AniFem Round-Up
Fall is shaping up to be good eating for fans of shoujo and josei!
Anime Feminist Recommendations of Summer 2025
Summer gave us a strong contender for anime of the year, plus some exceptional comedies and daringly out-there concepts.
Chatty AF 233: 2025 Summer Wrap-Up
Vrai, Dee, and Peter have quite a bit to say about a very sequel-heavy season and possibly one of the best anime of the year!
Has an anime ever changed the ending of its source material for the better?
It’s been known to happen.
Beyond AniFem
As Pokémon Legends: Z-A launches, we return to Pokémon Legends: Arceus’ rose-tinted take on the past, and the hard questions it raises about Japanese history (Eurogamer, Edward Hawkes)
Arceus’ use of time travel and Hokkaido-based setting raises questions about how the Pokemon relates to Japanese colonization of the region.
To grapple with these issues, I spoke to Dr John Hennessey, a historian at Lund University, whose work has explored Ainu colonial experiences and popular representations of imperialism more broadly. He shared my mixed feelings about the game. He agreed that increasing positive Ainu representation in mass media is a praiseworthy trend: “There’s this really, really popular manga series called Golden Kamuy in Japan right now. And the main character is a veteran from the Russo-Japanese war. Then he meets this Ainu girl and they hang out together. She’s super tough and kick-ass” he told me. “The person who wrote this manga, Noda Satoru, went and talked with Ainu representatives and asked ‘How I should depict your culture?’ They said ‘we want to be strong and not just the victims'”. This is something that Legends: Arceus also gets right.
But Dr Hennessey agreed that the game does not always represent the period well: “1869 is the turning point because the Meiji regime started actively colonizing Hokkaidō… They saw it as an important source of wealth for developing the nation; a new source of land… ‘Our wild west’.” These comparisons were quite overt: “They compared it over and over again with America – very self-consciously – and brought in American experts,” Dr Hennessey explains. “That’s the kind of depiction being perpetuated here”, he told me, it’s “the common colonial trope of ‘terra nullius‘ – treating a territory as practically ‘uninhabited’ or a ‘wilderness’ waiting to be explored and claimed, even though it was in fact already inhabited.” And these very same ideas were used to justify settler-colonialism not just in Hokkaidō but around the world.
We also discussed whether the game could have done more to highlight the tragedies of the time-period. Certainly, much of the actual history is too stark for a family-focussed game, but not all of it. For instance: “there used to be huge amounts of salmon and deer. And then they opened canning factories. And within 10 years, they were almost all gone”. Ecological devastation is a topic that is often tackled in children’s media, from the Lorax to Wall-E. Given Pokémon “has a nature focus”, Dr Hennessey continued, this is where Game Freak could have really “planted the seed to get people interested in reading and studying the history”.
Netflix’s Fastest-Surging Anime on Streaming Works Because of What It “Refuses” To Do, Says Its Producer (Collider, Laura Adams)
Interview with a producer on The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity.
COLLIDER: When adapting The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity into an anime, which aspects of the original manga did you most want to emphasize to viewers?
SHOKO HORI: The original manga is not only a love story—it’s also a delicate and thoughtful depiction of how people build relationships. What drew us to the work was its soft, warm atmosphere and the gentle world it portrays. By adapting it into an anime, we wanted to introduce this wonderful story to as many people as possible—transcending age, gender, and nationality.
The “kind and gentle world” of this series is created by its characters. That doesn’t mean they are simply kind by nature, but rather that they possess the ability to empathize and express their feelings honestly through sincere communication. It’s this willingness to face others earnestly that shapes the warmth of the story’s world. Through the characters’ interactions and personal growth, I believe the anime will warm viewers’ hearts and inspire gentle feelings within them. Just as it did for me, I hope that after watching, viewers will feel encouraged to think, “I’ll try a little bit harder.”
Crunchyroll Joins FDA-Approved Luminopia Vision Therapy for Kids (Bleeding Cool, Adi Tantimedh)
Nice to see a corporation actually put some good into the world.
