waylonsthings

[waylonsthings]

Supporting Women’s Wrongs (Just Not Like That): Fandom misogyny and the flawed women of NANA

Content warning: Grooming, misogyny, cheating, abusive relationships.

Spoilers for NANA (anime and manga). 

The phrase “I support women’s rights, but more importantly, I support women’s wrongs” speaks to the idea of holding space for female characters to be complicated or flawed. This concept is applicable to the cult-classic manga NANA by Yazawa Ai, which features an array of complex and polarizing fictional women. The need for well-written female characters is supposedly understood and advocated for in fandom spaces, but the moment these female characters show any unfavorable attributes or make mistakes, they are rarely given the same grace as male characters. The complicated women of NANA prove that there’s a limit to how flawed a female character can be before she’s no longer palatable to readers.

NANA follows the lives of two women, Osaki Nana and Komatsu Nana (nicknamed Hachi), who decide to become roommates in Tokyo. Nana O wants to become a famous punk-rock singer, while Hachi craves love and struggles to find herself outside of her relationships with men. Beyond its iconic Vivienne Westwood fashion and abundance of queer undertones, the manga is known for its emotional realism and its complicated, messy characters. 

You’d think that complicated female characters would be a good thing, right? Especially when there seems to be a shortage in many of the most popular animanga series. In their video on poorly written women in shounen anime, youtuber Inakyu explores the ways in which female characters are often undeveloped, regulated to damsel status, or used for fan service. Varied, nuanced female characters who drive the narrative are much more common in shoujo and josei media, so it’s unfortunate that shoujo manga isn’t given the same value as shounen manga in mainstream anime fandom spaces. However, while female characters in shoujo manga are often written with more care and complexity, that doesn’t always translate to these characters being well-liked—even by the demographic these characters are supposed to speak to the most. 

Read it at Anime Feminist!

[waylonsthings]

The Formative Media I have Consumed: The positive and Negative.

When I was in Middle school, around the age of 13-14, the media that I had consumed shifted from animated sit-coms like The Simpsons, which I was exposed to by my dad at the age of 9, to east-asian media. My first shounen-anime that I ever watched was Naruto. It started because someone in my homeroom class in sixth grade would draw portraits that incorporated elements of the Japanese Visual Language, and I was intrigued by them. I asked about them, and she said that she was interested in Anime. She recommended some like Fairy Tail and Soul Eater, other shounen anime that were popular at the time; that afternoon, unaware that my Netflix profile was automatically set to kids, I looked up Anime and the first and only result was Naruto. I started watching it and the first episode starts with the mastering of the “transformation: sexy-jutsu”. Which I found funny more than anything else. Though, there was a more emotional element to the first episode as it depicted social outcasting as well as the troublesome kid who was finally given a chance by the slightly perverted Iraku sensei.  This exposure to this medium dragged me away from more Western media as I thought that there was “nothing like this on TV”. Naruto may not be the best example of media that is void of misogyny, most of the women are often sidelined and are painted as inferior and are constantly overshadowed within the narrative. The mainstream media in East Asia that is widely consumed contain positive messaging that is depicted in Naruto, with the downsides and drawbacks that comes from the lack of ability to write a strong female character that most shounen mangaka seem to be inflicted with.

As my taste in media shifted as I got older, I reverted back to mostly watching Adult Animated Situational Comedies. When depicting a positive narrative that lacks misogyny or denounces it, there is one example of an adult oriented comedy that seems to denounce the constraints of masculinity. It is the Mike Judge Animated sit-com, King of the Hill. The story focuses on a conservative suburban family. Since Hank Hill carries certain ideologies about the roll of himself and his son Bobby, there is a constant denouncing of how Bobby expresses himself in various ways that fit outside the proper views of masculinity. These scenes are often used for strictly satirical purposes and not to be properly idolized, making the audience properly empathize with Bobby Hill. Though Hank is presented as an “Ideal Masculine figure”. Hank will threaten physical violence when inconvenienced, He has a wife, a kid, and obsessed with lawn work. Though, one of Hank’s attributes is his “Narrow Urethra”, making it hard for him to conceive a child with his wife. Throughout the show, these kinds of satirical jokes come up. In some episodes, we see Hank Hill’s Father, Cotton Hill being blatantly Misogynistic. Depicting that toxic masculinity is a learned and absurd ideology of masculinity. Hank’s ideas about Masculinity become so severe that it gets to the point where he no longer wants express proper affection, thus turning Hank into a Tsundere. Hank clearly loves his family in some manner, but all he really says “I am not un-fond of you I tell you what”. There are other characters that represent a proper view of masculinity. Specifically through Bill who, through divorce, is able to learn about self-worth, and learn how to handle rejection properly. This kind of messaging is positive for a male audience, and it’s done through an easily accessible and consumable medium.

[waylonsthings]

not my funniest but it is my job to feed the barren wasteland that is the thomas fandom

[waylonsthings]

Not Just Roses and Sparkles: Unpacking assumptions about shoujo through Hagio Moto's work

Content warning: mentions of sexual assault and childhood sexual assault in the material of some comics discussed

Minor spoilers for The Poe Clan, Marginal, A Cruel God Reigns, and The Heart of Thomas

Like a lot of people, before I ever read a shoujo manga, I used to think of shoujo as “romance comics.” For me, the word would evoke a mental image of an unserious, weepy soap opera about girls with curly hair and very shiny eyes, with a lot of sparkles and stylized roses around the panel borders. In other words, not for me—a butch, working through a lot of internalized misogyny about not liking “fluffy romance stories for girls.” I assumed that all shoujo manga was melodramatic and over the top, and that I, a “serious comics reader,” wouldn’t enjoy it very much. 

Several years ago, though, I stumbled into reading some of the work of the Year 24 group—a group of female artists who were incredibly influential on the evolution of shoujo manga in the 1970s—and fell in love, not just with their series but with shoujo manga itself. I discovered that shoujo was so much more than I had first assumed: not a genre, but a demographic category (manga aimed primarily at a young, female audience) and a style—and a set of tools and conventions for telling stories. Shoujo manga is all about focusing on melodramatic emotion, and using expressionistic linework to depict a character’s internal emotions as images on the page, and what I thought of as just that “sparkles and roses” style was used even from the demographic’s earliest days to tell stories to all kinds of emotional effects. Manga artist Hagio Moto’s work in particular opened my eyes to how versatile the iconic shoujo style can be as a storytelling tool—not just for romance, but for horror, mystery, and mind-expanding science fiction. Her classic work is emblematic of the exciting range of stories under the shoujo umbrella, and how the visual and narrative hallmarks of shoujo itself can be applied to great effect in many different genres. And if you’re like me, and think you won’t like shoujo manga because you’re not a “romance person,” I think checking out her work might be worth a try.

Read it at Anime Feminist!