Death Notes on Camp: Repurposing a classic
New layers and new ways to appreciate the series emerge when it’s considered as a campy melodrama rather than the brooding thriller that writer Ohba Tsugumi intended it to be.
gender equality Tag
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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.
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“I Can’t Wait Around Anymore”: Civilian women’s agency in My Hero Academia versus Fullmetal Alchemist
The emotional strain a woman experiences in a relationship with someone who’s so often in danger yet doesn’t communicate is rarely treated as a real issue. A woman’s opinion apparently doesn’t count if she’s not involved in combat. In fact, it’s almost implied that she doesn’t count.
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Unsung Heroes: The women of The Heike Story
The creators of The Heike Story go a step further beyond tribute with the character of Biwa: by presenting her as the epic’s original author-performer, the anime adaptation places the theme of female agency front and center in what is otherwise a male-centric work.
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The real-life adventures of teen racer Noda Juju adapted by manga creator Inuwashi
Noda Juju is a prodigy in the racing circuit and has gained an immense following over the years due to her popularity as a race car driver in Japan. She started to drive small cars when she was 3-years old and gradually began competing against adults in tournaments. When she met manga creator, Inuwashi in 2021, she was excited at the idea of adapting her story into a manga series on YouTube.
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Clothes Make the Guardian: Fashion and femininity in the Sailor Moon franchise
The silhouettes and clothing styles from the original 1990s Sailor Moon anime, as well as the manga, are consistent and intentional. What is feminine becomes something powerful. Unfortunately, this idea doesn’t carry through to much of modern Sailor Moon media. The new adaptations betray the purposeful fashion of the original series in a way that undermines the story’s overall gender commentary.
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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.
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All My Darling Daughters and the need for working women’s success and failure stories
Just as inspirational stories of women who achieve their goals are necessary, stories of those who are forced to relinquish them are equally important. Success stories are empowering, but in a vacuum they may unintentionally insinuate that failure also rests entirely on effort, laying the blame on women themselves rather than the disadvantages they face as a result of gender inequality.
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Choosing to “Remain Strong” Against Female Criticism: The vindictive storytelling of Oda Eiichiro
While One Piece looms large in the present and past, conversations about how Oda treats women have often taken place on a surface level. Oda started his career by including women in prominent and active roles in his stories. But as time went on, he began responding to criticism by taking it out on his female characters and fans alike, undoing the good work he had done in the series’ early days.
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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.
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Re:Zero’s critique of Nice Guy Subaru and supposedly selfless love
Though often shown empathizing with and caring for Emilia, Subaru is also manipulative and controlling towards her. Re:Zero highlights these contradictions to create a portrayal of what is often the actual problem with Nice Guys: the assumption of commodifying good behavior for the return of love or sex, and the sense of entitlement or control over the person they like that often stems from it.
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Wolf Queens and Girl Heroes: How Lonely Castle in the Mirror plays with gendered fairytale tropes
Tsujimura Mizuki’s best-selling novel Lonely Castle in the Mirror twists and plays with familiar fairytale tropes to empower its young female characters.
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Daring to Speak its Name: Goodbye, My Rose Garden and the queer historical romance
Set in 1900 England and steeped in references to both the history and literature of the Victorian era, Goodbye, My Rose Garden draws on turn-of-the-century reality and fantasy alike to highlight the intersectional struggles of queer women of the period.
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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.
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Brazilian mangaka Marina de Melo do Nascimento broke the internet and the rules to make her way to Japan
Nascimento studied the work of one of Japan’s famous feminist scholars, Kishida Toshiko (1864 – 1901), and her place of study is especially meaningful given that Tohoku University was the first university to accept women as students back in the early 1900’s. Nascimento is also known as Mmyoi and is the creator of The Bride of the Fox.
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Love Hina and the Normalization of Male Abuse
The abuse women can inflict on their partners is a topic taken seriously by intersectional feminist discourse, but often dismissed and even normalized in mainstream media. In anime, this was especially prominent in the world of harem anime. The wildly popular 2000s series Love Hina is a useful emblem of this, as it showcases normalized abuse directed by women toward its male protagonist.
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Writer Budjette Tan discusses Filipino folklore and the TRESE anime’s international reach
Michele Kirichanskaya recently had the chance to interview Budjette Tan about working as the writer of Trese and the series’ recent anime adaption on Netflix
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Gearing Up or Dressing Up? On female fighter equipment
When it comes to a particular category of battle-related gripes, I think I’m less the annoyingly fastidious critic nobody wants to watch a show with, and am actually harping about something genuinely important: female fighter equipment, which too often sacrifices realism and practicality in favor of sex appeal. In anime, this issue manifests in three major forms: “boob armor,” high heels, and “chainmail bikinis,” all which hurt the dignity of not only the characters who must wear them but also the female viewers who must endure the real-world effects of such normalized sexualization of womens’ bodies.
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The Dead Mothers of Shounen
To be a mother in a shounen series, especially of a male protagonist, is often a guaranteed death sentence. It also means a lack of characterization outside of her role as a caretaker. Even otherwise highly acclaimed series are guilty of these tropes, and I can’t help but wonder why they continue to persist.
