the found family that the detectives build and the support it provides them.
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Nonconforming in the ‘90s: How Pokemon’s gender variance caught the hearts of a generation
Twenty years ago, I fell in love with the Pokemon anime. Now, I think I can finally tell you why: why this strange, silly, sincere show mattered. How it filled the space between “boy stuff” and “girl stuff,” treated both as having value, and challenged why there was a division in the first place.
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Shoujo Manga’s Lost Generation
The 1950s and 1960s were a time of incredible change, when a generation of young women emerged to forge many of the conventions and visual language we associate with shoujo manga. That makes it all the more tragic that this period has fallen into obscurity, as time and circumstances threaten to erase it.
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Not with a Bang, but a Letter: How Violet Evergarden rewrites traditional World War I narratives
Violet Evergarden reimagines historical discussion of post-traumatic stress, early 1900s literary tropes, and the popular “war narrative” genre, but with a female child soldier as its protagonist. In its remixing and calling back to World War I history and especially women’s history, the series provides a fresh take on an old tale with a strong undercurrent of feminist themes.
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Every Rose Has Its Thorns: Vilifying female ambition in The Rose of Versailles
As a main character, Oscar is an all-encompassing figure who struggles with gender roles, duty, empathy, and more. But with Marie Antoinette and the women who act as villains, we see a more traditional exploration of female power, ambition, and anger.
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Southeast Asians Not Included: Black Lagoon and the invisible civilians
Sayang. It’s a word in Tagalog that expresses light frustration and disappointment at a missed opportunity, a combination of “so close” and “what a shame” in one word.
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The Tezuka Revue: How an all-woman theatre troupe influenced the Godfather of Manga
Osamu Tezuka is considered one of the most influential artists in the manga and comic industry. But who inspired Tezuka? It’s common knowledge that he was a huge Walt Disney fan, but there’s an influence on Tezuka that isn’t as well known: the Takarazuka Revue.
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From Princes to Pigeons: A Beginner’s Guide to Otome Games
In the world of video games, anything is possible. You can be a cavegirl dating pigeons in a post-apocalyptic romantic dramedy, or someone helping humanized swords fight against historical revisionism, or you could even be a gender-nonconforming barista at a cat cafe. In other words, you could be playing an otome game.
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Flowers for Zoisite: How Sailor Moon’s iconic queer villains raised the bar
While the romance between Sailors Uranus and Neptune has rightfully earned praise,Sailor Moon’s other explicitly queer relationship gets little notice. And that’s a shame, because Zoisite and Kunzite were remarkably progressive compared to both their contemporaries and what had come before.
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Banana Fish and the real-world racial politics of 1980s America
The classic 1980s Banana Fish manga is a painful read because it’s able to capture how pervasive white supremacy is throughout all sectors of society. The series also depicts how that ideology is perpetuated through interpersonal relationships and how it has an influence on real-world policy decisions.
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If the Belt Fits: The battle for trans characters in fighting games
Ask someone who plays fighting games to list trans characters and they’re probably going to struggle. It’s not exactly their fault, either: While indie games offer marginalized creators a chance to represent themselves and major Action/RPG franchises have worked to make their worlds more diverse, fighting games are one of the many genres lagging behind.
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Hollow Shells: The feminist core of Dominion Tank Police
The Dominion Tank Police OVA was released in 1989 and tells the near-future tale of tank-equipped law enforcement. This isn’t exactly an outlier for a bubble-era OVA production—but it is precisely those standard trappings which help make its female protagonist and central message so potent.
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The Diversification of Otaku in Japanese Media
While as a westerner it’s difficult to have a truly nuanced understanding of the cultural norms surrounding the term “otaku,” we can get an idea of how stereotypes and expectations have changed by looking at how otaku are portrayed in anime and manga, and how those portrayals have evolved over the years.
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Not Just A Man’s Job: How war involves (and hurts) everybody in Gundam 0080
In Gundam 0080, our protagonist watches paramedics pull a female pilot out of a wrecked Gundam surrounded by debris. He is shocked, pupils as dilated as can be. To him, this female pilot occupies a very different sphere: a domestic one. In fact, she’s his old babysitter.
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Sazae-san and the Grandmother of Manga
Osamu Tezuka is often called “the Godfather of Manga.” But if there’s a Godfather of Manga, does that mean there’s a Godmother of Manga, too? There is, in fact! Her name is Machiko Hasegawa and she’s profoundly influenced animation and manga with her most popular work, The Wonderful World of Sazae-san.
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Why We Call it “Yuri”
“Yuri” is a complicated word and a complicated genre. Complicated, because words often change shape after they have been coined and exceed their roots, sometimes even completely changing their meaning to the opposite of their original intent.
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Ahead of The Pack: How Trixie in Speed Racer broke gender barriers
At a time when most female characters on television were barely allowed to have careers, Speed Racer‘s Trixie was an action star in her own right, a racing professional and hero on equal footing with the male characters.
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From Eroica with Love is the 1970s gay thief caper you never knew you needed
Eroica is often recommended based on its delightfully out-there narrative elements, but none of that quite compares to getting to see a gay protagonist star in a comedic spy thriller.
