This Week in Anime

Girls in Boyland

Sylvia
We've certainly come a long way, Chris. But perhaps the more pertinent question is, where did we begin? Which, now that I bring it up, is WAY too big a question for our conversational column to adequately answer. But on the other hand, I know a couple of things about shonen and a few more things about gender, so I'm sure we can hash this whole super uncontroversial thing out lickety split.

If I know one thing about general audiences, it's that they can't get enough of feminist discourse!

Really! And it's funny, a drama about rakugo starring a heroine hardly sounds like stereotypical shonen fare, let alone a series running in WSJ. Yet in practice, Akane-banashi invokes and executes many of the genre's staple tropes: familial legacy, training arcs, larger-than-life characters, an indomitably plucky protagonist, and so on. It's just executing all those things with a female protagonist the same way you'd do them with a male protagonist, and that in itself ends up feeling radical. When, in a Perfect World, it really shouldn't! It should be normal!

Garth Marenghi would be proud. And certainly, Akane being a woman does very much play into her arc. She has been taking lessons for years in secret, and she's not warmly welcomed by all of her peers. The subtext (sorry, Garth) is that she's shattering norms in an art form that embraces tradition, so the old guard pushes back. However, as Akane also explains, rakugo has a timelessness rooted in the human dramas of its stories, and no one gender holds a monopoly on being a person. No matter what you might hear out there.

But I also wouldn't say Akane's gender is at the forefront of Akane-banashi's concerns, at least in its early phases.

Lots of girls are dragons. It's normal. Trust me. And yeah! Akane has a lot of fine company in Jump and beyond, even if they're not quite what I'd consider normal. Emma in The Promised Neverland is a smart cookie who uses those smarts to fight the power (and a lot of other things).

And all intelligent people know that Momo is the real protagonist of Dan Da Dan.

But Dan Da Dan is also a "good" example of the other ways in which shonen series often treat their women characters.

And double-time clown hours to the anime adaptation that used this threat as a cliffhanger at the end of the first season. Going full exploitation film-mode for no good reason.

Momo is a great character, too! I love her. She kicks ass. She dresses incredibly. Her puppy love affair with Okarun is adorable. While I can kind of understand these skeevy scenes as a consequence of the series' roots in occult fiction and B-movies, which have historically shunned good taste, I also cannot digest them separated from their wider context in the shonen sphere. Especially in light of Ogino's comments. Did editors pressure Yukinobu Tatsu to reel readers in with "eroticism"? Did Tatsu include it of his own volition? And at the end of the day, does the reason even matter? The result is the same either way.

Plus the historical record. A couple of years back, I watched all of the original Dragon Ball, one of modern shonen's biggest urtexts, and had a great time. Bulma quickly emerged as my favorite character, and by quickly, I mean her very first scene. She runs Goku over with a car and shoots him with a gun. Queen shit.

But she's also just been quickly made the butt of a lot of juvenile, bawdy humor, where the joke is her exasperation at these provocations. I mean, they put her in a bunny suit less than ten episodes into the series. That's gratuitous. It's not serious, of course, but it also doesn't resemble any of the humor directed at the guys in the story. There's a very clear delineation there.

Sure, but I just finished watching the Cell Saga, and there was nary a molecule of estrogen on that battlefield, save Cell's digestion and regurgitation of Android 18. Seems like a lopsided ratio if you ask me. But I also won't accuse Toriyama of being incapable or uninterested in giving his female characters more even ground to stand on. Literally just today, I watched an episode where the moral was that Gohan actually doesn't need to swoop in and rescue Videl from all of her vigilante hijinks.

Plus, I like that Bulma sticks around as tech support, with her knowledge of science and engineering generally coming in handy. But DBZ's main focus is the fighting, and precious few women are allowed to seriously participate. Bulma stays on the sidelines as a mom. Chichi becomes a caricature of a helicopter mom. Videl is tough, but often is in over her head. The possibilities presented for women in DBZ are second-class at best.

