Nude girl anime pdf series#
In the magical girl anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, middle-school girls receive the power and responsibility to fight witches in exchange for making a wish. Sailor Moon characters offer a re-envisioning of identities that is not limited by Western binaric thought and cannot be easily pegged within the heterosexual matrix. Working within Western binary systems, categories and language, many of these identities appear contradictory and incoherent. Queer characters in Sailor Moon are not translatable into dichotomous Western thought - categories fail us and, through their enforcement, the depth of meaning and the complexities of queer identities/desires are lost in translation. To name Sailor Moon characters in Western specific terms would be at the expense of reducing the complexity of their identities to a categorical system whose boundaries detract and limit meaning. Arguably, Sailor Moon acts as a site to play out the contextualities and complexities of sexuality, sex and gender identities. The focus of this article is the set of challenges presented by the genderqueer characters in Sailor Moon and how Westernization and English translations have worked to erase and re-write queer identities. The series provided what could be interpreted as resistance to dichotomous conceptualizations of sexuality, sex and gender. Sailor Moon, a Japanese series grounded in manga and anime, began airing translations in the West throughout the 1990s. Relying on both original manga as well as animated adaptions, the dissertation will explain the history and evolution of the genre from the early fifties majokko (witch-girl) concept through to the present, as well as a brief discussion on the recent rise of the magical boy (mahō shōnen) sub-genre. We will examine the Japanese magical approach to Greek mythology and how the basic myths in each series-in this case the legends of Selene and Endymion (Sailor Moon) and Eris and the Apple of Discord (Saintia Shō)-are translated into twentieth century Japanese settings and given a distinctive genre twist while answering a core and important question about the relevancy of Greek mythology in the modern world. Each deals with ordinary, teenaged girls fighting immortal forces personifying chaos, through the lens of ancient, western mythology in modern Japan. This question will be answered by examining how two Japanese magical girl (‘mahō shōjō’) manga series reimagine key stories from Greek mythology: Naoko Takeuchi’s Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon and Masami Kurumada and Chimaki Kuori’s Saint Seiya: Saintia Shō. This dissertation asks how has Greek mythology been made relevant for modern audiences, specifically mahō shōjo (magical girl) and anime and manga, and does it need to be changed to remain relevant for modern audiences?