AniFem Round-Up
Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on Pokémon’s “Electric Soldier Porygon”
Everyone knows the urban legends about the seizure-inducing banned episode of Pokemon. But the facts of what happened are stranger and more complicated than many know.
Resilience and Resistance: Reimagining marginality and agency in The Apothecary Diaries
A deep dive on how The Apothecary Diaries explores the oppression under a Confucian patriarchy, and how the women under it carve out power where they can.
What’s your favorite 1980s anime?
Time to get a bit of history.
Beyond AniFem
Reuters: Sony Is in Talks to Acquire Kadokawa (Anime News Network, Joanna Cayanan)
This purchase would give Sony a de facto monopoly over the English-language anime market. ANN’s Editor-in-Chief confirms she will be resistant and publicly vocal about any attempts at editorial control.
Sony already has a 2% stake in Kadokawa and a stake in its subsidiary FromSoftware (Elden Ring RPG developer).
Aniplex is a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment Japan (SMEJ). Animation studios A-1 Pictures and CloverWorks are subsidiaries of Aniplex.
Sony‘s Funimation Global Group completed its acquisition of Crunchyroll from AT&T on August 9, 2021, after the company first announced the acquisition in December 2020. The purchase price was US$1.175 billion, and the proceeds were paid in cash at closing. Funimation‘s home video releases are now listed under Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll reached over 15 million paid subscribers to the anime streaming service as of this year.
Sony announced in May that it will launch an academy to develop talent to create anime. The academy will aim to “[nurture] anime creators in global markets, mainly by Aniplex and Crunchyroll with collaboration from across the industry.”
Multicultural representation in Japan’s media slowly evolving (The Asahi Shimbun, Takuya Asakura)
Interview subject Grace portrayed Sowande in the live-action Eizouken adaptation.
Born and raised in Chiba Prefecture to a Ghanaian father and a Japanese mother, Grace was frustrated with the stereotypes of black individuals often depicted in Japanese entertainment circles.
She rarely saw girls with skin and hair like hers in Japanese manga or TV dramas. When she did, they were usually portrayed as hip-hop dancers, athletes or other typical stereotypes of black people.
These were the last roles she wanted to play because she never wanted to help spread a form of prejudice that she herself had been subject to.
Grace had a glamorous side and had worked as a commercial model since elementary school, so the conformity a school environment demanded was stressful.
Her junior high school’s rules on hairstyles did not account for different types of hair and she was unable to conform to regulations such as having to tie her hair below her ears because of its volume.
During every break, she would wet her hair to keep it in place.
Other students with mixed heritage tried to blend in by dyeing their hair darker or straightening it.
She also found it uncomfortable when other students made innocent but insensitive remarks about her, such as, “You must be good at dancing” or “You look like a fast runner,” which they intended as compliments.
She was even more hurt by how TV programs focused only on impoverished areas of Ghana, or Africa in general, and how school lessons showcased only images of traditional tribes from these regions.
The author of “Eizouken,” Sumito Owara, 31, attended elementary and junior high schools in Kanagawa Prefecture where a number of students had international roots.
In what appears to be one of the first instances of inclusive character design in a series with mainstream popularity in Japan, he featured an African-Asian girl among the main characters of the manga to reflect the realities of modern Japanese society.
The Intensely Colorful Work of a Painter Obsessed with Anime (The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead)
A profile of Jadé Fadojutimi, the youngest artist to have her work entered into the Tate Museum’s collection.
Fadojutimi’s works from that period are expansive and glowing—communicating a sense of openness that lockdown had placed off-limits. All was not calm, however; in the summer of 2021, Fadojutimi experienced a manic episode, and was involuntarily hospitalized. The incident is not easy for her to talk about, and during our conversations she initially approached the subject and then darted away. “They should have just asked me why I was dancing all the time,” she told me at one point, with dark humor. Being institutionalized had been terrifying: “What was shocking to me was how scary it can be to be told that you have got to live with loads of people that are unwell, and you are saying you are not unwell, and they are also saying they are not unwell—but they really are, and you really are.”
