Girls Doing Stuff: Agency and Motivation in Girls’ Hobby Shows

I like to think I have a fairly varied palette when it comes to my anime tastes: a genre charcuterie board with some fantasy here, some meaningful coming-of-age stories there, and a peppering of rom-coms seasoned just right. There’s one category, though, that I always find myself savoring and looking forward to each season. If there’s a cast of funny teen girls trying out a new hobby, be it animation, camping, playing guitar, or building a treehouse, I’m there.

But why does this genre have such a gravitational pull? I could answer, simply and truthfully, that we live in stressful times and these shows are often very relaxing. But upon deeper consideration, there’s something else about these girls’ hobby shows that makes my heart happy, and it’s happening more on the level of character construction and development.  

Read the full article on AniFem!

A Big Ol’ Pile of Anime Recommendations (2020)

What a year, huh? At least there was some good cartoons!

In all sincerity, 2020 saw the release of some very fun and intriguing series—and working for AniFem has enabled me to keep a closer eye on what’s coming out than ever before, and, with premiere reviews, check out and enjoy series I may otherwise have totally missed. So read on for my favourite anime that I watched in 2020, which include everything from soft sapphic romances, to murder and mind games, to a “reincarnated in a video game” story I actually liked, to anime about anime.

Creativity, Discipline, and Eizouken (or: Everyone Needs a Kanamori in Their Life)

There is a pervasive myth of The Creative Genius: the great writers, or artists, or musicians, or filmmakers must receive divine inspiration, or perhaps are simply born with a unique knack for Making Art that mere mortals are not. Creators are still asked things like “where do you get your ideas?” as if a muse descends from the heavens and bestows them to a select chosen few. The idea of creation as work is, while more widely understood in today’s capitalist hellscape, still something a lot of people are wrapping their heads around. And yet, creative work is exactly that: work. That creative lightning strike is still part of the process, but you need to put in certain efforts to bottle that lightning and actually make it into something viewable by others.

In my last blog post about Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! I talked a lot about the sense of creative wonder, and I talked mostly about the characters Midori and Tsubame. This time, I want to talk about Kanamori Sayaka—the invaluable team member who actually wrangles that wonder and forces it to take shape, providing representation of an oft-understated aspect of the creative process: discipline.

The Gloriously Goofy, Geeky Girls of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

In a media climate with a lot of restrictive expectations for the behavior and beauty standards of young cisgender women, there’s always something gratifying and delightful about fiction that lets female characters be goofy, expressive, and a little bit weird. 

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, a series about three high school girls using a school club to start their own animation studio, inspires exactly this feeling (as well as a general, inescapable sense of creative joy). Through both the character design and characterization of its three protagonists, Eizouken challenges a lot of the tropes that often loom over portrayals of nerdy, passionate teenage girls… and, if we’re being honest, teenage girls in general.

Two Eizouken posts in a row? You betcha. Read this one in full at Anime Feminist!

Keep Your Hands off Eizouken: A Passion Project about Passion Projects

Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! is an anime about making anime. The meta potential here is obviously off the charts, and people who know more about the industry than I do are having a whale of a time gushing about the stylistic inspirations, the obvious homages to famous works, and the general technical prowess of the show as it sets out to be a celebration of all things animated. But Eizouken can be enjoyed even if you’re not deep in the anime paint. While it’s clearly a love letter to the animation medium, above all else it’s just a love letter to the very concept of the passion project. It’s a love letter to creativity itself, to the magical act of collaboration and creation, to taking in inspiration from everything around you and transforming it, via the alchemy that is art, into something amazing.