We’ve got a lot of teens facing the end of the world this season: sometimes that means a messy break-up, and sometimes it’s extremely literal.
How did we choose our recs?
Participating staff members can nominate up to three titles and can also co-sign other nominated shows. Rather than categorizing titles as “feminist-friendly” or “problematic,” they are simply listed in alphabetical order with relevant content warnings; doing otherwise ran the risk of folks seeing these staff recommendations as rubber stamps of unilateral “Feminist Approval,” which is something we try our hardest to avoid here.
The titles below are organized alphabetically. As a reminder, ongoing shows are NOT eligible for these lists. We’d rather wait until the series (or season) has finished up before recommending it to others, that way we can give you a more complete picture. This means we also leave out any unfinished split-cour shows, which we define as shows that air their second half within a year of the first.
Here’s what the team thought—let us know your picks in the comments!
Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede-Destruction
Recommended By: Toni, Vrai
What’s it about? Kadode and Ouran are just two normal high school girls at the end of high school trying to decide what to do with their lives. They deal with the same things as everybody else–overbearing parents, existential ennui, and watching their friends get into too-fast relationships. However, there is one big difference: anytime they look up, they see a gigantic mothership flying overhead.
Content Warnings: fatphobia, student/teacher relationship (depicted as toxic); depictions of genocide, mass death, gun violence, gore, depression, suicide, body horror, war crimes and the military industrial complex, sexual harassment
It’s a daunting task to boil Dead Dead Demons’ appeal down to a few paragraphs after a full hour of discussion failed to completely encapsulate it. There, I compared the manga to Watchmen: an ensemble work in conversation both with mythic figures of pop culture and its political moment, complete with a thematically resonant throughline of in-text fiction. Elsewhere, I tried out, “what if PLUTO respected its female characters.” I stand by those comparisons, but they still don’t give a full picture.
Dead Dead Demons is a sci-fi story about the mundanity of living in a war zone and feeling powerless in the face of atrocities. It’s unsparing in its evisceration of U.S. colonialism, and equally unflinching in its assessment that Japan would jump at the chance to return to its imperialist leanings if given the chance. It’s hard not to feel your jaw drop as the camera pans from a “Cool Japan” billboard down to a government-funded AI drone, or when the weapons manufacturer hires an idol to do a glam makeover of that same weapon for PR. Though the manga started in 2014, it’s impossible not to see echoes of the Gazan genocide in its narrative.
That makes it sound intimidatingly heavy, and it can get quite dark, but at heart it’s an often very funny story about a group of teens growing up and figuring out how not just to survive but to live at the end of the world. While the manga is impressive in its scope, the smartest choice adaptive screenwriter Yoshida Reiko made was to anchor the adaptation to Kadode and Ouran above all else. They’re wonderfully weird and real-feeling teenage girls, flawed and impossible not to love even when you tear your hair out at their bad decisions, and their relationship (which isn’t just, but does eventually encompass, romance) is the story’s beating heart. The story exhibits a great deal of care for its female cast in general, including some gentle and lovely writing around transfemme countryside transplant Makoto.
If there’s a downside to the adaptation’s stronger focus, it’s that it requires some caveats in the viewing order. Episodes 1-16 tell a tight and satisfying narrative about their central heroines. Episode 0 (which takes place chronologically after Episode 16) and Episode 17, which more or less work in the manga given its more spread-out cast, feel extraneous at best and a detraction at worst for the anime, as they focus on wholly different characters—they’re best watched after the fact or skipped altogether. It also, if you’re so inclined, has a fantastic dub with a cast largely comprised of unknowns and actors who normally act in American cartoons, giving it a unique aural texture; and a script that isn’t afraid of judicious slang use when it’s appropriate to the time period (the late 2010s) in which the story takes place.
While its resonance with our current moment can’t (and shouldn’t) be denied, this is also just a damn fine work of art—one that got severely slept on between its awkward airing schedule, atypical art style, and total lack of marketing support. You’d be hard-pressed to find a recent show more actively interested in asking questions about activism, radicalization, and the world today.
—Vrai
Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines
Recommended by: Alex, Caitlin
What’s it about? Nukumizo Kazuhiko is in a coffee shop dreaming of what it would be like to fall in love when he sees a drama playing out in front of him: Yanami Anna gets dumped by her crush in favor of a new girl. He was not supposed to see that–-and now, Anna needs him to hold all her messy feelings and secrets about this situation. And these feelings are messy.
