There are some exceptions, like Miyazaki, but even Studio Ghibli never gave us a female badass like Haku or Howl.
Men don't write female protagonists who are supernatural AND good, most of the time.
Even with like, Ponyo, she's a child.
Naruto sidelined the female characters sooo bad.
I guess I'm just bringing this up because I was looking up zodiac signs and beastars came up, so I decided to see if I agreed with what signs people were saying, and the female characters (other than maybe haru) are so dependent on male attention and infantalized.
Sorry for the double post, but I can't unsee anime misogyny.
Hinata or Sakura should have been hokage.
Miss Amane could have been the main character and lived and Death Note could have ended as a cliff hanger where she doesn't kill herself but has her death note.
Males are writing us badly, and when teen girls watch anime, this is what they think we ARE.
Side characters, or less cool protagonists at BEST, like Chihiro, with no magic.
It's just not good enough for me.
You hit the nail right on the head 🔨. That's why any guy who watches anime is a red flag for me 🚩
I used to like anime as a kid because it was so pretty and different and I felt cool knowing how to speak Japanese. Sailor Moon, Fruits Basket, Naruto, and Shugo Chara were literally all I’d want to watch. I did try to branch out into the more popular ones like One Piece and Bleach, but I never got into it and as I got older I found it all generally waaay to creepy to keep enjoying. I turned to watching k-dramas instead in high school as I found them much more romantic and normal. Now, as an adult any man I see watching anime I know is 100% a porn addicted scrote who hates women. Any man wasting his time watching anime girls is on the same level of creep as dudes who spend all their time playing fortnight and reading comics. It just draws in the most repulsive, brain dead losers imaginable.
It does hurt tho. I tried rewatching Sailor Moon and Shugo Chara because they had such an impact on me during middle school and I cringed every time they mentioned ages or something really creepy happened. I never picked up how much older their love interests were and it’s so unnecessary! In my head as a child they were the same age because age gaps literally weren’t a thing to me. And the relationships are SO inappropriate. Why is a child with a grown adult man taking care of a baby? Why would the hospital allow a middle school child to TAKE someone else’s baby? Why is a grown adult man in a middle schooler’s bed, forcing her to cuddle with him?! It’s disturbing. The total creep factor that seeps into EVERY single anime from rape to incest to pedophilia is revolting. I wouldn’t be upset if someone destroyed every anime ever made.
Like, I do like Studio Ghibli but you’re right. I saw the Boy and the Heron and the women are just… there. The women had the magical powers and were part of the magical line YET their only purpose was to support the boy. It was ridiculous. There was SO much potential but they wasted it all. It would have been a lot better had they fleshed out the female characters yet they didn’t. Japanese media lacks real depth or true merit. There’s just so much better stuff made elsewhere.
I can’t watch my old childhood anime because of this very reason. Even if the female side characters are powerful (sometimes more than the male characters), they’re still portrayed as dopey or childlike and end up pining for the male character to save the day. I also find that male writers can’t develop good enough female characters to actually be relevant to the main plot so the female characters often disappear by the time we reach the peak of the series 😑
Even anime written by women (death note author is anonymous, demon slayer and full metal alchemist author is a woman) only have women as side characters. They're always written as emotional support for the MC or offering utilities. The amount of degeneracy and over sexualisation (or FaN SeRvIcE) seen in anime is likely because Japan has a deeply misogynistic culture. I also hate how common sexual assault is in anime !!
And even worse I watched a popular anime then stopped by ep3 because it was very obviously p!dophillic. Same with demon slayers nezuko, she ended up getting sexualised because they just can't resist.
Most anime is very degenerate. The only ok anime is Sailor Moon and Inushaya. I also did love FMA, it has strong female characters in it with different personalities. I enjoyed death note but Misas ending was awful. Princess mononoke has a badass female character though. I've never been able to find a good anime after watching these.
Anime is a direct inspiration of Disney's work and was heavily funded to help soothe the children of Japan after the losses of ww2 yet it became utilized for incels because the men don't grow up and stay like a teen/hikkikomori probably to cope with the stresses post war Japan faces.
Alot of guys end up hikkimori (social recluse with no job) and are 40+ years old but only have the experiences of teenagers because their anxiety caused a failure to launch situation.
The family often enable this by sending money to their moid children and coddling them it's kinda like how mommas boys pickme moms destroys men's development but in hikkimori case both mom and dad baby them. My suspicion is this is the parents futile way of controlling their adult child instead of teaching them how to function.
Japan also has alot of sexist artifacts still left over from pre-ww2 ideologies. I've seen women called "hysterical" in Japanese tiktok skits which is just another leftover from German psychology but it's like outdated now and nobody gave Japan the memo I guess. Incels will steal misogyny tips from any culture they come in contact with and integrate it like putting together Legos. We also have to consider the Japanese condition is a history of constant warring states so there is a older generation dealing with PTSD which usually leads to mental illnesses to the people.
Many Japanese women I think are born into a BPD like condition with those narc incel moids around them. It made me understand why manga for girls was so insanely idealized and fluffed out it's because real men in Japan are THAT bad just like how Korean comics the males are also extremely idealized in terms of physique and masculinity due to how badly the men handled their traumas.