Sexism In Anime

I said the same thing.

What happened to the heroines of each series is legitimately frustrating. I can only guess why it keeps happening. Sexism is probably a factor, even if its not an active contributor.

Part of the problem with the original series is that the manga established that Duelist characters were the exception, not the rule. Indeed, games that involved the whole group usually allowed Anzu to do more (although she gets used as a hostage by Shadi at one point), but once the Dueling began, she stayed at the sidelines because she was not a Duelist. The anime, in order to sell merchandise, needed everyone to be a Duelist, so she and Honda became Duelists who hardly ever dueled.

The only real female Duelists established at all in the manga were Mai and Ishizu, both of whom lost all onscreen Duels. The anime showed some of Mai's wins, but they lacked the tournament stakes they otherwise could have had. The anime also introduced Rebecca as another female Duelist, but (almost) never let her get a win despite her being a champion.

Forgot about her.

Also worth noting that Mai was not brainwashed in the Japanese version of the Doma arc, but joined willingly because she hadn't properly recovered from her previous trauma. Doesn't make her ending any better, but it at least gives her agency.

Edited by SatoshiBakura on Apr 1st 2023 at 8:48:48 AM

About Digimon; while I mostly agree with what was said about usually being good with its female cast, the one caveat I have is Digimon Frontier's Zoe/Izumi. Like what was said about Alexis, Zoe was very much the Girl character. Unlike most other Seasons, Zoe was the only female character in the main cast, without even a partner to interact with, and as a result was defined largely by her gender.

...which in this case meant everything with a Y chromosome crushing on her, human and Digimon alike. Her Digimon forms are a Fairy Sexy girl in lingerie, and a bird woman in lingerie. Her rival on the villain's team is their token female, who singles her out because she's jealous of how pretty she is, because what else would girls fight about?

Not to mention that she rather infamously loses and has to be saved in her own introductory episode.

Edited by Dracoblade on Apr 1st 2023 at 6:22:27 AM

Rebecca won once in the Kaiba Grand Prix against a Chinese girl, but it's about fighting over Yugi's affection.

This one's more nitpicking, but in Digimon Tamers, Rika's role in the final fight against D-reaper was to lend her power to Justimon and rendering herself powerless, while Takato gets to save his love interest and Henry gets to do the Juggernaut program that defeated the D-reaper.

Edited by Ikedatakeshi on Apr 1st 2023 at 8:53:44 PM

The original manga is kind of weird for this discussion because it wasn't originally a battle manga where the plot revolved around dueling. At the start it was more like a... game-themed slice-of-life horror manga? You couldn't judge characters by their dueling prowess as a shorthand for judging their narrative agency. Though Anzu was a damsel in distress most often in those early parts, but on the hand she still tended to have some agency in what's happening. Once it because a battle manga with structured duels and tournament arcs, the author kept things simple by having just Yugi and Jounouchi duel, which meant that for the most everyone else was treated as supporting characters for those two. In a sense, any female character weren't treated any worse than male characters.

The anime kind of made things worse, because of how it was even more focused on dueling and selling cards and as such every character got more duels. Additionally, Kaiba got a lot more screentime to the point of kind of pushing Jounouchi aside as the 2nd most important character. So you end up with a shounen battle anime where basically everyone "fights", but of the heroes only 3 male characters are particularly important or strong, and none of the female characters are that relevant.

With GX, as I argued before, I don't believe Asuka got a particularly short stick when it came to presented strength or character agency. The problem is she wasn't given a clear role or goal and was the sole major female character, so she ends up The Girl of the cast and everything she does gets judged by that. If she doesn't get much to do, then that means no female character in GX is getting much to do. There was technically Rei later on, but by that point the cast was getting bloated and something had to give, so Rei didn't have much screentime.

