When the Most Precious Diamond is Not a Piece of Jewelry: MAJOR 2ND and female baseball players’ struggles in a male-dominated sport
Spoilers for Major 2nd
MAJOR is a big deal in Japan. The original series, which was published by Shogakukan and serialized from 1994 to 2010, finished its run at 78 volumes and still managed to get a full adaptation across six two-cour seasons, two OVAs and one movie. This is no small feat, especially considering that such long-running series have become less and less common in the current anime industry. Given its success, one must wonder what the MAJOR franchise did to gain so much popularity. The answer is simple: it has almost everything a fan of sports anime is looking for, and Mitsuda Takuya knows how to keep his story interesting no matter how much time passes (for him or his characters). What was it missing, then? The answer to that is also simple: well-written female characters.
So, five years later and serialized by the same publisher, MAJOR 2ND came along, telling the story of Daigo, the son of original MAJOR protagonist Goro, and his friends. Although Daigo’s teammates and rivals are mainly male in the beginning of the series, as time goes on, the female cast becomes increasingly robust, to the point that Daigo’s middle school team is majoritively formed by girls. This is big for the sport anime genre as a whole, as it represents an important step towards gender equality and the media visibility of women in sports.
Read it at Anime Feminist!
