AniFem Round-Up
Attention to the letter: Lettering and Deaf representation in A Sign of Affection
The manga alters its display of dialogue to convey its Deaf heroine’s experiences with sound and communication, visually conveying an aural experience.
Social Commentary, Horror Manga and the Left: From Ero-Guro to Junji Ito
From the Marxist-leaning magazines of the 1960s to the modern era, the best horror has always been a way to unearth the unspeakable and speak for the voiceless.
What’s your favorite music anime?
From idol to school band and beyond.
Unfortunately, circumstances beyond our control mean we weren’t able to interview this artist. We’re extremely bummed about it.
Beyond AniFem
Monogatari’s Past, Present, And Future: Director Midori Yoshizawa And The Synergistic Storytelling In Off & Monster Season (Sakuga Blog, kViN)
How Monogatari’s first female director is putting her own stamp on the visually striking franchise.
But what was it that earned her that positive reputation? Internally, there’s the fact that working with her is breezier than their chaotic norm, since she requires little oversight to put together a compelling package that will retain that vague SHAFT identity. Painting her as someone who’s simply easy to work with, however, would be a massive mischaracterization. For starters, Yoshizawa is an ambitious director whose roots in animation make her envision troublesome layouts. SHAFT works lean towards very symbolic framing, with impossible cross-sections of buildings and flat yet memorable staging. As a storyboarder, she packs her framing with meaning in similar fashion, but often with more spacious approach that makes the job inherently more complicated for the animators. The more realistic fundamentals (which she then loves to exaggerate through fish lens distortions) have great synergy with Yoshizawa’s ability to compose attractive shots where not just the animation is laid out with depth and intent, but backgrounds, CG, and even live action elements work in conjunction to guide the eye together. Quite the important skill within SHAFT’s idiosyncratic system!
This brings us to another characteristic trait of Yoshizawa: the sheer creativity represented not just in form, but in material. SHAFT’s most visually radical days, represented by the likes of Oishi himself, are behind them… but Yoshizawa never got that memo, because the more leeway she’s been granted, the more she has emphasized live-action footage and unconventional analog materials. For one, Yoshizawa often leans on the inherent link between time and tangible elements. As something that physically exists, those real materials evoke the passage of time in a more direct way than intangible animation could—hence her usage of time-lapses and seasonally coded live-action reels, analog drawings, paper cutouts, and so on.
A remarkable example of this can be found in one of Yoshizawa’s episodes of Magia Record, where she busted out an actual hourglass for the cuts indicating the passage of time. When reaching the present, she prepared a similar canvas of sand where she herself painted a convincingly childish picture to represent a relationship that had blossomed during that period. With this move, a form of expression that evokes time goes on to become time spent together, a diegetic element that also represents the bond between two individuals. In a way, this sums up the aspect that sets her apart the most from her peers at the studio. Fascinating as her technique is, it’s that emphasis on personal, emotional storytelling that differentiates her from the more logically-oriented veterans like Yukihiro Miyamoto (or her Monogatari predecessor Itamura) as well as mad geniuses like Oishi, who always feel like they operate on higher levels of abstraction. The outlandish visuals in Yoshizawa’s works might lead you to expect detached storytelling, but her natural tendency is to use those unorthodox tools to humanize the characters in small, very personal ways.
Empathizing with Pregnancy: An Interview with My Girlfriend’s Child Manga Creator Mamoru Aoi (Anime News Network, Kalai Chik)
The series was recently nominated for an Eisner Award.
You include very useful information in your manga and helpful Q&As about sex and pregnancy from experts in the tankobon volumes. Was this to help educate the readers of your manga about their choices, regardless of age and gender?
AOI: Yes, I believe the ideal situation would be for people to read a story and gradually gain knowledge. The main story strikes a balance between entertainment and information, while the collected volume supplements the parts the main story couldn’t completely cover. I would like to share the content within with everyone, regardless of gender or age.
Takara is portrayed as a positive role model for boyfriends in this situation, but other male and female characters are not supportive of Sachi’s choice. Why did you want to show the positive and negative reactions to a teenage pregnancy?
AOI: There needs to be a representative for the readers. In order to get everyone thinking about this topic, we needed the readers to be an involved party. Who do you think this applies to? Although not every topic may be applicable to you, you can understand how a character thinks. You also may not empathize with how other characters think. And why is that?
The purpose is to have you understand why you think a certain way, why this or that character thinks that way, and to have you stand on the same level as the characters you read about—so that you don’t see it as someone else’s problem.
Unification Church hit with fresh fines for impeding Japan government inquiry (The Mainichi)
Abe Shinzo’s assassin claimed his motivation was to bring attention to the injustices of the Unification Church, to which the Liberal Democratic Party has numerous ties.