Content warnings: fan service (with the camera being particularly skeevy around the one darker-skinned character), a running joke about teachers being overly invested in their students’ sex lives, stalking played for comedy.
Losing Heroines asks intriguing questions, like “what happens after the big climactic rom-com moment has happened and normal high school life must go on?” and “how do you navigate a friendship with someone who has rejected you romantically?” and “what if the Pining Childhood Friend character had an absolutely dogshit personality in the funniest way possible?” There are no straightforward answers to any of these, but there is some very funny and heartfelt storytelling as these messy kids try to figure it all out.
Despite Anna’s initial insistence that “there’s two kinds of girls, childhood friends and homewreckers,” the series itself resists this binary, and rejects the notion of pitting the female characters against one another as rivals; instead, it explores the awkward but genuine friendships that grow between the so-called winners and losers of each love triangle. I feel in my bones that there’s a romance between Anna and Nukumizu down the line; however, from where this season leaves us, the show overwhelmingly emphasizes platonic bonds and the importance and hard work of genuine friendship. A wonderful, gentle chemistry evolves between all the main characters across the series, leading to some raucously funny and also very moving moments between all the different members of the ensemble.
The series has its fair share of bawdy, less-than-tasteful comedy moments (see content warnings above), often punctuated by Nukumizu awkwardly noting that wow, this is just like in his light novels, as if making a meta joke about the cliches of the rom-com genre excuses the narrative stupidity of a girl tripping and falling bust-first into his face. I definitely don’t think Makeine will be for everyone, and whether or not the sweet moments and fantastically sincere character writing outweigh the (occasional, but jarring) gross scenes will be for each viewer to decide. But I definitely want to give the so-called losing heroines their flowers for being so fun, complex, unsympathetic, messy, and ultimately loveable, very much feeling like complicated humans despite how they initially slot neatly into romance archetypes.
––Alex
MAYONAKA PUNCH
Recommended by: Alex, Chiaki, Dee, Vrai
What’s it about? Masakichi has just been booted from the Hyped-Up Sisters NewTube channel after throwing a punch during a livestream. Spiraling and desperate to make a comeback, Masakichi stumbles on the perfect solution in Live, a vampire who just woke up from a 20-year dream of a woman who’s Masakichi’s spitting image. The two make a deal: if Live will star in videos and rack up a million subscribers, Masakichi will offer herself up as dinner.
Content warnings: Suicide ideation, violence (both slapstick and more serious), depictions of anxiety and burnout
MayoPan is deeply, delightfully silly, starring a cast of female characters who are given full range to be raucous and ridiculous, and for that alone I’d recommend it. However, like all the best comedies (supernatural or otherwise), these goofs are anchored in solid character writing and there are some great emotional beats amidst the vampiric content creation chaos. I was surprised, in particular, how much I ended up liking our very online anti-hero Masaki. She’s a satisfyingly (and entertainingly) flawed protagonist who’s capable of being a garden-variety asshole in ways female characters don’t always get to be. She’s also (in a nice complement to Vtuber Legend below) a great encapsulation of the horrors of the current online content creator landscape, and how getting your sense of self tangled up in this system can impact a person’s self-esteem, relationships, and overall health.
Masaki’s arc and the depiction of her burnout is great; that being said, if you want a deeper look at the ecosystem of online fame and its many terrors and flaws, this show may not do it for you, as it admittedly skims over a lot of the issues that feel pretty entrenched in the industry (toxic parasocial fandom, for example, or the ways in which female creators are encouraged to commodify themselves for views, both of which MayoPan briefly acknowledges, but only as punchlines). It also, unfortunately, doesn’t quite make good on the incredibly homoerotic set-up of Live’s dreamy bloodlust, at least in terms of giving her and Masaki a romance arc. Still, the series reaches its zany conclusion while clearly leaving the window open for a second season, so who knows what could be down the track? I’ll certainly be liking, subscribing, and hitting the bell for notifications.
— Alex
NieR:Automata Ver1.1A
Recommended by: Vrai
What’s it about? The androids of YoRHa exist to do battle with the machine lifeforms on Earth, so that humanity might one day return to the planet. 2B is one such android, who bears the weight of remembering the many times her body has been destroyed and replaced—and the times she has watched it happen to those she cares about.
