AniFem Round-Up
Anime Feminist’s Recommendation Backlog: Unusual School Clubs
Let’s jump back into the past and look at some fantastic shows about strange clubs, whether because of their unusual subjects or offbeat members.
Chatty AF 232: 2025 Summer Mid-Season Check-In
Summer is filled with surprises, from unexpected plot twists to mini-length series and some unexpectedly fun harem titles.
What’s your favorite anime that’s shorter than 12 episodes?
Since short runs are quite popular this season!
Beyond AniFem
AI Killed My Job: Translators (Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant)
Stories from the front lines of translation in various industries.
I currently work at a company focused on localizing adult games from Japanese to English. (Yeah, hentai games.) I used to be one of the top 3 members of said company until this April, and I’ve been with the company for longer than both of the other two managers.
The company I work for has been actively avoiding the use of AI in our translations due to concerns over the final output’s quality at every level of our localization process. (I, myself, was one of the translators within it advocating against the use of AI.) However, this has not been true for the company’s competition. In recent years a domestic Japanese publisher of these games has decided to enter the English localization market, and they have had no qualms against using AI in order to churn out mediocre products faster and at greater scale, publishing the slop on Steam.
As a result, the company I’ve been working for has begun struggling to acquire licenses to titles to work on period. Because of this, our board of investors chose to divest and sell off the company to the man who was its acting general manager at the time. Then he, effective this April (the start of this financial year), came to all of us who were in any kind of salaried position and told us we could take a 50% (or higher) pay cut to stay on, or we could walk.
He gave us all claims that it was to “optimize efficiency” or “refocus on more profitable performance tasks,” but away from the others he admitted to me that it’s mostly so the company could have more free capital on hand in order to compete for licenses better.
So in short, we’ve all had our salaries slashed because our competitors are unafraid to make liberal use of AI to churn out barely-passable slop translations of adult titles so they can flood the market and monopolize the supply-side (the original developers).
The worst part of it all? We’re not even seeing much outcry or antipathy from the fanbase, which is usually quick to criticize localizations. So we’re kind of left to conclude that either the developers don’t care that their titles are only seeing middling sales abroad, or customers don’t care if their porn is using AI slop so they’re willing to buy it anyway.
Farewell, Daisy: Jun Mayuzuki Short Story Collection Manga Review (Anime News Network, Kevin Cormack)
A collection of Mayuzuki’s early short stories, prior to After the Rain or Kowloon Generic Romance.
Thumbelina is perhaps the most emotionally upsetting story, in that it follows a young woman strongly implied to suffer from an eating disorder. She loves cooking, and posts pictures online of elaborate meals she cooks for herself and her boyfriend, desperate for the validation that every “like” provides. Sadly, her boyfriend is an asshole; using her for soulless “quickies” in the kitchen while dinner cooks, before leaving her to eat alone, his other appetites sated. Mayuzuki juxtaposes sexual imagery with the use of social media, in one panel depicting free-running fluid spilling onto a glowing smartphone screen.
The protagonist’s indifferent boyfriend cares little for her cooking, or anything else about her life, and it’s only her eccentric artist neighbor who even notices the calluses on her knuckles from repeated self-induced vomiting. She develops an odd friendship with the artist, who makes a hilariously inappropriate sculpture from casts of the main character’s body parts, which makes her incandescent with rage. At least the artist sees her, though. “I won’t accept anything other than the real, genuine you,” she says. While this story also doesn’t conclude in terms of plot, there is a climactic moment of amusing self-actualization, even if it takes the form of a bare ass posted online.
Celebrated Korean poet Yun, who died in Japan, still resonates 80 years on (The Mainichi)
Yun’s work is still remembered and studied in both Japan and South Korea.
While studying at Doshisha in 1943, Yun was arrested by the secret police and, the following year, sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for violating the Public Order and Safety Act.
He is believed to have been punished for writing poems in his native Korean language despite facing immense pressure to use Japanese during the Japanese colonial period.
Yun died in prison on Feb. 16, 1945, but the circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. His poetry mainly focused on the internal struggles and moral conflicts faced by a young Korean intellectual under Japanese imperialism.
Japan’s colonial rule of Korea lasted from 1910 to 1945, ending with Japan’s defeat in the war. Initially involving direct military rule, it was followed by efforts to assimilate Korea into Japan through cultural suppression and economic controls.
Yun’s poems often used nature as a backdrop to explore themes of national identity, personal guilt, and the search for purity during a time of oppression. His poems are also characterized by glimpses of the folk spirit and Christianity — Yun himself was Christian.
‘It’s Just Not Impressive If A Robot Is Doing It:’ Soundalike Voice Actors On AI (Aftermath, Isaiah Colbert)
Unions are still fighting for ways to give actors bargaining power in regards to AI usage.
Most people today get into voice acting not through SAG-AFTRA union jobs, but through online casting sites such as Voice123, Voices.com, or Fiverr. Unfortunately, AI has taken over many of these seemingly entry-level roles, such as creating training videos, local commercials, or phone system recordings. When companies use more robotic AI to record full commercials, it takes away what could have been an entry-level job for a budding actor, especially since some companies claim that humanistic acting isn’t necessary.
“What I’ve seen every single one of my sessions for the past two months, [producers] say, Hey, so here’s a scratch track. Here is the audio that we have that we want you to match, or we put it into the video so we can see what it sounds like with voice over—every single one of the sessions that I’ve been in so far has used an AI scratch track. Every single one,” Gilfry said. “That did not used to be the case before two months ago. I’ve kept track of the past two months. Every single one’s an AI scratch track.”