The church is a South Korean religious organization established by a staunch anti-communist in 1954. In Japan, the church has long been criticized for extracting huge donations from followers via “spiritual sales,” in which victims are pressured to buy items at exorbitant prices.
The government has sought to question the Japanese branch so an application can be filed seeking a court order to dissolve the organization.
According to the district court, 22 civil lawsuit rulings involving the church suggested there were people who were victimized by the group’s illegal fundraising practices.
Following the high court’s decision, the church, formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, said it would consider appealing the latest ruling, which it described as “extremely unjust” and in violation of a precedent set by the Supreme Court.
The church maintains its senior officials have never been implicated in a criminal case and that the government’s questioning of the organization is illegal.
After an almost yearlong investigation, the government filed a request in October 2023 with the district court for the dissolution order over the church’s donation practices, a move that would deprive the group of its tax benefits.
Foreign residents call for Japan to abolish nationality requirement for public servants (The Mainichi, Chika Yokomi)
Negotiations with ministry officials took place on August 23rd.
Teachers of foreign nationality also participated in the meeting and complained about the discrimination to officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
While the nationality clause was abolished in 1991 for the hiring of foreign nationals as teachers at public schools, many remain only as “full-time lecturers,” who are not allowed to hold senior positions. Moreover, many local governments also do not permit foreign nationals to take employment exams, and even in municipalities where they can be hired as civil servants, they are only allowed to work in certain fields. The U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued a correction advisory to the Japanese government in 2018 in response to this situation.
One 54-year-old woman of foreign nationality works as a full-time lecturer and a homeroom teacher at a part-time high school in Yokohama run by the municipal government. She revealed to the Mainichi Shimbun that though managerial staff had asked her if she wanted to be involved in teaching students with special needs, she rejected the offer, saying, “I really want to do it, but the nationality clause issue makes it impossible for me to take a leadership role and stay motivated. It would also affect my students.”
She complained to government officials, saying, “I’m systematically discriminated against, and I’m constantly wondering what to do.” A representative from the education ministry responded, “Appointment and treatment are handled appropriately under the authority and responsibility of education boards.”
Support groups step in as Japan’s homeless cope with round-the-clock extreme heat (The Mainichi, Daiki Takikawa)
Night temperatures in Osaka have regularly stayed over 25 degrees Celsius (77 Fahrenheit) along with heavy humidity this summer.
In July, during their night patrol activities, Homedoor volunteers found a homeless person collapsed over their bicycle due to the heat. The person appeared to be suffering from heatstroke, so they quickly gave them a sports drink and called an ambulance. In August, they received reports of homeless people collapsing from heatstroke.
During these night patrols, volunteers distribute boxed meals and drinks while checking on the well-being of the homeless and gathering information on their support needs. In August, they also handed out salt tablets and heatstroke prevention candies as part of their heat-related aid efforts. The patrol covers four routes in Osaka, where many homeless individuals reside, and takes about two hours to complete by foot or bicycle. Along the way, volunteers engage in casual conversations to check on the well-being of the homeless people they encounter.
Homedoor director Kana Kawaguchi, 33, told the Mainichi, “Many homeless people say that the summer heat is harder to endure than the winter cold. There’s no way to escape the heat. We have a space where they can cool off during the day, so I hope they don’t hesitate to visit us.”
Southwestern Japan school for underserved Koreans marks 30 years of student empowerment (The Mainichi, Yuki Enami)
Over a hundred students have studied at the small night school over the course of its history.
Yoshie Yanai, 65, who was born and raised in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, initially established the school in the industrial city for her mother and other older Koreans. But the institution has not only become a haven of learning for those who never attended school but also a source of emotional support for others without a formal education.
When Yanai was a student at the University of Kitakyushu some three decades ago, she was bewildered by the contradiction of Japan’s Constitution, which touts the “right to education,” despite the fact many so-called zainichi Korean residents, including her mother, were illiterate, having received no formal education during or after World War II.
They were mostly first- and second-generation Korean residents who were unable to return to the Korean Peninsula nor afford to go to school due to their low social status after Japan’s surrender in the war. “I had no adolescence,” Yanai’s mother had told her.
Many Koreans then were “socially invisible because they couldn’t write their names and addresses in Japanese and couldn’t even ride the trains,” Yanai said.
Yanai came to know of the presence of night junior high schools through renowned film director Yoji Yamada’s film “A Class to Remember,” but, when she saw the movie in 1994, there were no such public night classes in Kitakyushu.
