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.
mental health Tag
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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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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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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.
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The Always Smiling Girl: How Tohru critiques toxic positivity
The narrative takes care to demonstrate that Tohru has her own issues, and highlights that her relentlessly positive attitude and her devotion to putting others before herself is not healthy. Ultimately, Fruits Basket explores and unpacks the harmful side of her relentless positivity as one of many healing stories across the series.
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Convenient Monsters: The problem with Frill and Wonder Egg Priority’s take on trauma
Just as the dreamscape Wonder Killers provide a convenient and killable representation of the issues that harm young people, the writers of the show invent a convenient “monster” and pin the blame for those very issues on her. As a result, a lot of the nuance in the series’ treatment of trauma and suicide is lost.
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My Fave is Problematic: Samurai Flamenco
No one has ever asked whether Samurai Flamenco is good, because the question is a loud and simultaneous “no” and “yes.” But the question of whether it “counts” as queer romance has waged on for eight exhausting years now. Incidentally: yes, it does.
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ADHD as Investigation: How Hyouka’s Chitanda carves space for herself as a leader
ADHD is often maligned as strictly a lack of the willpower necessary to concentrate, or a simple inability to ignore distractions. But through her investigations, Chitanda exhibits behaviors characteristic of ADHD that contribute to, rather than hamper, her ability to lead herself and others.
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1122: For a Happy Marriage explores how prescribed gender roles can damage marriages
1122: For a Happy Marriage examines two different married couples that are pressured to adhere to gender and allonormative roles within marriage, which ultimately damages their marital relationships.
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Misato Katsuragi lives an existential millennial nightmare
Evangelion takes place in the year 2015. Misato, 29 at the start of the anime, would have been born in 1986. With this knowledge, both American millennials and the members of Japan’s Lost Generation who came of age following Japan’s economic recession in the ‘90s may joke about how Misato is a millennial stereotype. However, this goes beyond a meme and into a message about processing pain, pressure and grief.
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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.
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“What If Our Greatest Pain Speaks to Us?” Using the supernatural to explore mental health in Bunny Girl Senpai
If I feel invisible, then I turn invisible. If I feel conflicted about myself, I split into two people. If I suffer from verbal bullying, then I wake up with cuts and scrapes all over my body. This is Adolescence Syndrome, the key concept behind Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai, which the series uses to explore various social anxieties and mental health issues that can affect young people but which often go unnoticed.
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Thinking Outside the Circle: Accessibility and education in Witch Hat Atelier
Using its “magical school” premise, Witch Hat Atelier explores diversity among students and argues for the importance of accessibility throughout society, but especially in education. With supportive mentors and a focus on individual accommodation, anyone really can wield their own kind of magic.
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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.
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“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.
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Joy in the Apocalypse: Ruminations driving through desolation
At first glance, Ashinano Hitoshi’s 1995 sci-fi world seems no more than a quiet and rural part of modern Japan, but the easygoing protagonists live amidst ruin in what would have been the metropolitan Tokyo Bay. Entire cities have sunk and an untold number of lives have likely been shattered, yet the comic takes solace, even joy, in depicting the beauty of the world as humanity sits back to accept its fate.
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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!.
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I Am One Yet Many: Plurality representation in the When They Cry Series
The horror genre has historically stigmatized mental health conditions, but Ciconia normalizes plurality and frames it as explicitly positive, making me feel comfortable in trying to express myself as plural.
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Indecent Exposure of the Soul: Trauma and recovery in Gintama
When I found Gintama, I was going through the worst depressive/anxious episode of my life. The thought that plagued me the most was: “How am I going to live like this?” Of all the people in the world, I was not expecting Sakata Gintoki to give me an answer.
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After the Injury: Rediscovering my athletic identity through After the Rain’s Akira
Series that focus on non-cis male athletes in a serious, competitive environment, let alone deal with the mental health issues that some athletes face, are rare and valuable. I was absorbed with how much I saw my own relationship with tennis in Akira’s relationship with track, and that it wasn’t cute. It hurt.
