#ons 97

[ellyisthecat]

[wakeupandsmelltheflowers]

ONS 97

I’ve been reading Seraph of the End since the point where it had five to ten chapters (2012? 2013?). It’s been a long time, and the premise of the story really captured my interest at the time. It has a really cool dystopian/fantasy setting and I can tell you that I’m all about it.

Over the last few years, the writing has taken an interesting turn, and while I don’t follow or agree with everything, I really want to see how the story resolves for the characters, in particular Yuu and Mika because that’s what drew me in: family on different sides of the battle field trying to protect what is important to them.

One of the things that has put me off slightly in recent chapters is the treatment of women in this manga. I recognize that it’s a Shonen, meaning that it might not have the best writing of women. However, there are limits to bad writing of women. 

No matter how you spin it, sexualizing periods and four-year old’s having WHAT kind of dreams? That’s fucked. I don’t care if you say it’s because of the demons, but there’s no reason to write that, and you can certainly write it any other way you want. The other thing that has been rubbing me the wrong way is the depiction of women’s desires as if they are monstrous. I just can’t. That just takes me back to so much stereotypical cultural bullshit about women from around the world.

You can try to justify this by saying it’s a Shonen, that maybe the women aren’t the main focus. You can say that because it’s a Shonen, the women are badly written. But you can’t say that how the women are being written here is okay.

There are wonderful Shonen manga that write women well, and unfortunately, they tend to be the exceptions in this genre. Maybe it’s time that these exceptions become the norm.

[fandomsarepainful]

Hmm...I guess baby Shinoa is cute. Welp, can’t wait for the English translations!  Hopefully we get more lore and no weird “Shinoa is important to the plot I swear” scenes.