AniFem Round-Up
Turkey! Time to Strike – Episodes 1-2
Gauging the first episode of Turkey! feels useless without the second, which is both a good and bad thing.
The action scenes look fantastic, but that’s about all there is to recommend from this premiere.
A summer marked by technical and ethical streaming issues is still home to some incredible shows.
Chatty AF 231: 2025 Spring Season Wrap-Up
Vrai, Peter, and Toni belatedly regroup to finally recap the 2025 Spring season’s many triumphs and biggest blunder.
What was your favorite Spring 2025 anime?
We’re late, but we’re here!
Beyond AniFem
Fighting for a Better Anime Industry – An Interview with Animator Supporters’ Jun Sugawara and Genga-chan (Anime News Network, Coop Bicknell)
The duo have been working for several years to create training programs and housing for up-and-coming animators.
SUGAWARA: [Nervous chuckles] Regarding MAPPA, it’s said there’s a rule that you’re not supposed to talk about it.
Genga-chan: It’s difficult, so people tend to keep it bottled up and don’t necessarily talk about it.
SUGAWARA: Most people who work in animation are fundamentally artistic, and a weird fact of the situation is that a difficult environment can sometimes lead to greater artistic work. There’s an irony in that perspective. But unfortunately, such methodologies are unsustainable, and they result in people quitting.
What’s one reality of living and working as an animator that you’d like the readers to know?
Genga-chan: Many people assume that you need to be insanely good to get your foot in the door. But actually, animation is the sort of industry where you get in, and then you become good after a decade or so of working in it. You don’t necessarily need to be super good from the get-go. Sometimes, a very talented person enters the industry, gets burned out, and leaves. And other times, a person who isn’t necessarily a super genius will enter, but they stick around for ten or twenty years. It’s the people in that latter group who end up leaving great work behind. I’m also not great [chuckles], but I’m doing my best to stick around and be part of that group.
SUGAWARA: We’re not in a great place right now. There are not enough people around. In particular, there are no great animation directors or key animators. And for in-between artists, there is no one left in Japan—it’s all being outsourced to other countries. This is a very different situation from the ’90s, where you could find good people working in those roles, and therefore, you could easily produce good work. Of course, there are the occasional good title or two being made to this day, but that’s done by using money from a big production to assemble talent from other studios. However, that’s very rare.
Bad Summer: A Horror Romance Visual Novel (Kickstarter)
The game has six romance routes and a demo available.
Bad Summer is a narrative-driven visual novel filled with romance, suspense, and a creeping sense of dread. Will you forge deep bonds and uncover the truth, or will the secrets of Bear Ridge swallow you whole?
Play as dual protagonists Jenny Lewis and Oliver Smith. Jenny is a shy guitarist trying to survive her first summer as a camp counselor. Oliver is a young detective sent to investigate a string of disappearances no one wants to talk about.
Two different routes. The same fate. Who will you love?
Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Turns an Exploitative Sport into a Predatory Game with a Relentlessly Positive Facade (Endless Mode, Grace Benfell)
It’s always worth remembering the gears going on behind gacha mechanics.
Unlike other gachas, Pretty Derby‘s gambling gains a weird resonance because of the sport it simulates. At least in American culture, horse races are associated with gambling addiction. The track is a place where poor and desperate people grow more poor and more desperate. The sport has also been brutal to the jockeys who participate in it. Laura Hillenbrand’s book Seabiscuit, about the legendary American race horse, describes jockeys starving themselves, even ingesting tape worms, to maintain light weights. It is no less harsh on the animals (for one poetic example, listen to the intro to the Killers song “Runaway Horses,” which describes a horse’s injury and the deadly aftermath). Like most sports, the horse race is easy to turn into drama, because of its connections to the most extreme demands on the body and its place in the culture as a frantic run for wealth and power.
This resonance gets even weirder because each of Pretty Derby‘s anime girls is based on a real race horse. In the game’s lore, the girls are reincarnations of these legendary steeds, who maintain their speed and stamina in this more humanoid form. There are no male uma musume, though many of the real horses Pretty Derby borrows were stallions. The cutesy designs, and the high-school like setting of Japan Tracen Academy, combine with the game’s themes of mentorship and guidance in the most loaded ways possible.
However, Pretty Derby is hardly the only gacha game to take inspiration from real-life for its collectable characters. Fate/Grand Order features historical figures from throughout all of human history. But the circumstances of Pretty Derby‘s cast make it a touch weirder. Grand Order‘s characters are mostly powerful figures whose inclusion in a silly game does nothing to shape their legacy. Pretty Derby‘s cast, in contrast, is made up of one of the most vulnerable living populations on this earth: Animals from which humans can extract profit. Race horses are bred to run; they don’t have a choice in the matter. Pretty Derby posits that these horses are not free even in death. Instead, they are doomed to relive their careers over and over until they achieve a total victory. This even includes horses that are best known for losing, like Haru Urara.
