AniFem Round-Up
The Real Indians of Victorian Britain: Black Butler and the representation of South Asian histories
At times stereotypical and at others nuanced, Prince Soma’s story eventually grows into critiquing Britain’s exploitation of India.
The women coloring the worlds of Studio Ghibli from behind the scenes
Ghibli’s onscreen heroines are known the world over, but what about the women behind the scenes? Dr. Zoe Crombie digs into the history of the studio’s work culture.
Chatty AF 230: Ave Mujica Retrospective
Tony, Cy, and Chiaki get the band back together to look back at plurality, toxic yuri, and glorious camp with the latest BanG Dream entry.
What’s your most rare or unusual out-of-print manga?
There are sadly plenty of failed companies to choose from.
Beyond AniFem
Bring Back Crunchyroll’s Library Outreach Program – Save Library Anime Clubs (Change.org)
A petition made by a librarian over Crunchyroll shutting down its library services.
Their outreach program is what gave libraries the right to show the shows on their platform in a public space. It is a common misconception that people can do public showings of copyrighted works legally if they do not charge an entry fee. This is not true, and you do need permission or a license to show these shows or movies. Our library spends a lot of money to have a SWANK license to show certain movies and tv shows, which gains us permission to show a handful of anime-related media at events and clubs, but the selection is extremely limited.
Getting individual permissions for shows is not reasonable to expect of local librarians, especially not libraries that have small, busy staff with many responsibilities besides their Anime Clubs, regardless of how treasured those clubs are to those librarians. While other companies like Viz are offering some amount of help with getting these permissions, it’s difficult and needs to be decided well ahead of time.
My audience of teens tends to rotate or change month-to-month, and so I usually would have the teens present that month vote on what shows to watch. We often couldn’t just “pick back up where we left off”, as we would sometimes randomly have an extra dozen teens from our previous meeting, who would have no idea what was going on in the show we were watching.
I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that our library would’ve been willing to pay to continue our access to the viewing permissions for these shows, even if it had been more expensive than a standard subscription. However, instead of simply removing the fact that library accounts have free subscriptions, or perhaps removing their status as ad-free accounts, all of which would’ve been annoying but manageable- they chose to end the program entirely.
Tuesday’s Blues: A monstrous comic/novel hybrid (Kickstarter)
An upcoming dark rom-com from Adorned By Chi creator Jacque Aye.
In Tuesday’s Blues, Tuesday’s a Nigerian-American, anxious, pansexual, struggling musician hoping to make it big in the big city (Obscuris). Despite her lofty dreams, Tuesday isn’t the most motivated. She spends more of her time mucking about in pits of self-doubt than booking gigs or perfecting her craft.
Her love life hasn’t fared any better, either. She’s been ghosted way more than she’d like to admit, and she’s never had a steady partner. Her current romantic prospect seems to only call her after the sun’s gone down…
When Tuesday’s recluse of a roommate disappears under, well, let’s call them mysterious circumstances, Tuesday’s gotta forge a plan to make her rent…and fast. That’s when she summons the monster under her bed.
Osaka Kansai Expo holds Palestinian fashion show (The Asahi Shimbun, Eriko Kai)
Emcee Yamamoto Maki first visited Gaza in 2013, and hopes her obi will help preserve traditional Palestinian embroidery.
With limited materials entering Gaza and the women’s lives at risk, Yamamoto is unable to place orders for new obi.
In the West Bank region, the Israeli military has tightened restrictions on movement, preventing women from reaching their workshops and procuring fabric, yarn and other materials.
Toward the end of the fashion show, two cushion covers featuring geometric designs were displayed. They had been crafted by women in Gaza amid the Israeli military’s attacks.
Even in the shelters where they’ve taken refuge, the women continue to embroider, focusing on their work to keep their minds calm.
“The embroidery is not just fashion, but their identity. It gives people the will to live,” Yamamoto told the audience.
Yamamoto thinks that people are paying more attention to Palestine than ever before, since the conflict started more than a year and a half ago.
“I believe respecting their long-standing culture would encourage Palestinians more than simply feeling sorry for them,” she said.
Grief and Hot Boys?! – Spell Candle First Impressions Demo Review (Blerdy Otome, Naja)
The available demo can be completed in about 90 minutes.
When I saw Spell Candle described as a “grief coping mechanism”, I thought the devs were referencing how some in the otome fandom like to claim that otome is how they escape the pressures of reality. But, then I read through more of the Steam page and saw that the devs meant “grief coping” literally:
Spell Candle is 2D otome visual novel that aims to raise awareness about mental health and the challenges we face after losing a loved one. As you navigate the game, your choices shape the experience, and the in-game system will reflect your decisions, providing insights into grief-related behaviors by the end of it. The game is made with the help of psychologists.
My bachelors is in Psych, so I’m always interested in seeing how mental health is handled in media, especially games—and let’s be real otome games love to play around with trauma for funsies. Whether it’s an attempt to add depth to the characters themselves or as a gimmick to add spice to the story, otome writers love giving us damaged boys to “fix” with our love. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve yelled at my Switch (or during streams) that whatever otome love interest I’m romancing need therapy, and not a girlfriend. But, alas mental wellness isn’t always at the forefront of the otome agenda, so my pleas tend to fall on deaf ears.
