Strong female characters in high school anime?

(And I mean actually strong and well-developed, not a girl who can kick ass and not much else)

Recently, I've been actively avoiding high school anime. Why?

The girls are usually concerned about:

• Bust size
• Not getting fat
• Otherwise looking appealing (for boys)
• BOYS - a lot of their lives revolve around dudes 

And if not....they're often objectified or told they need to be good wife material.

Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu comes to mind immediately.

I used to really like this series until I realised how awful Himeji Mizuki and Shimada Minami - the two main females - are.

Almost everything they do revolves around Kenji, they even try to change themselves in some episodes to suit his tastes. The character development is barely there either - we find out why they've liked Kenji for so long, but that's pretty much it.

Anyway, this isn't about Baka to Test, it's about a high school anime series that actually gets a high rating from me - Kokoro Connect. With a title like that ('kokoro' means 'heart'), I expected a boring, lovey dovey anime and was preparing to drop it within the first ten minutes....but I'm so glad I didn't.

 I'll list the negatives first to try and maintain a balanced argument:

• The only out, queer character's first impression is that of a persistent sexual predator
• It's always the girls who need help/saving, usually by guys (however, when one of the girls gets in real trouble at the end, it's mainly the other girls who rescue her)
• Aoki has asked Yui out more than once instead of respecting her unenthusiam
• There are a couple of 'sexy' scenes but they're there for a reason and it's kept to a minimum, so this is barely even a point
• The ending may have been too perfect? I can't tell - I'm a sucker for soppiness

Positives:

• Very good character development
• Strong female characters, mentally and physically
• Lives not revolving around guys - girls would rather sort their own problems out first
• Free from major stereotyping
• The females all stand up for themselves, even Iori's mother who stood up to her abusive ex-husband

User 'Trollbrotherno1' on myanimelist.net says in their review:

[F]or the genre and medium, this was an amazing job of characterization.

(find the full review here under 'Kokoro Connect')

And that is exactly it - my expectations were exceeded completely. I was blown away by how fleshed-out and strong-willed all three girls were. Not only that, but they all had backstories that explain their personalities. And, shocker - the girls had more character development than the guys! I'd prefer all characters to be well-written, but I'm glad the girls got lots of attention because usually, they're badly written.

We see them evolve into better people; not one of the girls is exactly the same as they were at the beginning, but the guys don't really develop (I guess because nothing was really 'wrong' with them in the first place....? Taichi hurts himself to save other people, but that doesn't change, even in the last episode. Aoki is more considerate of Yui's feelings but only because her issue was brought to everyone's attention).

Here's my review of some of the characters and why they appealed to me so much.

SPOILERS FROM HERE TIL THE END (also, watch the whole show, plus the 4-episode special/final ending - it's very interesting and has an ever-changing supernatural theme throughout).

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

We know that Aoki has a thing for Yui but she doesn't want to be with him. Naturally, we figure that it's because she sees him as a friend...but it goes deeper - she's scared of men because she was nearly raped in middle school. Because of this, the furthest they go is when she hugs him.

What I appreciate here is that they didn't push her character to get with anyone - she's still coming to terms with her fear of men, it can't just end with her magically getting over it.

Another thing I appreciate about Yui - she's very strong, physically (even though she's a 'girly girl'), but this doesn't automatically make her bullet-proof. It makes it real for someone strong to also be vulnerable - plus, she gets a lot stronger as her character grows.

Now, onto Iori (and a bit of Taichi)...

I didn't like Iori at the start because she seemed your typical kawaii girl who everyone's encouraged to 'awwww' over. I was mistaken.

Turns out that Iori struggled so much to please every step-father she had that she constantly altered her personality, she even admits that she maintained her bubbly persona in order to live up to everyone's expectations.

She eventually learns, with help from the others (mainly Inaba, the third girl) that living to please others is stupid and she should just be herself. This inspired the line, "I'm done caring about what's normal and what isn't. It's my damn life, and I'm living it any damn way I want." This is one of the most inspiring lines in the show. I am so done with female characters who live their lives to please people, especially guys, and never actually undergo any changes or have the issue addressed by other characters. Iori, I salute you.

Also, Iori is in love with Taichi and it looks like they're going to date for the majority of the show, but when he formally asks her out, she refuses because she knows he's fallen for her "ideal" self, not her actual self. This impressed me because again, it felt realistic and mature.

Another important factor: Taichi handles it well! He doesn't guilt-trip her, call her a bitch, or complain about being in the 'friend zone'; he still admits that he loves her but he moves on and continues to be by her side. The people who ARE mean to her about it get their comeuppance.

Finally, just a quick word on Inaba. In one of the first few episodes, she admits to masturbating to Taichi and it isn't sexualised nor is she demeaned or treated differently. Girls masturbating is still a taboo topic, so I count this as a big deal. The only anime series I've heard of girls admitting to masturbating or doing anything sexual is where the theme is already very sexual.

What I also liked about Inaba is that she admits that she loves Taichi too, but this doesn't completely ruin her friendship with everyone. Instead of getting jealous of Iori, she playfully declares her a rival (unlike in Baka to Test where they both try to outdo each other, cry about it, and get angry at Kenji for speaking to other girls).

Even though the ending was romantic and it has a strong romance theme, the girls' aim was not to get with the guy/s, it was to better themselves as people and combat issues as a team.

