Gaming Idiocy

A hat-tip to Ami Angelwings.

I think this story pretty adequately sums up just why I avoid video game culture like the plague: It's filled with pathetic, small-minded men with the mentalities of 15-year-old boys.

I think the thing that bothers me the most is that these people don't realize that saying,

"That professional woman deserved to be harassed because she wore cute dresses in front of repressed nerds. She brought it on herself!"

is the same line of thinking that leads to,

"That rape victim deserved what happened to her because she wore revealing clothes. She brought it on herself!"

or, if you want to take it to its extreme (and I realize this is hyperbole),

"That rape victim deserved to be stoned to death in the name of Allah because she inflamed her attacker's passions by her feminine nature. She brought it on herself!"

See what I mean?

I feel dirty. Also: Shuggoths.

My first blog fight. Ugh. I managed to go for over a year with no drama whatsoever, and now this. I don't hold it against WFA 'cause it's not their fault who follows their links, but I think from now on I should moderate myself a little better when discussing feminism and other political topics in case I attract more trolls out to belittle my fanhood.

...my bulging, throbbing fanhood.

*snicker*

Okay, I'm done being juvenile. No ripping bodices here.

On a completely different note, here's Neil Gaiman talking about H. P. Lovecraft:





Damn straight. The thing about Lovecraft isn't that his stories were particularly scary (most were not), or that he was a particularly skilled writer (he really, really wasn't). In fact, he was a wordy, overly-sentimental bigot -- and that's what his fans have to say about him. The great thing about Lovecraft, though, was his ability to masterfully set a sense of mood, to convey his worldview, and to inflame the imagination. Say what you will about his writing ability ('cause it's all of it true), but he's still one of the greats in my book.

Gasp! Shock! Horror of Horrors! Dumbledore is--- GAY?!

A tip o' da hat to Thom Wade. May the hair on his toes never fall out!

...er, wait. Wrong fandom. Moving on...

ONOZ DUMBLEDORE IS TEH GAY!!!!11

At first I thought that was from CBS and I was all like, "You call this shit reporting? I expect this from Fox, but geez!" But then I realized, "Oho, it's CBN! Pat Robertson's guys! That makes perfect sense!" Ahh, I love the smell of Christofascist moral panic in the morning.

Seriously, there are too many broadcasting networks with "CB" in their name. CBS, CBN, CBC...

I also love how the "reporter" thinks that Fan Fiction is one specific website and that all the fanfic on the 'Net is located there.

Oh, and the "young fan" was nineteen.

On a more serious note, I think it's great that Rowling made the conscious decision to write such a popular character as gay, but I agree with Kalinara in that it would have been a lot more courageous on her part if she'd explicitly written that detail in the books instead of tossing it out as a sound bite months after the series ended. A casual reader 20 years from now will be none the wiser.

Getting Fed Up with Scans Daily

Christ, these people just live to bitch.

"Oh boo hoo! Plastic Man's in a story with drama! Dan Didio wants to rape my childhood!"

And they still won't shut up about fucking Blue Beetle getting killed two and a half fucking years ago. ARGH!!!

Seriously. Pisses me the hell off.

EDIT, 12/08/07: For those of you coming here from Google (I don't know how I got to be on the first page of results for "scans daily"), let it be known that this was written in a fit of pique during a bout of depression. I'm over it. Please don't take it all serious-like.

Oh, hey.

When Fangirls Attack linked to me again. Twice!

That's pretty neat.

Thanks!!

Also: Blogger has flagged Pott Manor as a possible spam blog and now I have to type in a word verification just to post on my own journal. Thanks a lot, tech support. I AM NOT A SPAMBOT!!! Now if you'll just listen to this great offer for generic Viagra I have for you...

Moral Panic and Popular Culture

This is actually a research paper I wrote earlier this year; now that it's behind me, I felt like sharing it. It could use a lot of work, I'm sure, but as the closest thing I'll probably ever get to a scholarly dissertation, I don't think it came out too badly. I've removed the citations for ease of reading.

Moral Panic and Popular Culture

On April 20, 1999, two teenage boys named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold came to Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado and gunned down their classmates, murdering twelve students and one teacher and leaving twenty-four wounded. When it was learned that they had planned their attack ahead of time using a popular violent video game as a simulator, the American mass media launched into a feeding frenzy, blaming this game and others like it for the boys' murderous rampage.