Content warnings/considerations: fan service (incidental panty shots and some thinly justified revealing outfits, plus combat stilettos), gore, mass death/genocide imagery, child death
I have said before that I have a bad case of the Yoko Taro brainworms. NieR:Replicant is my favorite video game, and one of my primo relaxation methods is putting on Drakengard speedruns (Ending E or bust). If his weird bullshit is involved, I will at least show up to look at it. But I’ve always remained fond but slightly at-arm’s-length from NieR:Automata, a game that I think gets a little too far from its characters in its pursuit of asking Big Questions™ about human nature. And on the subject of the famously jorny character designs, it’s cowardice to dress A2 and 2B so sparely but not commit to putting 9S in correspondingly absurd short-shorts.
Ver1.1A faces, in some ways, an insurmountable task. I wouldn’t say it stands on its own, given that the story’s most intense moments are intrinsically tied to their origins in ludological narrative. The most powerful moments of route C (roughly the last eight-ish episodes) rely on the active involvement of the player to build their sorrow and horror. But it does address one of my problems with the game: not the booty shorts (though the animators do love some Nines moe), but those good, good character beats I’d been missing.
Draken-Nier is a(n in)famously diffuse and often obtuse narrative, but the anime weaves together a very workable explanation of the basic lore and also spends a lot of time with side characters and backstory that had previously been shuttled off to side stories in various mediums. The animation also just has more room for expression, from detailed facial expression to more dynamic stagings of previously stark scenes. It brings the story’s focus back to the strength of human connection in the face of overpowering hopelessness, which is the strongest feature of all Yoko Taro’s best stories.
It also creates a somewhat more cohesive narrative about the horrors of war, and particular its “infection” as the fog of war and paranoia. It should never be forgotten that the first NieR was a work created in response to the Iraq War, and Automata follows in its footsteps. For all the winking internet jokes about 2B’s butt, this is a story about traumatized soldiers and whether the impetus to violence need be a core of the human experience. It’s also just nice to hear Buckland and McCarley again in the dub, though it comes with the sting of remembering the latter’s admirable but failed attempts to push Crunchyroll toward unionization. Even if the anime in no way replaces the game, it reminded me that I do care about these characters, even more than I thought I did. Points off for not shouting out YorHa Boys, though.
—Vrai
Oshi no Ko – Season 2
Recommender By: Vrai
What’s it about? Still on the hunt for his mother’s killer, Aqua joins the cast of a 2.5D stage play adaptation of mega-hit Tokyo Blade. Surrounded by both new and familiar faces, Aqua finds that the demands of his part dig up details of his past trauma that he can no longer keep entirely to himself.
Content Warning: depictions of panic attacks, PTSD, child abuse; age-gap relationships, gender essentialism
The overarching theme of the Tokyo Blade arc could be summed up as “competing philosophies of art.” It shifts away from the most cutting commentary of the industry (for better or worse), concentrating most of that energy on an early arc about the perils of getting too famous too young, burnout, and the brutality of working as a weekly manga artist—having the young megastar shounen artist mentored by a shoujo veteran is also a nice touch, and certainly true to advice I’ve seen from successful artists about reading everything.
Aqua even starts to feel like a real character rather than an irritatingly omnipotent super-genius. This arc takes the weight of his trauma (explicitly named as PTSD and a panic disorder) seriously as a hurdle to both his acting and ability to connect with others, giving him flaws to struggle with beyond just being bitter and revenge-driven. Characters also get to come to revelatory conclusions independent or even ahead of him at some satisfying crucial points, which does a lot more for the sense of stakes.
But the real highlight of the season is the focus on Akane and Kana’s rivalry. Not over Aqua, but on their respective approaches to acting and shared history. For a few episodes the show goes fully, gloriously Glass Mask, and both characters absolutely shine as they play off one another. The show struggled very publicly with production issues this season, but its best internal moments shone without question. And while Ruby gets benched for most of the arc, the sting is lessoned by a finale that makes it clear the spotlight will be hers next time around.
Unfortunately, the show is still absolutely trash at writing romance. A big part of it is the reemphasis on Gorou—while the end of Season 1 and much of 2 established that Aqua was increasingly losing his connection to his former self and becoming a normal teenager, the last few episodes bring the doctor back in a bad way to sweep Kana off her feet in a sequence that really emphasizes how important him being 30-something is to impressing this teenage girl. It also means having to once again grapple with Ruby’s crush on her former doctor (who she doesn’t yet know is now here brother), and thus the mega-age-gap-turned-potential-incest specter that haunts the whole damn series. Akasaka Aka’s conception of romance is both childishly shallow and gender essentialist, and the result is that almost every character becomes much more thinly written whenever dating comes up—whether it’s petty seething between Kana and Akane over Aqua or Kana grumbling about gender equality before being delighted that Aqua has gallantly paid. It sucks, no two ways about it.