However, in May 1994, Yanai approached her academic advisor at the university and opened a reading and writing school for first- and second-generation Korean students at a local community center based on a voluntary evening junior high school in Osaka she had learned about.
Girls Band Cry Anime Series Review (Anime News Network, Nicholas Dupree)
You can stream it in North America now! Sort of!
A lot of that comes down to tone and setting. The ladies of Love Live! go through their struggles but they ultimately embrace a near-supernatural positivity in their stories. GBC is immediately more grounded, a good bit more cynical, and much closer to what starting a band in your late teens might look like. Its characters are a mix of high-school dropouts and 20-something musicians working part-time jobs to keep the lights on while self-funding the band. They play small-time gigs in whatever music venue will spare them the time of day. There’s a minor plot point involving music copyright, where Momoka signed away the rights to her original songs after leaving her previous band, and now has to watch them flourish off the success of her work. GBC wants to explore the realities of being a professional musician and the constant friction between making art and making money.
Similarly, the character drama is fueled by angst and optimism constantly being at odds. Nina and Momoka’s dueling character arcs take up much of this season’s drama, constantly clashing and arguing in the ways only supremely passionate bandmates can. Nina is fueled by a need to prove that she was right about moving out on her own and taking the difficult path—showing that preserving her sense of justice was better than compromising with the bullies and adults who failed her. Momoka finds herself pulled into her angry apprentice’s energy, yet can’t escape the guilt of her own past choices—personally familiar as she is with the biting sting of failure that can come with standing by one’s convictions in the cutthroat entertainment world. They pull each other closer while simultaneously pushing each other away. As Nina urges Momoka to embrace her anger at the wrongs she’s faced, Momoka tries to shield them both from the indifferent and uncompromising music industry.
That might make the show sound like relentless drama but the real key to GBC‘s charm is how it mixes all that angst with whip-smart humor. There’s a smorgasbord of physical comedy to be had in any and every episode, from Nina attacking a passerby with a lamp, to bassist Rupa catching a beer can thrown at her head and cheerfully chugging it in seconds. Drummer and actress Subaru provides a seemingly infinite number of weird, silly, and altogether wonderful faces—enhanced by about half of them being bitingly sarcastic. Nina and Momoka get into shouting matches every other episode—and the choice to have these happen in populated restaurants adds the perfect level of awkward absurdity as countless strangers witness these two girls tossing drinks and making dramatic declarations while their bandmates groan in embarrassment or try to sneak out of frame. There is so much Grade-A slapstick in this show that perfectly complements its heavy drama.
This Abundance Of Sex Is Kinda Nice, Actually (Adult Analysis Anthology 2, Blit)
Applying the notion of the “cozy game” to eroge.
There’s another side to all this cozyness, as well. The Coziness in Games authors acknowledge that making things comfortable, or using comfort as a reward, can be dangerous. It’s “Comfort is a Weapon” that nails it, though. When we make a space cozy, we set it aside from the rest of the world: we draw a boundary and include the things we like and exclude the things we don’t like. If we want to engage with cozy media, we must ask: who or what is on the outside?
Anime has a long history with race, porn has a long history with conventionally attractive bodies (and also race). Ditzy Demons and Girls aren’t breaking any new ground on either axis– its characters read as white (to me), with supermodel body shapes. Mice Tea brings more color and bodies into its cozy spaces, but all the characters still read as upper middle class. And although Margret and Julie are pudgier, plenty of lines still have Margret fretting about her weight. I’m not the smartest bunny, but I’d imagine hearing about weight watching can take someone right out of a cozy headspace fast. I also have to at least acknowledge that it’s considered a character flaw that the girls in Ditzy Demons
let Ren do the cooking. No one explicitly says it, and Ren admits to himself that he likes doing chores, but the subtext is there: the girls should be doing this domestic labor.I think it’s important to take extra care with cozy porn. Cozy porn pieces don’t just say “bodies like this get to have sex and attention” in their subtext. They also say “bodies like this get to feel like they belong.”
VIDEO: Review of the otome game Him, the Smile and Bloom.
VIDEO: SungWon Cho sings “Baka Mitai” while cosplaying Kiryu Kazuma.
AniFem Community
NANA: forever in our hearts.
NANA, Kids on The Slope, Carole and Tuesday, Given
[image or embed]— Latonya “Penn” P. (@tonyawithapenn.bsky.social) Aug 27, 2024 at 5:46 PM
I feel so basic picking the obvious Bocchi. So I’ll mention Gravitation (yes, I AM old) and Given OH AND SYMPHOGEAR. that… probably counts, right?
[image or embed]— Orestria (@orestria.bsky.social) Aug 27, 2024 at 8:47 AM
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