Anime Feminist

Content Warning: Discussion of misogyny/gendered violence, maladaptive trauma response, queerphobia, queer erasure, and transphobia.

Spoilers for all of Samurai Flamenco.

Samurai Flamenco is infamous twice over: what started out as a grounded slice-of-life series about tokusatsu addict and male model Masayoshi Hazama dragging local cop Goto Hidenori into living his lifelong dream of becoming a superhero took a sharp turn into the supernatural halfway through its first cour, hurtling through genre parodies at the speed of sound against ever-decreasing production values. It became the very definition of a hot mess, with the remaining viewership predominantly tuning in just to see what weird thing would happen next. So poorly received was the series that its production house, Manglobe, would make only one more series over a year later (and, at that, it was the likewise troubled production Gangsta) before closing its doors.

What finally got eyes on the show, for a brief and shining moment, was its finale: the series climaxed with an impassioned marriage proposal between the two male leads. It gained a second life of notoriety as queer fans who’d stuck around for the subtext rejoiced at an overt declaration of love between two male characters in a non-BL series, and cis male-dominated fandom spaces like Reddit and TVTropes drummed up endless excuses for why this Didn’t Count as Gay. Yuri!!! On ICE fans may be familiar with this cycle.

Content warning: discussion of ableism

Shy is a show about empathy. It is the protagonist Teru’s defining quality: a stalwart refusal to dehumanize the people who she is fighting against, no matter how brutal their actions towards her.

This belief in empathy is drawn less from the superhero genre and more from the magical girl genre, where the battles often are proxy fights over the hearts and societal problems that the characters are facing. The villains of these shows are often represented as manipulators: They may intuit the emotions of others and then twist them to their benefit–corrupting the precious dreams of those around them, as the villains in Sailor Moon SuperS do, or using girls’ despair over a patriarchal world as a source of fuel in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. We can see such a narrative at play with Stigma, who uses the pain and trauma of others to fuel his ambitions, twisting Iko’s survivors’ guilt around her parents’ deaths to make her curse the world.

Watching these arcs as an autistic person has often felt complicated to me. Most of these shows go to great lengths to set up a dichotomy between the deeply feeling, empathetic protagonist, whose humanity is their superpower, and the uncaring or unempathetic antagonist—whose assumed inhumanity justifies their punishment and death. With shows like Madoka Magica and its descendants, where the villain is straight up incapable of empathy, it is often less the actual actions of the antagonist that justifies this punishment, but their position as an abomination—somebody so heartless they cannot be allowed to live. It is hard not to see the ghost of eugenics underlying the narrative arcs of these villains—people whose neurological state is so horrifying as to borderline on an eldritch monstrosity, requiring their death. This is especially troubling given that lack of empathy is one of the calling cards of stereotypes about autistics.

I had myself experienced this stereotype first hand for years–being forced to go through applied behavior analysis, take on “social skills groups,” and be generally punished constantly, all to beat into my head that I should be more empathetic. All of it, of course, had the opposite effect–leading me to retreat further and further into myself, and cut myself off further from others.