We may yet come to a day where these flaws come to outweigh the compelling, touching, and popcorn-munching highs that Oshi no Ko offers at its best. But this is not that day.
—Vrai
Senpai is an Otokonoko
Recommended by: Caitlin, Chiaki, Dee, Vrai
What’s it about? Aoi Saki finally plucks up the courage to confess to cool older girl Hanaoka Makoto, only for Makoto to confess that he’s an otokonoko. Used to being ostracized, Makoto tries to push Saki away to keep her from being picked on. But Saki isn’t one bit deterred, even by the protective prickliness of Makoto’s childhood friend Ryuji.
Content Warning: depictions of trans/queerphobic bullying and parental abuse; initially boundary-pushing love interest
One of the biggest issues with making a story that’s about explicitly queer people is that the storytelling can fall into the pitfall of becoming Gender and Sexualities Studies 101. Not to say this isn’t a good thing since you can use your project to create a teachable moment for people, but it takes some skill to tell a compelling story and also be educational. These stories inevitably must pause in the middle of a scenes to have a character stare straight at the camera and go “hi I’m gay, it means I like people the same gender as me.”
And similarly, at the other end of the spectrum, some stories feel explicitly by and for queer people, which is also invaluable and should be treasured, but isn’t necessarily accessible to the general public.
Senpai is an Otokonoko sit between those two archetypes, and, though not perfect, does a solid job in conveying the teenage years of self-exploration of queer identity.
Its imperfections invite criticism and some unsure footing in the outset. Taking a nod from its webcomic roots, the show incorporates simplistic animation, which led to Vrai’s assessment that the show is sometimes a “slideshow.” Moreover, the title refers to “otokonoko” which is written out in hiragana, but is often written 男の娘 or “boy who is a girl” in Japanese slang, referring to boy or man who crossdresses and often a grey area for whether someone is “truly trans” or not. But stick around, and you’ll find the story is genuine and messy in all the ways a group of teens trying to navigate personal issues can get.
Being old enough to be exasperated of teenage bullshit, I get how Ryuji’s reaction to crushing on Makoto is grating. He’s got a lot of learning to do, but personally, I think his character plays out in a way a kid navigating this stuff (in his case, internalized homophobia) should. He’s simply trying his best.
Similarly, Saki has her own issues, stemming from a rough childhood and, at times, she’s as strong of a character as Makoto in the spotlight, perhaps even enough to outshine the titular Senpai. And personally, it’s these segments that make me feel this show is more than just a show About Gender.
Of course, this also means that the middle of this show almost feels like Makoto’s kind of out of the picture at times, and you start wondering if this show even is about gender identity or not. But that’s kind of the beauty of it in my opinion. I don’t think it is.
For while the initial conceit of the show is about Makoto trying to be himself as a boy who loves to be effeminate (and struggling as that conception continues to change), it’s also about him trying to fit in and wear a mask. For him, that mask is for his transphobic mother. And on further reflection, all three protagonists wear a similar mask. Ryuji similarly wears the mask of heteronormativity while wrestling with his feelings for Makoto, and Saki also puts up a front to appear carefree and happy to appease others in her life while wondering if she’s really interested in romance at all. It’s all incredibly high school, and honestly, that’s fine because they are in high school.
And to top it all off, the show’s theme song is the queerest bop this past season, making it all the more better. If there ever was any doubt or question on what the central theme of the show is for Senpai is an Otokonoko, the show’s opening is happy to drives that point home by literally being about how suffocating it is to appease people while burning with desire to just be free of those societal pressures.
— Chiaki
Twilight Out of Focus
Recommended by: Caitlin, Lizzie, Vrai
What’s it about? High schoolers Tsuchiya Mao and Otomo Hisashi have established several rules going into their second year as roommates: most importantly, that Mao will never out the closeted Hisashi; and that Hisashi will never consider Mao as a romantic prospect. But things get complicated when the head of Mao’s film club asks him to recruit Hisashi as the lead in their BL student film.
