Get Your Rifles, Boys & Girls - It's Hunting Season

[redbrunja]

autoschismatic  has an amazing and absolutely dead-on article about Kishimoto and his kunoichi and the problems therein. This has also brought all the misogynics to the yard.

Basically, they're saying, 'so what if Kishimoto is sexist? It's just shonen manga, it's made for boys anyway (implication: it doesn't matter if boys are taught that women are less than), you're just thinking too hard about this.'

As I'm sure you can all imagine, I look that as meekly as Maka would, because everyone knows that girls can't be kickass in shonen manga lololol.

Comments

[the-sun-is-up.livejournal.com]

*points up* What she said. Bleach has pretty horrid gender politics.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

If she asked for examples, I was going to point her to your epic and utterly made-of-word rants on Bleach.

[fani.livejournal.com]

"she" would like to see the essay.

I just read Bleach up till...I think it was 5th volume and I've been busy with school and work so I haven't really updated myself on that. Bleach didn't keep my interest going as good as Avatar or 20th Century Boys, so I sort of gave it up.

And up till 5th volume it was still pretty light-hearted.

[the-sun-is-up.livejournal.com]

If you're only up to volume 5 then you haven't gotten to the head-desky bits yet. I thought the gender stuff in Bleach was fine until the Soul Society arc, which starts around volume 7 (?) and then it all went downhill from there.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

As the_sun_is_up mentioned, it's later in the series that thinks get insanely headdesky on the sexism front. If you don't mind spoilers:

http://the-sun-is-up.livejournal.com/106642.html#cutid2

http://the-sun-is-up.livejournal.com/134043.html#cutid1

http://the-sun-is-up.livejournal.com/114182.html#cutid1

http://the-sun-is-up.livejournal.com/111664.html#cutid1

[fani.livejournal.com]

...holy cow.

And the girls probably get the depictions tenfold because there are around 20 + mangas in publications like Shounen Jump (not to mention other shounen magazines)

I wonder how they feel about all this...

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Yes. So Bleach? Not a shining ideal of feminist shonen.

Honestly, I think a lot of girls are trained to think 'oh, that's just the way it is.'

[goldengrimoire.livejournal.com]

Yes, I never got into Bleach for this reason.

Part of the problem is that I think that there's a huge component of the female fandom in Japan that read Jump manga just for yaoi fuel, so they don't really *care* about the characterization of female characters (and of course I'm sure we're all familiar with the ridiculous female character bashing that happens in fandom if it's a character that happens t get in the way of the TRUE LOVE of Favorite Yaoi Pairing X as well.) I figure that the editors probably don't see much of a reason to encourage their mangaka to be more progressive on this front at least partially because of that. They probably get less pressure about improving gender roles than what happens here.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

*nods*

Agreed about the pressue from editors - I think that within another decade or two, shonen jump (if it's still around) will look far different than it does not.

...unless Naruto and Bleach are still running.