Fun Stuff: My Top Ten Favorite Anime Ladies

I may be all about the bishies, but I've definitely got a lot of love for some of the leading ladies of anime, too! As someone who likes to take the feminist perspective when digesting literature, film, etc, the subject of the role women play in anime is of particular interest to me. Several anime titles (especially those geared towards young men) tend to disappoint me with women whose characters are entirely dependent on fanservice and their physical appearance or otherwise dependency on the male lead(s) without any other driving purpose given, but several shows have developed fantastic heroines who have brains, guts, and emotional depths to go along with their looks. 

Here are my top ten anime lady crushes and the reasons why I love them:

10. Kaname Chidori (Full Metal Panic)

If you're going to be paired up with a dense-in-the-ways-of-love type man like Sousuke Sagara, you've got to be sharp and on your game, and Kaname Chidori is all of these things and more.  Though both a high school girl and slight tsundere, Chidori avoids the negatives of these tropes by being in many ways smarter and more emotionally on point than the majority of the characters surrounding her, even those who are prodigies when it comes to war games. Like most tsunderes, she does have issues with being up front about her personal life- particularly her growing feelings for Sousuke-- but she doesn't allow her tsutsun side to keep her from actively making sure he is safe, even from himself.  Quite a few anime ignore the fact that most real life high school girls are no longer in their "cute" phase, but are in actuality struggling the most with their relationships at this time-- first loves, the drama laden tensions of female friendships, rebelling against family, figuring out self-identity, etc- and I think Chidori felt true to the kind of girl who is not fully developed inside yet. I really enjoyed watching her come into her own and fight strongly for what she wanted in FMP's conclusion, during which shined even more brightly than Sousuke, the leading man!

9. Homura Akemi (Puella Magi Madoka Magica)

Homura is a tricky character to get a hold of at first, because the cold young lady she pretends to be at the onset of the series is a carefully placed cover to protect Madoka from becoming a magical girl. Who Homura is in reality is one of the most inspiring young female anime characters I have ever had the pleasure of watching. The magical girl genre can be hit and miss with me; I love titles like Cardcaptor Sakura which gives the leading lady some agency in a world where she wouldn't normally have much of a place (which Cardcaptors limited, much to my disgust), but titles where the female is stuck in the same fan-service geared, charmingly helpless rut she is in her every day life hit a bad note with me. However, Homura (and most of the girls of Madoka Magica, for that matter) takes her role very seriously, and understands the risks to the point where she will do anything in her power (which pretty much entails dragging herself through a living hell time and time again when she fails) to protect the person she cares about the most because of how much respect she has for the part Madoka played in her life. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful friendships in anime out there, and Homura's courage and determination isn't something I'll soon forget.

8. Blue (Wolf's Rain)

Though Blue spends the majority of the series in dog form and we don't actually find out that she is a wolf-dog half breed who can transform into a human woman until much later in the show, I grew to love her pretty quickly when she joined Hige, Toboe, Kiba, and Tsume on their journey to find paradise. The immediate concern when a woman joins a traveling part composed of males is that the series will take a dip into reverse harem territory, but Wolf's Rain is a title which focuses on the man vs beast dynamic as well as what happens when society and mankind turns on itself, so Blue's unique experiences with humans instead bring a much needed new perspective to the plot. I loved how she was able to see both sides of the equation in the conflict between wolves and humans, and was capable of falling in love with a wolf (Hige) while still maintaining her respect and adoration for the human who raised her (Quent). And even though she served as a bridge between humans and wolves, she never allowed either side to tell her how to think or feel after she learned her identity. In the end, I think she served as a turning point for several characters- Hige and Quent especially, but Hubb and Cher as well. An overall delightful character. 

7. Kurisu Makise (Steins;gate)

Three cheers for intelligent women! The focus of time traveling drama Steins;gate is on mad scientist Okabe Rinatrou, but Kurisu Makise was just as fascinating of a lead as Okabe's unwilling assistant and eventual love interest. Though Kurisu's attitude is often cold, her iciness is what keeps her safe in the man's world of scientific study. Shunned by her father for outperforming him in his own field, Kurisu still loves and wants to excel in scientific research, even though her talent is often rejected by the people she most wants to please. Throughout the series, she time and time again shows her wisdom and strength even when faced with inconceivable challenges, and the scene in which she urges Okabe to reverse a world line even if it means they can't be together anymore is one of the bravest, most poignant moments to bring a tear to my eye.

