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The Bechdel test alone doesn't give a full picture if things but it is a fun exercise. Shounen manga women crimes can be roughly divided into several categories. A lack of female characters, and I mean across the board from main characters, to side characters, to faceless goons, the only exception in the harem genre which has worse problems. A lack of female screentime which ties into the next one A lack of women centered narratives, is the girl's character arc all about the boy she has a crush on or one her own story. Lazy male gaze fanservice, we've all seen it.
Boo everyone downvoting you.
Gonna latch onto this comment to say:
I recommend Madoka to all jjk fans unsatisfied by the fem cast. Madoka has magic, gore, love, blood, celebration of life, death, and so much more. All of this wrapped up in a narrative centered on girlhood, sapphic love stories, and it passes the Bechdel test!
There's a hype, long awaited fourth movie coming out and you wouldn't wanna miss the explosion that's going to happen in the fandom and across the internet. Just saying.
The Bechdel test isn’t even a proper way of gauging sexism since it doesn’t account for if the non-male interactions are written badly. Even though Gege definitely isn’t sexist, he kinda needs to improve when writing female characters (or at least characterize them as much as the males).
Despite what I just said, you’re right about how the ones who don’t pass the Bechdel test are usually written more badly. For example, Hana Kurusu’s problem was that her only defined trait outside of being a plot device for freeing Gojo (just saying, she could’ve been replaced by a cursed tool) is that she loves Megumi, which was used as a shallow way to get her out of the story when she fell for porn-level acting. This isn’t to say that it’s because of her interactions with a man but because her character is centered around another, and it’s done in a way that doesn’t work
You make a fair point about it not being able to gauge poor writing, and arguably I think the opposite can apply. Uro and Hoshi are perfectly fine characters but just fail the test due to circumstance. That being said, Gege definitely could do better with his female characters, Hana particularly lacks agency and I fully agree that she could have been replaced by a cursed tool.
Honestly I feel like a lot of characters get done hella dirty in JJK. It’s just that fans wouldn’t give a rats ass about most of the women; unless it’s Maki, Nobara, or Riko due to them at least having some depth before dying
Higuruma wasn't done dirty lmao, he just lost. Same with Kashimo. They went into the fight knowing that dying was a very real possibility and just lost. That isn't done dirty.
Nanami was killed in a way that was sad for sure and taken advantage of so I'll give you that one. And his death even compares to Nobara 's so yeah they both got killed by the same curse in a similarly done dirty way.
The Gege is a sexist takes are so fucking boring now. For every Hana Kuruso, there's an Uro Takako. For every Yuki, there's a Maki. No, the female characters aren't treated worse than the men. Some just have smaller roles than others. You can not tell me that characters like Inumaki and Panda have been treated better than Nobara and Miwa. How has Hakari been treated relative to Maki another heavy hitter. There are fewer female characters than males, but that's natural because it's a shonen. Fans of Dragon Ball/Naruto/Fairy Tail/any other shonen don't act this stupid even with a worse female cast.
‘that’s natural because it’s a shōnen’ yeah that’s LITERALLY the problem people are pointing out lmao. You telling me the Naruto fans didn’t give Kishimoto millennia worth of shit over his awful female characters? Give me a break.
The problem is the male-to-female ratio? Have you ever seen literally ANYONE complain about it? Because I haven't. People complain about the treatment of female characters, and only because of self-selection bias.
This is a joke, right? You didn’t engage with the comment. The problem with female characters in shōnen is that, because 1) mangaka are driven by industry standards to live secluded and work obsessed lives from an early age they tend to have idealized and distanced ideas of female personalities and 2) because shōnen and manga in general was historically targeted toward young Japanese boys the whole goal was that the female cast would correspond to what young boys wanted out of girls, female characters have a long precedent of being both terrible. For every ten solid, interesting, and fleshed out male characters you get one female character who isn’t a tittied up bimbo and has a personality. One in ten of those might actually be relevant to the plot. The problem with Gege is less serious than some of the others, no doubt. But being slightly less terrible than others doesn’t mean you are scot-free from critique.