That's it, really!

Watch the show, it's a refreshing break from your typical slice-of-life high school anime and it comes with an inspiring moral.

See how I've rated nearly 300 anime series' by checking out myanimelist.net/animelist/Twigglet

Gay Best Friend

Who's ever wanted a gay best friend? Someone to go shopping with, trade secret with, give you fashion tips...a pretty valuable friend to have, right?

...

Why is the idea of a gay best friend so problematic? Many reasons...

1. It assumes gay men act a certain way (TV does this A LOT)
2. It highlights sexual orientation as something of importance beyond anything else about a person
3. It objectifies them, treats them like accessories

Basically, people care about having a gay best friend because they're gay. They care about the sexual orientation more than the person who matters much more.

In the following TED talk - What's Wrong With the Commodification of Gay Men, Mark Pampanin explains why turning someone's sexual orientation into a commodity and why assuming that being gay means x and y is wrong.

Not just that, he also says that being pro-gay has become somewhat of a trend, something to show how progressive and accepting people are.

Are you a gay man? What do you think about the GBF idea? Have you ever been treated this way?

Critical Thinking

For a while now, I've enjoyed questioning social norms, and encouraged others to do the same (as implied with this very blog title).

Up until now, it's always been kind of vague - Think about it ...Think about what? Think how? It wasn't until I watched Steve Joordens' TED talk that I remembered it had a name - critical thinking.

One of the first things Joordens says is, "[Critical thinking] is what drives social change."

All of the progression we've made from history to the present day has been due to critical thinkers encouraging others to think the same. It used to be normal to receive therapy for being gay, it used to be normal to refuse women the vote, it used to be normal to treat black people as slaves. All of that changed because people starting to think.

Now, I'm going to touch on a few things Joordens says and afterwards, I'm going to explain how he influenced the way I want to approach things from now on.

The way that we naturally think, behave, see the world etc is due to [cultural] beliefs that we have probably held since we were children. The media, our parents, peers, teachers, law enforcers etc teach us right from wrong, what is acceptable and what isn't. For example, how do we know it's wrong to commit murder? We are not born with that knowledge, it's taught to us, we learn things like that from our environment and it becomes ingrained. If we find out that someone's killed someone else, we (normally) react negatively without a second thought.

Joordens brings up something called observational learning - learning things by copying. We do this almost exclusively when we're babies, but as we grow, we learn to think more for ourselves but we still engage in bits of observational learning.

We're not all 'sheep', we don't do everything just because other people do, but we often DO follow the majority in terms of what is acceptable behaviour and what isn't.

Think about if you were a white person in Southern America during the slave trade, Joordens says, and everyone around you owns slaves and treats them like objects. What would you have done?

Left image says: 'Am I not a man and a brother?'

You can call old slave owners bastards, and rightly so, but what would YOU have done?

Did they know any better? "Generally speaking, most of us would think it's okay. In fact, most of us wouldn't think it's okay, most of us wouldn't think at all, we would simply accept it, it would just be normal," says Joordens.

They did not know any better, but that didn't mean that what they did should have been acceptable.

Going along with things without giving it real thought is the opposite of critical thinking, this is what critical thinking wants to combat - the normal, accepted way of thinking.

Then you get someone that Joordens terms an 'opinion oddball' who steps in and realises that treating black people as slaves is not okay because they, like the slave owners, are also human - slave abolitionists. Obviously, there was a slight backlash... Why didn't everyone automatically stop and say, "Know what? These people are right - keeping slaves is immoral, we should stop"? Because when someone says that what you naturally think or do is wrong, you get defensive and try to justify yourself, maybe even refuse to listen.

This all sounded similar to something that I've been fighting against for five years now, and I was amazed when Joordens said exactly what I was thinking - eating meat. He vocalised the fact that he knew it would make people uncomfortable, but, as an example, he wanted to encourage the audience to think critically about where their food comes from.

He then talked about the realities of the meat industry and rounded it up with saying that what he just did was the equivilant of putting a hot air mass and a cold air mass together to create a thunderstorm: "When an opinion oddball uses critical thinking to attack your indoctrinated beliefs, you get what you feel right now."

It took me a while to understand that not everyone is going to believe that using animals for food (or anything unnecessary, for that matter) is wrong because most people are used to it. They're used to dipping chicken nuggets in ketchup as part of a Happy Meal, used to adverts advertising different meat every fifteen minutes, used to seeing meat on the menu at well-established restaurants.  

If it's everywhere, if it's accepted and widely available, how can it possibly be wrong...right?

I forgot that for nineteen years...that was my life, and I can't expect everyone to see things my way just because I tell them that eating animals is messed up. Instead of trying to shock people or tell them they're shitty people, I need a better approach.

It took me nineteen years to realise that I didn't like what I'd been doing my whole life, so how can I expect people to listen immediately if I don't persuade them to think for themselves?

Of course, people will still get defensive...

"Our ancestors ate meat."

"It's what I'm used to, how can I change."

"That's just the way life is."

I hear this a lot from meat-eaters. But is that really enough to justify anything? Was that argument enough to justify the slave trade?

Sometimes it really helps to think about things you take for granted - just because something is normal doesn't deem it acceptable.

Without critical thought, normalised injustices will prevail.