[Categories: Editorials]
Gender and anime: the line begins to blur
Yep, it’s time for me to once again jump on the joint blogging bandwagon and attempt to keep up with people of superior intelligence and insight…this time we’re taking on the issue of gender in anime. It covers an even wider field than the last joint blogging exercise did so I’m going to narrow it down to my own experiences and thoughts on the validity of the division between anime that’s intended for male and female viewers. I’ll be using the traditional labels of ’shounen’ and ’shoujo’ for simplicity’s sake but I’ll try to address the problems with those definitions too.
Is gender important? Maybe you should ask this guy.
shounen Vs Shoujo
There’s a line that’s drawn between the two but in these enlightened times of equality is it nearly as pronounced - or even relevant - as it seems at first glance? Sure, there are extreme examples that fall squarely into the ’shounen’ or ’shoujo’ categories: Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon are prime examples but there’s a proportion of shows that deserve recognition for not restricting themselves to one side or the other.
As the old saying goes, you can’t please everyone. Targeting a series at one audience runs the risk of alienating another: dashing bishies and pastel shades is as offputting to male viewers as panty shots and giant robots are to females (some male viewers find excessive fan service detrimental too, myself included). While it’s impossible to make something everyone will love, it seems the importance of carefully mixing bits of both isn’t lost on writers and animators.
Why not have it both ways?
Escaflowne is a good example of this. Aside from the fact that it’s very concept is pure win to start with, it expertly blends disparate themes and ideas that you wouldn’t expect to see in one show. Hitomi’s abilities and personality are magical girl through and through; add some handsome bishies and knights in shining armour and you have the quintissential girls’ adventure. In addition to this though, there’s a political slant, some excellent mecha action and a catgirl…fully ensuring that the fanboys are catered for too. The end result is a series that exhibits the cliches of both shoujo and shounen, but not to an excessive degree.
A more recent example, brought to light after ruminating over the significance of the Huerrgh! factor, is Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. This show is a boisterous, testosterone-fuelled mecha-fest but because it mocks these themes as much as it celebrates them, it has garnered a female audience whose number may be surprising (also explained by the fact that Yoko kicks major ass). Of course, Gainax’s MO has an enviable reputation for not playing by the book - the stunning Gunbuster, one of my all time favourite anime series, places female protagonists aboard a giant robot that would normally have a male pilot.
Who cares whether you’re a boy or a girl as long as you can offer hard work and guts?
Girl power!
Telling a story from a girl’s perspective like this, but including sci-fi elements that appeal to guys too, was something of a masterstroke that Escaflowne made great use of several years later. The presence of a strong female lead is also a great idea: both sexes tune in for a butt-kicking female protagonist, which has become a refreshing change from the male heroes of yore.
Nausicaa, the archetype of a gutsy heroine
The best heroines are well-developed characters beyond the looks. The Miyazaki heroine, such as Nausicaa and Mononoke Hime’s San, is a beautiful and independently-minded figure who shows female tenderness but without being the helpless damsel in distress for the male hero to rescue; similarly the all-female central characters of Bubblegum Crisis, not to mention Masumune Shirow’s love of drawing gun-toting attractive females, means that science fiction isn’t necessarily ‘just for boys’. And if you think mecha can’t be girly you should check out Idolm@ster Xenoglossia sometime.
Limitations of the definitions
This topic also drags up the recurring problem of slapping a label on or trying to pigeonhole things. My own experience of this dates back to a conversation with the writer of Hopeless Sensei’s Anime Views (whose blog is now sadly offline) when he recommended me Kare Kano. I reluctantly agreed to look into it, with the preconception that it would be saccharine, tame and difficult to enjoy from a male perspective. Not only did it burn through my embittered cynicism like a hot dramatic knife through butter but it gave, as its title promised, a balanced account of both sides of Yukino’s and Souichiro’s relationship and feelings. I realised that dismissing Kare Kano for its shoujo aesthetics would have been as foolish as avoiding Escaflowne because the characters’ noses look weird!
Kare Kano’s Arima and Yukino
…and an additional point to round things off
The ever-helpful ANN also points out that seinen, which forms a significant proportion of my collection, is occasionally mistaken for shoujo because male-friendly shows for a younger audience (i.e. shounen) are less thematically complex in comparison. Seinen has a level of character development that is more associated with shoujo than shounen, yet is in fact intended for a male audience. Because it has so much in common with shoujo, there are plenty of reasons for female viewers of a similar age group tune in as well. With this point in mind, perhaps some shows that are associated with the seinen category belong in a different one that’s more widely-encompassing. At a younger age the material is simpler in theme so is easy to lump onto one side or another; it is harder to justify doing the same for more ‘grown up’ fare.