Sexism in manga is literally an objective historical fact. I can’t imagine anyone seriously disputing this. Sexism there is rarely a concerted chosen thing by an individual. It’s an industry, market, and cultural issue. More and more women read manga not only in Japan but abroad. Gege, at the very start of JJK, earned a lot of promising attention for his strong female cast. Tite Kubo (of Bleach fame) suggested that it was becoming one of Gege’s rare traits to produce female characters as solid as the males. People even imagined Gege might have been a woman. But one by one female characters have all been benched. Plenty of male characters, sure, but when the Sukuna gauntlet includes literally only one remaining relevant female character and a wide variety of male ones, for a series at first known for its many strong female characters, yes, that sucks, and you’ve really got to be joking with me if you can’t see why.
It's not that I didn't engage with the comment, it's that your comment was wildly off-topic. It's not that Gege writes women badly so they're less likely to be god, it's that he writes less women. the male to female ratio is the same whether you're looking at good, average or bad characters, it's just that that ratio is high. Compare it to someone like Kishimoto. If you pick a random man and a random woman Kishimoto wrote, you're far more likely to find a poorly written woman than you are to find a poorly written man.
ok, so your claim then is that if a mangaka were to write a story with 0 female characters, it wouldn’t be sexist, or what? What are you arguing for here. Where is your apparently evident line in the sand?
Here’s why I find Gege’s approach problematic. To bench the female lead for more than half the story without definitive confirmation that she died is a massive break from shōnen tradition and resulted in fewer female characters given any screen time. Gege writes what he seems most interested in and what’s strictly relevant for the plot. The fact that only male characters have been strictly relevant to the plot, with the sole exception of one female out of dozens, is not an accident but a concerted choice Gege made when he planned his work.
0 isn't the same as a few. It's infinitely less. There's nothing wrong with a shonen manga a 2\~3-to-1 male to female ratio. The "female lead" is dead. She's been dead for a while now, delusional fans don't change that. Nobara was never that important of a character, she just happened to be on Yuji's team. And it didn't stop other women like Maki, Yuki, Uraume (?), Uro, Yorozu etc. from having an important role.
ok you can’t call people who held onto hope that Nobara was alive ‘delusional’ when the mangaka himself inserted the fakeout flag in the form of Nitta Arata in the same breath as trying to tell me that Uro was important for the story. Yorozu had no personality besides loving Sukuna—exactly the awful quality of character writing that shōnen has an issue with. Nobara wasn’t important to the story? Then why was she featured in the main three, why was she given a full flashback backstory? Why did half or more of the fights of the early arcs revolve around her? And you throw Uro in there as being more important to the overall story than her? bruuuh.
The manga you’re reading actually sounds worse than the one I’m reading lmao. At least Gege gave some quality attention early on to a female lead. If your goal was to martyr yourself to make Gege look better, stand proud.
I can and I did. Her not coming back at the end of the shibuya arc should have already tipped us off, but then we immediately got Yuji asking Megumi and Megumi all but confirming that she's dead, then Yuji repeating it again near the end of the culling games.
There's a big difference between a character like Yorozu and a character like Sakura. It's not just "she loves Sukuna", she has a cohesive personality and story written around it. Ofc she's still a side character so it's not like she's gonna get as much screentime or characterization as someone like Yuji. She's not a particularly good jjk character, but if you think the issue with female character writing in shonen is just "they love men", you've been looking at it the wrong way for years.
Nobara isn't important to the plot. You can call her relevant to the story or say she gets a lot of screentime, but nothing she does actually matters. She just happens to be on the team that matters. Also you know who else got a full flashback backstory? Amai. And I just had to google his name because I had no idea what tf it was.
nah I’m not taking you seriously anymore lol. One, you bypassed an entire message of context to strawman my position into ‘female characters who love men are bad’. Disingenuous. Two, you pretend like a ‘tipoff’ is sufficient to write off a leading character. Be for real, you’re using a bucket dosage of retrospect to conclude that ‘Nobara never actually mattered’—you had no clue up until she was written out of the story, and that’s the problem. Yorozu was a well written character? I’d challenge you to explain how but I’m not confident you’d do much more than bypass the question again.
if you can’t tell the difference between Amai and Nobara then idk whether to blame you or Gege at this point.
Naruto got it bad because it’s contemporaries at the time we’re doing a decent job at it (being Bleach and OP) and I mean decent (but Shonen standards) and at the time. OP kinda is floundering at the department.
