gender equality Tag

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From Tsunade to Mereoleona: Looking for Shonen Jump’s Lady Mentors
Although marketed toward boys, at least one third of Weekly Shonen Jump’s readers are now female. Despite this, Shonen Jump’s female characters remain over-sexualized, helpless, or useless beyond serving a role as the main character’s love interest. The manga and anime world has not yet caught up with the times by creating female characters that are both realistic and sympathetic to their real-world counterparts, and as prominent and important as their male costars. If one in three readers are female, why are female characters still relegated to the sidelines?

Versusby Ivy Rose September 16, 20200 Comments
Your Lie in April: An Oedipus Complex and a Manic Pixie Dream Girl have a meetcute
Your Lie in April has high ratings on almost all of the major anime databases. Unfortunately, I, the Feminist Killjoy, am here to say that Arima has an Oedipus complex and Kaori is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Featureby Caitlin Moore September 4, 20200 Comments
Tower of God’s Rachel Problem: Fandom, female antagonists, and the risks of overly vague writing
While Rachel did do many things wrong, and this is definitely not a defense of that (especially as she is coded as a blonde white woman in the art), her character’s depiction can open a larger discussion about portrayals of female antagonists, and patterns of online fandom misogyny.

Featureby Olive St. Sauver August 28, 20200 Comments
The Devils in the Details: The grotesquely charming world of Hayashida Q
Hayashida may not be the only female seinen mangaka – there’s Mori Kaoru and Urushibara Yuki, authors of A Bride’s Story and Mushishi respectively, to name just a couple – but she is certainly unique among them. While female-written seinen manga spans a wide array of genres from historical dramas to cooking comedies, Hayashida stands apart from the rest due to her focus on gruesome body horror and gleefully graphic violence.

Creator Spotlightby Kirsten Doroff August 26, 20200 Comments
“Who the Hell Do You Think We Are?” Gurren Lagann’s blunted message of liberation
A distinct antiauthoritarian spirit runs through Imaishi’s works. Yet nowhere is the director’s call for collective action more realized, but most glaringly compromised, than in the show that made him a household name: Gurren Lagann.

Featureby Stephen Hero August 14, 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
The Post-Apocalypse Which Enforces Gender Roles: Code Vein
The game’s cast is gender balanced, with a roughly equal number of male and female characters, and the female ones play an important role in driving the story. While that sounds great on paper, the problem lies in the gender-essentialist ways that “importance” works out.

Featureby Tessie Alina Corwin August 5, 20200 Comments
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.

Historyby Anthony Gramuglia July 29, 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
Bend the Rules, but Never Break Them: Individual growth and systemic oppression in Yu-Gi-Oh!
While the series wants to tell a story about individuals overcoming their trauma and inner darkness, its strength at depicting individual growth often conflicts with the conservative social systems it ultimately upholds.

Featureby Vrai Kaiser June 26, 20200 Comments
How Can I Connect to You? Breaking out of toxic masculinity and capitalist ideologies in SARAZANMAI
Both Kazuki and Toi emerge from similar circumstances of capitalism, oppression, and the hypermasculine coping mechanisms they’ve been given to deal with the pain of that oppression. It is only through learning to care for one another—and learning that they can care for one another—that they can both be free.

Featureby Anthony Sun Prickett June 19, 20200 Comments
A Thousand Good Excuses: LGBTQ representation in Gankutsuou vs. The Count of Monte Cristo
If all representation is good representation, then Gankutsuou’s two LGBTQ characters should win out against Dumas’ one. But if we are to examine representation with a more critical eye, it is difficult to conclude that the later reimagining of the story does any more for queer people than does the story as first told some hundred and sixty years before.

Versusby sunnysegons June 12, 20200 Comments
Beauty and Beast: The messy, complex women of Helter Skelter and Pink
Constantly, in pop culture, we see women being used as an accessory, a love interest, a mother, but in Okazaki’s world, women take the main stage and prove that a female-led manga can be just as impactful as stories focused around men. These two stories explore both the “beauty” and the “beast” contained within their heroines.

Featureby Teresa Navarro June 3, 20201 Comment
Allegory, Allegorier, Allegoriest: Visual storytelling and empathy in Revolutionary Girl Utena
Revolutionary Girl Utena has a well-deserved reputation for being difficult to parse. Dense with metaphor, thinly-veiled critique of old shoujo tropes, and allusions to obscure literature, Utena’s style of storytelling relies heavily on its own visual language.

Featureby Meg Ross May 27, 20200 Comments
Skip Beat!’s Harmful Healing: Forgiving abuse at the cost of self-worth
As Kyoko struggles to recover from abuse and trauma, she is encouraged to forgive everyone around her, put her own happiness last, and believe that love cures all. Skip Beat’s prioritization of these ideals over actual healing processes perpetuates unhealthy, even dangerous ideas about recovery.

Featureby Baillie Pucket May 22, 20200 Comments
My Fave is Problematic: Nobunagun
You never know when a series you watch on a whim will turn out to be one of your favorites. That’s how I discovered Nobunagun: I just plopped it onto my Crunchyroll queue after seeing my favorite voice actress, Asakawa Yuu, tweeting about it.

My Fave is Problematicby Kayu Chen May 15, 20200 Comments
“A Man Who Can Experience His Feelings”: Fruits Basket, toxic masculinity, and mental health
Fruits Basket is a radical work regarding its treatment of mental health because it actively works to destigmatize mental illness, critiquing and dismantling ideas about toxic masculinity through its portrayal of mental health.

Featureby Katie Randazzo May 8, 20200 Comments
My Hero Academia Shows Us How To Write Damsels (And Dudes) In Distress
It’s easy to think the best solution to any harmful trope is to avoid it altogether and, to an extent, in the short term, this is true. In the long term, however, avoiding a trope entirely can be counterproductive, creating a new harmful trope on the other side of that same coin.

Featureby Marina Garrow March 27, 20200 Comments
Rage, Mentors, and Rebellions in Classic vs. Modern Sukeban Anime Girls
While old-school sukeban (“boss girls”) anime/manga characters come across as irrational in their anger and resentment toward society (until the very end of their respective series, at least), newer sukeban characters often are more level-headed, using their rebellious spirit to improve their circumstances.

Versusby Athena Zhang Baker March 20, 20200 Comments
Coping with Trauma and the Burden of Leadership in Maid-sama!
Juggling respect and likability is a tightrope many women are forced to walk. This intricate dance of cultivating social and professional balance is what first drew me to Maid-sama!.

Featureby Luisa Aparisi-França March 11, 20200 Comments