The narrative takes care to demonstrate that Tohru has her own issues, and highlights that her relentlessly positive attitude and her devotion to putting others before herself is not healthy. Ultimately, Fruits Basket explores and unpacks the harmful side of her relentless positivity as one of many healing stories across the series.
Just as the dreamscape Wonder Killers provide a convenient and killable representation of the issues that harm young people, the writers of the show invent a convenient “monster” and pin the blame for those very issues on her. As a result, a lot of the nuance in the series’ treatment of trauma and suicide is lost.
No one has ever asked whether Samurai Flamenco is good, because the question is a loud and simultaneous “no” and “yes.” But the question of whether it “counts” as queer romance has waged on for eight exhausting years now. Incidentally: yes, it does.
ADHD is often maligned as strictly a lack of the willpower necessary to concentrate, or a simple inability to ignore distractions. But through her investigations, Chitanda exhibits behaviors characteristic of ADHD that contribute to, rather than hamper, her ability to lead herself and others.
1122: For a Happy Marriage examines two different married couples that are pressured to adhere to gender and allonormative roles within marriage, which ultimately damages their marital relationships.
Evangelion takes place in the year 2015. Misato, 29 at the start of the anime, would have been born in 1986. With this knowledge, both American millennials and the members of Japan’s Lost Generation who came of age following Japan’s economic recession in the ‘90s may joke about how Misato is a millennial stereotype. However, this goes beyond a meme and into a message about processing pain, pressure and grief.
Your Lie in April has high ratings on almost all of the major anime databases. Unfortunately, I, the Feminist Killjoy, am here to say that Arima has an Oedipus complex and Kaori is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
If I feel invisible, then I turn invisible. If I feel conflicted about myself, I split into two people. If I suffer from verbal bullying, then I wake up with cuts and scrapes all over my body. This is Adolescence Syndrome, the key concept behind Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai, which the series uses to explore various social anxieties and mental health issues that can affect young people but which often go unnoticed.
Using its “magical school” premise, Witch Hat Atelier explores diversity among students and argues for the importance of accessibility throughout society, but especially in education. With supportive mentors and a focus on individual accommodation, anyone really can wield their own kind of magic.
As Kyoko struggles to recover from abuse and trauma, she is encouraged to forgive everyone around her, put her own happiness last, and believe that love cures all. Skip Beat’s prioritization of these ideals over actual healing processes perpetuates unhealthy, even dangerous ideas about recovery.
Fruits Basket is a radical work regarding its treatment of mental health because it actively works to destigmatize mental illness, critiquing and dismantling ideas about toxic masculinity through its portrayal of mental health.
At first glance, Ashinano Hitoshi’s 1995 sci-fi world seems no more than a quiet and rural part of modern Japan, but the easygoing protagonists live amidst ruin in what would have been the metropolitan Tokyo Bay. Entire cities have sunk and an untold number of lives have likely been shattered, yet the comic takes solace, even joy, in depicting the beauty of the world as humanity sits back to accept its fate.
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!.
The horror genre has historically stigmatized mental health conditions, but Ciconia normalizes plurality and frames it as explicitly positive, making me feel comfortable in trying to express myself as plural.
When I found Gintama, I was going through the worst depressive/anxious episode of my life. The thought that plagued me the most was: “How am I going to live like this?” Of all the people in the world, I was not expecting Sakata Gintoki to give me an answer.
Series that focus on non-cis male athletes in a serious, competitive environment, let alone deal with the mental health issues that some athletes face, are rare and valuable. I was absorbed with how much I saw my own relationship with tennis in Akira’s relationship with track, and that it wasn’t cute. It hurt.
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.
I knew Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare would be the series that got me back into manga as soon as I saw a cover image. The fourth volume features two women in wedding dresses, clearly getting married to each other. There were no pretenses; it wasn’t open to interpretation. This was a queer manga and I loved that the cover didn’t hide it.
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.
