i want to make it clear that on this post i said "rarer." i did not say that three dimensional mother figures do not exist. in fact, many people in the tags have listed examples and it's wonderful! if anyone wants to find new stuff to watch/read, there's a bunch of recommendations in this post now. if you have any of your own, please share!
i will note that this is something i wrote after watching ikoku nikki, which is an anime where an aunt who has no desire for children takes in her niece after her sister's death. and i truly enjoyed that show for how much it explored the interiority of not only both the aunt and the niece, but the late sister, who is implied to have post-partum depression and a complicated relationship to motherhood.
when i watched it, i really enjoyed it, but i also went "why is this so rare? i have seen so much media where fathers have complicated relationships to their children, and it was not even in a show dedicated to specifically a father and their child." some of the most infamous action hero premises is that a man must go out on an adventure because of his wife or his children - there is an entire concept of the fridged woman, but less so for a man. there are iconic male mentors in fiction, be it yoda, gandalf, mr. miyagi, dumbledore, and more. when i go on a "top ten mentor figures in media" list, its almost always entirely men.
this is changing, obviously! media is always changing. and also media includes things such as movies, tv, comics, manga, books, magazines, and much more. they're not all the same, so the landscape may be different. i'll say just off the top of my head as an example: avatar the last airbender has almost entirely no women authority figures. the white lotus is made up of entirely men. the closest i can think of is gran-gran, who is only a character for a couple episodes - and katara & zuko's mothers, who are both dead. but legend of korra improves this greatly! toph gets to grow up and be a mother and she's not perfect. lin chooses to not have children, while her sister suyin gets to have interesting dynamics with her children. if you read the legacy of yangchen novels, chaisee is one of my favorite characters in there. so we can see this pattern change in continuing franchises, and i hope it only improves as we get new shows, books, movies, etc.
i think its also important to note that audience perception is also misogynistic. because when shows do write three dimensional women, the audience also interprets her in a sexist and misogynistic lens. if a mother is not perfect, then she must be evil. mothers are interpreted in black and white, and not given the same grace men are to mess up. because raising children is HARD! there are tons of reasons to have doubts, be it from things such as post-partum, mental illness, disability, one's circumstances and economic burdens, or even simply not particularly liking children! there are so many fascinating stories to tell about mothers wanting children but their circumstances making that complicated, or mothers second guessing themselves without automatically being villainized. but its also up to the audience to interpret those characters in a three dimensional lens, instead of flattening them.
and obviously, some people may just be uncomfortable with pregnancy as a topic because it is, of course, pregnancy. some people automatically are squeamish, and i understand that. but pregnancy is also something many people choose! and i think media should explore that in a meaningful way, in all sorts of genres. because if there's representation for everything else in media - be it fantasy, sci-fi, slice of life, westerns and slow introspective 100k novels - then i think mothers should also know their life continues after they have children. should get to see themselves in their favorite media and favorite genre as well. and i think also even little kids should have this too! they should watch shows where they know that if they grow up to be a mother, they can do a bunch of kickass things still!
anyways, thanks for listening to my rant. and thank you to all the people in the replies to this post. there are a lot of things i need to check out :)
