are there any other series out there in the Utena and Homestuck club for series that were actually way better at writing female characters than male ones
tbh actually even with equal gender ratios there's still a lot of stuff I can think of it's just that most of them are 1. books or vns and 2. have left my brain as I tried to recall them, as usual
like in bl manga sometimes actually there are very good female characters but do to the fact that there is generally just one of them it is harder to make a scientific assessment on 'this is how this writer writes female characters vs how they write male characters'
otoh actually a lot of shounen manga with very skewed gender ratios are very easy to make a scientific assessment on how they write male vs female characters
yeah I keep thinking about galge I've played and running into the issue of just kind of liking how most of the characters are written equally independent of gender or the ratios being skewed such that I wouldn't count it
I was going to say "most stuff I can think of that are more animanga oriented but not vns and like this are just stuff that are written by women, as would be expected"
or like katy said sometimes I am simply not interested in any of the guys and it is not really a measure of their writing quality and is more just my taste
SETH ⚘
: I am only one book in but I actually disagree bc Palamedes is one of my favorites. like there is definitely more focus on female characters and they are great, but I don't think the male characters actually suffer. they are fewer and less central but not actually less complete or compelling as characters
in Utena the male characters can be very charming and entertaining but who on this earth can honestly say they found Touga's arc emotionally compelling
I guess actually in the mari okada case it's hard to say that the female characters are better written than the male characters outright because like most mari okada stuff that isn't her adapting another work and sticking pretty closely to it is just straight up "men (or the society they've created) are a problem", which like
does lead to the male characters kind of being props for the female characters but in a way that doesn't really feel like "oh she's bad at writing them"
but Utena is not doing the harem series thing of just straight up not writing dudes as characters either. they are not [one dimensional protag] or [one dimensional antagonist]
i do also like palamedes very much, i was just also thinking about like, there are definitely some other male characters in book 1 that are simply ??? unmemorable so he felt more like the exception than the rule there to me
actually I guess now that I can think of titles the problem I have is everything that comes to mind are galge or other things that fall in harem territory or touhou or shoujo or shoujo-inspired and therefore in the mari okada camp of "these men COULD be well written they're just not because that's the moral of the story" vs. like
the dragon vore anime"