This makes a lot of sense. It's...sad, somehow that the only way to successfully allow many men conditioned by western society to engage in media and allow themselves to be vulnerable is to use a female protagonist as a conduit. Sad, but...right sounding.There are a lot of film essays and analysis about women in horror films, and they mostly boil down to vulnerability. The idea is that women are socially allowed to be scared and experience a full range of emotions. When viewers, including male viewers, go to watch a horror movie and get that all important catharsis, it's easier for them to get that catharsis through the medium of the female MC. They're not directly comparing themselves to the character or subconsciously thinking she should man up. It basically allows them a safe way to experience vulnerability. Since this goes against the grain of most other films and the accepted wisdom of "men can't relate to women", it's a really fascinating thread to follow down the academic rabbit hole.
Yeah, I don't want to give the impression that Japanese media doesn't also just have completely trashy stuff with atrociously written, pandery characters, just that they seem to manage to successfully characterize women in stuff that's very, VERY aimed primarily at men on a pretty regular basis. I mean, my favorite game character this year came from a pair of SRPG-Visual Novels that are direct sequels to a decade old game with pornographic content (that still retained quite a bit of iffy stuff despite being on console this go-round). Granted, I'm so done with open world games at this point that I just can't with Horizon, and I don't count Estelle from Trails in the Sky the 3rd because she's not new at this point.But it makes a lot of sense that, if you like and are attracted to women, you might actually want to like the female characters you're attracted to. I don't think it has to be an entirely cynical thing either. Like it can be. I've seen that too. But there are plenty of examples of guy's media in Japan that have good female characters.
Shirobako is a heaven-sent gift, I swear.Someone mentioned Sakura Quest above, but it's (in my opinion) better counterpart Shirobako, about five female friends in their 20s trying to make it in the anime industry is classified as shonen. And it's not weird or fanservicey in telling it's story.
I learned a lot the day that I found out that demo labels in manga are exclusively a result of what magazine a comic is being serialized in and say nothing about actual content or real-world target audience.Also demographic genre labels are weird and half the time barely mean anything other than what shelf something gets stuck on.
This is only tangentially related, but you kick started my memory here. I'm genuinely curious how much of the costume/design disconnect happens because of disparities in cultural perception of the fourth wall, as it were (I'm not really sure how to express this, really). Interviews and reactions to unexpected western controversies and such over the years combined with the general trend for theatrical exaggeration and melodrama in their media has given me a pretty strong impression that Japanese people might see the kind of bizarre costumes their characters often wear less like things an actual person would ever wear and more like exaggerated stage costumes. We in the present-day west prefer extreme naturalistic acting and presentation in our media, but some of the divide in how audacious stuff gets might be explained if they consider what their characters are wearing in a lot of this stuff less as practical outfits and more as literal costuming.It is interesting to see this connection between real-life perception and the framing through fictional characters, especially considering how often our concerns are dismissed as "it's just fiction, it has nothing to do with real life".
Wondering if anybody more in the know than my American self has any thoughts on this.