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I’m Not Okay (and That’s Okay): Happy Sugar Life and the comfort of “bad survivor” narratives
Reading through Happy Sugar Life was a therapy I didn’t know I needed. With its wild-eyed, camera-spinning melodrama, it managed to capture so many unwanted feelings of anger, sorrow, desperation, resentment, anxiety, and at times, a truly aching nothingness. I joy-rode this tour-de-madness, but even I still spent a week afterward somewhere between “destabilized” and “no bath or shower will make me feel clean.”

Perspectivesby Aquarius August 17, 20220 Comments
Ribbons for the Win: Battling internalized misogyny with Pokemon Diamond & Pearl
I watched Pokemon: Diamond & Pearl during elementary and middle school, and Dawn became one of my all-time favorite characters. This might seem a little strange given that Dawn was a girl who loved pink and dresses, while I was a girl who rejected all things feminine, including my “girly” classmates. However, I realize now that I adored her so much because she challenged my conceptions of what femininity could be.

Perspectivesby Julianne Estur August 3, 20220 Comments
Personifying and relating to neurodiversity in Love, Chuunibyou and Other Delusions
When I first watched Love, Chuunibyou and Other Delusions I had no idea what “chuunibyou” was, but the anime quickly made me think: I was definitely a chuunibyou as a kid! While not a form of mental divergence in and of itself, I contend that for neurodiverse kids, chuunibyou can be a coping mechanism.

Perspectivesby Carmen Antreasian June 8, 20220 Comments
How shoujo manga helps me grapple with internalized misogyny
I’ve been a fan of shoujo manga for 20 years, and for much of that, I’ve been fighting to get other manga readers to take it more seriously. I even started a podcast, Shojo & Tell, where I talk to other fans and industry professionals about it. Even so, the word “shoujo” for me evokes knee-jerk stereotypes and assumptions that I have to consciously fight against.

Perspectivesby Ashley McDonnell May 18, 20220 Comments
Reading The Duke of Death and His Maid as disability allegory
The Duke of Death and His Maid takes what could be a cheap device for titillation and, intentionally or not, transforms it into something far more emotionally powerful. When looking at the show as a story with metaphors about disability and navigating disability in that space, it becomes difficult to remove the fanservice without making the story weaker.

Perspectivesby Borealis Capps May 11, 20220 Comments
Mirror, Mirror: Ouran High School Host Club and reflections of twin identity
One of the most clever anime/manga series of the 2000s, Ouran High School Host Club is best known for the gently satirical way it engages with classic shoujo tropes, with its characters performing and overexaggerating certain traits for an audience of squealing female clients. It examines twin tropes through Hikaru and Kaoru, playing up certain stereotypes while dismantling others, and creates a more human portrayal of twin identity than most of the media it parodies.

Perspectivesby Michele Kirichanskaya March 2, 20220 Comments
I Like Your Style: How The Prince of Tennis helped me shape my butch fashion sense
I studied storefront displays too, the Aeropostale mannequin sporting the same dress as my lab partner. What did my peers see in these clothes that I couldn’t? I didn’t know, but I hated it: clothes, fashion, school, my classmates, all of it. I was better than the other girls. Fashion was shallow. I’d stick to tennis and The Prince of Tennis instead.
Toxic thinking? Absolutely. But in 2006 I didn’t know better.

Perspectivesby Natalie Schriefer February 23, 20220 Comments
Girls Over Flowers: My resonance with Makino Tsukushi’s burden of parenting
Tsukushi faces more than just bullying from her peers and the controlling grasp of Domyouji. She also must carry the additional burden of financial instability and the pressure from her parents to marry a rich man in order to resolve their money problems. This situation forces her through the psychological process of parentification, molding her into a spirited and resolute character that I came to love.

Perspectivesby Sky February 9, 20220 Comments
The Sound of Depression: Liminal spaces, sound design, and Super Cub
Ruminations on everyone’s favorite motorbike anime, the pandemic, and my favorite topic: liminal spaces.

