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Anime Weekend Atlanta - Day Three - Gender
Issues
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In live-action movies, there aren't many roles for strong women. In
anime, most of the roles seem to be for powerful women as heroes. The women
who play the English-language versions of those roles were asked about
those parts at an Anime Weekend Atlanta panel on Sunday. Actor Jessica
Calvello (left) mentioned her Cutey Honey role as a strong woman, while
actor Tiffany Grant (center) wondered if Honey would be as popular "...if
she wasn't [didn't measure] 64-12-64." Grant felt that her Elise role in
Plastic Little was a weak character because "She just whimpered a lot.
She didn't have a lot of empowerment." And Soryu Asuka Langley, Grant's
signature role from Evangelion, was a "weak" character in her opinion. |
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| Lisa Ortiz needed no prompting to talk about her strong-woman roles,
Deedlit from Record of Lodoss War and Lina Inverse from Slayers. "Deedlit
was an elf, but she was realistic," said Ortiz. "Her journey as a person
was very realistic." Weak characters? Choose just about any of the cute
girls from Pokemon, she said (although one person at the panel piped up
that Jessie wasn't a weak person). |
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The panel discussion was moderated by Christian Smith, the person who
assembled the convention's program book. He wanted the audience "...to
think about what you watch. A character in a show is never completely sexist
or liberated. Entertainment does not make you do thinks, but if you pursue
sexist entertainment, they'll make more of it. They are plenty of entertaining
dumb things, but they are entertaining smart things, too." |
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| Any discussion about gender issues and anime raises the gender bending
Ranma 1/2 series from Rumiko Takahashi. Elizabeth Christian of the AWA
staff noted that fans catch on to the idea that, no matter whether Ranma
is in male or female form, he acts like a man - or as a man would be presumed
to imitate a woman. Smith added that Takahashi, a woman, writes stories
that are uniquely aimed at a young male audience, as opposed to the many
female manga artists who write for a female audience. That leads to the
issue of "yaoi" stories of male-male love, about which Christian said those
stories seem to be tales of "...women writing about themselves. If they
had written about female characters, they may have had trouble getting
those stories published." |
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