On gender and character in Project Sekai
6.9k words
Happy 5th anniversary!
1. Emu
I had a lot of people ask me about Emu which surprised me. It largely comes down to the field she works in and how her family, or, the men in her family, treat her in early stories. While yes some of this can be attributed to her personality leading to them not taking her seriously, there's definitely some stereotypical gender roles stuff going on too (although her personality goes hand in hand with her gender in how she's treated).
Emu is the only woman in her family interested in business and taking a role in her family's corporation. Her sister is training to work with children (a stereotypically feminine job) and her mother's job is vague. She's said to be going on business trips but the most we hear about specifics is that she does volunteer work. So I get the feeling she isn't an integral part of the business like Kounosuke and the sons are, being the head of the Otori group and managers of PXL respectively. Emu is the first woman in her family to want to be at the level of her brothers and father. She also challenges them, a group of men way older and more experienced than her, telling them that they aren't doing their jobs the way they should. And she's in the right. Consider her personality as well: while she's not as typically super feminine as, say, Mizuki or Saki, she still likes pink, and cute things, and plushies. It doesn't help her when combined with her optimistic nature and childish whimsy, because in the eyes of the patriarchy it reinforces the idea that she's an incompetent little girl trying to do a grown man's job. People at her all-girls school don't even believe her intelligence, so how does she look to a man?
In general you have to consider the roles society plays here too. Big corporate business jobs like the ones the Otori men have are most commonly associated with and held by older men. Business is not an easy field for women to succeed in due to how male dominated it is, especially in Japan. Emu being a Japanese woman who wants to go into a typically male job, a head of a corporation at that, is fairly rare. Based on what I've read from some articles/papers that were accessible to me, there are still quite a lot of cases where traditional gender roles are pushed in workplaces and households in Japan, i.e: men/husbands are expected to be the breadwinners, and women/mothers are expected to worry more about marriage and family over careers. They also tend to slack behind on the economic sections of the Gender Gap Index, due to a lack of female workers in managerial and other high ranking positions, which is obviously relevant here.
Choices for the future is a very important event for Emu. She hears about the all-mens group at the opera house being disbanded due to decreasing ticket sales, and multiple members leaving as a result. The situation reminds her of when she helped to save PXL back in Wonder Magical Showtime, and she offers to help Suzu appeal to management and save the group. Aside from Suzu, Emu is primarily helped by her brothers in this event, and we get to see how much their relationship with her has changed since Smile of Dreamer. Compared to previously, they trust her decision making and visions significantly more, and are willing to teach her the skills she needs to help the opera house. By this point not only do they recognise her potential in managing PXL, but her genuine capabilities in the field of management. In chapter 7 she presents her business plan along with Suzu, another woman her age, in front of the management board of older men. She's a childish teenage girl who everyone doubted but is able to prove her worth to the men above her whilst maintaining her unique vision. It's also interesting to note that the group she helps save is the all male one, it completely throws gender roles on its head by having two women save a group of men when the other group of men that had the potential to save them were unable to. Emu is able to empathise with the theatre group in a way the management board couldn't, because of her experiences in not having her voice be heard. She understands the value that troupe has to audiences and the cast, because of her own experiences on the Wonder Stage and her wishes to save it being ignored by those who underestimate her for who she is. As a little side note, the Choices event song, All Save Challenge, was produced by a woman (Kashii Moimi) in a male dominated industry (vocaloid).
Colorful Palette as a company is also interesting to look at here. According to stats from 2023, the company is comprised of 46% women, and they make a point in the article that the near 1:1 gender ratio is rare for a games company. It's also worth noting that, at least as of 2021, the two lead writers are both women. I couldn't find any mentions of a specific gender equality initiative on their website, but they do have the 1:1 gender ratio mentioned on their employment page, so it's clearly something they're proud to advertise. It's not hard to see how the experiences of their female writers and staff are reflected in Emu's story, and the other girls' as well, but Emu's is the one that's blatantly focused on work in a corporate setting.