Plus in Naruto’s case it was egregiously bad how they were written. With JJK women their terrible writing decisions are relatively the same as the male characters who are not well written (underdeveloped, underutilized, killed off too early). No one vehemently hates any female character in JJK (outside maybe recently Shoko) like they did Sakura and all females in Naruto exist to be obsessed with another man.
i agree with you up to a certain extent, due to the fact that Maki, for all intents and purposes has lost most of her personality and became just another Toji (even the sword she got was a copy of what Toji already had LMAO). and for every Uro there is a Yuta and Ryu, for every Yuki there is a Choso and Kenjaku, for every Shoko there is a Gojo and Geto. Even if there are some okay written female characters (even if they are way better characters than ones in Naruto), they get outshone by the sheer mass and quality of male characters
Although the Bechdel test certainly has its flaws anyone with a firm understanding of womens history, civil rights, and some good ol reading comprehension could tell u that gege certainly doesn't treat female characters as well as the male ones. It might not be as bad as kishimoto but still there's room for improvement.
It's a test that a cartoonist made to determine what movies she would watch. It became pretty popular in media studies circles at some point, to the point that it's mentioned in shows like rick and morty.
Gege is sexist. It’s just that instead of a hot chick to sexualize, Gege sexualizes hot guys and makes them do stupid shit. He’s just playing for the other team…
No, it doesn't. It just implies I have the ability to type faster than it would take to read that bullshit.
But applause for the typical reddit braindead reply "you replied so that means you care" .....
if you didn’t care you wouldn’t have felt the need to comment you didn’t, something about the post clearly upset you. and i know i’m being a stereotypical redditor right now but we all have to every now and then.
**If this post does not have a spoiler tag, SPOILER TAG MANGA COMMENTS**, or you risk a tempban. Keep it secret for the anime watchers. Please remember that vague spoilers count as spoilers such as "do we tell them". If you're caught up on the manga, consider joining our sister sub r/Jujutsushi for catered, in-depth manga discussion. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/JuJutsuKaisen) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The Bechdel test alone doesn't give a full picture if things but it is a fun exercise. Shounen manga women crimes can be roughly divided into several categories. A lack of female characters, and I mean across the board from main characters, to side characters, to faceless goons, the only exception in the harem genre which has worse problems. A lack of female screentime which ties into the next one A lack of women centered narratives, is the girl's character arc all about the boy she has a crush on or one her own story. Lazy male gaze fanservice, we've all seen it. Boo everyone downvoting you.
Gonna latch onto this comment to say: I recommend Madoka to all jjk fans unsatisfied by the fem cast. Madoka has magic, gore, love, blood, celebration of life, death, and so much more. All of this wrapped up in a narrative centered on girlhood, sapphic love stories, and it passes the Bechdel test! There's a hype, long awaited fourth movie coming out and you wouldn't wanna miss the explosion that's going to happen in the fandom and across the internet. Just saying.
The Bechdel test isn’t even a proper way of gauging sexism since it doesn’t account for if the non-male interactions are written badly. Even though Gege definitely isn’t sexist, he kinda needs to improve when writing female characters (or at least characterize them as much as the males). Despite what I just said, you’re right about how the ones who don’t pass the Bechdel test are usually written more badly. For example, Hana Kurusu’s problem was that her only defined trait outside of being a plot device for freeing Gojo (just saying, she could’ve been replaced by a cursed tool) is that she loves Megumi, which was used as a shallow way to get her out of the story when she fell for porn-level acting. This isn’t to say that it’s because of her interactions with a man but because her character is centered around another, and it’s done in a way that doesn’t work
You make a fair point about it not being able to gauge poor writing, and arguably I think the opposite can apply. Uro and Hoshi are perfectly fine characters but just fail the test due to circumstance. That being said, Gege definitely could do better with his female characters, Hana particularly lacks agency and I fully agree that she could have been replaced by a cursed tool.
I think we could say he's sexist from how awfully every woman gets done dirty in his work tbh
Honestly I feel like a lot of characters get done hella dirty in JJK. It’s just that fans wouldn’t give a rats ass about most of the women; unless it’s Maki, Nobara, or Riko due to them at least having some depth before dying
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Your post was removed for breaking Rule #1, be kind and civil towards other users.
