anicrit

Daring to Speak its Name: Goodbye, My Rose Garden and the queer historical romance

Set in 1900 England, Goodbye, My Rose Garden tells the story of the young noblewoman Alice and her maid Hanako as the two connect over their shared passion for fiction and eventually fall in love. Steeped in references to the history and literature of the Victorian era, the series draws on turn-of-the-century reality and fantasy alike to highlight the intersectional struggles of queer women of the period.

Utilizing the narrative devices of early feminist and women-loving-women (wlw) literature, Rose Garden encourages its audience to expect a melancholy love story. However, it swerves in its finale to offer an unambiguously romantic, happy ending, arguing against “inevitable” heteronormativity and providing a shining example of how to write nuanced, happy historical queer fiction for a modern audience.

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You Don’t Have to Kick Ass to Be Kickass: Shoujo fantasy and the value of the noncombatant hero

HItomi stands atop the Escaflowne mecha, holding aloft her glowing pink pendant

Over the decades, the number of fantastical stories starring female characters has slowly but significantly risen. As that number has gone up, so too have the number of lady action heroes. Girls and women are no longer relegated to the roles of “white mage” or “brainiac”; they can sling spells, slay vampires, and punch supervillains in the face right alongside the menfolk.

And this is a good thing… for the most part. But the ability to enact violence shouldn’t be the only way we measure someone’s value. It’s important to showcase a variety of roles—not just soldiers, but politicians, doctors, mediators, artists, caretakers, and so on—to highlight the different ways of doing good or being a hero. This is as true of fantastical escapist fiction as it is grounded slice-of-life stories.

So, how do we tell these stories without falling back into the old gendered stereotypes of “man fight, woman heal”? One subgenre in particular provides us with a useful template: shoujo fantasy, which features a number of action-packed tales with protagonists as diverse as their worlds.

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A Swing and a Miss: The mixed-up feminism of Princess Nine

Ryo and Takasugi in their baseball uniforms, facing away from each other and looking grimly upset.

Created as an anime-original project in 1998, Princess Nine spends the first three-quarters of its 26-episode run with an often spot-on understanding of the sexism girls and women face when trying to enter traditionally masculine fields. Through its narrative and characters, it challenges gender norms and argues for female participation both in boys’ sports and adult leadership positions.

Unfortunately, the series falls into its own sexist assumptions in the last act, becoming mired in a melodramatic love triangle and undercutting its progressive messaging in the process. It makes a strong early pitch for feminist-minded viewers to cheer it on, but by the time it staggers into home plate, it’s hard to manage more than a halfhearted sigh.

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Thinking Outside the Circle: Accessibility and education in Witch Hat Atelier

No witch left behind.

A boy sits instead a broken glass bottle. He presses a hand to the side of the bottle. Just outside of it, a girl in a witch's hat presses her hand to the bottle as well, the two trying to touch through the glass.

Witch Hat Atelier begins with the premise that “anyone can become a witch” and then spends practically every volume introducing us to someone who’s been told “no, actually, you can’t,” whether because of their family, their learning speed or style, their physical abilities, or their mental health. Thankfully, the series always proves these naysayers wrong, telling hopeful stories not about “overcoming” differences, but working with and even embracing them.

Using its “magical school” premise, Witch Hat Atelier explores diversity among students and argues for the importance of accessibility throughout society, but especially in education. With supportive mentors and a focus on individual accommodation, anyone really can wield their own kind of magic.

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Nonconforming in the ‘90s: How Pokemon’s gender variance caught the hearts of generation

Smashing gender norms at the speed of light.

Jessie and James in Rose of Versailles cosplay. James is Marie Antoinette and Jessie is Oscar.

Twenty years ago, I watched my very first episode of Pokemon and began my lifelong journey into the world of anime, manga, and JRPGs. I couldn’t tell you the exact date, but I can tell you the episode was “The Flame Pokemon-athon!” and that I was both confused and delighted by this weird show with electric mice and flaming horses. I can also tell you I swiftly fell in love with it, bringing my best friends along for the ride.

And now, two decades later, after diving back into the anime after years away from it, I think I can finally tell you why: why this strange, silly, sincere show mattered, not just to me but to the turn-of-the-century Western kids’ media landscape as a whole. How it filled the space between “boy stuff” and “girl stuff,” treated both as having value, and—through its world, characters, and story—challenged why there was a division in the first place.