2. Mafuyu (& Her Mom)
Mafuyu's section will probably be a bit shorter, because I feel like I talked a lot about how gender affects both her and her mother recently (as of writing this paragraph. it was a while ago now). To summarise: Mafuyu's entire family builds their lives on the idea of perfection. They're the ideal family, conforming to basically every expectation in the book. Mafuyu's dad is the breadwinner who works a good job and provides for his family (at the cost of never being around), Mafuyu's mother is a stay at home mom who married a slightly older man from a higher social standing, and prioritised raising her child over a career. Much the same, Mafuyu acts like the perfect child, she's well behaved, always studies hard, and wants to get a well-paying and ideal job. It's perfect and average to an unsettling degree.
Obviously so much of their story revolves around asian parenting culture, but a lot of it can be tied to Mafuyu's gender as well, specifically looking at it from the POV of her mother. Mrs Asahina is unemployed, and had Mafuyu at roughly the age of 24. Assuming she went to university, she probably graduated around the age of 21-22. That leaves a 2-3 year range in which she might've had a job before quitting to raise Mafuyu. In addition to the expectation of her to prioritise her child and family, it's easy to see why she might want Mafuyu to prioritise a career in a respectable and high-paying job. She didn't get that life, especially not in such a good field (if she did go to medical school, she would've dropped out to have Mafuyu because it's a ~6 year course). An assumption on my part, but I think if she had a job it was probably at whatever office her husband works at, since she married very young and he's enough years older than her to the point they probably didn't meet at school (unless their parents or a mutual friend introduced them). Either way, she never got to be the doctor that may have been expected of her when she was younger, and now she doesn't even have a job, so she wants Mafuyu to have the best life possible.
You have to remember that in addition to being an only child, Mafuyu is the only daughter. She looks just like her mother, it's a constant reminder of what Mrs Asahina could've been or perhaps once was. Think back to what I said in Emu's portion: an expectation of women is to focus on marriage and raising a family, while a job is still important, it's often second place, and such is the case for Mrs Asahina. Additionally, less than 30% of doctors in Japan are female as of 2022. In flashbacks, we actually see that Mr Asahina was the one who originally suggested a job as a doctor based on Mafuyu's grades, but Mrs Asahina very quickly jumps on the idea, and is the one who continues to push this on Mafuyu for years. Never once is the idea of marriage and children brought up as something Mafuyu should think of in her future, it's only medical school. This may in part be down to the sort of game this is, relationships have only been brought up once and as a joke if memory serves, but even if that is the case it does add a nice layer of characterisation. Despite conforming to expectations by pushing Mafuyu for perfection, there's also this idea of pushing her because she wants Mafuyu to break expectations and break that cycle. Mrs Asahina wants Mafuyu to have the opportunities she didn't. She sees herself in Mafuyu, and wants Mafuyu to have the best life possible. At the same time, she uses Mafuyu as a way to prove herself as a mother and as a person, making sure Mafuyu looks good so everyone knows her mother raised her well, making sure she has all the best textbooks, all the best clothes and the best packed lunches. It's the best life for Mafuyu, while proving herself in the position she's in, conforming to the roles forced upon her as a mother.
Sorry this is a bit disorganised it's mainly afterthoughts of the linked post.
3. Tsukasa
Tsukasa's pretty interesting because gender doesn't actually affect his arc and development too much, but it affects his backstory a lot. Obviously, Tsukasa based his entire personality around being a good older brother to Saki, and what that entails is a seven-year-old boy's idea of what a good big brother should be. He acts brave because he doesn't want to make others worry, he's responsible and looks out for those younger than him because he's a reliable senpai, he's capable of anything because a star shines at everything, he doesn't accept defeat and he never shows weakness unless pushed (and he would never show this face to Saki specifically, as we learn in his fes story).
The Tenma's situation was entirely out of their control, so it's no one's fault that it happened, but as a result of Saki being in hospital, Tsukasa was often left at home alone. His dad is a company exec, an important job that probably takes up quite a bit of time, and then on top of that he was often doing overnight stays at hospital with Saki, eventually not even in the same part of the country. Tsukasa was 7, and functionally became man of the house, simply because he was the only one consistently there.
Tsukasa's entire personality is structured around the idea of being a star, which is very nondescript and I'm not even sure if he really knows what it means either, it's not something the game has ever really elaborated on (yet, if ever). However, if you read a few stories with him, it's very obvious this whole idea of a star is just the mature older brother personality he adopted as a child with 'become famous actor' tacked on. Now, "brother" is inherently a gendered term, and you can see where these ideas of responsibility and maturity fall into that. I'm sure if Tsukasa was a girl and he was an older sister, the result would be the same, but as i've brought up for the last two characters, consider the sociocultural aspects.
