Familiar Territory
(Four young women stand in a line in bright military uniforms. The girl on the left, a blonde is saluting, picture courtesy of anime-planet.com)
Part of the problem that popular media has with balanced portrayals is baggage. Not luggage, that’s a problem I have with airlines (okay, that was cheap, but it felt good, so I went with it). As a result, shows set in alternate pasts need to adopt elements of the societies they ape in order to be recognizable and those requirements bring along socially-determined gender roles.
Mad Men, gets acclaim for this approach so it feels fair to lavish praise on works that operate in the same (loosely defined) paradigm. On that note, I’m going to talk a little about Sakura Wars (which is really an excuse to write about Taisho Baseball Girls at some point in the future, but more on that later).
Set in an alternate version of the 1920’s, the Taisho government recruits six unique women to fight the growing menace of demon attacks in Toyko (Edo?). While by night or in an emergency, they climb into brightly colored power-armor and smash demons, they spend a large portion of their time masquerading as a theater troupe, putting on plays for the population of the city and mugging for the “camera” in cute costumes.
The earlier post on REDLINE begs the question WHY? Why not make them a regular military unit? Why not make the power-armors in less “girly” colors? We did it with Last Exile/Sora no Woto, why not Sakura Wars?
Part of this comes from the narrative: The underlying story of the series (and the first OVA for that matter) is how a group of disparate characters can come together into a fighting unit. They are irregulars, they should look like irregulars.
But more importantly, they are blatantly operating outside of the gender norms for their time period (especially in Japan). Each of these women (or girls) is extremely peculiar in her own way and the theater provides excellent cover for their strong personalities (in addition to a convenient excuse for importing the foreigners who make up crucial parts of the team).
The show trades heavily on the uncertainty of the Taisho Era which works well with its themes of technology versus magic (see also: Otome Youkai Zakuro), and part of maintaining the feel of the time relies on assuming that the social conventions survive the conversion intact. Blowing them out of the water for the sake of female equality would make the show into something else entirely. And, the show gets to use the tension between these women’s socially-proscribed gender roles and their core task—fighting in an elite military unit—to provide character development to Sakura Shinguji.
Now, this isn’t to say that Sakura Wars is without problems. As it was adapted from a dating-sim-cum-TRPG, it’s got some issues (mainly with the haremy role of Ogami), but I would argue that since the show offers an excuse for the women as sex-objects (it’s a cover story!) it allows us to focus more on their actual mission-killing some demons.
Side note: This is the only show that I’ve watched solely because I loved the OP.
edit: KiraKira pointed out that I COMPLETELY misremembered the uniforms in Simoun. So I picked another example…
