Worldcon 2019: Gender in manga and anime

[spindizzy]

• OKAY, like, I knew Ada Palmer was a cool human but SHE STUDIES THE HISTORY OF MANGA AND ANIME AND DOES EMERGENCY TRANSLATIONS/LINER NOTES. SHE IS SO COOL, OMG.


• Apparently manga as we'd recognise it today was actually published with women's magazines, for mothers to read with their children! Women were the target audience for serialised manga before it was formally even a thing! THAT'S SO COOL! (She said that Yotsuba&! was the descendant of those manga, which fills me with glee.)


• (I am absolutely here, btw, for women digging their heels into every fannish space that men try to drive us out of and go "No, YOU move, we were here first.")


• During the Chino-Japanese War and WWII, apparently there was a ban on "frivolous materials," which meant that there were no books or manga printed that weren't about war. Which means that a) manga for adult women ceased production entirely, and b) by the time that the ban is lifted and non-war related media can be printed again, children under the age of twelve grew up ENTIRELY WITHOUT MEDIA AIMED AT THEM. WHAT. WHAT.


• Recommendations specifically about this time period: Showa: A History of Japan, Barefoot Gen, A Drifting Life. The latter two both have scenes of discovering kids' media for the first time!


• Many children didn't have enough kanji to read prose, because schools were replaced by military drill and child labour, but manga meant that they could have age-appropriate stories in a format that they could read!


• Apparently Osamu Tezuka grew up around the Takarazuka Revue, like, as his babysitters and his mum's friends, which apparently influenced Princess Knight! Many of his works have genderfluid/genderchanging characters (having read some of them, he's not always GREAT at it, but considering when he was writing, I'm impressed at the effort?), and considering how much of an influence he had on the manga industry as a whole.


• I have MANY notes on the ero-guro stuff, but I'm just looking at them and going "I believe that these all existed and happened exactly as she said, because I too am a person who has stumbled across pornographic manga before, but what the shit." But I liked her explanation about beauty as ethics and transcience?


• Apparently we can blame moé as a thing on the animation fandoms in the 90s as their interests got even more hyperspecific (from global animation to anime to moé) and she didn't actually sound as accusatory as I do right now, but it's so GOOD to have someone to blame!


• Like, apparently these animation zines didn't get a fuck about Ghost In the Shell coming out because it had an adult woman as the protagonist, and I've not seen a huge amount of Ghost in the Shell, but I've seen enough that I'm like "... Seriously?" to that news. But also apparently the reason there is so much stuff focusing on specifically fourteen year olds is because that's the age of consent in Japan. The conclusion that she drew from this was that anime went much narrower in its exploration of gender, while manga could keep its wider field.


• In Japanese, characters have the option of NEVER being gendered by second parties, which is a thing that I'm running into watching the dub of Fate/Apocrypha (where two of the characters whose gender is canonically "No" are binary gendered in the dub.) and there's a solid history of genderless characters/spirits!


• THING I DIDN'T KNOW: female mangaka who had kids and kept working used to (still do?) receive death threats wtf wtf wtf


• Apparently there've been a lot of rich interrogations of same-sex or quasi-same-sex relationships because they're depicted as fantasy – one of the shows Ada Palmer described (and didn't recommend – Project A-Ko?), the f/f romance plotline was as much of a fantasy as the aliens and the blowing up the moon. But m/f relationships? Those are depicted as real and serious and more high stakes than queer relationships! But now, we're moving past that and getting more realistic queer stories!


• My notes for the next bit are a bit garbled – what I appear to have written is "Works about gender exploration but not trans narrative give us tools to explore those stories and trans culture" and I'm not sure what I was trying to say.


• Here's probably the most hopeful bullet point I wrote that day: "1990s: shonen comics found to be most populara among women, so female gaze is now accommodated. The EXISTENCE of women and their gaze shapes how the manga is written."


• Recs: Metropolis has a genderless robot and specifically explores different attitudes to friendship! Rose of Versaille is being published in English now! I didn't catch the name, but there was a 1981 romcom about a trans girl (specifically predating the surge of interest in afab characters presenting as male). Wandering son is so good! Princess Jellyfish is a great story about fashion and the fashions that female bodies are allowed, but separate from gender!