6. Ayumi Yamada (Honey and Clover)

If taken at face value, Ayumi Yamada from Honey and Clover doesn't appear to be much of a strong female character. In fact, she spends a significant portion of the series crying over the fact that her male friend Mayama is in love with another woman and has rejected her several times. But honestly, whether you're a woman or a man, if you've been in unrequited love before, you'll know how hard it is not to be terribly upset over it. Yamada has a long and winding grieving process, but the ways she views and internalizes her problematic love during this time is so magnificent and true to life that I wished that I had known about Honey and Clover the first time I fell in love. Hanging everything you are on the shoulders of someone else is rarely a good idea, but Yamada isn't quite like that. She understands and tries to respect herself as much as she can; she simply can't change the way she feels, which is something we are often told to do for our own sake, but don't actually have to do if we make that choice. She does eventually begin to reconcile herself to the fact that Mayama will never love her, but I've always been an advocate for moving on at your own speed and deciding your heart for yourself. She's by far and away one of the most impressively real characters of slice of life anime.

5. Arashi Kishu (X)

It's always a bad idea to get too attached to X characters given that the majority of them end up dying on you, but I just couldn't help falling a little for Arashi Kishu, one of the Dragons of Heaven fighting to prevent the end of the world. As somewhat of a kuudere, she doesn't talk or express herself all that often, but her heart awakens when she is forced by fate into an impossible decision. The person she falls in love with is destined to die on her behalf, and in the ­X-verse, changing predetermined fate is nigh on impossible. One of CLAMP's main theories on destiny is that the power of the human heart, manifested through wishes, is stronger than the notion of fate itself, but unfortunately for Arashi, she is unable to realize her wish before it unfolds just as foretold. Even so, her resolve is something spectacular, much like Ashura's in Tsubasa. Even if she has to sacrifice something precious to have her wish granted, she stills sees enough value in the thing she wants the most to pay any price for it. Sometimes this isn't always the right choice to make, but as in all CLAMP works, there is quite a bit of dignity to be found in choosing for yourself even if that choice comes with its own set of consequences.

4. Faye Valentine (Cowboy Bebop)

Faye Valentine is hot. She is also one of the bad-assiest females of anime, even though her bounty hunter skills are far from perfect. These days, a lot of busty action girls are turned into jokes complete with a special soundtrack for their jiggling chests, but while Faye does have her moments, she is still a very serious character with a very serious history, just like male leads Spike and Jet Black. Even though her plans don't always work out, she has enough spunk in her to last long-term alongside Spike (who has lone-wolf coming out his ears) and gives the hard hearted boys reason to care about her, even though she starts off as an interloper. She was also one of the first anime heroines I actively wanted to be like. Growing up with two older brothers, I wanted to mimic the way she stood up to them and became one of the team without giving up being feminine. Learning how to be your true self among members of the opposite sex is something that it takes many years of acting stupid for some of us to learn.

3. Winry Rockbell (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood)

I actually can't think of anything I don't love about Winry. Like Faye, I respect how she's one of the team-- and a mechanic to boot-- without sacrificing her femininity  but I think more than anything else, I respect how she was able to retain her sense of self despite living through horrors-- confronting her parents' killer, learning of the death of a man she looked up to, having her very existence turned into a blackmail tool against Al and Ed, etc. From the beginning to the very end, no matter what kind of grief she suffered, she was able to pick herself back up and fight for the people and world she loved with all her strength. I also loved her for her adorable nerdy side which sparked up whenever automail technology was nearby. In fact, Fullmetal Alchemist is simply rife with women I have a lot of respect for: Lt. Hawkeye, Lan Fan, Mei, and so on.

2. Yuuko Ichihara (xxxHolic/Tsubasa)

I can't think of an anime character I quote more often than I do Yuuko. Of course, Yuuko has a built in bonus of being one of the ones "who know the world," meaning that she's privy to knowledge of the dimensions and how the multi-world universe operates to the extent that your average civilian wouldn't understand. That being said, she has her own unique base of knowledge gleaned from witnessing many lifetimes of human behavior that makes her one of the most intelligent and emotionally wise characters of anime. She provides numerous insights into subjects that affect us all-- self-sacrifice, wanting to be considered special, pride, the desire to break the rules and lose control, revenge, envy, the limitations we put on ourselves using words-- and all of it hits at the heart of the matter that we often overlook. In spite of having an endless amount of perceptiveness, she's also simply fun to be around, and is at her heart an incredibly caring person towards those who truly matter to her. My only regret is that we don't really get a glimpse of her when Clow is alive; I really think there's an amazing backstory there that we don't know about.

