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Mirror, Mirror: Ouran High School Host Club and reflections of twin identity
One of the most clever anime/manga series of the 2000s, Ouran High School Host Club is best known for the gently satirical way it engages with classic shoujo tropes, with its characters performing and overexaggerating certain traits for an audience of squealing female clients. It examines twin tropes through Hikaru and Kaoru, playing up certain stereotypes while dismantling others, and creates a more human portrayal of twin identity than most of the media it parodies.

Perspectivesby Michele Kirichanskaya March 2, 20220 Comments
Girls Over Flowers: My resonance with Makino Tsukushi’s burden of parenting
Tsukushi faces more than just bullying from her peers and the controlling grasp of Domyouji. She also must carry the additional burden of financial instability and the pressure from her parents to marry a rich man in order to resolve their money problems. This situation forces her through the psychological process of parentification, molding her into a spirited and resolute character that I came to love.

Perspectivesby Sky February 9, 20220 Comments
The Metamorphosis of the Magical Girl Genre
As the tone in the Madoka series shifted at the end of episode three, so did the tone of the mahou shoujo genre as a whole, leading to a change in demographic focus that’s still being felt today.

Historyby Nina Morales February 2, 20220 Comments
The Always Smiling Girl: How Tohru critiques toxic positivity
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.

Featureby Olivia "Livi" Burke August 20, 20210 Comments
Honda Tohru and the Strength of Nurturing
Female characters who put their energy into caring for others, rather than standing up and fighting, were dismissed as passive doormats who exist only for the male cast’s development. One such character was Honda Tohru. The first part of the remake has made it abundantly clear that Tohru is plenty strong. However, since her strength comes in the form of traditionally feminine roles such as nurturing and protecting those dear to her, audiences tend to disregard her strength because of how these roles are devalued.

Featureby Caitlin Moore May 21, 20210 Comments
Feathers and Glass: How Swan’s heroines find themselves through dance
Swan, which ran in Margaret from 1976 until 1981, follows Hijiri Masumi, an average high school girl from rural Hokkaido, who through the course of the series becomes famous as a modern ballet dancer. One of her key relationships is her friendship and rivalry with Lillianna Maksimova, a Russian classical ballet prodigy. This relationship uplifts them both, as the series uses Lillianna as an avenue to explore just how harmful and restrictive gender roles and expectations can be.

Historyby Zahra Ymer February 24, 20210 Comments
You Don’t Have to Kick Ass to Be Kickass: Shoujo fantasy and the value of the noncombatant hero
Over the years, the number of lady action heroes has slowly but significantly risen. And this is a good thing… for the most part. But the ability to enact violence shouldn’t be the only way we define our heroes, regardless of gender.

Featureby Dee February 12, 20210 Comments
The queer blood ties of Vampire Princess Miyu
Miyu is born a vampire, and her bite does not seem to turn her victims into other vampires. In Vampire Princess Miyu, blood bonds become not something that transfers a vampiric condition, but something that creates connection. While in some vampire stories it can also forge mythical bonds, the conventional vampire bite crucially also transfers a condition (vampirism). But here, the connections are not accompanied by transformation. Rather than giving you new traits, its only effect is to create a link between yourself and another person.

Historyby Camellia James January 27, 20210 Comments
Anime’s Glass Ceiling: what keeps women out of the director’s chair?
The popularity of women authors like Itagaki, Takeuchi, Takahashi, and Arakawa led to their work being adapted into similarly successful anime. But most of these anime, if not all of them, were directed by men.

Featureby Adam Wescott December 18, 20200 Comments
Rise of the Villainess: How the reborn bad girls of otome games are defying shoujo stereotypes
In the past few years, the villainess has seen something of a renaissance. Rather than being the subject of ridicule or comeuppance, she’s being celebrated, given the opportunity to come into her own as the subject of an emerging theme in an ever-expanding field of light novels, manga, and anime. Today I’d like to talk a little bit about these ojous: who they are, where they come from, and why in the 21st century their success demonstrates an alternate world where being smart, hard-working, and kind gets you far.

Featureby Kyle T. October 28, 20200 Comments
My Fave is Problematic: Phantom Thief Jeanne
As Jeanne, Maron steals paintings possessed by demons trying to steal the beauty of human hearts, weaken God, and strengthen the Demon Lord. By doing so, Maron seals the demons away, restores the affected humans to normal, and leaves a new painting of an angel in its place. This premise intrigued me because the magical girl was a phantom thief, rather than the standard “magical warrior” or “witch.”

My Fave is Problematicby Latonya Pennington October 21, 20200 Comments
World-Building a Queer Paradise in My Next Life as a Villainess
So, is the world of Villainess a queer utopia uniquely laid out so that Catarina’s love(s) can bloom? Or is the question of world- and story-building a little more complicated?

Featureby Alex Henderson August 7, 20200 Comments
Skip Beat!’s Harmful Healing: Forgiving abuse at the cost of self-worth
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.

Featureby Baillie Pucket May 22, 20200 Comments
“A Man Who Can Experience His Feelings”: Fruits Basket, toxic masculinity, and mental health
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.

Featureby Katie Randazzo May 8, 20200 Comments
Rage, Mentors, and Rebellions in Classic vs. Modern Sukeban Anime Girls
While old-school sukeban (“boss girls”) anime/manga characters come across as irrational in their anger and resentment toward society (until the very end of their respective series, at least), newer sukeban characters often are more level-headed, using their rebellious spirit to improve their circumstances.

Versusby Athena Zhang Baker March 20, 20200 Comments
Coping with Trauma and the Burden of Leadership in Maid-sama!
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!.

Featureby Luisa Aparisi-França March 11, 20200 Comments
Reclaiming the Witch Through Magical Girls
There comes a time in every girl’s life where she’s obsessed with one thing: the occult.

Historyby Nina Morales February 7, 20200 Comments
Beautiful, Broken, and Queer: The complicated interplay of sexuality and trauma in Banana Fish
Ash is a problematic depiction of a queer assault survivor, but also one that claws open some of my most private, difficult wounds.

Perspectivesby Sara Connor January 22, 20200 Comments
“Queering” Heteronormativity: Biological essentialism in genderbending manga
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.

Featureby Kris Avila December 11, 20190 Comments
Shoujo Manga’s Lost Generation
The 1950s and 1960s were a time of incredible change, when a generation of young women emerged to forge many of the conventions and visual language we associate with shoujo manga. That makes it all the more tragic that this period has fallen into obscurity, as time and circumstances threaten to erase it.

Historyby Megan D August 7, 20190 Comments