I feel like some people need to relearn Genre Expectations... "Man, this tragedy sucks!!! Why didn't they just do XYZ, then everything could have ended happily!!" well, then it wouldn't be a tragedy, would it. "Man, this lighthearted teen romcom is terrible, it's so sappy and unrealistic!!" Well, yeah. If it had been gritty and dark, it wouldn't have been a lighthearted romcom, would it. Is the writing actually bad or are you just trying to order a milkshake from a Home Depot
everytime someone rbs this i get a notification as though it were my post, even the rbs that don’t have my addition. go away onion post i am not your mother
all i wanted was to be a small creature who lies in bed and does small creature things but NOOOOOooo i have to pay bills and work the capitalism machine 🙃
LWA was the first anime I watched and became really attached to back in high school. There's a lot I could say as an intro to it (I highly recommend the OVA film and The Enchanted Parade Film, both are some of the most perfect short anime films [spot the MLP reference in the OVA!]. The main anime series is pretty good but is mostly no-plot shenanigans), but I wanna highlight the designs of background characters as an appeal for you to check it out. Because by god, the crew really cared about developing a fun, diverse cast of students that actually captures teenage girlhood pretty well.
Here's a cool fact: every student in the background of the anime has a name, nationality, and personality (and possibly backstory and relationships). A lot of love went into designing each individual student, and 90% of them have no speaking roles or major screen-time.
This is only half of the student body too. More under the cut.
Some students of note:
Aisha, a Middle Eastern student who wears a hijab (and a niqab in some concept material).
There's actually also a female teacher who wears a niqab, but she's unnamed and only a background character.
(In fact, all the teachers in this line-up only appear in backgrounds, yet look how crazy and inventive their designs are!)
It'd take too long to list/show BIPOC students; there are African students (Wangari, a side character and school reporter, from Kenya), BIPOC students from the UK, Latina students from South America. There are these twins from India (Rajani and Rashmi) who're both very protective of their smaller, shier roommate and will often argue over how to better care for her.
There's a great amount of diversity in facial structures, nose sizes, heights, and body types that you just don't see in anime. Stocky builds, large foreheads, double chins. And traditionally "unattractive" character designs are not designed to reflect bad qualities. Alma (1) from Austria is insecure about her flaws and enjoys talking, sometimes a bit too much. Verochka (2) from Russia is constantly paranoid about everything going wrong, yet manages to be friendly to everyone. None of this is relevant to/used in the actual anime, but it's there and it's fun.
In regards to the main cast, there's a girl from Russia named Jasminka who's unapologetically fat and loves to eat and it's never questioned and everyone is friends with her. There's also Amanda, an American tomboy who's canonically butch and crossdresses as a man to sneak into a boy's school (the LWA game also reveals that one of Akko's bullies, Hannah, has a crush on crossdressing Amanda. The game also reveals Amanda's crossdressed on multiple occasions before). There's Constanze, a nonverbal girl from Germany who loves mechanical engineering and hacking game consoles.
Not to mention our main protagonist, Akko, who's very clearly neurodivergent and commentary on how schools treat ND students. Akko is a non-magical girl who desperately wants to become a witch. She enrolls in the elitist magic academy Luna Nova despite having no magical lineage and is afforded zero accommodations or sympathy. She is constantly belittled and bullied by faculty and peers for being lazy, stupid, incapable, and untalented when in reality, she is working twice as hard as everyone else to get a barely-passing grade. We see her fall into the oh-so-relatable loop of staying up late and sacrificing free time to study, only to fall asleep in class and wind up with even worse grades. Luckily, she finds a teacher who truly advocates for her, and it's so satisfying seeing her earn magical powers on her own terms. Even more satisfying seeing her snooty aristocrat rival, Diana, realize that she was wrong about Akko this whole time and being a bully. (No exaggeration when I say they were the original Lumity.)
Akko is also a Marxist who becomes her school custodial staff's labor union chief secretary in striking and negotiating for fair pay.
At the risk of sounding preachy or assuming too much about the crew, this is what happens when you truly care about a world and its presentation. You make good characters –– even unimportant ones –– who become good reflections of real people and identities. You can tell the designers hoped that each background character would be someone's favorite. And it's genuinely nice to see an anime create a cast of teenage girls who are actual teenage girls, with interests in sports or films or gardening and both positive and negative personality quirks. And again, 90% of them exist as only set dressing. Yet they took the time to make each one a real character.
If you're craving good modern-fantasy magic school media with original concepts, a great art direction, and fun characters, check out LWA.
LWA put more-- and more interesting-- background characters into 25 episodes than appear in most series that run for many years and hundreds of episodes; they could go back and make entire season-long stories featuring any of them.
Just read The Strange Case of Harley and Harleen and my god I needed a little bit of positive plurality in my life this week.
The way Pam and Harl's relationship adapts to accept the Harley/Harleen split makes my heart swell.
The way Pam sees the difference between her girlfriends.
And assures her that she accepts and loves all sides of her.
And does what she can to accommodate Harleen's memory holes.
The core relationship of this book is just so sweet and positive in accepting things as they are without judgment or pushing. Just acceptance and love.
And after finding that in our own life, I know what a powerfully positive thing it can be.
But the Harley/Harleen relationship is well handled too. There's friction and denial at the start but the two develop and trust one another by the end and Harley takes a seat as my favorite kind of character, the morally ambiguous protector.
I love the way Harley's protectiveness of Harleen is depicted and how she tries so hard to keep her from interacting with the criminal underworld of Gotham.
It's just saccharine and kind.
Highly recommend the book to anyone who just wants soft and kind plurality vibes. Heaven knows the majority of the fiction involving split personalities are flooded with angst and darkness and though this book contains a few dark plot beats like DV it never feels painful or sorrow inducing.
The Ranma fandom is on a whole nother level of gay. Yes the main character and his male rival have a slightly homoerotic relationship with tropes such as “love spell” and “people think were dating”, but we all choose to ship the straight main couple because the guy can turn into a girl and something about that feels more gay than an actual gay ship.
ordered a bunch of hoodie blanks to print on and included a 4xl form obscuring robe for myself so now I’m just hanging out like this at home all the time
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