Scratch voice-over is a gateway for many voice actors to break into the industry, serving as an entry-level opportunity for actors to gain work. It’s how actors like Scott, who’s done voice match for actors like Kid Cudi, broke into the industry.
“Kid Cudi is in the show Young Love [and] I voice-matched him, literally reading the whole script as scratch, and the producers fell in love with me and gave me a role,” Scott told Aftermath. “Before I knew it, I was 10 characters in the show, like a series regular, because that scratch was the pathway to get into that ongoing work. I wouldn’t have had that opportunity with AI as a barrier.”
One of the most well-known examples of a scratch track leading to an actor securing a major role is when Disney was so impressed with Coco actor Anthony Gonzalez’s scratch performance as Miguel that he was cast in the film.
Teen with mixed roots registered as foreigner by soccer club (The Asahi Shimbun, Takahiro Ogawa)
The Japan Football Association registered him as a foreign national, preventing him from playing in the first game of the season.
In response to questions from The Asahi Shimbun, the JFA’s public relations team commented on the mistaken registration of the student as American: “We don’t know the details, but this is a mistake that should never have happened.”
The JFA said: “Up until now, when changing a registration from foreign to Japanese nationality, the usual reason was ‘naturalization,’ so that’s what we listed as an example on the application form. This is the first case where the reason was a correction, and we recognize the need to make the language clearer.”
Regarding that the student was barred from participating in an official match, the JFA said, “Thinking about what the player must have felt, we feel very sorry. As the JFA, we believe that better communication with the club might have made the process go more smoothly.”
Moe Miyashita, a lawyer who works on issues such as racial profiling, said, “Forcing someone to submit documents with inaccurate nationality information against their own or their guardian’s wishes is a serious human rights issue.”
Lawrence Yoshitaka Shimoji, a special researcher in international sociology at Ritsumeikan University and an expert on issues related to mixed heritage and nationality, said, “Registering someone as a foreign national without confirmation is problematic in itself, but asking for a submission based on an incorrect application—such as claiming a nationality change—is an even more serious issue.”
90% of women in Japan want partner to perceive physical changes, but fewer tell them: poll (The Mainichi, Atsuko Ota)
The survey was conducted by Medley Inc, which developed a period-tracking app.
Regardless, sharing information can be an important key to establishing relationships with partners.
Of those who shared such health information with their partners, 50.2% said they saw “positive changes” in their relationships, while hardly any respondents said they saw changes for the worse in their relations.
In an open-answer section, examples of positive relationship changes cited by respondents included: “My partner cares about me more than before I communicated my issues”; “My partner now studies about and takes an interest in menstruation and physical conditions”; and, “I could tell my partner that he was not the cause of my irritation, which made me feel more at ease.”
In regard to the findings, Medley noted, “To share an understanding about female-specific health issues with partners, women face barriers in communicating their issues, while men face barriers in understanding those issues.”
Specifically, the company pointed out that women feel worried about how to communicate their issues to partners, and commented, “There may be a need for indirect communication tools, such as app-sharing features.”
“Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue” by Yoko Tawada (Asian Review of Books, Ryan Plocher)
Translation of a collection of essays originally released in 2003.
Tawada goes beyond merely “existing” in multiple languages, but rather has great joy in exploring, testing, and experimenting, then going back to her mother tongue, Japanese, to continue the process. According to Tawada, the procedure is universal to all multilingual people, but challenges monolingual audiences and publishers who want authors to fit in neater categories. She recalls being asked whether she writes as a German or a Japanese person. “This question always perplexes me,” she writes. She explains
“The terms ‘immigrant literature’ and ‘foreign literature’ conjure images of an outsider coming in and taking up the domestic language in order to write something. ‘Exophonic literature’, on the other hand, implies that a writer is going from the inside out. How do I step outside of the mother tongue to which I am bound? What might happen if I did? [….] Sometimes a writer is made to write in a language that is not their own due to colonization or exile. And yet, if the literature produced by such circumstances is beautiful and interesting, I see no need to place it in a separate category from other kinds of exophonic writing.”Tawada is also aware that including authors who involuntarily write outside their native languages may erase racism or colonisation. Recalling a panel discussion in Korea, she writes
“I realized how it sounded for me, a Japanese person, to be harping on about the joys of venturing outside one’s mother tongue–particularly here in Korea, where Japan had forced the Korean people into an exophonic condition against their will. People have no right to proselytize about the joys of exophony if they have never been forced to speak in a language against their will.”
This, of course, is in an essay collection exactly about the joys of writing in other languages by choice.
At the same time, Tawada firmly and emphatically rejects the idea that a language is attached to a national (or nationalistic) identity, a common and problematic political claim both in Germany and Japan. Very subtly describing her own experience with racism in Germany, she writes, “I sometimes meet people who think they have absolute ownership over the German language simply because they are native speakers.” Tawada works through this discrepancy between her own largely positive experience with exophony and the knowledge of the negative sides of involuntary exophony to come to the poetic conclusion: “What I am really searching for is a language that has been freed of meaning altogether.”
Are you a girlprince, princess, or witch? (uQuiz)
Just your average personality quiz.
VIDEO: The discussion of whether “idol lolita” fits within the lolita style umbrella.
VIDEO: Short interview with Polyester and Polyurethane’s voice actors.
AniFem Community
We really miss OVAs.
Tied: Princess Jellyfish and Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku
— Izandra 🔪🩸 (@izandra.bsky.social) August 25, 2025 at 11:25 PM
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Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket. I feel sacrilegious saying it, but I think I'd pick it over Gunbuster.
— Lili Rouxxx // V-AMPIRE GAMING (@lilirouxxx.bsky.social) August 26, 2025 at 12:47 PM
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