As is, some of the societal expectations of a man are for him to be self-sufficient, strong, hardworking, and to be the breadwinner of a family. What happens when you put that on a child? It's easy to see where Tsukasa as a child saw these concepts associated with masculinity and decided to fold those into his personality. Obviously outside factors contributed too, such as Saki's illness and the general responsibilities of an older sibling, but there's definitely aspects that tie more strongly to his masculinity than those, specifically the idea that he's good at everything that the story has deconstructed over time as we see him regularly hit roadblocks with his acting and watch him realise he still has a lot to learn. There's also other aspects that we see of this in how he acts on the regular. He's a very caring person as part of his older brother personality, but this results in him always looking out for everyone, and usually keeping his own problems to himself and his family. Again, this is something that the story deconstructs over time with him being more openly vulnerable (usually about the aforementioned acting roadblocks, but sometimes more personal matters like in OHE) as the story goes on, I feel like this really climaxes with Phoenix when he has his breakdown.
As I said, it's not a huge influence on his story or character, but there's definitely aspects of gender and societal expectation that informs his backstory, and thereby personality, very heavily.
4. MMJ, individually and as a whole
MORE MORE JUMP!'s story is that of four girls who have been wronged by the entertainment industry, how it mistreated them and broken them, and how they come together to build a career and work towards a shared dream without the shackles of a predatory industry holding them back. It's not perfect in the story its trying to tell, it obviously can't get too deep into the problems with the idol industry due to the audience of the game (though this isn't the fault of the writers), and it does encourage some unhealthy aspects of the industry (such as constantly praising Haruka's inability to take breaks and labelling it as super cool and professional), but it definitely says a lot about the treatment of women in society and especially within entertainment.
Minori, no matter how hard she worked, faced constant rejection from talent scouts and audition panels. The details of why she was rejected from these is not given in too much detail, but given comments made in later events, there's a chance some of the rejections were due to her 'plain' appearance, especially in comparison to Haruka or Shizuku. Minori represents the average teenage girl. She's a schoolgirl who wants to be something more than she is but in the grand scheme of things isn't particularly noteworthy or special. She gets good grades, she has nice friends, she lives in a cosy house with her family and dog, she's average height and isn't super pretty. She's girly and clumsy and gets excited about the things she loves. But she's not special and no matter what she did she was never special.
Idols are a product manufactured to be sold to the people, this will become far, far more apparent as we talk about the rest of the girls, but it's still seen in Minori's story. Minori is average, she's not marketable, she lacks the qualities that agencies think will appeal to audiences. She's not particularly pretty, her singing voice isn't anything outstanding, and if you ask her about her life she'll give you the same answer as thousands of other girls. Minori can't be sold the way the other three can, at least in the eyes of capitalism. In reality, Minori's appeal to MMJ's audience is entirely rooted in the fact she's your average teenage girl. While she didn't have many fans at first, he had Yuina, who was inspired by seeing a girl her age with her lifestyle so passionate about her dream and able to achieve entirely through her own hard work.
Minori represents every girl in a way, it's why she's the face of MMJ in the game. She's been underestimated by an industry looking for something superficial when she's been able to bring hope to so many through her own actions. Even if she's not as pretty or graceful or charismatic as the other MMJ girls, her background and personality allow her to connect with the audience in a way they can't. It's why that scene with her and the little girl in Dear Me As I Was Back Then is so important. She's someone any little girl can look up to and aspire to be, she's not the last in a legacy nor is she the first, she's part of a line of girls inspiring one another and is passing that on to the next generation.
Haruka's most interesting to talk about in terms of her most recent events and how they showcase the way men in the industry use women and pit them against each other just to benefit themselves. As I talked about with Minori, MMJ was deemed not to be marketable as a group of four due to varying reasons, from difficulty marketing Minori to competition with rival agencies. As a result, they took it into their own hands to build their presence as a group and started freelancing. Ultimately this is a choice that benefits all the girls: Minori doesn't have to worry as much about her 'lack of marketability', and Airi and Shizuku don't have to worry about their agencies handling their careers and images in ways that actively harm them.
