2023 Summer Premiere Reviews
All the summer premiere reviews in one easy-to-find place. We’ll update the chart as more series become available, so be sure to check back in the coming days for more!
All Articles
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Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout The Animation – Episode 1
There were about five times in this extended premiere that I said, out loud, “I can’t believe it’s still going!” It doesn’t help that the characters move and act like cardboard cutouts. What went wrong?
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Chatty AF 187: Yuri Is My Job! Retrospective (WITH TRANSCRIPT)
Alex, Vrai, and Toni shine a spotlight on one of the best modern yuri available, its genre commentary, and its cast of lovable disaster girls.
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A Life Drawing Boys: Takemiya Keiko, the shoujo trailblazer and proto-BL artist
Classic shoujo has a hard time being exported, especially in the Anglophone sphere, and in pop culture discussions it’s generally been reduced to a subpar category of comics when compared to the high-praise shounen manga are known to receive. However, her value as a multifaceted artist and storyteller should be valued as much as other prominent authors from the ‘70s and ‘80s.
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Working Out the Kinks: Deconstructing gendered expectations of sex in Ladies On Top
NEJIGANAMETA’s manga Ladies On Top is a cute, sexy josei romcom about the crushing pressures of heteronormative gender roles. I know, the emotional trauma inflicted by society’s narrow expectations about acceptable masculinity, femininity, and sexual desire doesn’t sound very cute or sexy, but trust me when I say Ladies On Top weaves these themes together effectively with its fluffy romance.
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Killin’ ‘Em With Kindness: The radical compassion of Kamado Tanjiro within the modern shounen landscape
Tanjiro’s got that moralistic determination trait/defect common in many of my Shounen Sons (™), but what makes him different is a clear and consistent decision to choose kindness toward others, with a pang of deep sadness and forgiveness that outlines it. When holding it up against the other leading boys in the same genre, this particular “brand of nice” feels different. But what is the difference in Tanjiro’s “nice” compared to other shounen protagonists—and why isn’t it more common?
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Lum Through the Years: Urusei Yatsura’s gender roles, then and now
While Lum herself unquestionably remains an anime icon, looking to the different ways she’s depicted in the older anime versus the new can shed some light on changing attitudes to the genre and archetype she’s so nicely embodied over time.
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Chatty AF 186: Death Parade Retrospective – Part 2 (WITH TRANSCRIPT)
Caitlin, Cy, and Toni celebrate the 10th anniversary of a cult classic and dig into its portrayals of women, motherhood, and the question of transformative justice.
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Forcing Yourself for Love: Hotaru, Sailor Moon, and “Overcoming Disability” Narratives
Hotaru’s story represents the tension between our desire for comforting narratives of disabled people healing and the reality of disabled life as shaped by capitalism and the limits of our bodies.
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Akane-Banashi: Writing women protagonists using Battle Shounen tropes
Akane-Banashi, a manga about a young woman coming into prominence in the world of Rakugo, has one of the farthest possible premises from the shounen standard, and yet it uses the tropes of shounen effectively to convey the emotional stakes of the story.
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She Has Two Hands! Room For non-monogamous love in yuri
Yuri and the wider GL community has an increasing reach that seems to be growing each year, and it’s worth examining the ways in which the increased variety of yuri stories are representing different kinds of love and relationships. Love can be so many different things, after all, and it’s gratifying when fiction reflects that—not to mention how it opens new possibilities for storytelling and discussions of relationship dynamics.
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Site Update: New Shoujo-Inspired Merchandise at the AniFem Store!
Back in 2021 we officially opened our merch store, which offers our Trans Magical Warrior designs by Nico Neeks and our fantastic site logo by Katy Castillo. The enthusiastic embrace of these artists and the site warmed us to the bottom of our hearts—which is why we’re so excited to introduce you to our latest collaborator!