1. Hitagi Senjougahara (Monogatari)

When Bakemonogatari was first recommended to me, I was not very interested even though I love supernatural anime. I had just been burned by several harems in a row where the male lead had no personality and the females obsessed with him were all stereotypes, and I simply just wasn't interested in yet another harem-type story. Luckily, the person who recommended it to me assured that the script would make the literature lover in me jump for joy, and that turned out to be the absolute truth. I was surprised by the fact that I could not get enough of the first lady introduced to the story: Hitagi Senjougahara. Male lead Araragi was enjoyable, and so were the other females who made up the sort-of harem who fortunately were not unbearably consumed with fighting over him. But Senjougahara was something else; shrewd, honest, perceptive, and incredibly self-aware. She easily narrows down the shortcomings of Araragi that tend to get brushed over in other harem titles, and knows herself well enough to where she can be upfront about what others may be perceive to be her own shortcomings. In the second season of Monogatari, she's already singles out the things that made me not as big of a fan of fellow character Hanekawa Tsubasa, and her insight has helped me learn how to appreciate her as a heroine (although she simply cannot usurp the awesomeness that is Senjougahara. Amen.)

He is mad scientist. It so cool!

 Ever since I was a little kid, I've been a huge fan of the X-Men animated series that aired on FOX back in the 90s. Though I had a special love for characters Gambit, Rogue, and Wolverine, my favorite arcs were centered around Bishop and Cable, the show's two time travelers. Time traveling is such a fascinating subject, one that I've never been able to get enough of. Whether it be playing Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? or lounging in front of the TV to watch The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, time travel makes up a large part of my pop culture intake. X-men was what started it, but it's come a long way since then.

"You don't understand! I'm from the future!"

To bring me back to earth from this little obsession of mine, my mom is fond of telling me that a scientific study was done which proves time travel is an impossibility. Of course, this has done nothing to deter me. Hundreds of years ago, who ever thought we'd be able to fly in the air and reach long distant destinations by plane? Whoever thought we'd be able to share information around the world by way of smart technology and a little thing called the Internet? Calling something an impossibility is just an invitation for the geniuses of the world to take the bait and rise to the occasion.

Because of this, I was thrilled to hear that there was an anime called Steins;gate which began with scientists debunking the myth of time traveling and led up to mad scientist Rintarou Okabe (alias Kyouma Hououin) developing a way first for text messages to be sent through time, and then memories to be transferred to past bodies. Both of these inventions had severe consequences, naturally, but they are admittedly cool nonetheless.

Okabe, proving mad scientists can be foxy, too

Following the anti-time travel lecture which Okabe (who definitely puts the 'mad' in mad scientist) slams with all of his manic might, he encounters a woman named Kurisu Makise who acts like they have met each other before. Okabe, a firm conspiracy theorist, is convinced she is working for an organization sent to spy on him, and makes a dramatic get away when she questions him. A few minutes later, he hears a scream and returns to find Kurisu lying in a pool of blood.

Kurisu, one of the best female characters (and tsunderes!) of anime

Bewildered by the abrupt murder, Okabe texts his lab buddy Daru about Kurisu's mysterious death. But as soon as he hits send, something odd happens. The street that was just seconds before perfectly normal is now completely deserted, and a strange satellite has crashed into the building where the lecture was held. To make matters more strange, when he's back at the lab, both Daru and Okabe's childhood friend Mayuri, who initially attended the lecture with him, report that the lecture never happened due to a cancellation. Okabe's confusion persists until he realizes that the text message sent to Daru's phone arrived a week before he sent it, indicating that some sort of time glitch happened during its sending.

Of course, this raises a bunch of new questions. The lab was working on a remote-controlled microwave oven which has the strange side effect of turning objects placed inside of it into a green gel-like substance. Okabe begins to suspect it has something to do with the time traveling anomaly, especially when he shortly after discovers Kurisu alive and well in the area. Due to her studies regarding the impossibility of time travel as well as the mystery of her continued existence, Okabe forces her to join his laboratory as a team member.

The silent and coy Moeka, a megane-chan.

His interest in time travel mounting, Okabe begins to examine the teachings of John Titor, who holds that every time the future is changed, reality branches off into a new world line which follows to a different conclusion than the original line. Okabe also encounters two strange characters during this time: Suzuha, the new part timer who works for his landlord, and Moeka, a quiet girl searching for more information on the discontinued IBN 5100 computer.