Between 1988 and 1989, an introverted print-shop employee, Tsutomu Miyazaki, kidnapped, killed, and performed acts of necrophilia on four girls of preschool age before being apprehended by Tokyo police. When the authorities searched his apartment, they found it filled with nearly six thousand videos, including gory "slasher" films and animated child pornography, as well as many comics of a similar nature. The Japanese media leapt upon the incident, and many soon believed that all otaku – fans of comics and animation – were just as deranged as Miyazaki.

In 1950, a fourteen-year-old boy named Willie was tried and sentenced for the murder of a man whom he supposedly shot from the roof of his building. An avid fan of violent comics about gangsters, Willie had seen many ads in his comics for hunting rifles, and eventually obtained one for himself. Though the case received little nationwide attention, to a child psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham, who had known Willie since infancy, it was symptomatic of a mass breakdown of societal morality caused by trashy comic books.

These are but a few examples of moral panic, that tendency of people to believe en masse that something poses a greater threat to society at large than it actually does. The term was popularized in 1971 by sociologist Jock Young in his studies on drug culture. For the purposes of this paper, we shall focus on the phenomenon in relation to popular commercial culture. We shall see in the end that moral panic directed against popular culture is not justified at all.

At least as far back as the 1790s in Great Britain, growing industrialization and urbanization, mass publication, and the creation of mass transit led to the birth of a nationwide commercial culture, in contrast to the communal pastimes that had previously provided entertainment. Even then there were those who railed against "the poison continually flowing thro' [sic] the channel of vulgar and licentious publications.” By the 1830s, British legislators were speaking out against penny gaffs, inexpensive plays with bawdy or sensationalist content, which were supposedly corrupting "the children of the lower classes" and leading them to crime. Thus, we see that moral panic is nothing new.

A classic example of moral panic was the crusade of Doctor Frederic R. Wertham against American comic books in the 1950s. Comic books were wildly popular in the 1940s and 1950s, having enjoyed widespread popularity among United States soldiers during the Second World War thanks to their colorful heroes fighting against the Axis powers. After the war, comics about masked mystery men fell out of popularity, to be replaced by comics about gangsters and supernatural horror – Tales from the Crypt, still popular today, got its start in this era, then published by EC Comics. A 1950 survey showed that 41 percent of American adult males and 28 percent of adult women regularly read comics; another survey in the same year revealed that 54 percent of comics readers were twenty years of age or older. Comics were even more popular among young people, however: 95 percent of boys and 91 percent of girls between the ages of six and eleven read comics, as did 80 percent of all teenagers.

During the war, the likes of Superman and Captain America had drawn criticism from parents for their might-makes-right message. Intellectuals viewed comics as a drug for children and the mentally deficient, keeping them occupied with colorful characters and black-and-white conflicts settled through brute force. This concern turned to outright panic with the ascendancy of horror and crime comics, which regularly portrayed cold-blooded murder, wanton sex, and supernatural elements such as occultism, vampirism, and walking corpses. Despite being sold to children, however, these stories were written with adults in mind. "We were writing for ourselves at our age level," recalled EC Comics editor and artist Al Feldstein in 1972.

Doctor Fredric Wertham abhorred all this. A German-born New York psychiatrist, Doctor Wertham believed that there was a direct link between comics and juvenile crime. A resident psychiatrist at the free Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, Wertham cared greatly for the mental health of children and was an ardent supporter of civil rights for people of color. Wertham drew many disturbing conclusions from his studies on comics and published them in his 1953 book, Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham was convinced that violent imagery led children to perform violent acts. For instance, one ten-year-old child he interviewed said:

"Once I saw in a science comic where this beast comes from Mars. It showed a man’s hand over his eyes and streams of blood coming down. I play a little rough with the kids sometimes. I don’t mean to hurt them. In a game I said I would gouge a child’s eyes out. I was playing that I was walking around and I jumped out at him. I scratched his face. Then I caught him and sucked the blood out of his throat. In another game I said, 'I’ll scratch your eyes out!'"

The boy later said, “I played such games because I got them from comic books.”

