It’s easy to think the best solution to any harmful trope is to avoid it altogether and, to an extent, in the short term, this is true. In the long term, however, avoiding a trope entirely can be counterproductive, creating a new harmful trope on the other side of that same coin.
Anime (like media in general) has a rough record when it comes to body positivity. Fat-shaming is frequent and even stories that attempt positivity often fall into fetishization. Fortunately, there are bright spots as well, particularly in series that integrate fat characters without drawing attention to it.
Juggling respect and likability is a tightrope many women are forced to walk. This intricate dance of cultivating social and professional balance is what first drew me to Maid-sama!.
Every character in Stars Align gets at least a few moments under the spotlight, and the team’s manager, Asuka Yuu, is no exception. Yuu provides an example of how anime can respectfully and meaningfully incorporate both LGBTQ+ characters and the challenges they face into their stories.
Where Aggretsuko season one mostly dealt with how Retsuko handles her emotions, season two instead explores the different ways in which men and women are allowed to express their anger in society, exposing a double-standard within the show itself.
Through both the character design and characterization of its three protagonists, Eizouken challenges a lot of the tropes that often loom over portrayals of nerdy, passionate teenage girls… and, if we’re being honest, teenage girls in general.
Throughout its 100-year history, yuri has uniquely evolved in and moved about multiple markets, often existing in many simultaneously. It is by and for a variety of people: men, women, heterosexuals, queer people, everyone!
The first time I read Kindred Spirits on the Roof, I was surprised and even grateful, because it often felt like the game was speaking to my questioning teenage self. It attempts to honestly portray queer female relationships, but sometimes blurs the line between depicting attraction and sensationalizing it.
Minutes before a high-stakes karuta match, Inokuma first must calm somebody who doesn’t respond to reason and certainly doesn’t know how to be patient for his meal. It’s a moment every new parent will experience at least once—when your own wants and needs butt heads with your obligations to your kid.
Monstrous women serve as a reminder of the “other” in society, but good writing helps characters take pride in themselves.
The framework of “[cis character] must pretend to be [“opposite” gender] before restoring their [femininity or masculinity]” invites biological determinism by making the plot’s stakes dependent on the successful concealment of the main character’s “true” (here, meaning “assigned-at-birth”) gender. The idea of a “true” biological gender is itself a transphobic trope that does harm to the gender-nonconforming communities that genderbending manga purports to represent.
Domestic Girlfriend knows its central relationship between a high school student and his teacher is tragic, but completely misses the mark on why.
Despite a broad range of titles, when looking at Japanese media about cooking at large, I’ve noticed a frustrating gender imbalance between stories about professional male and female chefs. Stories about male chefs (most often in shounen manga) tend to center around their skill and on their prowess in the kitchen; while the professional lives of female chefs are downplayed in favor of focusing on a romantic storyline.
Fantasy is often described as escapism, but the genre has great potential to expose a reader to different perspectives on their own society while drawing them into an exciting new world. The Twelve Kingdoms novels by Fuyumi Ono truly show this. The world of the Twelve Kingdoms is a masterful example of a fully developed, politically complex, colorful and varied fantasy world.
Demon Slayer’s commitment to empathy thoroughly impressed me from the beginning of the series. However, Nezuko’s infantilization, objectification, and silencing throughout the season makes me worried the series may fall into the same traps as its shounen predecessors and contemporaries. Tanjiro and Nezuko share the same trauma, but only one is allowed to speak it.
Throughout the series, My Roommate is a Cat depicts Subaru’s social anxiety and his efforts to manage it in a realistic manner. As he and his adopted cat Haru grow closer, he learns to cope and develop warm friendships.
While manga artists have done a great service for international comics, we readers see an unsettling trend of writers and artists burning out.
Dororo is a complicated work to parse from a disability studies perspective. The story is set somewhere in the early- to mid-fifteenth century, was written by “godfather of manga” Osamu Tezuka in the 1960s, has been told in multiple mediums in the ensuing decades, and was recently adapted into an anime for the second time in 2019. These disparate time periods have created a jumble of disability representation that ranges between accurate, inaccurate, and downright confounding.
Much like the wider idol industry, when it comes to virtual idols, the picture is mixed.
“Purity” is most commonly used as a shorthand for chastity or sexlessness, and generally refers to stories that don’t engage with sex at all. Though Yamada’s sincerity and innocence is part of Kase-san‘s appeal, the way it engages with the girls’ sexuality is just as important. Sex does exist in Kase-san, and while the series focuses primarily on Kase and Yamada’s emotional relationship, it also explores their physical relationship and sexual attraction to each other from the very first chapter.