In 2020, even before that first hospitalization, Fadojutimi had been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She had long suspected that she might have the condition, but the news was still painful. “I cried,” she recalled. “I always thought I was, but there were a lot of emotions in hearing a diagnosis. I obviously wasn’t living life like everyone else was. But I wasn’t living life admiring what everyone else had.” Her practice as an artist had been about figuring out how her own mind was ordered, and how best to give expression to her emotional experience. The public reception of her work had given legitimacy to her state of being, whatever the personal difficulties involved in making her paintings might be: the depression, the isolation, the struggle on many days just to get out of bed. “I’ve gotten used to being myself, and my paintings created this product of being that made me feel justified in my own, let’s say, findings,” she said. To have a label thrust on her felt diminishing and traumatic. She was also aware that a mental-health diagnosis can narrow the critical understanding of an artist’s work; the radiant œuvre of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has spent decades living in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, is sometimes reduced to an extended act of “self-care.”
Mayonaka Punch: The Bloodlust and Burnout of Content Creation (The Afictionado, Alex Henderson)
A character study of MayoPan’s failgirl lead.
If you want a deep look at the Content Creator ecosystem and its many terrors and flaws, this show may not do it for you, as it admittedly skims over a lot of the issues that feel pretty entrenched in the industry. Aside from Masaki physically fighting a crazed fangirl who almost destroys the venue of a collab event, it doesn’t get into the kind of frightening, parasocial fandom that these platforms often foster. Aside from the vampires protesting that they only got a spike in followers because they filmed their latest video in the bath, it doesn’t get into the ways that women are often exploited and commodified (or encouraged to commodify themselves) for views.
But when it comes to the depiction of Masaki’s insecurity and burnout, and the way that her self-destructive tendencies become intertwined with success on this fickle platform, MayoPan feels pretty spot-on. You don’t need to be deep in the paint to know that “why I’m taking a break from YouTube” videos are a genre unto themselves, that mental health issues are rife within the field, and that the flash-in-the-pan nature of trends and topics (and the supposed attention spans of the audience) are encouraging a lightning-speed social media version of the “publish or perish” problem that’s always talked about in academia. Masaki clearly buys into this, and she very nearly does perish—and that’s unrelated to the vampire who wants to eat her!
Without spoiling too much about the (admittedly ridiculous) series finale, I think MayoPan does a good job keeping Masaki’s growth and issues at the heart of the narrative, giving her something of a satisfying character arc while also expressing that there’s no easy “fix” for any of this. It’s a messy business—that much is clear, even with the focus on one disastrous young woman’s career and with supernatural silliness thrown thoroughly into the mix.
5 times more women in Japan changed jobs in 2023 than 10 years earlier: report (The Mainichi, Yuko Shimada)
It was previously assumed that 35 was the upper limit for changing careers.
Recruit Agent, a service operated by Recruit Co., also found that the number of cases in which contract and temporary female employees became full-time workers through job changes grew 5.8 times over the same period. It said a total of 40% of those who changed jobs saw their wages increase by 10% or more.
A Recruit representative noted that in 2013, very few women in their 40s were changing jobs. Regarding the large increase, the representative pointed out that “the targets that companies are seeking are expanding against the background of a shortage of human resources.”
About 40% of women in their 40s switched to jobs as administrative specialists. The company says many also become IT engineers and general clerical workers. A Recruit employee commented, “As long as you have some kind of accumulated experience, you can change jobs even when you’re older. With the human resource shortage remaining unresolved, this trend is likely to continue.”
Hokkaido event draws protests for denying Ainu are indigenous (The Asahi Shimbun, Kohei Uwabo)
The Ainu are legally protected as an indigenous people as of 2019.
About 30 people gathered outside a civic center where the Ainu no Shijitsu wo Manabu Kai (Group to study Ainu’s historical facts) organized a speech and panel exhibition on Nov. 15.
The group contends the Ainu, who mainly inhabit Hokkaido, are not an indigenous people, unlike the Aborigines in Australia and Native Americans in the United States.
It said the Jomon people, who are the ancestors of Japanese, lived in Hokkaido for more than 10,000 years from around 16,000 years ago before the Ainu people.
