Hurting for summer shows? Your backlog’s about to be spoiled for choice.

How did we choose our recs?

Participating staff members can nominate up to three titles and can also co-sign other nominated shows. Rather than categorizing titles as “feminist-friendly” or “problematic,” they are simply listed in alphabetical order with relevant content warnings; doing otherwise ran the risk of folks seeing these staff recommendations as rubber stamps of unilateral “Feminist Approval,” which is something we try our hardest to avoid here.

The titles below are organized alphabetically. As a reminder, ongoing shows are NOT eligible for these lists. We’d rather wait until the series (or season) has finished up before recommending it to others, that way we can give you a more complete picture. This means we also leave out any unfinished split-cour shows, which we define as shows that air their second half within a year of the first.

Because it aired late in June, and because this season was so packed with good titles, Ooku: the Inner Chambers will be considered as part of the summer recommendations.

Here’s what the team thought—let us know your picks in the comments!

Read it at Anime Feminist!

It's some bullshit how Bandai said their marriage is "up to interpretation" lol. It's really not.

Things have happened since I last posted about it but yeah it's not just the magazine doing the shitty censoring, now they're trying to sweep under the rug all the efforts of everyone who produced an explicitly queer show because it'd "look bad" for the protagonists to be gay married. I've seen a lot of rightfully angry fan art, middle fingers to that weak release on the official site, it's just a complete joke. I'm glad people are coming together even harder to celebrate these two's marriage in the face of homophobia though, queer people cannot be silenced, be it japanese queer people or anyone else from around the world.

I have zero tolerance for bait apologism... It's always worthwhile to think about why a story is written the way it is, especially when there's money involved.

—A comment on /r/shoujoai/

This post contains spoilers for the following anime series: Senki Zesshou Symphogear, The Aquatope on White Sand, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury.

If you're a fan of yuri anime/manga, and probably LGBT media in general, it's hard to avoid discourse about queerbait—the all-too-common phenomenon of stories hinting that two characters of the same gender are romantically attracted to each other, but failing to ever confirm it beyond a doubt.

The quintessential example of queerbait in anime is the TV series Hibike! Euphonium, where the two female leads have a intense, passionate relationship throughout two seasons only for one of them to abruptly tell the other that she's in love with a man. While this example involves the queer relationship being replaced by a het one (something that was depressingly common up until the 21st century), in contemporary parlance, stories don't have to feature heterosexuality to be accused of being queerbait—they only need to contain an inadequate degree of homosexuality.

Whether a story is queerbait is wholly subjective, but at least when it comes to yuri, there are a lot of people with very high standards out there; perhaps best described as "if the ladies don't get to at least first base, they're out."