smarrie

I do not see how a show that plays sexual harassment (against women) and abusive romance (against men) for laughs in any way could be feminist; I’m talking about the second season here. However, I also doubt the writers’ (Mike and Bryan) credentials regarding feminism when their attitudes towards young girls has been less than stellar (i.e. portraying the fangirls in the Avatar Promise comics as frivolous little things spouting the word “like” a lot while antagonizing the main character’s love interest, calling anyone who took issue with the unhealthy pairing of an unlikeable character with Korra in the first season as “angry fangirls”). Anyway, if anyone is interested in more analysis regarding Korra as a show dealing with feminism, privilege, etc then I recommend a great site called Avatarreviews.wordpress.com (Marshall Turner as blogged and v-logged extensively on the show).

Did you happen to see that Buzzfeed video on how Americans watch anime for the first time?

While I applaud the show for its stance against victim-blaming in its first episode, I cannot help but think that Takeo is more subversive gender-wise as a character than his girlfriend. Takeo is huge but not easily angered and normally quite harmless, he is expressive and he cries quite a bit. Rinko on the other hand talks in that cutesy falsetto voice expected of women to appeal to (otaku-ish) men, appears demure and diminutive most of the time, she is great at baking at does so all the time, giving her that “waifu” quality that real women in Japan might not always have, and she only demonstrates her physical strength once and it’s meant to come across as unexpected, since women are not supposed to be strong it’s implied. At least the show acknowledges that she, and women in general, do have sexual desires, but not in a way that could be truly offensive to men whose sensibilities include wanting a “pure, virginal soul” who is inexperienced in the ways of sex: Rinko’s big bad secret is that she wants to hold her boyfriend’s hand and even though her girlfriends thought she had sex with her boyfriend one evening, it’s a misunderstanding, thus reassuring the audience that she isn’t really a “bad girl.” This kind of thinking is already out there thanks to the otaku fanbase of idol groups who want their singers dateless according to contracts to maintain their “sexually available but pure” image as well as how in other romantic comedies (usually aimed at men but sometimes women as well) characters will not initiate or move their love to the intimacy stage for fear of angering fans or scandalizing them.

Are there any other critics we could turn to as a possible “voice of the people?” when it comes to mainstream criticism? As great and socially aware as Mr. Ebert was, he still comes at certain films from a male perspective: for example, he might not have had as much of an issue with the gender politics in classic Disney films such as Snow White unlike feminist critics of the 1990s who called such princesses “pallid.” I know there are more and more informal critics from the non-white and female side on YouTube and the like voicing their opinions on how certain storytelling conventions such as the cult of beauty and narcissism provided by a princess’s central positioning in the love narrative influenced the way they perceive themselves and their own writing, but I wonder if there were any big critics like Ebert but for anyone not necessarily a straight white man?

I wonder what you make of the fact that in Western animation, historically speaking, male characters were often allowed to be anything from monsters to animals but female characters were more often designed as human and pretty?