Protesters demanded the organizers stop “spreading false information that distorts history and denies (the Ainu’s) indigeneity.”
They carried cards and banners that said, “Ainu denialism constitutes hate speech” and “Anti-Ainu discrimination violates the law.”
The rally was organized by Counter-Racist Action Collective North, a group opposed to hate speech.
Stim culture: Outlining anime’s appeal to the autistic community (International Journal of Cultural Studies; Megan Catherine Rose, Patrick W. Galbraith, and Georgia Thomas-Parr)
Anime fandom as a communal space for autistics.
In conceptualizing stim cultures, this article has offered a critical intervention in autism studies, much of which seeks to ‘cure’ or ‘intervene’ with our bodyminds so we may appear neurotypical. While some researchers contend that accounts of our own lives might be biased or inaccurate, we argue that documenting stim cultures as part of autistic wellbeing and community is essential in our collectively reclaiming research about our bodies, minds and lives. In our discussion of visual tactility or animation stimming, layers or moving through estranged worlds and unmasking or emerging neurocultures and languages, we identified key features of how anime works for and with the autistic. With its moving images, transforming figures and slick sound design, the visual and aural aesthetics of anime function as a tool for stimming. The literature suggests that stimming acts as a ‘release of any high emotion’ (Kapp, 2019: 1786), where, in anime, moving images and moments and dramatic scenarios become catalogued and re-lived by fans, who enjoy overwhelming affects. Furthermore, thinking in layers and exploring texts from different angles, and playing with their dis/connections from the ‘real’, is pleasurable and engaging for autistic people. The estranged world of anime provides a sense of comfort, a lens through which we can interpret the world. Finally, anime worlds not only present autistic people with safe spaces to both belong and play with sociality, but the characters themselves also provide more-than-human companionship (as emblazoned in the ‘wife’ or ‘husband’).
Anime fandom presents an interesting site of ‘neuro-culture’, which recognizes neurological difference and challenges neurotypical socio-cultural norms. Anime fan spaces facilitate and celebrate strangeness, bringing together autistic people who feel ‘different’. Resonating with studies of anime fans, also known as ‘weeaboo’ and ‘otaku’, activities in fandom spaces facilitate nuances in social connections. One of the goals of this article has been to outline the evidence for anime attracting and being a support for autistic individuals organized into ‘neuroqueer microsocieties’ (Price, 2022: 52–53). Fan cultures operate outside the imaginary confines of neurotypical ‘norms’ and acknowledge the neurodiversity that already exists among anime fans. Here we have presented stim cultures as a form of tentative exploration that can uncover new directions in autistic and fan culture research, inviting other scholars to participate moving forward.
VIDEO: Discussion of the first half of Mars.
VIDEO: How Tokyopop crashed and burned.
SKEET: Congrats to Shoujo Sunday for taking home a Signal Award.
🧵 ✨🍨 We did it! 🍨✨ The Shoujo Sundae Podcast has struck gold at the 2024 Signal Awards, proudly winning the Listener’s Choice Award in the Recap Category! 🏅 This marks a monumental moment as we are now the first award-winning #shoujo podcast in the United States. 💖
— Shoujo Sundae Podcast (@shoujosundae.com) November 18, 2024 at 2:07 PM
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AniFem Community
Just a fun reminder that there’s a lot of cool old anime out there.
i mean…..it's glass mask and dirty pair. always glass mask and dirty pair
— phia (@_selphic on twitter) (@phiabean.bsky.social) November 19, 2024 at 8:49 PM
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Hana Ko no Lunlun aka The Flower Child Lunlun (Angel). I think everything else I like it’s from the 70s or 90s 😳. I mean, I grew up on World Theater anime.
— flowermiko (@flowermiko.bsky.social) November 18, 2024 at 9:52 PM
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The Golden Bird (1987). A very charming family film with an exceedingly strong aesthetic – from the stunning art direction to the highly personable character designs of Atsuko Fukushima and Manabu Oohashi. Toshio Hirata is an incredibly creative & talented director, though he is sadly not well known
— revuekino.bsky.social (@revuekino.bsky.social) November 19, 2024 at 4:41 PM
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