Haruka is sort of the outlier here. Haruka's relationship with the idol industry up to this point had actually been fairly healthy, she hadn't run into problems with the way agencies treated her and her image, she wasn't pushed past her limits, she didn't have toxic groupmates. The reason she quit is due to how the industry affected one of her groupmates. Mai felt constant pressure to catch up to the other members, Haruka specifically, and as a result pushed herself until she suffered a career-ending injury. And even still, Haruka doesn't blame the industry, she blames herself and deems herself unworthy because of the harm she indirectly caused on someone who once looked up to her.
Haruka benefitted a lot from the industry, and it's why I think giving her the arc of becoming producer and facing off against Hiiragi is best fitted to her over any of the other girls. Personality aside, she has a certain naivety to how she interacts with the industry. She's the one least likely to suspect Hiiragi of pulling strings because he'd been a good producer in the past. She doesn't have experience of being used and mistreated by the industry like the others do, so she's more trusting of him at first. Rise and Strive was a good learning moment for her, she learned about how competitive the industry truly is and how willing they are to throw you under the bus once they don't need you anymore.
Hiiragi gained a lot of success with ASRUN; they were one of the top idol groups in the country for a few years until Haruka quit and the group disbanded. It's evident from the way Hiiragi explains his motives that he holds a grudge against Haruka for this. Haruka leaving ASRUN meant that his biggest success became his biggest failure. ReLight exists solely as a product of that grudge, purely as a way to get back at his ex-talent. He uses ReLight to attempt to sabotage Haruka's current career and get himself back up to the top.
It's a wake up call to Haruka. The people in this industry don't care about her. She's a teenage girl, MMJ and ReLight are groups of teenage girls. They're easy to use and manipulate, and it's easy to take their autonomy away. Hiiragi and other producers will easily and willingly use these girls in order to benefit their own careers, the talent doesn't matter as long as they can be puppeted. Hiiragi pits ReLight and MMJ against each other when it's clear they'd rather be friendly rivals. He does it against their will because engineering infighting between the two groups of women is how he can get back at a young girl he blames the downfall of his career on. The industry does not care about women, especially young women. They're pawns for men to use in their game of corporate chess.
Airi's story is about the constant scrutiny women face, especially those who do not fit expectations of femininity to the degree society wants them to. I feel this aspect of Airi is often overlooked due to how much more upfront Shizuku's story is about its themes, but there's a reason for Shizuku and Airi's past rivalry and friendship and why their bond is so deep.
For a first time reader of Airi's first event, Re:START from Here!, it may seem sort of odd how they open with her backstory and how disconnected it can seem from the rest of the event. It's there to inform players of how important being an idol is to Airi and her motivations, but also provides us with the context of why being pushed as a tv star by her managers was so frustrating, on more levels than just it not being what she wanted to do.
Her fes card and Happy Lovely Everyday are essential to understanding this. Airi was mocked by other children when she was younger because of how rowdy she was. She was a tomboy, she was messy, she got into fights with boys and was rude to them, and she didn't dress like other girls did. No one took her seriously when she decided she wanted to be an idol, because she wasn't girly enough. She didn't fit those expectations of femininity other kids had for her. She'd never acted or dressed 'like a girl' before, so no one could see her as that even when she started performing the way they'd always expected of her. It's easy to read this as a trans allegory, but it's just as much something many women experience. Rampant misogyny means any women who doesn't perfectly conform to societal expectations are looked down on, they're judged and scrutinised and mocked for not ticking every made up box they're tested against.
Happy Lovely Everyday gives a bit more insight on the misogyny Airi faced in the actual idol industry and not just by the general public. When Airi made her debut as an idol with the group QT, one of her groupmates interrupted her self-intro, and people found her reaction to be entertaining. It's due to this that she was invited to guest star on variety TV shows, and the more time she spent on TV, the more people found her attitude amusing, and the more and more requests she got, eventually causing her agency to want to pull her from QT. She was too 'run of the mill' to be an idol according to them, so Airi left.