Wertham picked and chose his examples, however, often citing fringe comics with low readership and exceptionally gory content as the norm; none of them were from major, mainstream publishers like DC or Fawcett. He spoke at length about comics leading children to homosexuality, displaying the prejudices of his day. He condemned Batman and Robin for promoting a gay lifestyle and Wonder Woman for partaking in un-feminine activities. He went out of his way to attack the use of onomatopoeic words as "thunk" and "blam," apparently believing that they degraded children's reading skills.

Wertham also never addressed whether his case studies were true of delinquents across the board and tended to jump to conclusions without considering all evidence. His case studies were just a random assortment of juvenile delinquents who all just happened to read comic books.

Doctor Wertham’s accusations toward the comics industry weren’t all hyperbole. For instance, he was immensely troubled by the comics’ depiction of blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and other racial and ethnic minorities as sub-humans and savages. He was concerned with the hypersexualization of women in comic book stories and ads and the effect they had on girls’ self-image. Despite this, however, most of his declarations amounted to alarmist hype.

Regardless, people listened. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, already at odds with EC publisher Lev Gleason due to his leftist political leanings, turned an ear to Wertham. Despite one 1950 congressional hearing that found that crime was actually decreasing when crime comics were at their most popular, Wertham pushed on. A 1953 Senate hearing in which Wertham testified – described by a British comics authority as a show trial much like the anti-communist witch hunts of the era – ultimately fell in Wertham’s favor. In 1954, in response to veiled congressional threats of censorship, a group of major comics publishers formed the Comics Code Authority, a draconian self-censoring committee. Over 100 comics series were put out of publication due to failure to comply with CCA standards. The CCA essentially neutered the industry, reducing comics to harmless fluff for children. Comics sales would not begin to pick up until the introduction of Stan Lee’s popular characters at Marvel Comics in the early 1960s (the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, etc.), and comics written for adults would not appear again until the “underground” comics late in the same decade, and in either case the damage was done: Comics sales never rose above a fraction of what they were after the war, even to this day.

Japan in the 1980s and 1990s provides an interesting parallel to Wertham's America. Unlike America, comics in Japan (manga) never experienced significant censorship, and by the 1980s they were regarded as a mainstream medium for readers of all ages, much like television or video is in America. Toward the end of the 1980s, pornographic manga was as easily available as adult videos are in America, some of it containing elements of rorikon (from "Lolita complex") – child pornography. It was in this time and place that Tsutomu Miyazaki went on his killing spree.

The Miyazaki slayings would not be the only time the Japanese media turned the spotlight on manga. Media outcry against manga and anime (Japanese animation) repeated in 1995, due to their use as promotional tools by the doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyō. Aum's leader, Shōkō Asahara, directly lifted some of his ideology from popular science-fiction anime of the 1970s, such as Space Battleship Yamato and Future Boy Conan, and many of his converts were culled from the otaku subculture. Aum was responsible for the deaths of twelve people when they unleashed nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system. The idea that a fevered mind could draw such grisly plans from cartoons shocked parents.

Some claim that violent and sexual imagery in the media is leading to societal breakdown. For instance, one commentator claimed that adults and youth alike receive "inspiration" from television featuring "casual sex and filthy language," leading them to commit acts of molestation and adultery. The same source notes that in 1996, cases of STD infection, divorce rates, and television viewing were at an all-time high in America. Yet in Wertham's America, the rate of murders per year was at an all-time low when comics, then filling the niche that television fills today, were experiencing the highest sales they would ever attain. In Japan, comic books regularly portray acts of sex and violence that make anything American television has to offer seem tame in comparison; yet two 1994-5 studies on crime revealed that Japan experiences about one-tenth as many murders and one-fortieth as many rapes as the United States. Despite the constant barrage of sexuality in popular culture, dating back as far as the erotic ukiyo-e art of the 1600s, people in Japan continue to present an air of staidness and repression. As the commentator above himself admits, "No cause-and-effect relationship can be absolutely proven."

All too often, self-appointed moral guardians use popular culture as a scapegoat, an excuse not to deal with legitimate social problems such as poor education or poverty. Sensationalism is easy: A headline that reads “Gory video game turns boy into killer” sells more papers than “Lonely boy turns against classmates.” Hip-hop music, wildly popular among French youth (the country being the second largest market for the music after the United States) was blamed by some in the media for the devastating Paris riots of 2005, ignoring France’s long history of neglect towards its ethnic minorities. The rioters’ outrage may have been reflected in hip-hop, but it was fuelled by poverty and racism.

