We Need Your Help!
We’re dedicated to paying our contributors and staff members fairly for their work—but we can’t do it alone.
You can become a patron for as little as $1 a month, and every single penny goes to the people and services that keep Anime Feminist running. Please help us pay more people to make great content!
Any story that wants to explore this darker side of humanity must be willing to explore how doing horrible things affects the world and people around you, or it risks trivializing the true horrors of the darkness it depicts.
Despite its enthusiastic embrace of playful exaggeration and dramatic pageantry, Baki the Grappler shouldn’t be written off as mind-numbing entertainment for the masses. A critical analysis of Baki as contemporary anime, and a part of pop culture more broadly speaking, can help us all better understand how performative masculinity functions—and why it is so potentially dangerous.