It's similar in a sense to Minori, it's why Airi always tries her best to look out for Minori. She sees her younger self in Minori. She was average, she wasn't beautiful and graceful like the idols at the top of their game. She didn't have that natural idol aura. She was cute, but fairly average, but her attitude made her stand out. However, that attitude wasn't idol-like enough. She didn't fit the expectations that the industry had for her. She was too outspoken and snappy, but that made her funny. It's why Airi is so jealous of Shizuku in main story. Shizuku is beautiful and charming, she's the perfect girl. She's everything anyone expects an idol to be, and in Airi's eyes she was handed the world on a silver platter. Shizuku quickly became popular, she was promoted within her group and she got to do modelling on top of that because of how pretty she was. She's everything Airi wanted to be but Airi just wasn't 'marketable enough' to have that.
The way Airi was treated in the industry mirrors that of how she was treated as a child. She didn't fit the boxes people wanted her to. She was too rowdy, too short tempered, she wasn't girly or beautiful, but these things made her easy to laugh at. Her attitude made for good entertainment, not to be taken seriously. Her whole childhood was filled with people trying to control her because of how she looked and acted, but her autonomy is something she constantly fought for. She dressed how she wanted despite her classmates mocking her, she aimed for the career she wanted in spite of her agency. She constantly has left people behind and run away if they try to stop her or take away all her control.
This is in contrast to Shizuku, who always let everyone decide for her. Shizuku has a lot of natural beauty and charm. She's a lot prettier than most girls her age, she's incredibly polite and she's full of kindness and love that she wants to share with others. She makes for the perfect idol, and that's what her friends thought when they signed her up to an idol audition behind her back. Shizuku never had any autonomy from the very beginning, no one ever let her make a decision for herself. Everyone has always seen her as something she could be, all this potential from surface level characteristics, and never as her own person.
The same characteristics that her friends saw is what the industry saw and preyed on. Shizuku on the outside is a perfect girl, and that concept is easy to capitalise on. Beauty is a commodity, she can be sold on that alone, but a manufactured personality to go alongside it makes Shizuku incredibly marketable. What use is a pretty face if she has flaws once she opens her mouth? If Shizuku can be the most beautiful girl in the country and never make a mistake, constantly be the kindest, most mature, and most talented girl around she's guaranteed to make her agency a load of money
The idol industry never once thought of Shizuku as a person, she's a product to them. She's stripped of everything that makes her Shizuku, and her face is put on display for every consumer around. Her second world link card demonstrates this idea perfectly. Shizuku is laid out on the table, perfectly posed, perfect outfit, perfect hair. Everything about the card composition and design is done to make her look appealing. So you the player want to pull for this card, so you want to spend money on her. She's the main course, she's been prepared to feed consumers, she isn't a person to these people. She's robbed of her autonomy and she's dehumanised to a ridiculous degree. But you won't notice her face, how pained she looks and the utter lack of hope in her eyes nor her body language. Her face is deliberately positioned away from the focal points of the card. Your eyes are immediately drawn to the brightest section of the card, the lower focus point of the right side of the card, where Shizuku's body is laid out. That's the focus of the card, not Shizuku's feelings, not who she is as a person, but what she looks like. You don't get to her face until you follow the Z line upwards, and even then her face isn't in focus, it's slightly off to one side. They don't want you to look at her face, they don't want you to realise that she's suffering. The way she's posed is intended to look attractive, but if you see her face you'll realise she's resigned, she's given into what the audience wants. Shizuku is one of the greatest victims of misogyny in the game and the story isn't afraid to shy away from this fact.
Aside from harming Shizuku's own self image and identity, the way the industry treated her caused her relationships to crumble, it started to ruin every aspect of her career and life. Her groupmates envied her for everything she was sold as, and so did Airi, one of the first friends Shizuku made in the industry and one of the first people to show her kindness when she was debuting. Airi was always Shizuku's idol, she was someone who showed her warmth and brought her hope, so it hurt to see the jealousy caused by the mask the industry put on Shizuku. Shizuku wasn't as talented as the industry had people believe, she was constantly working hard and training extra behind the scenes. In public she had to constantly maintain a persona and suppress any traces of her true self. She was constantly working to maintain the persona of Shizuku Hinomori, center of Cheerful*Days, and she was so good at doing everything that was wanted of her that she was losing friends and feeling like she was failing people.
Shizuku and Airi are like mirrors of each other. Airi suffered because she stayed true to herself, Shizuku suffered because she pretended to be someone she wasn't. Airi fought back, but Shizuku let people walk all over her. Airi ran away, but Shizuku stayed put for as long as she could bear. Shizuku's bravery and hardwork inspires Airi, and likewise Shizuku is inspired by Airi's ability to be outspoken whilst also being so immensely kind. Freelancing with MMJ finally gives them the ability to be themselves and decide on their careers, on their own terms.
