So I am always on the hunt for random anime to watch whether it’s on Crunchyroll, Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon Prime. Every now and then I even find a whole series on Youtube. I recently found one anime series which seemed like a decent anime until I realized there were racist tendencies throughout the course of the show. The anime has 2 seasons involving 52 episodes. I only got to episode 11, realizing that I didn’t want to continuing watching the series because of how racist it was.
Today I figured I would share with you guys the racism in anime.
I watched my first racist anime – Racism in Anime
The anime is entitle Super Gals on Youtube, but it’s also known as simply GALS! or Super Gals! Kotobuki Ran. This show follows Ran Kotobuki who stands up for justice in her town as a teenage girl while also rebelling against her family’s wants for her to become a police officer in the future. The show somewhat gives me Madison Finn vibes which is why I kind of wanted to watch it. The story itself wasn’t similar to the book series that I consistently read when I was in middle school, but it did have little blips of moments where they revealed what certain acronyms meant for certain text… for example “BRB” = Be right Back, but they would use it in actual verbal conversation… which I’m not going to lie… Became kind of annoying after awhile anyway. However middle school me, would have probably enjoyed this.
Side Note: I wish I would have kept all of my Madison Finn books because a lot of them went up in price value. Check them out here.
Anyway, there were random moments within this anime where the main character Ran would get into it with the “tan” girls. These were girls that were portrayed as being antagonistic to the main character. They also gave the girls these weird looking lip colors. Basically they were giving me Gyaru girl vibes. If you don’t know what Gyaru means, here’s an article going into detail about it.
At different moments, the main character Ran would refer to them as an insult as being tan while they referred to her as being pale. In one episode, she even said something similar to,
“When you turn off the lights, I can’t even see you..”
which of course is making the reference that they are so dark that they blend in with the night when the lights are off.
There are clips of darker girls with the exaggerated lips in an obviously not so flattering way at different moments throughout the show:
One of the other issues I had with this anime was also that they introduce a character named Tatsuki Kuroi. He also resembled the tan girls and even though he was a decent character, he was consistently referred to as being a “monkey.” Now keep in mind he is also a dancer, but I don’t recall him even dancing or doing anything monkey like.
I just looked up a bit of info and apparently this character eventually becomes the main characters boyfriend, but I didn’t get that far.
Regardless, this honestly wouldn’t be a great anime to be marketed to someone of color. It probably was supposed to come off as being a joke, but at the same time… it seemed very negative towards darker skinned individuals. It portrayed them either negatively or as being entertainers which is something that the media does a lot with people of color.
I am sure that if this was a newer anime being shown on television or anime sites like Crunchyroll… People would have had issues with this. A saw a few people even mentioning that some of the things were kind of racist in the comment section of some of the episodes on Youtube before I completed watching a few of the episodes….. and it in fact was racist.
I ended the series off on episode 11 and I pretty much decided not to continue watching it.
It’s crazy that racism in anime is an actual thing, especially when so many people have worked on an anime to create it and put time into making it. I have heard about different anime series as being racist on Twitter from time to time, but I didn’t realize it was so out in the open until I watched this anime and it’s unfortunate because the anime wasn’t that bad… It wasn’t great, but it was something just to watch randomly.
So thanks for reading this. It was just a mini-rant that I figured I would share with you guys since it was my first time experiencing this.
Leave a comment down below and share your thoughts on this or if you know of any other situations where there is racism in anime.
I found this blog wondering if anyone caught what was clearly deliberate racism in Violet Evergarden episode 10. In this episode, at around 12:45 Violet is reading a book to a little girl which refers to “a thief” being caught and running away. It shows a page in the book with what appears to be a black man with exaggerated lips running away from a blonde little girl. It caught me by surprise so I had to rewind and pause and for sure, it was what I thought. Mind you, except in this book, every character and I mean every, looks European. Not one POC anywhere in this anime except when they want to display a thief. They didn’t even have to flash the page of the book. She could’ve just read it or read a different story altogether. That being the case, it was clearly deliberate to insert this black man as a thief in what was supposed to be a children’s book.
Not necessarily surprised at the Japanese animators who more often than not make their characters look European even when they’re supposed to be Japanese. But as this is marketed as a “Netflix” series, I was completely disappointed in the illustrators, the director for cutting to it intentionally and even more in Netflix. I’m sure someone there reviews content and should have caught this before airing it. Once it hits Netflix it’s on a global platform for everyone to see and as anime as become a popular genre across nationalities, they need to do better. Moreover, it won a Crunchy Roll award. Sad that they tarnished such a beautiful anime to insert racism. I was turned off from watching at that point. With Violet Evergarden becoming so popular, I wish I could bring attention to it.
That’s horrible! I didn’t even know that, but that’s the unfortunate thing about a lot of anime.. There are subtle hints of racism and people overlook it a lot of times. I’ve only seen the movie about Violet Evergarden and not the actual anime series. I was planning on watching it. I’ll definitely have to give it a watch and mention it on my blog for sure. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!