Anime Feminist celebrates and critiques the growing genre

Anime is one of Japan’s main cultural exports and a large part of its cultural identity. Characters and series — like Goku from Dragon Ball series and Pikachu from Pokemón — are known worldwide. But feminists have pointed out that the genre has long had a problematic relationship with gender and racial representations.

The site Anime Feminist, founded by U.K native Amelia Cook, analyzes diversity and representation in this art form. Anime Feminist’s Managing Editor’s Dee (who doesn’t entirely identify herself because of fan harassment) told the FBomb how the site was developed and how the site’s Western perspective affects their analysis of the Eastern-based art-form.

The FBomb: Can you tell us about how you became involved with Anime Feminist?

Dee: Amelia invited me to be a member of the AniFem staff when it first launched. I worked as a writer and editor for most of a year then, as the site began to grow, I shifted into the role of contributor liaison and managing editor.

In addition to writing my own articles, reviews, and recommendations, I also go over the pitches we receive, connect contributors with editors, review final drafts, provide any final edits, and put together our schedule each week. So, basically, if you don’t like an article, you can blame me for greenlighting it.

What are some of the most problematic aspects of anime covered on the site? Are there certain problems that are really pervasive/consistent throughout all of anime?

You know, it’s funny - folks seem to focus on our critical articles, but we actually spend more time at AniFem talking about the positive aspects of series than the negative ones.

Our staff and contributors love anime and manga, even if it does frustrate us sometimes, and we want to share that love with our readers. So, we try to balance our content between praise and critique, between saying “here’s a valuable thing we’d like to see more of” and “here’s a troubling thing and here’s why it can be harmful.”

To answer your question, though, when it comes to problematic aspects, it runs the whole gamut. We’ve talked about sexism, ableism, racial or queer stereotyping, fascist undercurrents, and so on. Anime and manga are broad categories, so just like with western media, you can run into every troubling element under the sun if you hang around long enough.

If I had to pick the most common issue, it’d probably involve sexualizing female characters. Sometimes this is something annoying but relatively minor like revealing costumes or ridiculous boob jiggles, while other times it’s something more actively harmful, like adults preying on minors or stories that treat sexual assault as funny or romantic. (As an aside, these issues are by no means limited to one gender and are always a serious concern; they just tend to happen more often with female characters.) 

One of AniFem’s goals is to give our readers a heads-up when these issues arise and educate folks about the potential harm such stories can do. We’re not interested in stamping a series with an overly simplistic “feminist” or “not feminist” label. A lot of fiction is complicated, with both positive and negative aspects. Not everyone will have the same response to it and that’s okay. We just want to promote media literacy and critical thinking, to help give feminist-minded fans the tools they need to engage with their fiction and find titles they can enjoy.

How have anime fans responded to your critiques? Have you been targeted / online harassed for being critical of an art form so many people love?

Overall the response has been very positive. We have a wonderful, supportive readership (love you, AniFam!), and generally, when people disagree with our articles, they do so respectfully. We’ve even had some rebuttal pieces come out of those conversations, which I always love to see! We’re all about nuance, so we encourage healthy debate.

That said, we’re a feminist website, so of course, we have our share of hateful randos spewing slurs, death threats, and the like. It was much worse when the site first launched (I know our founder had to use the “block” button on Twitter liberally those first couple months), but nowadays it’s fairly quiet unless we criticize a popular series. Then things can get a little, uh, rough for a while.

We moderate comments closely, though, so I think we’ve shielded our readers from the worst of it. That’s important to us: we want AniFem to be a place where marginalized folks can feel comfortable chatting and debating one another, without having to worry about someone derailing a conversation with hate speech or bad-faith arguments.

How do you navigate your role as a Western fan critiquing an art form rooted in an Eastern culture?

It’s something the editorial staff is always aware of and we handle it differently depending on the article. For example, if a writer’s talking about how a story personally impacted them, then it’s not really an issue. If they’re trying the article to broader social or historical topics, then we need to take it into deeper consideration.

I think it’s a delicate balance between (1) being aware of cultural/historical differences and acknowledging them when they’re relevant to an article; (2) making connections across cultures when possible (things like sexual harassment and LGTBQ+ rights are by no means Western-only issues, just to name a couple of examples); and (3) understanding that people from different cultures and backgrounds can find different meaning in the same story and that these perspectives are both valid and valuable.

We stand by our writers’ interpretations, but we’d also never claim an article is the One True Reading of a story, either. We’ve had contributors from around the world, including Japan, and will always encourage different perspectives and interpretations. Like I said before, we welcome debate. That’s what helps us expand our own worlds and grow as both fans and people.

Do you feel that anime has evolved over the years to better represent diverse characters? If so, what are some examples of anime that are doing a good job on this front?

I’m going to be speaking in really broad terms here because there have been series in the past that were way ahead of their time and there are series now that are painfully regressive. You can always find exceptions to trends. In general, though, I think anime and manga (especially manga) have improved dramatically in recent years when it comes to sincere, emotionally complex, and/or cheerful queer representation.

Most people know about Yuri!!! on ICE at this point, but there have also been graceful, down-to-earth yuri (women-loving-women) love stories like Bloom Into You, complicated character dramas like Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, and even goofy comedies including positive, affirming depictions of trans characters like Zombie Land Saga.

There’s also been a welcome shift toward stories that challenge traditional gender roles, whether they’re about ambitious, assertive girls/women, or about boys/men embracing caretaker roles and other feminine-coded pastimes. 

Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun is the obvious popular example here, with its cast of heroine boys and princely girls. But there have also been brilliant female coming-of-age adventure stories like A Place Further Than the Universe, soothing comedies about single fathers like Sweetness and Lightning, and just this past season Mob Psycho 100 did some great work challenging ideas about unhealthy aggression and control that are often pushed onto boys.

I’m sure there are other areas where representation has improved significantly as well, and I hope readers will contribute to this conversation and recommend series of their own! These are just the two areas that stand out the most to me. 

There’s still a ton of room for improvement, of course. For every title I could mention that’s doing something positive, there’s another one that’s doing something that makes me want to throw my TV out a window. Still, I really do think there’s been progress, and there are a lot of series out there that feminist-minded anime and manga fans can enjoy as a result. 

It’s encouraging to see. I hope more creators consider inclusivity in their works as we move into the next decade, and that AniFem can keep helping our readers find and talk about these great series when they appear!