With 5D's, I don't think there was quite that problem since there was two major female characters from the beginning - Aki and Luca. And Aki had enough going on with her that she wasn't just defined by being female. Funny enough, while Aki is maybe the most popular female Yu-Gi-Oh character and usually called the strongest and best treated in her own show, I think specifically because of that 5D's becomes more obviously sexist in how it treats its female characters - in so far as I think Aki got the short-end later in the show specifically because she's a woman rather than it being incidental. The main issue with Aki is that she's treated like the 3rd most important character in the first half, after Yusei and Jack. But in the second half (even starting in the climax of the first half really), she gets replaced in that position by Crow. And I think that's specifically because Yusei, Jack, and Crow all being dudes who are both old friends and friendly rivals made it easy for the creators to write their dynamics and interactions as the main power trio, while Aki being the 3rd of the main trio would be harder to write. So she got shafted in that front, and from there the writers couldn't really think of something for her to do outside of her just kind of wanting to be around Yusei because of implied romantic feelings, and then later got a goal in wanting to use her powers to heal people instead of fight, which in a vacuum is fine but you have to admit is kind of stereotypically feminine.

Speaking of goals, you can see something similar with the twin, Lua and Luca. Both are kind of stereotypical for their gender. Lua is the hyperactive one who loves dueling and wants to be the best and protect Lua, while Luca is calm, mature, and helps guide Lua, but is also physically frail and needs Lua's protection. I don't have a problem with that by itself, but it extends to Lua having a goal in wanting to be a strong duelist like Yusei, Jack, and Crow, and therefore having a clear character arc to act on. Whereas Luca doesn't really have any sort of goal she wants to act on besides supporting her brother.

In fact, we can just look at the show's epilogue, where Jack, Crow, and Lua all became professional duelists, while Aki quit dueling to become a doctor, and Luca isn't really shown doing anything except continuing to hang out with Lua.

I hate to go to bat for this end of things since I kinda agree that YGO treats its ladies pretty bad.

But isnt 5ds at least a case of real life runs the plot? I always heard the reason they got so much less focus is Aki got pregnant and Carly was in a sex cult (ironic I know) respectively.

Edited by Imca on Apr 1st 2023 at 6:28:05 AM

The thing about Aki's VA not having as much time because of pregnancy is a myth. She didn't have her first child until 2014, 3 years after the show already ended.

And a thing about Carly is half myth. It did happen and caused her VA to get replaced, but not until the anime was already close to over. Carly getting less focus and her romance with Jack being made no longer an explicit thing was already well underway as early as the show's halfway point, so the incident almost certainly had nothing to do with any writing decisions involving her character.

AFAIK, the sex cult one at least was just a rumor (or at least didn't have that much of an impact on the show) and I think the timeline makes the pregnancy thing questionable as well. I do think there were some RL issues, but I'm don't think the pregnancy was once of them.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 1st 2023 at 6:38:50 AM

@dracoblade

Zoe/Izumi was also the only main character in that season to not win her first fight, Iirc. The light hero/ matt clone showed up to save her.

@morningstar1337 I think Mai's role in the Waking the Dragons filler arc isn't bad and does make sense given what happened to her. The love triangle is unfortunate but I can just pretend it's just really platonic feelings.

On paper, Anzu had her own goals, motivations, and interests. In practice, they’re hardly ever brought up, and she‘s mostly just there to commentate on what everyone else is doing.

Also, even if she got to do more in the early manga, she also got creeped on on a regular basis, and a lot of it was supposed to be funny. :/

Right, like I said, she had to be saved in her own introductory episode (well, more accurately Kazemon's introductory episode, but whatever).

Oh yeah Yugi's grandfather crept on her too. Sheesh.

To be fair to Izumi, she was the only one of the group who was able to control her Beast Spirit from the getgo without losing control once, so she got that.But yea, not much.

Rika is kind of 50/50; she's arguably the second strongest of the group in her introduction what with her and Renamon beating Champion level Digimon even before Kyubimon debuted and with Guilmon to fight her to a standstill.

But then when Ryo is introduced, and his sole purpose seems to be to help her get out of jams. It's not the worst example but eesh.

Aki usually gets a pass cuz her initial character arc is that good and unlike Yuzu, it actually got to finish.

