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I am an Anime Feminist. Ask Me Anything

all-tsun-and-no-dere wrote:

Hunter x Hunter may not fall into that exact trap but it has tons of issues of its own, one of which is that the core team is entirely male. Excluding women is not better than including them but badly. We have a really great article (I didn't write it, I just love it) about why shonen manga should be more inclusive to non-male readers and characters

<Removed> Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter x Hunter are popular with women because they focus on almost exclusively male characters, not in spite of it. Ditto for those sports series like Haikyu and Kuroko. Replacing half those casts with women isn't going to attract more women to the series, it'll more than likely turn a lot of the current women reading them off.

鏡 wrote:

Did you end up writing an article on DITF inspired by my posts?

Ha! https://www.animefeminist.com/discourse-childbirth-and-politics-in-darling-in-the-franxx/

It was inspired by the general discourse around Darling in the Franxx, but yes, you calling gender roles and nuclear family structures "fundamentally apolitical" was what made me say to myself, "You know what, people are so ignorant on this issue that it really does deserve a full article."

It's a real shame I didn't get people to say you were wrong and that fiction is actually apolitical.

While fiction, in general, is apolitical and doesn't necessarily reflect an author's personal ethics or worldview, I admit that art is subjective. People have the right to interpret whatever political message they choose from a narrative.

Doesn't make them right or wrong. It just means they're seeing something that others aren't, and in the end, can't you say the same for our own viewing experiences?

鏡 wrote:

It's a real shame I didn't get people to say you were wrong and that fiction is actually apolitical.

You couldn't get people to say that because you're wrong. Just straight-up incorrect.

all-tsun-and-no-dere wrote:

鏡 wrote: It's a real shame I didn't get people to say you were wrong and that fiction is actually apolitical. You couldn't get people to say that because you're wrong. Just straight-up incorrect.

That is very sad for me. Though not as sad as it was when I saw the article published, and saw the crushing dearth of angry responses in its comments arguing that fiction is, contrary to the article's assumption, apolitical. For my own edification though could you clarify what exactly you're referring to when you say I'm wrong?

All art is political. All of it. It's just a broader definition of "political" than most people are used to using. It goes back to the previous discussion of Shield Hero and its lens (or worldview as I put it before) vs. its agenda, but on a broader scale. Art with an agenda is overtly political - it sets out to make a statement, with an argument designed to persuade built into the narrative. This is a relative minority of art, especially in anime. The anti-war messaging of the Gundam franchise, the capitalist post-nuclear dystopia of Akira, and the environmentalism of Earth Maiden Arjuna are examples of overtly political anime with an agenda.

Not all fiction has an agenda, but it does have a lens. The people who created it have their own biases, assumptions, and opinions that inform their work, intentionally or otherwise, about things like ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, cultural institutions, and so on. That's fine; it's just part of being a human living in society. This may be invisible to you because the creators have a similar lens to yours, which you just assume to be natural. For example, few people will think twice about a story featuring a heterosexual romance that goes according to gender roles, but many will start accusing the creators of "injecting politics" if they have a same-sex romance or trans/nonbinary/genderqueer characters.

It's not always cut-and-dried, either; art is a two-way street, and it's natural that viewers will have their own reading of it. Sometimes, it just has to do with how well their lens connects with the show's lens, kind of like how colors look different in different lighting; other times, it is overtly political.

For example, there's a lot of contention about feminist interpretations of "cute girl" anime. Some will argue that they're feminist because they center the female experience and project a world girls can exist without out the interference of or need for men; others say that they present a restrictive view of femininity that idealizes nonthreatening cuteness and purity for the consumption of a primarily male audience that is intimidated by the complexity and fleshy nature of real-life women. Both arguments are compelling and persuasive and correct in their own ways; there is no "objective" truth because different viewers will respond different ways. The creators themselves probably had none of this in mind when they wrote and animated them.

Sometimes the political nature of art only reveals itself as part of a larger pattern. The Bechdel test is useless as a metric for an individual work, but if you take a large sample of films and see just how many of them fail it, it's pretty shocking how few can even clear the low bar of having two named female characters engaging in conversation about something other than a man. It says a lot about how writers often see women as an extension of the men around them, rather than individuals with their own lives.

Or hell, to step out of anime, I just reviewed the show "Workin' Moms" on Netflix. The creator, Catherine Reitman, set out to create something she saw as honest and true-to-life as a working mother herself. Reitman's father was a successful filmmaker before she was even born, and she has always been wealthy. That is her lens. Because of her lens, the working mothers on her show are all affluent. However, a show that puts itself forward as true-to-life only telling affluent women's stories and ignoring mothers working because they can't afford not to and are still struggling to get by has a huge blind spots, created by Reitman's privilege.

So yeah, all art is political and I took way longer writing this post than I expected.

I mean, you could read the rest of her post that you literally quoted instead of trying to be coy and play stupid.

What do you think of Cross Ange? It strikes me as an anime series that is both sexist and progressive all at once. I find the paradox interesting, at the very least.

Okay. Here's a good question. Do you agree that Goblin Slayer is a great show with an empowered female character in the form of the blind lady...?

All art is political. All of it.

all-tsun-and-no-dere wrote:

All art is political. All of it.

So you're telling me that Bob Ross and his happy little trees was political? How about Thomas Kincaid paintings? How about my neighbor growing up who made hand carved water bird sculptures out of driftwood because he liked birds? How is liking waterfowl political? How about my friend who does metal working? Or how about my own resin model kits I've made in the past. Those were political too? I simply didn't like the character and thought the figure was cute? I mean you said ALL ART is political and those are all examples of art in my book. I sure don't remember anything political going through my head when I was putting together my favorite resin Urd figure years ago. What "lens" are any of these examples seeing through?