Throughout the ages and especially in the past few centuries, popular culture has been blamed for everything from individual acts of violence to the breakdown of society at large. Looking beyond this alarmist hype, however, we see that other forces are at play: Individuals’ personal experiences, cultural influences, and society’s own failure to look after its members. Moral panic, we see, is simply not warranted at all.

References:

Chagall, David. “Television – The Phantom Reality.” The Media & Morality. Ed. Robert M. Baird, William E. Loges, Stuart E. Rosenbaum. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1999. 259-76.

Dudley, William, ed. Opposing Viewpoints: Mass Media. Farmington Hills: Greenhaven Press, 2005.

McBride, James. “Hip-Hop Planet.” National Geographic. Apr. 2007: 100-19.

Perry, George, and Alan Aldridge. The Penguin Book of Comics. Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, Ltd. 1967.

Schodt, Frederik L. Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkley: Stone Bridge Press. 1996.

Springhall, John. Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830-1996. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1998.

Thompson, Jack. “Violent Video Games Promote Violence.” Opposing Viewpoints: Popular Culture. Ed. John Woodward. Farmington Hills: Greenhaven Press, 2005.

Wertham, Frederic. Seduction of the Innocent. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company. 1953.

On Subs vs. Dubs

The eternal debate in anime fandom. Do you watch it in the original Japanese with annoying English subtitles cluttering up the screen, or do you watch it with American voice "actors" hamming it up and stumbling over Japanese names? And if you like the one that I don't, what the hell's wrong with you?!?

Ultimately I think it's a moot point. If the show is popular enough to make it to the States, then the DVD will have both subbed and dubbed versions available to watch, so what's the problem? I think it may have to do with plain old self-centeredness. How dare you like something I don't? Of course, you don't really get a choice when it's on TV, and most new anime fans (myself included) enter the subculture through dubbed televised shows. I think this is why dubbed anime gets so much flak: It's all that's available for many people, and most of it terrible. I'm sorry, but it is. The American dubbing industry can't afford the best cast and crew (like Central Park Media), or just doesn't care enough to put in the effort (like 4Kids Entertainment).

Which segues into my next point, which is my personal preference. Well, truth be told, I really don't have a preference -- I take it on a case-by-case basis. Like I said, I think most dub jobs are crap, but there's the occasional gem that really shines out, like the American productions of Cowboy Bebop or (my favorite dub) Fullmetal Alchemist, not to mention Disney's star-studded dubs for Studio Ghibli's films (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle). Even if the quality of the dub ain't so hot, I occasionally get a kick out of it anyway -- for instance, I enjoyed the over-the-top old-school dub of Record of Lodoss War (I will forever hold a torch for Lisa-Ortiz-as-Deedlit-the-Elf); and while the acting on Azumanga Daioh was a little choppy, it was apparent that the voice actors loved their characters, and that gave it a real charm.

There are still instances where I prefer to watch anime with subtitles. Contrary to popular belief, I don't feel that Japanese voice actors are better (or worse) on the whole than their American counterparts, but when you're not fluent in the language, you just don't pick up on poor acting as easily as you do in your native tongue, and that helps when you're trying to immerse yourself in the show. Furthermore, generally speaking, I like seeing foreign film in the original language, and anime is no exception. A dub also really isn't an option when you're viewing the newest series -- last year, I followed The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Ouran High School Host Club (both of which I really ought to write posts about sometime) as each episode came out in Japan, so of course there was no dub yet. Of course, by the time I caught a clip of the American Haruhi Suzumiya dub, the original version was ingrained into my mind, and listening to American voices coming out of the characters' mouths just felt wrong.

One other factor, which is totally a footling point, is that it just creates an odd dissonance for me when characters who are Japanese are speaking English. It feels weird to me. On the other hand, if an anime series is set in, say, London (Hellsing) or the characters are all obviously Anglophones (Fullmetal Alchemist), hearing them speak English just feels more natural.

Pet Peeves

Originally this was meant to be a Thursday Thirteen post, of which I'd learned from Ragnell's Written Word, but after I finished I realized that A) the point was to come up with your own list of thirteen items, not copy the same theme from someone else (I have a history of leaping before I look), and B) it wasn't Thursday anymore. So I'm just posting this as is without the Thu13 code/formatting.