Lazy eye affects about one million pediatric patients nationwide and is the leading cause of vision loss in children. Luminopia offers a modern, FDA-cleared therapy that allows pediatric patients to watch TV within a VR headset for one hour a day, six days a week, as treatment.
This is a completely reimagined approach to lazy eye therapy. For decades, patients have been required to undergo eye-patching, which forces them to cover their “good eye” and go through their lives with poor vision, making everyday tasks and activities difficult. Luminopia works differently from eye-patching and doesn’t require patients to cover up their good eye; instead, it encourages the brain to use both eyes together.
“Our mission has always been to transform lazy eye treatment into something children are actually excited about,” said Scott Xiao, Co-Founder and CEO of Luminopia. “By bringing anime content from Crunchyroll’s catalog into our library, we’re giving patients more shows to choose from, with the goal of making therapy as engaging as possible for every single child.”
This collaboration with Crunchyroll, already a subsidiary of Sony Pictures Entertainment, is a natural extension of Sony Innovation Fund’s investment in Luminopia. Crunchyroll joins Luminopia’s growing roster of content partners, including Nickelodeon, PBS Kids, and Sesame Workshop. Most recently, Luminopia partnered with Pokémon to bring hundreds of episodes of the original animated series to its platform.
Tourist-guiding robots give role to people with mobility issues (The Asahi Shimbun, Michinori Ishidaira)
The robot comes with a microphone, so that the pilot can also give the audio tour.
An occasional wheelchair user, Kotonoha joined the program after exhaustively researching the history and geography of Nihonbashi.
“Working as a guide is fun because I can communicate with others,” she said.
OriHime was developed by OryLab Inc. based in Chuo Ward. It has used robots as wait staff at the Dawn Ver. Beta cafe in Nihonbashi since 2021.
Around 100 individuals with mobility difficulties have served customers at the cafe via remotely controlled humanoids.
“We will be contributing to creating a future where everyone can be included in society and become part of the community,” OryLab President Kentaro Yoshifuji said about the cafe’s purpose.
Initially, the OriHime robots were primarily used indoors at restaurants and stores. The guided sightseeing package aims to broaden the product’s potential.
VIDEO: Explaining magical girl series Sugar Sugar Rune.
VIDEO: We once again remind you that all art is political.
VIDEO: On how fandom categorizes “annoying girls.”
VIDEO: Retrospective on mobile series Shall We Date?.
VIDEO: Recommendation of otome games on Switch.
THREAD: Manga artist criticizing the advice that manga artists be “apolitical.”
→てかSNSで「政治的発言は、やめましょう…！」とか同調圧力まいてるクリエイターの人、ほとんどの場合は決して「政治的ではない」のではなく、単に自覚がないだけで日本の保守/右翼寄りのネット文化にどっぷり浸かってるだけのことも多いし、むしろ外国人排斥とか女性/マイノリティ差別みたいな逆方向の「政治的発言」はボロっとやってしまう、加担してしまうこともありがちなので、むしろ真に受けるとヤバいと思う。もはや「自分はクリエイターなので一般大衆どもより意識高く潔癖でいよう」くらいのいけすかない選民思想を持っていたほうがまだ安全側だと思う
— ぬまがさワタリ@『いきものニュース図解』ほか3/19同時発売 (@numagasa.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 6:08 AM
AniFem Community
Bold choices get big payoffs….when they work.
I love that Sound! Euphonium changed the winner of the final audition; the tear-filled scene that it leads to between Kumiko and Reina is devastating, and it's so much more impactful for Kumiko's choice to stand by her ideals to cost her dearly instead of letting her have her cake and eat it too.
— Luke Beeman (@lukebee.bsky.social) October 27, 2025 at 10:41 PM
Angelic Layer, which took one of CLAMP's goofiest endings and gave it some actual pathos.
— SCREAMchild129 (@brainchild129.bsky.social) October 27, 2025 at 10:02 PM
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