Luca doesn't even get that though and most the development goes to her brother Lua, who is the more active of the two.

Think it says a lot that she's only ever dueled without him once and even when they both duel together, Lua is the one doing most of the heavy lifting.

What makes it dumber is that the narrative says Lua is the better duelist between them. But nothing onscreen supports that.

Yugioh females tend to suffer from a real bad case of a combination of; Faux Action Girl, Informed Ability and just straight up violating Show, Don't Tell.

The writers will tell the audience how amazing this female duelist is to hype her up, but then put her against either the Protagonist, his rival, or the Villain of the Week and have her lose because the other three can't look weak. And they lose in such a way thay doesn't even let them look good.

Aki mostly avoided that as even when she fought Yusei, she had him mostly on ropes and even forced him to use Stardust for the first time since he got it back. And even had her own personal enemy in Misty. Sure it was a Designated Girl Fight, but it's something.

Yugioh was originally a 90's manga with...everything that implies.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Apr 2nd 2023 at 3:11:07 PM

So, what are your top female characters in Anime? At least in terms of how well-written they are and/or how competent they are to the plot.

Kyoko Mogami from skip beat, though I guess using a shoujo manga is cheating.

What do you like about Kyoko?

She's a character who was wronged by most of the people who she considered her support network (absent father, emotionally neglectful mother, and a piece of shit childhood friend who used her attachment to him to carry her as an unpaid maide while he went off to make a name in showbiz) with the last one driving her to such a deep rage she decided to outdo him in the same field in a bit to spite him. The manga spends a lot of time on Kyoko's emotions, her trauma on opening her heart up especially to romance again after that experience, her growing love of acting and desire to improve for her own sake over all else (though the manga never lets her forgive the friend with the only times she's halfway nice to him being because she thinks him being a loser reflects badly on her desire to beat him), her silly childish fantasies and her desire to reclaim her "lost girlhood" that she missed out on due to initially not going to highschool and her memories from before then being tainted by her being bullied by her friends fangirls. She's a well rounded character with many sides to her and skip beat as a whole is a very good manga.

One or two unbearably bad arcs aside.

Pregnancy thing was a rumour, though it's possible she was working on expanding her resume based on the other roles she was taking at the time. The sex cult thing was not a rumour and Carly's VA was in one, but from what I can tell, I dunno if it specifically affected the writing of the show. I do think there was definitely some pushback from S&P or something since the show partway through the Dark Signers arc noticeably makes it's fair share of retcons to make the show more kid-friendly (stepping back on Aki killing Misty's brother is probably the most notable one) and does avoid pretty much anything magic-related after that arc.

And on Anzu/Tea, it's a mixed bag with the different anime and manga versions as on one hand, the manga version being less of a duelist sticks out less since the manga wasn't originally about dueling and is just generally a less omnipresent factor in that world unlike the spin-offs. But on the other hand, there's a lot of uncomfortable standard shonen sexual harrassment stuff and jokes early on and while it does lessen over time, it sticks out a lot in the early manga stuff when the card game aspects were less prominent.

Celty from Durarara. She is also one of my overall favourite fictional characters.

Yona from Akatsuki no yona (the manga more than the anime)

Erza from fairy tail. Probably my favorite female character from a battle shounen. Maka (Soul eater) is a close second

I'd always nominate Benten from The Eccentric Family because she's a fascinating character all around.

IN what sense?

If memory serves, he only did that once when he first showed up. Rika and Renamon where the ones saving Ryo and the rest when they first biomerged into Sakuyamon and held back the D-Reaper. Other than that, Ryo didn't save Henry and the last time he had to pull a Big Damn Heroes moment it was to help Henry and Terriermon during a fight against a D-Reaper agent.

Erza and Wendy from Fairy Tail.

Rika from Digimon Tamers.

Edited by windleopard on Apr 2nd 2023 at 1:23:21 PM

What's so good about Wendy?

I do see a bit of myself in her since I am somewhat shy myself. I also like her powers.