I may get in on the Thursday Thirteen meme when Thursday next rolls around, though. Might be good for me, giving me something to write about every week. Now that I'm back in English class after a year's absence, I need all the practice I can get.

Anyway. In no particular order, just as they popped into my head...

Thirteen Things that Bug the Crap Out of Me

1. Moe. Fucking moe. Er, the Japanese artistic aesthetic, that is. Not Moe Howard. For those not familiar, moe is an aesthetic that has been gaining ground in anime and manga over the last five or six years. The exact definition is debated, but for the most part moe seems to be about catering to (usually male) viewers' preferences or fetishes using (usually female) characters; often, the moe character is young, cute, innocent, nonthreatening, and designed to make the audience want to nurture her or cheer her on. Add on various fetishistic personality or physical traits, such as clumsiness, stubbornness, glasses, schoolgirl or maid uniform, and so on. Typically, a manga or anime series that relies on the moe aesthetic includes many different such characters with different traits, so as to attract as wide an audience as possible. Moe is ostensibly non-sexual on the creators' part by definition, though creepy otaku pedophiles always find a way to sexualize it.

In summary: Underage females who exist for no reason but to attract a male audience. I don't need to explain why that's so wrong.

2. Ken Akamatsu. Filthy pedophile. In fact, I might as well file all lolicon and shotacon under this heading. Akamatsu just stands out because he's so high-profile.

3. Whiny comic book fans. Look, people, I'm just as sad as you are that Blue Beetle is dead, but it's been three fucking years so shut your yaps and find something else to bitch about.

4. While I'm bashing Scans Daily -- rabid slashers. OMG BATMAN IS STANDING THREE FEET FROM TAHT GUY THEY ARE TEH GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!1111one!!!SQUEEEEEE Shut the hell up. Nothing against slash -- hell, I think Booster Gold and the Blue Beetle make a damn cute couple -- but come. on.

5. Any and all outdoors work, but especially raking leaves and shovelling snow.

6. John Byrne. 'Nuff said.

7. Otaku who think that Neon Genesis Evangelion is the greatest anime series of all time. Yes it was very well-written (at times) and yes Hideaki Anno is a very good director (at times), but the quality of the animation was sub-par, the characters all grate, and at times it was utterly obtuse. Evangelion is not the end-all be-all of world animation.

Patlabor is.

8. Hell, can I just list otaku in general? Anybody who willingly takes that label upon him- or herself has to have something wrong with them.

9. Ranma 1/2. I still can't believe I sat through nine seasons of that garbage.

10. Die-hard video gamers. I hate them. The ones who call you a "n00b" if your high score is just 3 less than theirs. The ones who think Penny Arcade is the funniest thing of all time. The ones who won't stop quoting that lame-ass "All your base are belong to us" shit. I hate them. They need to die. I want to kill them with fire.

11. Gratuitous Japanese used by American otaku (Baka kawaii snorlax!!!), and gratuitous English used in Japanese media. The superficial overuse of two beautiful languages by people who don't fully understand them irks me. I'm willing to give the Japanese a tad more leeway though, given how their culture was totally overshadowed by America's for decades. But it's still annoying.

12. Political pundits. Bill O'Reilly, Al Franken, Ann Coulter, Jon Stewart, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore... I don't care if they swing left, right, up, down, or all around -- these are the kind of obnoxious self-aggrandizing assholes whom we avoid like the plague at cocktail parties, so why should we have to tolerate them on our mass media?

Except for Stephen Colbert. He plays D&D. That makes him cool. "What's a 23rd-level magic-user? Just somebody you don't wanna mess with."