Further investigation reveals that rival research organization SERN has been experimenting with time travel, but the full extent of the research requires the technology of the same IBN 5100 Moeka is looking for to decipher the code. Luckily, Mayuri's good friend Ruka (one of the most androgynous males in anime history) has an IBN in his family temple's storage which he is willing to lend to Okabe and co. The SERN research reveals that the succeeded in traveling bodies through time, but that they arrived in the same gel state the remote control microwave replicates. Realizing his microwave is reaching close to true time travel technology, Okabe experiments more with it, eventually developing travel by 'D-mail,' or text messages sent to the past to change the future.

Mayuri (left) is the real girl of the two. Believe it or not, Ruka really is a boy, even in spite of those bishoujo looks.

The show then follows Okabe as he sends D-mails on the behalf of the people around him. First he sends a text to Ruka asking him to buy a winning lotto ticket, and when this changes the world line, his experiments proceed. Moeka sends a text message asking herself not to buy a certain phone (inexplicably resulting in a world line where the lab never finds the IBN 5100), Ruka sends one asking his mother to eat veggies so he'll be born a girl, and Mayuri's rich friend Rumiho sends a mysterious mail to herself which somehow results in moe culture never coming to Akihabara. Finally, after Suzuha reports that she has been unable to find her estranged father in Tokyo and leaves the apartment building, Okabe sends a text telling himself to follow her and keep her from leaving.

This part of the plot is an interesting study of how people choose to change their futures, but one of the most moving parts of this section of Steins;gate is the growing relationship between tsundere Kurisu and insane Okabe. Though they have seemingly clashing personalities, the two bring out the best of each other, and share with one another the things they find difficult to discuss with anyone else. To Okabe, Kurisu reveals the emotional struggle she underwent when her father rejected her due to her superior intelligence in the field of science. This is a hard thing for anyone to admit, especially the tense and confrontation Kurisu.

Kurisu's father has no reason to get offended! Science is humdrum! Right, Okabe?

SPOILERS! As the D-mails are sent, Okabe continually receives threatening texts from someone who claims to be watching him. Though this tickles at his paranoia, Okabe continues on with his research, eventually culminating in the microwave machine gaining the ability to transport memories to past bodies. However, as soon as this invention is complete, Moeka, acting on behalf of SERN, apprehends Okabe and shoots Mayuri and Kurisu. Before she is killed, Kurisu prepares the memory leap machine to send Okabe back to the past to prevent this tragedy from happening. However, no matter what Okabe does to change the future, Mayuri ends up dead either due to SERN or random circumstance. After Okabe is forced to watch her die time after time, Suzuha, who announces herself as John Titor's daughter and the time traveler responsible for the satellite hitting the conference building, explains to him that to save Mayuri from her inevitable fate in the current world line, he needs to reach the original world line he started from. Which, of course, means undoing all of the changes he made.

This, of course, is when things get ugly. Or sexy. You decide.

This is where the anime gets truly poignant. Think for a moment what you would do to change your own future. Typically this choice would change several things in your life, and would be selected for a deep, personal reason. If you had a taste of that future, it may be quite difficult for things to go back to the way they were. Such in the case when Okabe has to go back and ask his friends to undo the D-mails they had sent.

Though she hides behind a cute facade, Rumiho struggles
with the idea that her actions have led her to live a life
that was never destined to occur.

For Rumiho, this means sacrificing the life of the father she saved through her D-mail. Knowing that her father's death was caused by a plane crash, Rumiho sent him a fake ransom note through D-mail so he would never get on the plane, and instead chase after her and try to protect her, erasing over the future where she turned her inherited Akihabara into a moe influenced city. Undoing the D-mail means accepting the reality of her father's death, and only when she is able to glimpse flashes of the past she abandoned does Rumiho realize she is living a lie, and not her true fate.

For Ruka, reversing her D-mail means not only coming to terms that she was once a male, but also that the reason she changed her gender in the first place was due to the feelings she had once harbored for Okabe, which she could not confront as a male. Realizing she will have to become a male again to save Mayuri, she asks Okabe to take her out on a date, so she can enjoy one occasion of them together as a man and woman. At first he is awkward and distant in the situation, not knowing how to handle a date, but he eventually realizes the best thing he can do for Ruka is be himself and give her a good memory of being together with the man she loves.

