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.
So, is the world of Villainess a queer utopia uniquely laid out so that Catarina’s love(s) can bloom? Or is the question of world- and story-building a little more complicated?
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.
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.
As a long-time reader of manga, I always found the medium to be a means of escape to fantastical worlds. Yet, there remained a disconnect between me and the stories I was reading. Discovering I Hear the Sunspot filled that absence with its portrayal of the specific reality of being both gay and Deaf.
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.
Every character in Stars Align gets at least a few moments under the spotlight, and the team’s manager, Asuka Yuu, is no exception. Yuu provides an example of how anime can respectfully and meaningfully incorporate both LGBTQ+ characters and the challenges they face into their stories.
The first time I read Kindred Spirits on the Roof, I was surprised and even grateful, because it often felt like the game was speaking to my questioning teenage self. It attempts to honestly portray queer female relationships, but sometimes blurs the line between depicting attraction and sensationalizing it.
Ash is a problematic depiction of a queer assault survivor, but also one that claws open some of my most private, difficult wounds.
Tezuka Osamu’s gekiga show some artistic experimentation, but also dig further into his conservative ideas about gender and sexuality, which were more ignorable in titles aimed at wider audiences. Two stories in particular, Apollo’s Song and MW, hammer in how much of his work was steeped in heteronormativity and homophobia.
“Purity” is most commonly used as a shorthand for chastity or sexlessness, and generally refers to stories that don’t engage with sex at all. Though Yamada’s sincerity and innocence is part of Kase-san‘s appeal, the way it engages with the girls’ sexuality is just as important. Sex does exist in Kase-san, and while the series focuses primarily on Kase and Yamada’s emotional relationship, it also explores their physical relationship and sexual attraction to each other from the very first chapter.
Media presents a certain set of common tropes that informs much of our idea about love and what it “should” look like. Bloom Into You interrogates these tropes, making it a story that provides important queer representation in fiction while also talking about representation in fiction within the story itself.
Accepting that you’re not what’s considered “normal” by society is never easy. For me, it was accepting myself as a man romantically attracted to other men. Surrounded by a culture hostile to anybody that didn’t fit the cishet norm, I discovered myself through something very unlikely: otoge, or otome games.
What truly sold me on Scum’s Wish was that it was a romance that didn’t play by the rules. The series promises sex drama instead of sex comedy, a romance where people are flawed, ugly, disappointing creatures rather than glossy cartoon stereotypes.
In the world of video games, anything is possible. You can be a cavegirl dating pigeons in a post-apocalyptic romantic dramedy, or someone helping humanized swords fight against historical revisionism, or you could even be a gender-nonconforming barista at a cat cafe. In other words, you could be playing an otome game.
Tomie is just one version of a story we’ve heard about women over and over about the cruel, conniving woman who “gets what she deserves” after her manipulation of a man blows up in her face. This is how the stories justify and disguise their displays of male misogynistic violence: as uncontrollable supernatural urges in response to an unknowable, distinctly female evil.
Hiratori Ko’s unflinching view of a world so deeply immersed in misogyny as a mirror to our own would be deeply interesting if it didn’t simply reproduce the sins of the multitude of grimdark fantasy stories that came before it.
A lack of fiction that portrays varied, healthy sexual relationships often leads to a lack of understanding, especially among younger audience members, about how to engage in those relationships safely. This is why I was overjoyed when I found the manga Horimiya depicting a kinky relationship with a healthy separation between reality and fantasy.
Is it okay to own another person? No, of course not. Yet here I am, wearing a collar around my neck.
Throughout visual culture all over the world, sex and violence against women are constantly intermingled.
