u/yellowdocmartens

I get it. Anime doesn't have the best track record when it comes to well-written female characters and many casts are predominantly male. But you can say that about literally any type of storytelling.

I'm just sick of coming across posts that are like "Any anime where the female characters are actually well written?" or "looking for strong female MCs" and so on. It just seems purposefully dense, and honestly? Obnoxious.

No, in fact, out of the literal thousands of series out there, only a select few actually know how to write women /s.

Anime isn't a genre; it's a medium. There's so much variety in the storytelling; just asking "what anime has good female characters" is such a general question it's basically pointless. You wouldn't ask what books have good female MCs or if there are any movies that write women well.

This is not a topic you need to bother posting about. Literally just go onto any search engine, and you'll get plenty of results and recommendations. Especially considering anime has the benefit of having specific target demographics. If you don't like the female characters written for shounen anime, try out seinen; if you don't like how they're written in shoujo, try out josei. It's all about figuring out your tastes. Stop asking people to hold your hand and take you through every series one by one.

And while we're on this topic, I also hate that whenever a series with good female characters does gain a rise in popularity, people immediately act like it's never been done before. Frieren, Apothecary Diaries, etc, all great series, yet people treat these stories like they're the exceptions. "For once a series that doesn't sexualize its female characters!" stfu, that's baby's first anime-behavior. You're embarrassing yourself. Even worse, you're disrespecting all the great female anime characters that came before them.

I just need to know I'm not alone on this.

Not so much of a hot take but rather just a niche opinion you have that you never get a chance to talk about because most people never really think about it too deeply.

For me, with more manhwa getting anime adaptations these days, I wish we’d start veering away from the typical action-fantasy/isekai/power-scaling stories and give manhwas from other genres a chance to be animated. Webtoons like Surviving Romance or On the Way to Meet Mom would make great animes imo. Or even more lowkey series like Spirit Fingers.

I really don't get what goes through people's minds when they do this. Someone opens up about a problem happening in their lives, and then in response gets told: "Well, that's why you should've done [belated solution] instead." Okay, Captain Retrospect. Like, who is that helping? I would've loved to follow your advice when it was still applicable, but alas, I don't have enough plutonium for my time machine.

When people talk about what's bothering them, they're either looking for comfort or solutions. Telling them what they should've done is completely unhelpful and tactless. "But now they can make better choices in the future!" Most people tend to learn from their mistakes without someone patronizing them first. Just admit you wanted to be a smartass by showing off how you'd make better choices.

I know this is pretty much a given, but I had to get it off my chest. 

Even though I would consider myself a big fan of romance, I honestly don’t consume a lot of romance-based media these days (mainly because I prefer it as a subplot). But also because I feel like a lot of romance these days are writtten in a way that feels like the writer is checking off a list of “green flag” qualities people want in an ideal relationship rather than writing actually interesting characters and/or relationships. It feels more like a psa than a love story. 

Obviously this doesn’t apply everywhere. But here’s what really gets me: all the discourse around dark or “toxic” romance in media. I’m reading the psychological thriller webtoon “I Dare You” and every chapter, there are usually a few people who comment about being concerned about the romance tag and how they hope the main girl doesn’t end up with anyone because of how “toxic” the relationship would be (since she’s essentially a sociopath and the two implied love interests aren’t really in their right minds either). I just think that’s a really strange thing to fixate on? Would it really be such a terrible thing if the story depicts a toxic romance, considering it would be in-character for the people involved? I understand the sentiment of how unncessary romance can water down a story, but in this case, people just seem hung up on the fact that the supposed romance in the story would be an unhealthy and toxic one. But what’s the big deal? Stories are meant to have conflict. 

I see this issue a lot especially in fandoms like Alien Stage. In a story where children are enslaved, trafficked, and groomed, people fixate more on whether a couple is “toxic” or whether a certain character’s actions are considered SA as if they want to hold the characters accountable, for some reason. Truly, what is there to get out of insisting that the romance is unhealthy? Of course it’s unhealthy. Do you need to be told that singing death competitions are bad too? But it’s still a love story at the end of the day, and it’s the kind of love that makes sense for the story being told. 

That’s really all there is to it. There’s always so much pointless discourse around whether a romance in media is healthy or unhealthy regardless of whether it fits into the actual story at hand. There’s always such heavy importance on how well written characters should be written with flaws, but that same sentiment never seems to be shared toward character relationships. Who cares if they’re toxic towards each other if that’s what makes the most sense for their characterizations?

Just like the title says. I’m curious.

If there's anything I've taken away from the zomst discourse, it's this.

Listen, we can all agree that the zombie apocalypse is an objectively bad thing that no one actually wants to happen. But no one can deny there’s a sense of catharsis in fantasizing about what you would do in a zombie apocalypse in order to survive. That’s the entire appeal. It’s a scenario that speaks to something internal within us as humans that isn’t driven by logic. So why can't we apply that same reasoning to romance? 

Instead of arguing about whether certain scenes should be taken seriously as sa or whether a couple in fiction is unhealthy and toxic, we just need to acknowledge that in reality, this type of relationship isn't okay, but the fact that it appeals to us in story form is speaking to something deeper within us that has to do with people's intimate desire to feel wanted. So much of dark romance is exploring how people externalize the need to feel in control whether that's by exploiting or being exploited in a power dynamic. I feel like there's a much more fascinating discussion there rather than rehashing the same moral debate on what should be condoned in fiction.