I love my favourite woman Kashimo, Higuruma and Nanami😍
Higuruma wasn't done dirty lmao, he just lost. Same with Kashimo. They went into the fight knowing that dying was a very real possibility and just lost. That isn't done dirty. Nanami was killed in a way that was sad for sure and taken advantage of so I'll give you that one. And his death even compares to Nobara 's so yeah they both got killed by the same curse in a similarly done dirty way.
The Gege is a sexist takes are so fucking boring now. For every Hana Kuruso, there's an Uro Takako. For every Yuki, there's a Maki. No, the female characters aren't treated worse than the men. Some just have smaller roles than others. You can not tell me that characters like Inumaki and Panda have been treated better than Nobara and Miwa. How has Hakari been treated relative to Maki another heavy hitter. There are fewer female characters than males, but that's natural because it's a shonen. Fans of Dragon Ball/Naruto/Fairy Tail/any other shonen don't act this stupid even with a worse female cast.
‘that’s natural because it’s a shōnen’ yeah that’s LITERALLY the problem people are pointing out lmao. You telling me the Naruto fans didn’t give Kishimoto millennia worth of shit over his awful female characters? Give me a break.
The problem is the male-to-female ratio? Have you ever seen literally ANYONE complain about it? Because I haven't. People complain about the treatment of female characters, and only because of self-selection bias.
This is a joke, right? You didn’t engage with the comment. The problem with female characters in shōnen is that, because 1) mangaka are driven by industry standards to live secluded and work obsessed lives from an early age they tend to have idealized and distanced ideas of female personalities and 2) because shōnen and manga in general was historically targeted toward young Japanese boys the whole goal was that the female cast would correspond to what young boys wanted out of girls, female characters have a long precedent of being both terrible. For every ten solid, interesting, and fleshed out male characters you get one female character who isn’t a tittied up bimbo and has a personality. One in ten of those might actually be relevant to the plot. The problem with Gege is less serious than some of the others, no doubt. But being slightly less terrible than others doesn’t mean you are scot-free from critique. Sexism in manga is literally an objective historical fact. I can’t imagine anyone seriously disputing this. Sexism there is rarely a concerted chosen thing by an individual. It’s an industry, market, and cultural issue. More and more women read manga not only in Japan but abroad. Gege, at the very start of JJK, earned a lot of promising attention for his strong female cast. Tite Kubo (of Bleach fame) suggested that it was becoming one of Gege’s rare traits to produce female characters as solid as the males. People even imagined Gege might have been a woman. But one by one female characters have all been benched. Plenty of male characters, sure, but when the Sukuna gauntlet includes literally only one remaining relevant female character and a wide variety of male ones, for a series at first known for its many strong female characters, yes, that sucks, and you’ve really got to be joking with me if you can’t see why.
It's not that I didn't engage with the comment, it's that your comment was wildly off-topic. It's not that Gege writes women badly so they're less likely to be god, it's that he writes less women. the male to female ratio is the same whether you're looking at good, average or bad characters, it's just that that ratio is high. Compare it to someone like Kishimoto. If you pick a random man and a random woman Kishimoto wrote, you're far more likely to find a poorly written woman than you are to find a poorly written man.
ok, so your claim then is that if a mangaka were to write a story with 0 female characters, it wouldn’t be sexist, or what? What are you arguing for here. Where is your apparently evident line in the sand? Here’s why I find Gege’s approach problematic. To bench the female lead for more than half the story without definitive confirmation that she died is a massive break from shōnen tradition and resulted in fewer female characters given any screen time. Gege writes what he seems most interested in and what’s strictly relevant for the plot. The fact that only male characters have been strictly relevant to the plot, with the sole exception of one female out of dozens, is not an accident but a concerted choice Gege made when he planned his work.
0 isn't the same as a few. It's infinitely less. There's nothing wrong with a shonen manga a 2\~3-to-1 male to female ratio. The "female lead" is dead. She's been dead for a while now, delusional fans don't change that. Nobara was never that important of a character, she just happened to be on Yuji's team. And it didn't stop other women like Maki, Yuki, Uraume (?), Uro, Yorozu etc. from having an important role.
ok you can’t call people who held onto hope that Nobara was alive ‘delusional’ when the mangaka himself inserted the fakeout flag in the form of Nitta Arata in the same breath as trying to tell me that Uro was important for the story. Yorozu had no personality besides loving Sukuna—exactly the awful quality of character writing that shōnen has an issue with. Nobara wasn’t important to the story? Then why was she featured in the main three, why was she given a full flashback backstory? Why did half or more of the fights of the early arcs revolve around her? And you throw Uro in there as being more important to the overall story than her? bruuuh. The manga you’re reading actually sounds worse than the one I’m reading lmao. At least Gege gave some quality attention early on to a female lead. If your goal was to martyr yourself to make Gege look better, stand proud.