The next D-mail to undo is Moeka's, and this proves to be the most difficult as she sent the message from her own phone rather than Okabe's, and since she also has ties to SERN and a mysterious person named FB, she has no reason to tell him the true nature of her mail. Eventually, he realizes that Moeka has been drawn into the motherly tone of FB, who promises her affection in exchange for her completing certain tasks, including stealing the IBN 5100 from Okabe's lab by giving its location to her past self through D-mail. FB is later revealed to be Tennouji, Okabe's landlord and a mercenary for SERN. After Tennouji kills Moeka and himself, Okabe uses his phone to tell past Moeka not to steal the IBN 5100 for any reason. This reverses the D-mail and saves Moeka and Tennouji, but the emotional impact of how his D-mails have injured so many people is beginning to catch up with Okabe. As it should!

For obvious reason, Tennouji is also known as Mr. Braun.

However, Okabe grows even more fearful of reversing the very last D-mail, the one which to Daru following Kurisu's death which will return him to the same world line where she is killed. He has fallen deeply in love with her, and is almost even more fearful of losing her then he is of once again losing Mayuri. He confesses to her in an extremely cute moment, and she reciprocates his affections and begs him to right the wrongs they have done through time travel. Giving in, he at last returns to the fateful day everything started.

The moment he runs into Kurisu, he is moved by the sight of her and emotionally greets her, much to her shock (and this is, of course, why she recognizes the original Okabe when they run into each other). But when he seeks out Kurisu at the time of her murder, the event is more personal than he thinks: her father is the one to assault her, infuriated with her for once again showing him up at a scientific event. When Okabe tries to protect her, he winds up inadvertently stabbing her himself, absolutely demolishing any will he had to set the future right.

 Understandable, especially after you consider the amount of times he had to watch Mayuri die.

Luckily, Suzuhara lets him know that he has to fail in order to receive a message from his past self revealing the true way to save Kurisu: fake her death in order to fool his past self and set things back in the correct order they were meant to follow. With the timeline back in order, Kurisu and Okabe can meet again as the beta line intended, and have their love story unfold under natural circumstances. This is why time travel screws things up, but still is totally awesome in the process. Take that, mom! SPOILER END.

YOU! Yeah, you! If you're not watching, you're missing out.

This anime is a heavy hitter. It's hilarious in the beginning, but has several pretty astounding implications in the middle and end. For one, it forces you to imagine how many things have the potential to change by altering one little thing that you regret. For example, whenever I think of changing my future, I always imagine what would have happened if I confessed to my childhood love instead of choosing to keep myself safe from the potential of rejection. In one scenario, we would have dated and so many things about my current life would be different: the closeness of my relationship with my best friend (since boyfriends take up time, ya know), the amount of free time I have devoted to anime (who knows if I would have even that moment of getting into it in the first place?), my decision when choosing to go to my current university (would I have gone to the same school as him?), and the subsequent brushing with the bad boyfriends following him that helped me mature as a person and developed my strength as a person and a woman. In another scenario, we may not have worked out, and this would have gone on to destroy the happy friendship we currently share. A single moment can change so many things, and it's an amazing thing to consider. Steins;gate addresses the issue in a fashion more moving than I have ever seen, and I encourage all anime fans to try undergoing the experience along with Okabe.

When it comes to romance, Steins;gate also gets full marks. The love between Okabe and Kurisu is subtle and gradual, and while not laid on as thickly as shoujo couples, it comes across as a deeply romantic relationship between intellectual equals. It also manages not to overwhelm the plot, which will be of particular interest to people who would rather focus on the scientific bits.

Also, even though most anime fans are used to all manner of oddities, some may be put off by the strangeness of the scenario and Okabe's erratic behavior in the beginning. The premise of a time traveling microwave machine is a bit strange, but that's not what this anime is about: it's about the risks we take in changing the future, not so much the method by which we do it. Also, Okabe gets the lion's share of the series' character development, and you'll be amazed by the journey he takes becoming the person he is at the end of the anime.

Please note that I am saying this even though I am a notorious science dunce. The science used is simple to understand, especially since most of it is invented for the anime's plot. Once again, this anime is not for niche nerds, but for anyone interested in the implications of the universal human desire of changing the past and future. And why not be interested in it? If technology ever does go in this direction, the choices of a single person may have the ability to change the whole world. What will we do when/if that time comes? We can only hope that we'll be able to find a way to stay true to our original choices and realize that everything, even our mistakes, happen for a reason.