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Nichijou and the Everyday Epics of High School Girls

A slice-of-life that really knows how to live.

Mio dives dramatically off a riverbank. Yuuko watches her, shocked, in the foreground.

Adapted from the manga by Keiichi Arawi and vibrantly animated by Kyoto Animation, this comedy featuring robots, talking cats, and murderous deer initially sounds far from “ordinary.” However, Nichijou‘s dedication to finding reality through absurdity—to showing how things feel rather than how they literally are—grants the series an authenticity that many grounded YA dramas struggle to capture.

More to the point, it accomplishes this with a cast largely composed of high school girls—in particular, the central crew of Yuuko, Mio, Mai, and Nano. Through these girls’ diverse personalities and adventures, Nichijou not only showcases many common (and not-so-common) trials and triumphs of modern female adolescence and friendship, but also expands the narrow idea of what it means to be a “normal” teen girl in fiction.

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A Girl Worth Fighting For: Kingdom Hearts III and the mystery of the missing heroines

Curses! Damseled again! Aqua stands in front of a young Kairi, her keyblade drawn protectively

The first Kingdom Hearts game launched just over seventeen years ago, and I’ve been an avid fan and sometimes-apologist of the series ever since. Despite its (in)famously convoluted storyline, the character relationships and emotional blend of melancholy, hope, and heart-on-sleeve sincerity has kept me captivated into adulthood. Because, really, who cares about plot holes when you’re watching a cutscene through a veil of tears?

Needless to say, I was elated when the mythical Kingdom Hearts III finally dropped this year. I couldn’t wait to see the many stories come to a dramatic close and all the tragedy children get the endings they deserved. I wanted so badly to adore it.

And while there was a lot to enjoy (the gameplay, the graphics, most of the worlds, everything involving Axel), there was just as much that left me frustrated—and all of it linked back to the way the game treated its most prominent female characters. Kingdom Hearts’s cast and audience may have grown up, but its tired “boy saves girl” gender politics remain just as outdated as they were when the franchise first launched.

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Lady Leads & Sidekick Lads: Flipping the script in Team Rocket’s “Training Daze”

The lovely, charming origin story.

The Team Rocket trio stand together, wearing red training uniforms. Jessie clenches a fist and looks at James, who looks back at her with a determined smile. Meowth stands between them, grinning wide.

The Team Rocket trio have never been your typical villains. With a tenacity only matched by their incompetence, an enduring love for one another, a closet full of exquisite crossplay, and enough puns to sink the St. Anne, they’re about as charming as “bad guys” can get.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that their special backstory episode defies as many conventions as they do, taking the classic team origin story and turning familiar gendered archetypes cleverly on their heads.

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All Folks Bright and Beautiful: The casual gender diversity of Heaven’s Design Team

How to succeed at inclusivity without really trying.

A group of people sitting around a meeting room table. A man and woman face each other in the foreground.

The Heaven’s Design Team manga follows God’s R&D Department as they take requests from on high (literally) to populate the earth with new animals. Similar to Cells at Work!, it’s an edutainment series that balances comical interactions between coworkers with mini-lessons about some of the world’s most unique, clever, or just plain terrifying critters.

As the kid who devoured Zoobooks and the adult who’d rather visit a new city’s aquarium than its art museum, the series sounded like my jam, but it wasn’t exactly waving its arms and shouting “I’ll make great AniFem content!” either. Which was part of what made it such a pleasant surprise. I may have come for the neat animal facts, but I stayed for the charming cast breezily ignoring gender norms.

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Emma’s Choice: The gender-norm nightmare at the heart of The Promised Neverland

Some monsters aren’t just under our beds.

A sketch of two girls, Emma and Isabella. Emma is crouched and facing the left, looking determined. Isabella is standing and facing the right, looking sorrowful.

Since it began serialization in Viz’s Shonen JUMP, The Promised Neverland has garnered well-deserved praise for its twisting narrative, tense story beats, and compelling characters. But this series is more than a page-turning thriller. What begins as a sharply crafted horror story soon reveals itself to be a sophisticated critique on restrictive social practices—including the hellishly limited roles expected of girls.

CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of sexism and violence against children; disturbing imagery. SPOILERS for The Promised Neverland, Volumes 1-5 (Chapters 1-38).

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