2025 Winter Premiere Digest
The new year starts strong with multiple promising shoujo and the return of a beloved (by us) female director.
Feature Category
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2025 Winter Premiere Reviews
All the winter premiere reviews in one easy-to-find place. We’ll update the chart as new series become available, so be sure to check back in the coming days for more!
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Embracing darkness and exploring the female gaze in After God
After God is a wonderful example of how female characters in shounen can go beyond simplistic portrayals of strength and beauty, exploring the darker and more complex aspects of human emotions and identity–without disappearing from the narrative or being made an object.
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Cannibalism, the abject, and queering the narrative in Delicious in Dungeon
The main cast all cross, blur, or sit outside of social norms in some way, engaging in some taboo or another—heroes on the margins who are uniquely placed to engage with the abject horrors of the dungeon and transform them into something else through their unique, outsider perspectives.
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Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! and the toxic workplace
While toxic workplace culture is originally presented as something that’s keeping the couple apart, ultimately the narrative ends up reinforcing it, asserting that finding happiness in love and expressing your own queer identity are less important than maintaining a conservative, capitalistic status quo.
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Resilience and Resistance: Reimagining marginality and agency in The Apothecary Diaries
The Apothecary Diaries re-imagines the social life of women in its fictional society, showcasing how, despite living in oppressive systems, women continuously negotiate their existence through resilience, intellect, and community.
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Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on Pokémon’s “Electric Soldier Porygon”
As an Epileptic, I’ve been very outspoken about my opinions on the increased use of strobe lighting effects in American cartoons. Yet people have accused me of being a hypocrite: why do I continue to love Pokémon? My response often surprises people. That, in my personal opinion, morally speaking, the animators were not responsible for what happened. That Porygon was, in fact, innocent.
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Mental Health Crisis Resources and Advocacy Groups
As most of us are based in the United States, recent electoral news has hit the team hard. We suspect the same is the case for many of you out there. In lieu of posting today’s feature, we wanted to offer a post with resources for those looking for mental health/crisis help or for causes currently seeking donations.
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2024 Fall Three-Episode Check-In
This season is all about the popcorn-munching drama, from erotic thrillers to court drama.
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2024 Fall Premiere Digest
We’re going back to school with lots of magical girls this season!
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2024 Fall Premiere Reviews
All the fall premiere reviews in one easy-to-find place. We’ll update the chart as new series become available, so be sure to check back in the coming days for more! We’re having a giveaway! Starting October 1-5, sign up for a year’s subscription on our Patreon at the $5 tier or donate $50 to our […]
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Talk to Me: The stories you run into during an interview
From the reader or viewer’s perspective, the exchange seems seamless and natural, because how hard can it be to just talk to someone? Today, I’m here to tell you, it’s actually pretty hard.
Or: Chiaki just wanted to brag she gets fed at interviews with the rich and famous sometimes.
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Parade Parade and the Phallic Woman Fantasy
Parade Parade is part of a long tradition of media, especially pornographic media, that fetishizes trans and intersex women as victims and perpetrators of rape. It is also somewhat unusual in its focus on lesbian and long-term relationships.
Because we marginalized women are considered too unsanitary for the societies we live in, we are forced to look to the margins of media for representation, even if it also dehumanizes us. The narrative violence of the film, to those of us who relate to Kaori’s position, is not at all unlike how the world outside of Parade Parade treats us trans and/or intersex women.
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Attention to the letter: Lettering and Deaf representation in A Sign of Affection
It’s clear that Yuki’s the one we’re following along this journey, without the assumption that an able-bodied reader needs to have everything about her disability painstakingly explained to them. As well as the storytelling structure itself, this is achieved through suu Morishita’s ingenious use of lettering, wherein the format and function of the words on the page themselves allow the reader to experience the world as Yuki does: thus allowing this to be her story, told with her own words, and of her own experiences.
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Redemption and Retribution: Female antagonists in Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood
Fordola and Yotsuyu’s treatment and ultimate fate in the story are starkly different, and in this way they clearly expose underlying gendered biases in how their writers think about Evil Women(TM) and who “deserves” redemption in narratives about trauma and war.
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Show Time!: Mixing erotica, sex positivity, and TV idols
Declaring Show Time! as part of an entertainment criticism pantheon may overstate its importance in the anime sphere. However, this hentai uses its erotic elements to explore issues and humanize actresses in a way those other shows for general audiences cannot.
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2024 Summer Three-Episode Check-In
‘Tis the season of mess, whether from characters or writing.
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How Another Code: Recollection rewrote its villain in an empathetic way
Among the changes that this remake made to its source material, the most personally striking was the radical difference in one character: Ryan Gray, a neurodivergent-coded antagonist originally presented as an unambiguous villain, but reinvented as a nuanced, sympathetic figure.
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2024 Summer Premiere Digest
It’s a summer of love, ranging from sweet to very, very messy.
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Classmates and finding the humanity in clichés
In the afterword of the first volume of Classmates, Nakamura Asumiko wrote of her first BL series, “I wanted to go with something cliche, almost hackneyed.” It’s true, Classmates does indulge many of the standards of the genre. Instead of using these cliches as shortcuts, however, Nakamura uses the reader’s familiarity to build a framework for a humanistic, multifaceted story about queer intimacy, connection, and joy.