Maybe this pic’s relevant, maybe it isn’t. I just wanted to post a pic of a gun-toting female.
After growing up on movies and TV shows that feature car chases, guns and heroes that exhibit the Huerrgh! factor only to settle on drama and slice of life more recently, perhaps my (an albeit incomplete!) turning away from gung-ho action has more to do with age than gender in terms of viewing habits.
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Posted on September 10th, 2007 @ 3:09 pm
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Posted on September 10th, 2007 @ 3:50 pm
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.
Posted on September 10th, 2007 @ 4:28 pm
As you said, you can’t please everybody–just as most mediums have their target market, anime too moves around a business that has to have a target market. Whether it’s harem shows for one segment of anime viewers, or those shows which have so many abstract themes that only a niche market will want to buy–anime is a business that makes money by pandering to the needs and wants of the consumer.
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.
Posted on September 10th, 2007 @ 4:40 pm
[...] I see what you did there, and there, and there, and there, and there, and there. Everyone’s talking about the new topic. Gender in anime. [...]
Posted on September 10th, 2007 @ 4:55 pm
[...] part of a series of articles about anime and gender across the blogosphere. Visit here, here, here, here, here, and here (for now) for what others [...]
Posted on September 10th, 2007 @ 6:42 pm
@Snog: the topic was deliberately vague to give plenty of room for everyone to interpret it in their own way and cover different, but related issues from different angles. Last time we tried this exercise there were complaints that too many of the posts covered the same ground.
@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.
Posted on September 10th, 2007 @ 7:15 pm
Gender and Anime: Images of “Safe” Women…
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…
Posted on September 10th, 2007 @ 7:31 pm
I think the examples you use basically sum up my ideology when it comes to the whole ‘how women should be portrayed’ contention — that being that it really shouldn’t be a bloody contention to start with anymore. Men and women have a rather distinct thing in common: their humanity. Humanity with its myriad of facets is what I find most interesting in fiction; not whether a woman can kick arse like the boys, or whether a man can be sensitive and caring like dem womans folk. The whole inversion of stereotypes seems a bit lazy in this day and age, and I feel like I’m wasting time in acknowledging female characters that flout conventions that have already been dealt with decades ago.
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.
Posted on September 10th, 2007 @ 11:29 pm
@Hige: Exactly! I wasn’t going to delve too deep into feminism and so on, but the gender of a film or TV characters shouldn’t be an issue any more. Sure, a couple of decades ago it might have been a novelty to see females doing ‘men’s work’ but quite honestly, it’s the 21st Century - who cares? Nausicaa is respected by her people for her compassion, courage and leadership skills as much as her looks; Noriko and Kazumi earn the viewer’s admiration for putting their lives on the line, although the fan service probably draws some viewers in.
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.
Posted on September 11th, 2007 @ 3:25 am
I’d say the portrayals of male and female is mostly an accurate projection of what anime creators think will appeal to their audience, which is still primarily single, teenage-to-young-adult males. (I said anime, not manga, which is far broader-based.) Popular culture, especially niche culture like anime, is only occasionally a good reflection of society as a whole, though I think we shouldn’t underestimate the degree to which it really does form the perception of what a country is like overseas. There are millions of people whose main impression of America is Baywatch, action movies, and “24.” I’d love to find out what otaku who have never been to Japan think about Japan based on their impressions via anime.
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.”
Posted on September 11th, 2007 @ 4:38 am
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Posted on September 11th, 2007 @ 3:38 pm
I was expecting Utena. I loved Kare Kano. It was an excellent show.
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.
Posted on September 11th, 2007 @ 4:55 pm
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Posted on September 11th, 2007 @ 6:21 pm
I just have to comment because you share my thoughts on Escaflowne. Perfect blends of shoujo/shounen anime/manga have always been what I regard as the height of quality: Rurouni Kenshin had the gory, detailed fights and endless antagonists but (relatively) pretty guys and solid character development; Code Geass CLAMP-based designs and a story and characters that pandered to both ends of the spectrum; and even more recently, Darker than Black, which I’ve begun to appreciate as hovering in-between the spheres of both.
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.
Posted on September 11th, 2007 @ 11:51 pm
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Posted on April 16th, 2008 @ 3:55 am
i have a question, im from mexico, so i speak a little bit of english a i doesn´t know how to writhe too, so what anime is the one with the girl an the shotgun. its difficult to know for me? and the discussion is intresting too, well the gender is so funny in the anime, a love the guys dressed like women (im not gay but they make me laugh a lot) i think, its a good manner to show the people the freedom of cultures and genders Haha.
Posted on May 18th, 2008 @ 1:52 am
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