Which is why Spell Candle is such an intriguing concept, because it’s making mental health the focus of its narrative through how it presents its in-game choices. Not only do your choices shape the characterization of your player character, but they add context to their past and that in turn affects how they reacts to certain situations within the story.
Otome Games Celebration Postmortem (or, I held a Steam festival) (Arimia)
Reporting back on the process and unexpected hurdles of running one’s own Steam festival.
Valve has now made it abundantly clear that festivals are their answer to Steam’s lack of niche curation – and even moreso that developer-ran festivals are their solution. Valve has ran festivals starting back in lockdown, with their Steam Next Fest being the most prolific of them, but their category-specific ones like Visual Novel Fest and such are…lackluster, to say the least.
Making festivals rely on developer curation is a good and bad thing. It’s bad because it takes a lot of time to set up and plan for, which means developers have less time to work on their games. But, it’s also good because developers know our niches best, so we can weed out the 3d platforming games that claim to be visual novel just because they moved the tag to the front of their page. Steam festivals allow us the ability to curate the store page for a week, and I’m sure Valve will continue increasing the scope and visibility of festivals.
To put it in simpler terms, if you’re a developer then you should care about festivals because it puts your game in front of people who want things just like your game which means easy visibility and wishlists. If you’re a player then you should care about festivals because they make it easier to find games that you might like. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
What Are Yuri and Yaoi? A Dive Into The History of the Manga Subgenres (Them, Vrai Kaiser)
A brief history of how terminology and marketing for BL and yuri have evolved over the years.
Yuri is at once more straightforward and more difficult to talk about as an umbrella term. It hasn’t undergone as many terminology shifts as BL, but it also took much longer to coalesce under the firm marketing umbrella of “yuri.” Nobuko Yoshiya’s novels and other early 20th century writers established a trend of “class S” or just “S” fiction: stories about deep, spiritual bonds between girls who swore devotion to one another but ultimately had to leave their secluded space for the world of adulthood and heterosexual marriage. The Takarazuka Revue, an all-female theater company founded in 1913, also had hints of this duality. Though its actors performed intimately and attracted legions of fans, the troupe’s founder framed it as a training grounds for heterosexual marriage, and it was not uncommon to see reporting of harsh punishment or lovers’ suicides when actresses were found to be in relationships with female fans. As Sharon Chalmers noted in her 2001 work, “According to the literature of [the 1920s], female homosexuality was divided into two types, referred to as dôseiai and o-me no kankei. The former term implied non-sexual, that is, platonic intense friendships, which, while seen as ‘abnormal,’ were tolerated as a ‘girlhood phase.’ This period in a ‘girl’s’ life, from puberty to marriage, is known as shôjoki.”
These threads — dashing, princely girls and intimate friendships with expiration dates — appear in many early shōjo works. Riyoko Ikeda, another member of the Year 24 Group, is one of the most indelible influences in this regard. A socialist and feminist, Ikeda’s work pushed against the status quo, both in matters of class and gender. The Rose of Versailles’ Lady Oscar remains perhaps the most famous example of the princely archetype; class-S (romantic friendship) high school melodrama Dear Brother leaves the door open with its final lines for its heroine to implicitly still be pursuing women; and 1978’s Claudine is a tragic but sympathetic portrait of a trans man. As with early shōnen-ai, tales that explored explicit physical attraction between girls tended to end in tragedy.
Academic Yukari Fujimoto, studying these early tragic shōjo stories, noted that lesbian narratives were trapped by a “cage of reality” where shōnen-ai offered an abstracting distance; the weight of societal misogyny was doubly stacked in a story about two girls (and the few examples of early happy endings, like 1986’s The Sword of Paros, accessed the world of fantasy by way of those cross-dressing princely girls): “Why does a woman become so desperate to be loved? No other affirmation can rescue her from these anxieties; if she achieves love from a man then she is fine, but if not she will never be able to reconcile herself with the reality of her existence as a woman.”
Episode 95: Kase-San and Morning Glories ft Dr. Alex Henderson (Shoujo Sunday)
A podcast discussion of the popular yuri series.
In this episode of Shoujo Sundae, Chika, Giana, and Dr. Alex Henderson discuss the film Kase-san and Morning Glories! Yamada and Kase have been in a relationship for a little while now, and the two navigate their relationship through their third year of high school and the challenges that come with young love and the possibility of being separated in college.
VIDEO: The nuances of translation AI can’t capture, feat. Chihayafuru.
VIDEO: How Chinese and Chinese-coded characters in animation get neglected.
VIDEO: Emotional Trauma and Neglect in Fruits Basket.
AniFem Community
Some incredible rare finds on display, AniFam!
The full physical run of Mars. I took it with me when I moved from Texas, so it's the only thing from my old collection that survived subsequent hurricane flooding.
— makz 本物のマヴ (@jakka-ningen.aeug.space) June 3, 2025 at 10:29 PM
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Probably the most obscure are titles from Luv Luv Press, a short-lived line for smutty ladies manga. Pretty much like Seven Seas Steamship imprint but around 2008. I think I ordered most (all?) directly from their site.
— Lounge Lizzie (@loungelizzie.bsky.social) June 3, 2025 at 8:52 PM
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In terms of stuff that bombed, Viz‘s releases of Pineapple Army and Short Program. In terms of bragging rights? A Miura-signed US Berserk #1
— exedore (@exedore.bsky.social) June 3, 2025 at 1:18 PM
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