13. They Might Be Giants. I don't care how clever or meaningful their lyrics are, I don't care how quirky they are, I don't care that they teamed up with Homestar Runner once, and no offense to those who do like them -- I'm just not into them. You can take away my geek card now.

~~~

So there ya go.

(Still hoping to do that 52-meets-Evangelion post... if I can muster up the energy...)

To DC Comics...

Recently, DC Comics put out a (rather condescending) notice that it's trying to attract more female readers. There are a whole lot of women reading mainstream comics, but they're very much in the minority. Anyway, here is my response. It's largely made up of points made by other writers, but collected under a single header, with my own commentary and ideas.

1. The first one is the most obvious: Stop writing female characters as sex objects. There's nothing wrong with writing about a sexy woman as long as she's sexy on her own terms, so stop putting female characters in positions that "just happen" to show off their physical assets. Stop putting them in peril so the male characters can rescue them (why the hell does Mary Marvel get bound and gagged so often if she has the same powers as Captain Marvel, anyway?). And give them sensible outfits: It's okay for a female character to like how she looks and show off a bit, but what woman in the world with any ounce of self-respect would wear this abomination?

2. Also, stop using sexual harassment or romance as motivations for female characters to become heroes -- it's possible for women to do heroic things that aren't motivated by love or fear of/revenge for harassment. Don't have her trying to live up to her father (Lara Croft) or other male characters (Supergirl). The problem with all these things is that they tie the men in her life directly into the woman's story, rather than making her her own character.

3. We all know that mainstream comics are basically about adolescent male power fantasies. This isn't in and of itself a bad thing. But I ask you: Where are the adolescent female power fantasies? Many young girls dream about being a beautiful magical princess (and I cover that below), but many girls also would like to punch out whoever bothers them, perform amazing feats to the wonderment of onlookers, and just do good deeds for their own sake. And yet many of the best-known and longest-running female super-heroes are just lesser versions of male counterparts: Supergirl, Batgirl, Mary Marvel, etc. Even Wonder Woman, the greatest super-heroine, is not as strong as Superman (I like to think that her formal warrior training and magical weapons bring her up to his level, but still). That's the biggest problem with women in comics: They're strong, but never as strong as the men.

4. In the same vein, less female super-heroes with passive powers, like the Invisible Girl or Shadowcat from the X-Men. Admittedly, invisibility or walking through walls could be really cool in certain venues (Sue Storm would make an awesome secret agent, for instance), but not in mainstream comic books. There need to be more female super-heroes who can bench the Empire State Building and shoot frickin' lasers out of their eyes and such.

5. Combining items 1, 2, 3, and 4... Market the hell out of Wonder Woman. Seriously, Wonder Woman is the archetypal female super-hero. WW's one of the "Big Three," but her lack of mainstream exposure compared to Superman and Batman is inexcusable. Most people know her only from the campy '70s TV series with Linda Carter. Diana also has only one comics series, compared to Clark and Bruce, who each have three -- if we can have Superman and Action Comics and Batman and Detective Comics, why not bring back Sensation Comics? There needs to be a Wonder Woman movie franchise, animated series, lunchboxes (they still make lunchboxes, right?), underoos, etc., etc., etc. The public should know her story inside and out like they do Supes and Bats. Make people know her, love her, want to be her.

6. Get more female writers and artists. Really, women just tend to be better at writing women then men because, well, they are women. This is not to say that men should never write about women of course, just that female writers have a built-in perspective on the subject that male writers lack. Come on, Gail Simone can't do it all herself.

7. Create an imprint for importing Japanese manga, including many shoujo titles. This one's a no-brainer, and DC's already doing it with their CMX imprint. The biggest problem I see is finding any really good manga titles before the existing American publishers gobble them all up and glut the market.

8. Publish more comics in the trade paperback format and sell them in bookstores rather than monthly 22-page pamphlets in comic book shops. Not many girls go to comic book shops for reasons that are pretty much obvious: they tend to be dark, dirty, and frequented by creepy male nerds. As such, they just can't easily reach female readers. (The things comics shops can do to make themselves more female-friendly is a topic for another time.) But if major companies were to publish their comics in the same format and put them one shelf over from Inu-Yasha, a lot more girls would take notice. Again, DC is already doing this, with their (poorly-named, IMO) Minx imprint.

9. Bring back Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. Not all female heroes need to be about smashing things. As Neil Gaiman noted in The Sandman: A Game of You, normal girls who find out that they're really beautiful princesses are a very important archetype in fiction, going back at least as far as Cinderella. There is a reason that Sailor Moon was so popular, after all. Amethyst would be a perfect gateway for young girls interested in comics, and the fantasy setting could attract even more readers from different demographics. And hey -- princesses and power fantasies don't have to be mutually exclusive. Amethyst could be a magical princess who kicks righteous ass. Why not?

10. Three words: Green Lantern butts. Okay, okay, I'm kidding. But really, a little "manservice" for the ladies now and then wouldn't hurt. Just use it sparingly, because while it's good for an ironic chuckle now and then, it gets old fast.

So there you go.