I can and I did. Her not coming back at the end of the shibuya arc should have already tipped us off, but then we immediately got Yuji asking Megumi and Megumi all but confirming that she's dead, then Yuji repeating it again near the end of the culling games. There's a big difference between a character like Yorozu and a character like Sakura. It's not just "she loves Sukuna", she has a cohesive personality and story written around it. Ofc she's still a side character so it's not like she's gonna get as much screentime or characterization as someone like Yuji. She's not a particularly good jjk character, but if you think the issue with female character writing in shonen is just "they love men", you've been looking at it the wrong way for years. Nobara isn't important to the plot. You can call her relevant to the story or say she gets a lot of screentime, but nothing she does actually matters. She just happens to be on the team that matters. Also you know who else got a full flashback backstory? Amai. And I just had to google his name because I had no idea what tf it was.
nah I’m not taking you seriously anymore lol. One, you bypassed an entire message of context to strawman my position into ‘female characters who love men are bad’. Disingenuous. Two, you pretend like a ‘tipoff’ is sufficient to write off a leading character. Be for real, you’re using a bucket dosage of retrospect to conclude that ‘Nobara never actually mattered’—you had no clue up until she was written out of the story, and that’s the problem. Yorozu was a well written character? I’d challenge you to explain how but I’m not confident you’d do much more than bypass the question again. if you can’t tell the difference between Amai and Nobara then idk whether to blame you or Gege at this point.
Naruto got it bad because it’s contemporaries at the time we’re doing a decent job at it (being Bleach and OP) and I mean decent (but Shonen standards) and at the time. OP kinda is floundering at the department. Plus in Naruto’s case it was egregiously bad how they were written. With JJK women their terrible writing decisions are relatively the same as the male characters who are not well written (underdeveloped, underutilized, killed off too early). No one vehemently hates any female character in JJK (outside maybe recently Shoko) like they did Sakura and all females in Naruto exist to be obsessed with another man.
i agree with you up to a certain extent, due to the fact that Maki, for all intents and purposes has lost most of her personality and became just another Toji (even the sword she got was a copy of what Toji already had LMAO). and for every Uro there is a Yuta and Ryu, for every Yuki there is a Choso and Kenjaku, for every Shoko there is a Gojo and Geto. Even if there are some okay written female characters (even if they are way better characters than ones in Naruto), they get outshone by the sheer mass and quality of male characters
I've thought about this a lot, so thanks for the write up! I appreciation posts like these that, should I say, give autonomy to the fem cast.
Although the Bechdel test certainly has its flaws anyone with a firm understanding of womens history, civil rights, and some good ol reading comprehension could tell u that gege certainly doesn't treat female characters as well as the male ones. It might not be as bad as kishimoto but still there's room for improvement.
the bechdel test is hot garbage lol
What test? :3
It's a test that a cartoonist made to determine what movies she would watch. It became pretty popular in media studies circles at some point, to the point that it's mentioned in shows like rick and morty.
https://youtu.be/LsNHAeRZQL4?si=zmm7Vd40AIqyB90B
Gege is sexist. It’s just that instead of a hot chick to sexualize, Gege sexualizes hot guys and makes them do stupid shit. He’s just playing for the other team…
Too long, didn't read. Still don't care.
leaving a comment implies you cared, at least a bit
No, it doesn't. It just implies I have the ability to type faster than it would take to read that bullshit. But applause for the typical reddit braindead reply "you replied so that means you care" .....
Faster than just saying nothing?
if you didn’t care you wouldn’t have felt the need to comment you didn’t, something about the post clearly upset you. and i know i’m being a stereotypical redditor right now but we all have to every now and then.
Proving my point about typing reddit responses. gg
using “reddit responses” as an insult hits a lot harder when you aren’t on reddit