Also, if you're going to be touching on Ribon no Kishi, maybe bring up the Takarazuka Revue/Osamu Tezuka connection?
Possibly Kino no Tabi? The protagonist's clothing and language use in the anime and light novels are all deliberately ambiguous, it's not until several stories in that you learn she's abandoned a femme birthname to rename herself after a male character, and one of the movies has a monologue where she debates if she should call herself boku or watashi, ultimately settling on boku.
I don't know if you'd want to go into non-human examples, let alone wandering away from animanga into games to do it, but the PS2/Wii game Ōkami might be of some interest. The title character is a kami incarnated in the form of a wolf; apparently the original Japanese version used gender-neutral terms for both the earlier incarnation Shiranui and the later incarnation Amaterasu, and the English localizers were told to keep the character genderless: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3152879 In the English narration, they did this by avoiding pronouns altogether and either using the characters' names or references like "the god", "the wolf", etc.; since it was harder to work around the pronoun issue in dialogue, they went for alternating genders, having gods and other characters with spiritual insight referring to Ammy in female terms while ordinary humans refer to both Ammy and Shiranui as male. The English-language localizers speculate that the insistence on preserving the gender ambiguity was to distinguish game-Amaterasu from the actual Shinto deity, but I haven't seen anything directly from designer Kamiya Hideki confirming if that was the intent, or if it was a case like Saiyuki's Kanzeon Bosatsu of noting historical shifts in a divinity's gender portrayal (like these references to male versions of Amaterasu: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-japan&month=0407&week=d&msg=pB4O4MQxRxCYt3GhzyZBRA&user=&pw =), or something else entirely. But whatever the reasoning was behind the genderless portrayal, the bit where it gets really interesting, in a sad and frustrating way, is seeing how a lot of English-speaking players react to the ambiguity. Go to any game-focused board and you will find massive long-running, and frequently heated, debates on Ammy's "real" gender. She's female because these characters called her goddess or maiden! No, he's male because girl dogs don't raise their legs to pee! (Actually, some dominant female canids *do* mark that way, but...)She's female because Amaterasu is a sun goddess, duh! No, she's a female deity incarnated in the body of a male wolf! No, Shiranui was a male wolf, but Ammy's body is a statue of Shiranui magically brought to life, so it's genderless!
And so it goes, on and on and on; and the old debates are flaring up in a new form recently thanks to the Nintendo DS sequel Ōkamiden. The localization is slightly less gender-neutral than the original game, although I don't know if that's an accurate reflection of the Japanese original or not; it was produced by a different team than the original game, so they might have had a different attitude than the original director. But there's still some subtle ambiguity -- most characters refer to the new protagonist as male, and Amaterasu as his mother, but the other animal-form kami address Chibi as her "child" rather than "son". And so now folks are arguing over whether or not Chibiterasu is a boy, using the new game's dialogue to support their position that Ammy is female, etc. Even for cute animal characters, it seems, a lot of people are really, really invested in avoiding any sort of ambiguous or non-binary sense of gender...
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Sat, Apr. 23rd, 2011 03:44 pm (UTC)YES YES YES YES.
Also, if you're going to be touching on Ribon no Kishi, maybe bring up the Takarazuka Revue/Osamu Tezuka connection?
Possibly Kino no Tabi? The protagonist's clothing and language use in the anime and light novels are all deliberately ambiguous, it's not until several stories in that you learn she's abandoned a femme birthname to rename herself after a male character, and one of the movies has a monologue where she debates if she should call herself boku or watashi, ultimately settling on boku.
I don't know if you'd want to go into non-human examples, let alone wandering away from animanga into games to do it, but the PS2/Wii game Ōkami might be of some interest. The title character is a kami incarnated in the form of a wolf; apparently the original Japanese version used gender-neutral terms for both the earlier incarnation Shiranui and the later incarnation Amaterasu, and the English localizers were told to keep the character genderless: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3152879 In the English narration, they did this by avoiding pronouns altogether and either using the characters' names or references like "the god", "the wolf", etc.; since it was harder to work around the pronoun issue in dialogue, they went for alternating genders, having gods and other characters with spiritual insight referring to Ammy in female terms while ordinary humans refer to both Ammy and Shiranui as male. The English-language localizers speculate that the insistence on preserving the gender ambiguity was to distinguish game-Amaterasu from the actual Shinto deity, but I haven't seen anything directly from designer Kamiya Hideki confirming if that was the intent, or if it was a case like Saiyuki's Kanzeon Bosatsu of noting historical shifts in a divinity's gender portrayal (like these references to male versions of Amaterasu: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-japan&month=0407&week=d&msg=pB4O4MQxRxCYt3GhzyZBRA&user=&pw =), or something else entirely. But whatever the reasoning was behind the genderless portrayal, the bit where it gets really interesting, in a sad and frustrating way, is seeing how a lot of English-speaking players react to the ambiguity. Go to any game-focused board and you will find massive long-running, and frequently heated, debates on Ammy's "real" gender. She's female because these characters called her goddess or maiden! No, he's male because girl dogs don't raise their legs to pee! (Actually, some dominant female canids *do* mark that way, but...)She's female because Amaterasu is a sun goddess, duh! No, she's a female deity incarnated in the body of a male wolf! No, Shiranui was a male wolf, but Ammy's body is a statue of Shiranui magically brought to life, so it's genderless!
And so it goes, on and on and on; and the old debates are flaring up in a new form recently thanks to the Nintendo DS sequel Ōkamiden. The localization is slightly less gender-neutral than the original game, although I don't know if that's an accurate reflection of the Japanese original or not; it was produced by a different team than the original game, so they might have had a different attitude than the original director. But there's still some subtle ambiguity -- most characters refer to the new protagonist as male, and Amaterasu as his mother, but the other animal-form kami address Chibi as her "child" rather than "son". And so now folks are arguing over whether or not Chibiterasu is a boy, using the new game's dialogue to support their position that Ammy is female, etc. Even for cute animal characters, it seems, a lot of people are really, really invested in avoiding any sort of ambiguous or non-binary sense of gender...