2023 Spring Premiere Digest
This is a season of meteoric highs and nightmare lows.
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2023 Spring Premiere Reviews
All the spring premiere reviews in one easy-to-find place. We’ll update the chart as more series become available, so be sure to check back in the coming days for more! Check out our merch store for shirts, stickers, and more! Use the code SPRING23 to get 10% off your entire order.
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Ugly Things Cannot Be Loved: Penguindrum and the dilemma of Yuri
Yuri’s assault on Ringo is emblematic of how the tensions and arguable flaws in Penguindrum point to larger tensions and unresolved questions in our movements for transformative justice, abolition, and queer liberation.
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The Infantilization and Sexualization of Inoue Orihime in Bleach
Even as someone who loved the show in the past, I’ve found myself becoming more of an onlooker these days. I suppose it’s because I can no longer keep from opening Pandora’s box and exploring the problematic traits of Inoue Orihime, a character whose screen time grows in line with the misogyny of her portrayal.
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What we can learn about labor organization from Akiba Maid War
While not comprehensive, Episode 4 perfectly captures many of the tactics corporations use to suppress their workers. Of course, the challenging relationship these characters already have with labor organizations as sensationalized mobsters further complicates the themes of this episode, but the pro-union sentiment of this zany plotline deserves analysis.
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Subverting masculine expectations and complicating the male gaze in My Dress-Up Darling
While still tangled in fan service and horny comedy, My Dress-Up Darling’s depictions of masculinity and the sexualization of its female characters are typically leaps and bounds above many of its genre counterparts.
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How Otherside Picnic masterfully uses horror to explore abuse and show healing queer love
Otherside Picnic makes a wonderful addition to the canon by centering queer love and examining how survivors of abusive relationships can heal from their pain and trauma in order to move onto healthier relationships.
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Two Clever Princesses, Two Feminist Fairy Tales: The Clever Princess vs Princess Arete
Both interpretations of Arete’s tale are valuable works rich with feminist themes, and looking at the different ways the different versions play them out gives insight into the potential strengths that different tones and narrative structures can hold.
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The Transient Queerness of Fruits Basket
This show makes me laugh, it makes me cry, but more than anything, it makes me hope. It makes me hope that no matter how bad things get, there will always be a second chance waiting just around the corner. Even two decades after the original manga began publishing, it shines just as brightly. But I’m not here to talk about how much I love Fruits Basket. Today, I’m here to explore one of its most under-discussed problems: its portrayal of queerness.
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Remixing Expectations: Queer representation and gender euphoria in D4DJ Groovy Mix
Particularly in how it integrates canonical queerness and themes of gender identity within the text, D4DJ manages to go places that very few franchises in its peer group manage to do.
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2023 Winter Three-Episode Check-In
The big forerunner this season? Girls in fantasy shows!
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2023 Winter Premiere Digest
Things have cooled off from Fall, but there are still some excellent girls to root for this season.
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2023 Winter Premiere Reviews
All the winter premiere reviews in one easy-to-find place. We’ll update the chart as more series become available, so be sure to check back in the coming days for more!
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The Beautiful Masculinity of Mob Psycho 100
At its very core, MP100 is a show that despises violence as the main means of resolving interpersonal issues, and instead invites its audience to understand each other. In fact, it rejects the mere idea that being more powerful than your enemy is a net positive, or that having special powers makes anyone better altogether. Violence, the series posits, should only be used as a last resort.
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The Day I Became a God and the mistreatment of disabled people
The Day I Became a God, while not featuring representation of a specific, real-world disability, features a lot of insidious ableism in its last few episodes. This final arc of the show perpetuates a lot of harmful ideas around how those who are disabled should be treated, and the agency that they often do not have, serving as a painfully apt example of the clichés and stereotypes narratives about disability often fall into.
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Making Up and Making Waves: How Tropical-Rouge! PreCure rewrote narratives of femininity and fairy tales
Tropical-Rouge balances historical attitudes with refreshing, contemporary ideas that grant its young female characters agency and thus delivers a great message to its target audience.
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Girls Doing Stuff: Agency and motivation in girls’ hobby shows
By their very nature, these series’ protagonists are driven and motivated young women—motivated by something other than romance and men—who experience visible development across the narrative. As a bonus, the relaxed vibe and personal stakes of this genre means that realistic dangers are removed and these characters are left in idyllic spaces where they have autonomy over their time and their surroundings.
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The World is Our Egg: Understanding Adultification through Anthy Himemiya
Adultification not only works against Black and Brown women and AFAB folks in our society today but also contextualizes aspects of Anthy’s story more clearly.
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Digging Under the “Strong Female Character” Surface: The exploitation of women in Claymore
Going into it hoping to experience an underappreciated classic, I was met with a series that routinely undervalues the very women that define its main appeal, to the point of ritualistically torturing them on-page and treating what makes up their person as disposable.
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The trans resonance of Haibane Renmei
The series’ use of transformation and body horror resonate with the physical experiences of dysphoria and transitioning; its depictions of mental health struggles, particularly self-harm and suicide, may find special meaning with trans audiences; it thematically explores names as potential sources of both trauma and self-actualization; and the characters of Haibane Renmei strive to build a safe community that promotes healing and growth. Yet I have never seen this two-decade-old series discussed through a trans lens, despite the wealth of potential it has to offer. That ends today.
