Her ‘happy ending’ would be outside the so called ‘battlefield’ (oftentimes not literal), with her hair longer and her pants joining in the middle to make a dress and if not a baby in her hand, then in a stroller or in a picture on the mantle. In order for her to gain happiness, her strength must be undermined and her supposedly inherent femininity must be brought out. Unsurprisingly, this is what the male lead must work on as well. This Japanese anime character’s trait is her strength and…absolutely nothing else. But addressing this ‘strength’ reveals to us the not-so-feminist aspect of Japanese anime, and this is my first category.Īlso read: Hayao Miyazaki And Studio Ghibli’s Cinematic Representation Of Empowered Women The strong female lead who must be saved from her own villainous ‘masculine’ ambition
“But anime has strong female leads too!” fans might cry out. For example, while the two female characters might not talk to each other about boys, most of their personal character development and focus would still be on inciting romance and keeping the other from doing so or their sexuality might just be the only thing to offer, they stick around for ridiculous ‘fan-service’ and nothing more. Many of them pass the Bechdel Test (must include two women, they must talk to each other, and this talk must be about something other than boys), but still push female characters in Japanese anime within elementary boundaries. This is not to say that anime is regressive, on the contrary there is as much good content as there are problematic ones, but mainstream shows tend to raise eyebrows. This article hopes to present a pretty inexhaustive list of female character tropes in Japanese anime. Some loom in the background and some are the forerunners, and this article hopes to present a pretty inexhaustive list of female character tropes in Japanese anime. In my eight years of sticking around and exploring what Japanese anime had to offer, from fantasy to psychological and then some, I have noticed character archetypes that are studded in both these genres and beyond: The Japanese anime stock characters. This might be because it’s hard to ignore the involvement of Shin-chan’s flippant personality and Doraemon’s daily banter in our own desi after-school childhood. Japanese anime is often chalked up to cater only to a particular demographic (ironically even within anime itself) of children.