You may be a part of the oh-so fun-loving otaku community or you could be a part of the “weeb” community, which means you take your love for the animated Japanese culture to an extreme, but I’m not here to judge. I just wanted to speak about how I’ve noticed how some males in the anime community sometimes bash girls, saying we don’t really watch anime if we just like watching the romance genre. 

From what I’ve seen, I think they only recognized action anime as the “real” anime and that’s a little problematic. Now, I will say this, and that is I love watching romance anime – but that doesn’t mean I go around saying the action ones are straight trash. For instance “Bleach” is by far one of my favorite action animes. I’ll even admit that the fight scenes are good, especially if you watch the fight clips on YouTube with the music in the background, including songs from artists like XXXTentacion, $uicideBoy$, and other underground rappers. Just because we’re female doesn’t mean we have to like all of that mushy-gushy, smooching, romance stuff, but it’s absurd to think that we would be limited to a single genre. I, for one, don’t like all of the anime that are in the same genre. There’s some that I don’t like simply because I believe that the plot is not good enough, and even with a quality animation style, some just didn’t meet my expectations. 

Let’s be honest now ladies – some romance animes are just painful to watch. For example there’s ‘Your Lie in April’ which made me cry a freaking river in my bedroom to the point where I ended up getting a headache! But that’s probably just because I’m a sensitive person (because I even cried during ‘Akame Ga Kill’ which shows my problematic attachment to the characters I see the most on screen). One thing I can say about any romance show in the Asian culture, whether it’s anime or not, is that they tend to drag out the love story of the two main love interests, and they don’t get together until near the end, like ‘Maid-Sama’ for example. Because of this, I usually prefer to watch more animes with at least a little action, like ‘One Punch Man’ and ‘Kengan Ashura’ which are both entertaining and have interesting plots.

Anime is really an amazing cultural phenomenon, and we’ve been blessed to be born during a time with such a variety of animes. Nonetheless, there somehow still manages to be polarizing sexism in assumptions about the preferences of each gender in this relatively new style of media. Boys, just because we’re female doesn’t mean you should automatically assume that we’re only watching the anime for romance – even though there’s nothing wrong about that, people like what they like. No judgement should be placed on anyone, because everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go finish watching “Youjo Senki: Saga of Tanya the Evil.”