The game’s systems underline that grim subtext. If you fail any of your uma musume’s goals, career mode ends instantly and you retire that horse. You can use your retired horses, and their upgraded stats, in team races against other players and daily races against computer-controlled opponents. Furthermore, there are innumerable, more generic horse girls who fill out the rosters at lower levels who cannot get pulled from the gacha pool. These are horse girls that are destined to lose and be forgotten. The uma musume which populate Pretty Derby are at once immortal and disposable, eternal losers and forever winners, chosen over and over again.
Crunchyroll’s Annecy Moment: A Missed Opportunity for Industry Transformation (Anime News Network, Jerome Manzandarani)
The event was notably scant on discussion of coproductions as part of helping the taxed industry thrive.
This reverse cultural flow should have been the perfect launching pad for discussing international co-productions, cultural fusion storytelling, or how European creators might access Crunchyroll’s platform. Instead, Berger doubled down on the “authentic anime experience” messaging, missing a massive strategic opportunity as the rest of the world’s animation community pivots towards adult genre animation and “anime adjacent” content. If there will indeed be 1.5 billion anime fans by 2030, it seems likely that a sizeable percentage will be open to also watching complementary series and movies produced outside of Japan. The crossover audience for Arcane or Invincible with the general anime viewership is large, and based on the projections, it will also continue to grow.
Here’s what Crunchyroll isn’t talking about, but which desperately needs addressing: Japan has fewer than 6,000 animators, and that number is predicted to drop according to the Japan Research Institute. With demand for anime content exploding globally, the math simply doesn’t work without international collaboration. Japanese producers face a stark choice between AI automation and international partnerships to scale capacity. Speaking to industry professionals at the festival, there is real concern that the key anime industry stakeholders will simply “chase the money” and disregard the craft despite the tremendous value the global audience places on the medium’s authenticity and artisan reputation. Will the audience be satisfied with an explanation of “Hey! It’s OK. We are using a Japanese AI”?
Crunchyroll is part of a publicly listed company (Sony), and it does perform an ambassadorial role for many large Japanese entertainment companies, so I do have some sympathy for the position they find themselves in. Nonetheless, it feels like they will continue to resist the obvious solution to Japan’s capacity problem.
Please Let Me Say “Yes”: A Study Of Consent & Agency In Eroge (Adult Analysis Anthology 3, BáiYù)
A small sampling of eroge with explicitly consenting main characters.
It’s not uncommon to find both Eastern and Western eroge featuring protagonists of diverse genders and/or sexualities (or more specifically, women and non-cishet-male people) who have been stripped of their agency and dignity. Compared to games told from the perspective of cisgender heterosexual men, an overwhelming number of these protagonists are portrayed as unwilling to have sex, or must be brainwashed, mind controlled, or “corrupted” before submitting to their “base desires” despite the fact that the majority of prospective players can be assumed to have sought out sexual content by mere virtue of engaging with the game to begin with. This pervasive disconnect between desires creates a distressing ludonarrative dissonance for players whose identities may closely align with the protagonist, even when the player’s kinks are otherwise satisfied by the content.
I’ve talked to enough folks who are just like me, who don’t want to compromise and are tired of not being allowed to say yes outside of a small handful of games. I’d like to present four sex-positive games with female protagonists that have been well-received by its players because it assumes that those engaging with the game are interested in vicariously experiencing sex they may not otherwise be able to have.
With few help programs, Japan’s sex offenders won’t stop (The Mainichi, Yuki Enami)
Programs that work to prevent recidivism among offenders are currently difficult to access.
Kanaya pointed out that Japan stresses demands for remorse from perpetrators, but added, “There is a lack of understanding of clinical treatment that is effective in preventing recidivism.”
The Ministry of Justice’s program includes a section entitled “Understanding Victims.”
Through audiovisual materials and testimonials from victims, the program encourages participants to view their crimes from the perspective of the victims and learn about their impact and responsibility.
However, some studies have shown that encouraging empathy for victims by making sex offenders feel remorse is not effective in preventing further sex crimes. In Canada, Britain and other countries, there are moves to remove such rehabilitation treatment from programs.
The Ministry of Justice, referring to overseas cases, reviewed the pros and cons of dealing with victims’ sentiments through a panel of experts. It reaffirmed the notion of apologizing to victims as key to social reintegration of offenders.
Kanaya points out that recidivism prevention programs are a complex mix of victim understanding and clinical therapy. Meanwhile, public awareness of treatment options for offenders remains low, and it is believed that there are only a handful of private facilities like his in the country.
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AniFem Community
Dang, there were some really great heroines this season.
Anne Shirley! It looks amazing, feels just right, and the translator's clearly familiar with the source text.
— Jisu (@sanajisu.bsky.social) July 21, 2025 at 9:55 PM
— go for broke🪶 (@anhofo.bsky.social) July 22, 2025 at 6:21 PM
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