Content warnings: discussions of sexual abuse and homophobia, underage sex; brief nonconsensual touching (episode 1)
There is a heaviness to the first arc of Twilight Out of Focus that does not permeate the rest of the series. As Mao gets to know Hisashi and discovers his own, previously unexamined attraction to men, he learns more about Hisashi’s life and his experiences as a vulnerable youth, including a sexual relationship with his teacher since middle school. Importantly, the story makes no bones about the fact that Hisashi’s relationship with his teacher was abusive, a case of an adult taking advantage of a child. The story pays careful attention to all the signs of abuse: not just bruises, but the fear of missed phone calls, the sneaking around, the acknowledgment that when their relationship started, there was no way for Hisashi to consent in any meaningful way. It’s also extremely aware of the circumstances that make it possible to escape abuse: that Hisashi had somewhere else to go, a home with Mao, who cared about him.
From there, Twilight Out of Focus takes on something of an anthology format – every few episodes are about a different couple, united by the fact that they are in the film club. The story’s greatest strength is in its depiction of everyday couples and intimacy. Each one is different, with their own relationships to sex and queerness, but all of them talk their way through their issues, culminating in them feeling close enough to have sex. While some people may have some discomfort about the fact that these characters are high school students, it was nice having a BL romance that is neither sexless nor salacious.
VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral after Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream
Recommended by: Chiaki
What’s it about? Kokorone Awayuki is a Vtuber based on a pure, ladylike persona. She’s not getting a lot of attention, much less revenue… until one night she accidentally leaves her microphone on while she gets drunk, goofs around, and yells about how horny she is.
Content warnings: alcohol dependency played for comedy, sexual humor, stalking, unwanted sexual advances played for comedy, toilet humor
Despite the alcohol abuse and the regular theme of unwanted sexual advances, I just cannot stress enough that Vtuber Legend ends up being the second best show of the season for me, personally. The only show that I can say had more of a punch than this was, well… Mayonaka Punch, which winds up being a bit deeper and more dynamic as a show.
Yet, Awayuki’s 12-episode foray into losing herself at a mile a minute ends up landing because Vtuber Legend did its homework on vtubers. Whether it’s the dedication to the kayfabe, or the lowkey admission that all of the jokes and references are for people at least 30 years old despite playing someone maybe half their actual age online, the show gets me, which is one point I do like to point out. As much as LiveOn is a successful talent agency in the show, the way Vtuber Legend depicts the vtubers and the work they do feels closer to an indie vibe rather than a corpo vibe, particularly because it’s often harder to find an agency where almost everyone is consistently a huge unhinged disaster.
The show’s starting premise heavily leans in on alcoholism, and it regularly acknowledges that viewers should ultimately imbibe responsibly at a legal age. However, the joke gradually gives way as the cast expands, especially so after Ep. 5 when Awayuki meets a new generation of LiveOn talents. Unfortunately, that same expansion just serves to introduce a whole new set of wild behavior as one of the new talents bases her entire character around having a fantical obsession with Awayuki while another gen mate is straight up into vocal and enthusiastic ABDL-play. While I’m not about to kink-shame someone for wanting to be a baby, I do have to stress that unwanted personal advances are problematic at the end of the day, no matter how funny it is in its depiction.
Still, the bawdy, no-fucks, attitude Awayuki adopts, which joins the chorus of disaster-women in LiveOn’s cast, all serve to send a message. The show ultimately advocates for these women to be true to themselves, even if they are not all too sensible or good. That uniqueness lends not only interesting, but earnest content, which is invaluable when a streamer’s parasocial relationship with viewers needs to be conveyed genuinely.
This lesson is reiterated over and over again, and the show drives the point home in the final episodes, even adding a bit of non-explicit, but heavily coded autism rep in the finale to tell viewers, it’s important to sometimes be your true self, even if you feel like you need to commit to hiding yourself for the sake of others. Indeed, no one should aspire to be a bawdy alcoholic burnout, but that’s who Awayuki and her drunksona Shuwa-chan are. And frankly engaging with her fellow talents as that disaster lets Awayuki grow and make genuine connections as an entertainer as much as grow as a person herself.
This is a question I think a lot of content creators online must face and find an answer for ultimately, and I’ve seen it play out over the years. Whether it’s the comings out for popular video creators as trans, or the ruminations of a video essayist on wanting to create something deeper and bigger than “a YouTube video essay,” a tinge of earnestness from behind the mask can bring a lot to the table and Vtuber Legend gets that core life lesson very well all while being a nonstop comedic romp.
— Chiaki
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