Reclaiming the Witch Through Magical Girls
There comes a time in every girl’s life where she’s obsessed with one thing: the occult.
gender equality Tag
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How Chihayafuru frames breastfeeding as an early parenthood challenge
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.
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Women in the Kitchen: The unequal treatment of professional chefs in anime and beyond
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.
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No One is Born to Be a Slave: How The Twelve Kingdoms questions social systems
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.
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Who is Allowed to Speak Their Pain? Demon Slayer, empathy, and Nezuko
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.
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Nonconforming in the ‘90s: How Pokemon’s gender variance caught the hearts of a generation
Twenty years ago, I fell in love with the Pokemon anime. Now, I think I can finally tell you why: why this strange, silly, sincere show mattered. How it filled the space between “boy stuff” and “girl stuff,” treated both as having value, and challenged why there was a division in the first place.
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Virtually Feminist? The pros, cons, and possibilities of virtual idols
Much like the wider idol industry, when it comes to virtual idols, the picture is mixed.
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How Dragon Ball Z helped me fight back against toxic masculinity
While Dragon Ball Z is best known for its epic battles and power struggles, the series has meant much more to me than that. It helped me as a man address problematic aspects of my life and expectations placed upon me that I had up until that point either neglected or outright ignored.
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Decade Apart, Miles Ahead: Lady action heroes in Bubblegum Crisis and Tokyo 2040
Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 aired from 1999-2000, and I have recently discovered that I love it as much today as when I was a preteen girl with a deep hunger for ladies kicking ass.
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Nichijou and the Everyday Epics of High School Girls
Through its central cast of silly, snarky, kind, anxious, energetic high school girls, Nichijou not only showcases many common (and not-so-common) trials of adolescence, but also expands the narrow image of what it means to be a “normal” teen girl.
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Not with a Bang, but a Letter: How Violet Evergarden rewrites traditional World War I narratives
Violet Evergarden reimagines historical discussion of post-traumatic stress, early 1900s literary tropes, and the popular “war narrative” genre, but with a female child soldier as its protagonist. In its remixing and calling back to World War I history and especially women’s history, the series provides a fresh take on an old tale with a strong undercurrent of feminist themes.
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Every Rose Has Its Thorns: Vilifying female ambition in The Rose of Versailles
As a main character, Oscar is an all-encompassing figure who struggles with gender roles, duty, empathy, and more. But with Marie Antoinette and the women who act as villains, we see a more traditional exploration of female power, ambition, and anger.
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A Girl Worth Fighting For: Kingdom Hearts III and the mystery of the missing heroines
Kingdom Hearts’s cast and audience may have grown up, but its tired “boy saves girl” gender politics remain just as outdated as they were when the franchise first launched.
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When Creators Strive to Improve Female Representation: The case of Sword Art Online’s Kawahara Reki
Sword Art Online author Reki Kawahara has publicly stated he wants to improve the representation of female characters in the series… and this is something that’s already observable in his more recent novels. Let’s take a closer look at what Kawahara said and how the series has improved over time.
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Artist Mizuno Junko, guro-kawaii, and girlhood
When I saw Junko Mizuno’s work for the first time, I didn’t really understand the display of squat, adorable girls in lingerie acting violently or brazenly. But the imagery remained with me, a fascinating question at the back of my mind: could this be for me?
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“Boys Can Be Princesses Too”: Challenging gendered stereotypes in Hugtto! PreCure
SPOILERS: This article covers episodes 1-29 of Hugtto! PreCure. The magical girl genre as a whole is often stereotyped as blatantly feminine. Characters fight in skirts and frills, love and kindness save the day, and our magical protagonist is almost consistently covered in pink. As a whole, the genre seems to play off of gender […]
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Lady Leads & Sidekick Lads: Flipping the script in Team Rocket’s “Training Daze”
The Team Rocket trio have never been your typical villains. So perhaps it’s no surprise that their special backstory episode defies as many conventions as they do, taking the classic team origin story and turning familiar gendered archetypes cleverly on their heads.
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Fruits Basket’s Tohru Honda and her Path to Self-Acceptance
Selfless heroines are common in anime and manga, but Tohru is particularly noteworthy because her development throughout the series serves as an example of growing up, coming to terms with one’s feelings, and finding one’s voice. She navigates a very real, very familiar river, fraught with anxiety and self-doubt.
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My Fave is Problematic: Persona 4
No video game has ever hit me quite as hard as Persona 4 did. From Chie Satonaka’s very first moment on-screen, I related to everything about her.
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The Patriarchal Pains of Womanhood in the Films of Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata
Through Only Yesterday and The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Takahata Isao interrogates the patriarchal entitlements that strangle Taeko’s and Kaguya’s expressions of girl- and womanhood.
