Outside of being a demon hunter, Devil Hunter Yohko was primarily defined as preoccupied with her crushes, dates, and getting laid. Hell, even when I finally found some different anime with female protagonists, they were still primarily defined by being boy-crazy. And made me feel invalidated as a female for not being a girly girl. Like a lot of people, my first Shojo anime was Sailormoon, and if you're the type of girl who can't relate, at all, to revolving so much of your life around being boy-crazy, that got tiring fast. She loved martial arts and wasn't boy-crazy, but wasn't afraid to wear dresses or want to play Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet". It took Ranma 1/2's Akane Tendo to teach me that it was okay to be any mixture of traits considered "male" or "female". When I was little, I became so shamefully anti-girly-girl, even before the trope "not like other girls" became a term. But I think that a lot of younger girls don't realize what it was like to live during a time when everyone and everything was telling you that if you weren't a "girly girl", or hyper fem, or this narrow list of stereotypes, then "you weren't a valid female". I had the sudden thought that maybe Akane would be dismissed in present day, as a "not like other girls" character.
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