I was expecting Your Name to be a fluffy, gender-bending rom-com, and I got that. What I wasn’t expecting, though, were the progressive and fantastical twists that breathed new life into the exhausted body-swapping subgenre.
What makes a trash character? What’s the connection between trash characters and other anime archetypes, like moe or chuunibyou? How are male and female trash characters portrayed differently?
While they take place in very different settings, Rakugo Shinju and Yuri on Ice both challenge cultural expectations about how men should or shouldn’t act, and show why it’s important to cast aside restrictive gender roles and play to our own strengths.
In recent years, women’s sports anime hasn’t been able to grasp the same popularity it did during the intense shoujo showdowns of the ’60s, leaving female-driven sports anime lacking in quantity.