Perspectivesby Meru Clewis December 24, 20210 Comments
A Double Edged Sword: Reconsidering Moe Through a Neurodiverse Lens
Many criticisms of moe characteristics stem from the idea that these girl characters are created to be appealing to male viewers, and therefore cannot be relatable to any real woman in the audience. However, so-called moe series have yielded several characters that are extremely relatable to the neurodiverse female experience.

Perspectivesby Marina Garrow December 3, 20210 Comments
Slut-Shaming and the Fetishization of Queer Childhood: A love letter to Alois Trancy
Since his introduction, despite the fact that he’s a character quite hated by the audience, I’ve loved the Earl Alois Trancy as a multi-layered character that carries many intertwined themes around child abuse, queerness, genre influences and slut-shaming.

Perspectivesby Mélina Ghorafi November 17, 20210 Comments
Yuri!!! On ICE and the revolutionary portrayal of queer Slavic representation
Of all the amazing things about the show, one of the most striking to me was the revolutionary way it portrayed the intersection of queer and Slavic identity.

Perspectivesby Michele Kirichanskaya March 12, 20210 Comments
Reading Code:Realize as Queer Allegory
You wouldn’t expect an otome game like Code:Realize to have themes that resonate so strongly with common queer experiences. In many ways, the game follows genre conventions, with a heterosexual romance story following a singular heroine and a cast of attractive men. Yet it spoke to me, an enby transgender man, by exploring themes of inner discovery, found family, and self-love.

Perspectivesby Naomi "Bez" Norbez March 3, 20210 Comments
How BL and Yuri Helped Me Face My Sexuality
It took years of consuming BL and Yuri to finally face my truth: that I am queer.

Perspectivesby Cynthia Millsap February 17, 20210 Comments
Boys Run the Riot, Visual Kei, and Gender Euphoria Through Fashion
Gender identity, self expression, and ethnicity are so intertwined that it would be hard to discuss one without discussing the others. As a Japanese trans man, all of these things have come into play in relation to my self-expression and identity. One of the things I found solace and euphoria in, as a teenager, was clothing.

Perspectivesby Kazuma Hashimoto December 9, 20200 Comments
Love Me for Who I Am is inclusive, but falls short for some non-binary people
The Love Me for Who I Am manga is educational on how not to treat nonbinary people, but it’s not enough and needs to do better.

Perspectivesby Ghia Vitale November 4, 20200 Comments
Against the World: Madoka Rebellion, saviorism, and abolitionist schooling
As somebody who has witnessed repeatedly the failure of would-be individual saviors to undo entire oppressive systems, I want to try to come to a deeper understanding than what is afforded on the surface by Rebellion’s final twist. What happens when hope is institutionalized? How do oppressive ideologies shape the worlds we can imagine? And the question that has haunted me most: if in the moment we destroyed an oppressive world we were given the full power to create a new one before we had any time to heal, would we like what we make?

Perspectivesby Tony Sun Prickett September 25, 20200 Comments
How Berserk’s Casca challenges the myth of the “Strong Black Woman”
Black women always have to be strong. Society thinks we have some superhuman ability to withstand trauma. We are depicted this way all over the media to devastating results. I want to talk about Casca, a character who stands as the antithesis to this extremely harmful stereotype.

Perspectivesby Jackson P. Brown August 12, 20200 Comments
Magical Girls as Metaphor: Why coded queer narratives still have value
Even now, with the vast increase of explicit queer womxn’s representation on television over the past decade, I still see myself in Sailor Moon and The iDOLM@STER more than I see myself in Orphan Black.

Perspectivesby Sara Khan July 22, 20200 Comments
Home is Where Your Friend Is: Embracing diverse female friendships in Satoko and Nada
Satoko and Nada’s friendship is a great example of why friendships between women with disparate lives are necessary, as the two embrace their differences despite their vastly different backgrounds, protect each other, and offer one another a semblance of family when they’re far from home.

Perspectivesby Carrie McClain May 1, 20200 Comments