5. Ena
I'll be honest I don't have too much to say about Ena herself, more to do with Mizuki and the importance of Ena being a cis woman in this scenario. So this is only short.
Ena battles with a lot of insecurities with her artwork, but as a way to cope with this and as a way to receive attention, she turns to social media, specifically posting photos of herself. Ena's been doing this for a long time as well, while she's an adult in the story now (barely) she has been posting photos of herself online since she was around 15 years old. This alone shows some harmful ideas that a younger Ena had regarding her self image. She never received recognition for her art and faced constant criticism, so she turned to seeking validation from her appearance from a young age. The fact she even thought to do this in the first place indicates an understanding and compliance she has towards the patriarchal values of her society. She recognises that the easiest way for her as a woman to get the validation she desires is through her good looks, her age aside. As long as she's pretty people will give her attention, and that can give her small short-term boosts to her self worth, even if it ends up eroding it in the process due to the fact she only gets attention for her appearance and no one can recognise her outside of that.
It's worth noting as well that the reason she falls into this habit is all because of men. Does she lack talent and was she overly confident? Yes. But like with Shizuku and Airi she had men trying to determine her life every step of the way. Shin'ei, similarly to Akito, views her as overly emotional and reactionary. He believes she's unable to handle criticism and again it's true this is something she struggles with, but Shin'ei goes about this in a completely backwards way. He tells his daughter she's talentless and unable to handle the art world, leading to her enduring years of self hatred and insecurity over her ability, leading to her nearly giving into him and giving up on her dreams. Shin'ei tried to dictate how Ena should live her life and yet never held Akito to the same standards, the only child we really see him be involved with is Ena. It tells us a lot about Shin'ei and how he views his kids, Akito is the boy who can handle himself and Ena is the girl who needs to be handheld and guided through life. You could put this down to Ena being the only one interested in art but there's a clear relationship between Akito and Ena's gender roles and their relationship to Shin'ei.
6. Akito
Akito's the one who started all this, and I already briefly explained the situation around him but I'll do it in a little more detail here.
So there's this really old 4koma, I think from Nocturne, where Akito says something on the lines of "why bother worrying about a relative's feelings, much less a woman's". Ensekai opted to translate this slightly differently removing the obvious misogyny from the comment. Obviously, this is not a huge aspect of his character anymore, but for a pre-any focus events Akito, it makes a lot of sense that he thinks this way.
Out of all the boys, Akito's maleness and masculinity is probably the most important to his character (I already talked about Tsukasa, but Akito's gender is far more important to his overall story and arc than him). Something we were actually talking about on here a few days ago (as of writing) is the Shinonome parents and their parenting style, mainly Shin'ei. Compared to Ena, who frequently has Shin'ei, and occasionally her mother, appear in stories, Akito extremely rarely is shown interacting with his parents, and if he does it's usually in an Ena event or card story. Akito is also a character who is incredibly in the mindset of needing to be independent and being dogshit at dealing with or being open about his problems, at least prior to SBD. Shin'ei is a character with terrible communication skills as a baseline, but also is also not really close with his kids and doesn't tell Ena about his past until her fourth event. So that's Akito's first impression of what he, a man, should grow up to be. Obviously he sees the flaws with his father specifically with regard to his treatment of Ena, but Shin'ei's personality is like a blueprint for Akito (and you can see this in how he keeps things to himself early on), alongside general patriarchal values of masculinity which probably led to other parts of his personality. You could even argue that the reason Shin'ei is so uninvolved with Akito is because of his gender, he's the boy so he doesn't need as much guidance as Ena, he can be independent and work out life on his own.
In comes Ken and Vivid Street. Vivid Street's community is still very male dominated. Nagi is the only major female Vivid Street NPC, and she's dead by the time the story starts. Consider how the people on vivid street treated him as a kid. He was mocked for his ability by guys way older and with way more experience than him, and once again had no one to go to, having to just work everything out by himself. After failing again though, that's when he meets Ken. Ken is important to talk about here, because he's far more present in Akito's life than his actual father. Ken takes the role of father figure in Akito's life and pretty much treats him like a son.
