Week 9 - Presentations

For this week I read some Banana Fish, wish turned out to be something I'm highly interested in. I have never heard of this anime at all, but I'm glad I got to experience some of it, because I think the protagonist is a very interesting character. I also find the LGBT representation in Banana Fish to be interesting as well. I personally found the anime to be more appealing than the manga in my experience, probably because of the difference in art style. Ash seems to appear as more of a "pretty boy" in the anime in comparison to the manga, which made his place in the story more clear to me. Regardless, I'm hoping to finish the anime sometime, as I like a lot of gangster oriented anime, such as Gangsta and Baccano!

Shifting to the magical girl trope, I thought it was interesting that the presenter delved into these anime that divert away from typical magical girl anime. It was brought up in class that a lot of magical girls in anime had this tendency to fall in love with a man much older than them, which is something I'm glad we covered, because I feel like it's something important to be aware of. It makes sense that a lot of us were oblivious to this situation when we experience these magical girl shows as kids, sine we had the mindset that the heroine is getting romantically whisked away by this tall, handsome man.

Besides that, Kill la Kill is one of my most favourite anime of all time, as well as Panty and Stocking. Kill la Kill specifically has a little bit of controversy to it, being that it's about underaged characters getting naked. I get that it's fanservice for ironic purposes, and I feel like anime like this are in a high school setting for "coming of age" situations, but we need less horny older men making these things.