Anime Feminist

Content Warning: Discussion of sexual harassment, queerphobia, transphobia

Spoilers for the I’m in Love with the Villainess light novels

Inori’s I’m in Love with the Villainess series offers a delightful queer twist on the “reborn as the villainess” genre. Office worker Ohashi Rei is reincarnated as Rae Taylor, the protagonist of her favorite otome game—however, Rae has no interest in romancing any of the male love interests. She’s head over heels for the game’s snooty villainess, Claire Francois, and makes it her mission to stay by Claire’s side, protecting her from the tragic fate she knows lies at the end of Claire’s storyline in the game. Claire, for her part, is horrified that the target of her bullying is now not only infatuated with her, but openly enjoying said bullying.

I’m in Love with the Villainess starts out as a silly isekai romance but grows into a story that earnestly advocates for queer people, taking on complex subjects like homophobia, transphobia, and classism. However, the story’s reliance on messy tropes can sometimes muddle its messages.

We’ve got almost too many great shows to pick from, whether it’s medical detectives or superheroines.

The team split up the three-episode reviews between staff volunteers, with one person putting together a short(ish) review on each series. Like we do with our check-in podcasts, we started from the bottom of our Premiere Digest list and worked our way up.

If we didn’t watch a show for at least three episodes, we skipped it, and we’ve used nice bold headers to help you quickly jump to the shows you’re interested in. We’ve also excluded shows that are continuing on in basically the same vein as our premiere review to conserve space. Unless specifically noted, we will not be mentioning overt spoilers for anything beyond episode three.

We don’t have the time to keep up with everything, so please let us know about any gems we might be missing in the comments!

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Let’s dive into the many offerings of what might be the biggest season ever!
Which shows do you review?

We don’t review shows that are direct sequels, shorts, or (generally) for very young children. Anything not licensed and/or immediately available is off the table as well; series that are dropped in batches (the binge/Netflix model) won’t receive are a premiere review but are eligible for recommendations at end of season. Shows with late release dates will be reviewed separately from the digest.

While shows may change category as they continue to air, for ease of reference this is the order that will be used when discussing shows on our mid-season and wrap-up podcasts. Please note that any shows released in batches/by cour rather than weekly will not be discussed on the mid-season podcast.

Read it at Anime Feminist!

Content Warning: Discussion of transphobia, transmisogyny

Spoilers for I Wanna Be Your Girl

Yuri is a growing genre, increasingly depicting more and more varied stories about sapphic love. As yuri continues to get queerer, the existence of trans people in these stories would be one way to provide validation for trans readers in their gender and sexuality while also helping cis people understand and internalize our long standing place in the sapphic community. Yuri works featuring trans characters do exist, though their history is complex and they remain relatively few.
A Slice of Reality

Trans people are rooted in the sapphic community and have been a core part of it for as long as it could be called a community. Lesbians, by their very sexuality, defy the gender binary which was so strictly defined by heterosexuality, and in many cases they lose access to their conditional womanhood. This is furthered by the very long history of people engaged in the sapphic community who actively defied gender norms by presenting masculine, be that as a Butch, a Stud, lacking a label or some other label. Following from this, there is plenty of evidence of gender-defying companionship between lesbians and trans people in historical documentation, such as the works of Mariette Pathy Allen, who has chronicled transgender people for over 40 years as a photographer and released several books of her work. This is also present in fiction: for example, Alison Bechdel’s classic comic series Dykes To Watch Out For (1983) features a strip talking about the need for cis lesbians to have solidarity with trans women.

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