Ken is important to Akito because he's an adult man that he can actually look up to. Akito doesn't have any male role models outside Ken at this time, the only other prominent man in his life is Shin'ei, who around this point is ruining Ena's life. Ken is an actual responsible adult who treats Akito with respect and gives him the support that he needs. While Akito still needs help and support in the present day of course, Ken is the first person we see him be truly vulnerable with. Ken helps to break down some of the walls Akito put up and the expectations he boxed himself into, and continues serving this role until Burn My Soul. Find a Way Out is particularly important in showcasing what Ken provides for Akito. Ken advises Akito to actually let his emotions out instead of bottling everything up all the time. Akito very briefly doubts doing it as well, it's not something someone like him should do. He failed, he shouldn't forgive himself for what he did and he definitely can't mope about the consequences of his own actions, but despite all that, Ken listens to him. He's taken seriously, and encouraged to express his raw emotions and not to impose harmful ideas upon himself (even if these habits persist later on).
So to return to where we started with me ragebaiting people on twitter by calling Akito a misogynist, let's answer the question: is Akito a misogynist?
Kinda. He definitely shows it in earlier stories. We've already covered the 4koma, how he says why bother with how a woman feels. This comment was made in part in reference to his experiences growing up with Ena and people often bring that up to excuse it but just because they're related doesn't mean he can't hold misogynistic opinions. He views Ena as emotionally volatile and doesn't see the point in trying to work that out, it's demeaning. You can see other aspects of his earlier misogynistic mindset in his treatment of Kohane in the main story. Again people excuse it with "he was just angry she wasn't taking it seriously", and again, while this is true, there's layers and subtext to everything. Akito is deeply passionate and serious about his goals, so of course he's quick to write her off. But have you considered why he writes her off so quickly, besides her being a newbie. He was a newbie once too, so was Toya. Toya had musical training, but like Kohane he was a fish out of water. Kohane is also a naturally talented singer, so if anything he should have the same reaction to her singing as he did with Toya. The difference is, Kohane is a cute, feminine, and shy girl. She's the antithesis of Akito, and she doesn't fit in at all on vivid street unlike he does, and yet she's able to instantly gain the respect of An, and she's able to immediately be talented at something he worked tirelessly for.
He's definitely better nowadays like he doesn't just say shit like that 4koma or act like he did in main story anymore. I think dealing with his own insecurities helped him a lot. He changed and grew as a person somewhat.
I think considering prsk's motives, that being to portray realistic characters and stories for a tweenaged/teenaged audience, Akito is a very important character for young boys to have. He's someone who can appear tough and confident at first glance, yet when you look further he's not unlike his sister. He's got a lot of issues under the surface with his insecurity in his abilities and sense of self-hatred. He punishes himself for not meeting expectations and falling behind, he pushes himself to the point of harm to try and chase what he wants to be despite this only being to his detriment. He teaches young boys that it's okay to rely on others, it's okay to just try your best even when that might not be the same as someone else. Akito's stories break down a lot of those expectations of men and all of those first impressions of his character.
End
Obviously, there's also Mizuki, but I don't think anyone needs that explained to them. Another one I'd like to bring up but only in like, a couple sentences because it's not massively relevant is Toya. Toya's whole arc is informed by the idea of freedom (and legacy), and the main way we see Toya express freedom in the story is through discovery and expression. He didn't get to experience a lot growing up, so he's learning new things about the world and himself as a teenager. He's notably not as bothered by appearing masculine as, say, Akito. He collects plushies and isn't bothered by carrying them around in public, whilst in his 1* story Akito is completely against the idea of being seen with the plushie in public and questions why Tsukasa would be okay with it as well. The fact that the plushie is going to Saki seems to be enough of an explanation though, because, of course, plushies are considered something only girls are interested in past a certain age. Toya also hides the plushies from his dad, which although is just because of him wasting time in his dad's eyes, could easily have the layer of Toya's masculinity put on it. Additionally, Toya serves as Kohane's makeup model in Take the Best shot, instead of Haruka who was working with them. He's very excited to learn about makeup and wearing it in the story, and it should be noted he's modelling for a brand that is probably geared towards women based on how it's described. Anyway that's all I have to say about him. Yay GNC Toya!
Hope this explains my thoughts vaguely coherently.
