I’m still wondering if having Escaflowne as one of my real “first animes” (along with Evangelion and Vandread, amusingly) had that effect. And I had something else to say, but I guess I’ll head to bed and try again tomorrow since I forgot about it.

You’re right about the aspect of fandom that tries to categorize things into nice little genre or groups. I’d like to argue that doing that is childish and people grow out of it, but that isn’t the case. People define themselves on very distinct margins. I’m asian. I’m black. I’m white. I’m female. I’m male. I’m gay. I’m straight. It is rather telling that finding someone that simply says, “I’m human.” is almost impossible.

We are, as a species, compelled to be near each other; yet, we diverge from each other. Of all the things that divide there is nothing more so than that of the gender boundaries. Modern freedoms have allowed for what we see in anime, as far as varied male and female roles. Yet, it seems that a lot of anime still don’t stretch the societal roles very much.

You mentioned that you didn’t want to get into the female place in Japanese culture, but I would like to point out that we often see high school girls in anime who prize their cooking and cleaning skills and want to make a bento for their love interest. The typical harem comedy has a set cast of female archetypes who sometimes are all subservient to the main male character, sometimes violently subservient if that’s possible.

Hige’s comment made a good point, but it seems that a lot of the time what we define as a strong female lead is one that starts to take on what would normally be defined as “male” characteristics.

I love Kare Kano, btw. It’s the best high school romance story, in my opinion. Honey and Clover would be an excellent follow up to that, to follow people in college and first careers; it’s got the same emotional realism, balance, and excellent, excellent character writing. Sometimes I wonder why it’s the stuff ostensibly aimed at females which tends to have those virtues–though, in the seinen genre, let’s not forget the outstanding “Monster.”

An even more dangerous minefield is questioning whether the portrayal of males and females in anime is an indicator of male/female equality in Japan today. I avoided that issue on purpose since I don’t feel that I’m knowledgable enough in that area to speculate - it sounds like quite a sensitive subject to me. One or two of the other posts made a good job of exploring it though, so I’ll try to reference them in the follow-up post.

The best kind of female characters in anime are the ones that are so fantastic that their sex and all the preconceptions associated with it is a complete afterthought. I love Mononoke, or Motoko from GitS, because they’re brilliantly conceived /people/. The combination of chromosomes and how said combinations should behave is a preoccupation for the 70s and 80s. I think, now, feminism is about establishing genuine equality between masculinity and feminity, in that one can merge with and dilute the other so much so that all the associated behaviours basically amount to a base, unifying maxim that we’re all people and regardless of sex we have a whole buttload in common.

Clearly the medium of anime is too varied to make many absolute generalizations about a topic as broad as gender and anime. Even the fundamental notion of a gendered division between shoujo and shounen is more and more questionable these days, as thi…

@Mushi: You’re absolutely right. The examples I gave were intended to highlight cases in which the target market included both male and female viewers, which I guess is good business sense. Some shows conversely pander to one or the other but still do really well out of it.

So if you happen to not like a show, think of yourself as not the target market. It also makes this much easier to pick out shows which you can enjoy.

this time we’re taking on the issue of gender in anime.

The issue of gender? WTF is that? Is that like the smell of blue? The whole discussion group thing is an illusion when the topic is so poorly defined.