And to (likely futilely) fend off counterarguments, I'm not expecting Dragon Ball to be a paragon of women's rights, nor am I accusing Toriyama of being cruelly sexist or the recipient of a malicious editor's edicts. Rather, I'm looking at Dragon Ball as a (ridiculously popular) product of its environment. It's the result of a patriarchal society where, if you don't make an effort to be introspective and thoughtful towards your own biases and blind spots, you end up writing things that reflect and reinforce the general atmosphere of the times.

I'm a woman enjoyer! I like women. I like to look at women. I support women's rights and women's wrongs. But it's a problem when the majority of series in a genre hew too closely to the tenets of the Madonna-whore complex. When these patterns are observed over and over, they reinforce bad ideas in current readers and shut out a greater number of potential readers. There are many, many feminist critiques you can lob at it, but it's also a recipe for stagnation.

And that's not to say there weren't mangaka fighting the good gender fight much earlier. A little-known fella named Hirohiko Araki, when tasked with drafting the sixth part of his long-running series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, decided he needed a break from drawing buff dudes with a taste for haute couture.

But to your point about sympathy, Araki writes in Manga in Theory and Practice: How to Create Villains, that he feared his readers might have trouble "accepting" Jolyne based on the reception to a previous work of his, Gorgeous Irene, which also featured a leading heroine.

He's an artist who refuses to settle and rest on his laurels, and that's why he's one of the greats. Linking back to last week's Ghost in the Shell column, you can also see the influence of women action heroes in the Major. And of course, just because a woman protagonist can fight doesn't mean she can't also be objectified or treated by the narrative in ways that a man never would. There are many moving parts to this equation. Although I do think Jolyne is one of the best heroines in shonen, so don't get that twisted.

It's more than possible you have your cheesecake and eat it too. Stone Ocean owes a lot to legendary exploitation film Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion and its sequels, after all. It's a matter of attitude and execution. It's also a matter of variety. If we had more examples of compelling female protagonists in shonen, then we would have more to consider and analyze. A glaring fault in a single example wouldn't stick out as much.

Also, I can foresee the "shonen is for boys, so it should focus on boys" argument, and although we've already alluded to such, I want to clearly state that this rationale is bullshit. Set aside the fact that shonen/shojo/seinen/josei/etc are not genres, nor are they labels that enforce any kind of gender segregation; shonen manga and anime are some of the most popular on the planet. Everybody is reading and watching them, and each one of those people deserves stories that speak to their experiences.

Asa speaks to another facet of this, which is the "how" of writing a good shonen heroine. Sure, you can write her as you would a boy, but you can also write her while fully cognizant that she's a girl, and that girls can have different experiences than boys typically would. Asa, to me, could only be a messy teenage girl wrestling with her messy teenage girl feelings. Those aspects of her character ground her in a very specific kind of adolescent malaise—one I could recognize and relate to, and in a way I didn't with Denji.

Plus, if you'll allow me an excursion into the No Fun Zone, it's difficult for me to separate sexism in shonen manga from sexism in the shonen manga industry. We're not even three months out from the latest bombshell about managers protecting known sex offenders. And don't even get me started on Nobuhiro Watsuki and his friends in high places. These are consequences of and contributors to the misogynistic miasma that coats our entire planet. So when I hear a story about editors pushing for gratuitous sex appeal, I believe it. I know what that kind of "boys' club" is like. All of this is related.

Which is to say: I'm glad we're getting a greater number and variety of girls leading the stories in the shonen space. But even more important is serious advocacy for gender equality behind the scenes. And that starts with accountability. Real accountability.

But damn, do I respect Usazaki for turning things around when thrust into such an awful situation through no fault of her own. I hope her story inspires other aspiring women artists, and I hope we can see the day when this kind of career recovery is no longer an issue. We can build an industry that cares about women and their voices. It's not like we're colonizing Mars. This is achievable.

That's right. Read more women. Write more women. Hire more women. Center more women. Or else you're a coward. Are you a coward?