This Week in Anime - Call Your Mother

1 week ago 18

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Lucas and Sylvia give a salute to as many anime moms as they can fit in one column.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Crunchyroll streams 100 Girlfriends, Char's Counterattack, Chihayafuru, DARLING in the FRANXX, Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?, ERASED, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, JoJo's: Diamond is Unbreakable, Journal with Witch, Kill la Kill, March comes in like a lion, One Piece, Spy Family, Umamusume, and Witch from Mercury.
Netflix streams Evangelion.
Shonen Jump app provides One Piece manga.
Tubi streams Maquia.
Flip Flappers and Heybot! are not available to stream Stateside.

Lucas
Sylvia, it's Mother's Day in much of the world as we're writing today's column, even as my mom and my grandmothers have a very limited understanding of what I do for work, they all wish you and me well! To express my appreciation for them and moms everywhere, I think we should dedicate today's column to some of the most iconic moms in anime!

Also, much of the anime world is already getting in on this celebration, and I'll be damned if the TWIA crew (comprised of some of the biggest anime women appreciators around) doesn't get in on the festivities too!

Sylvia
That's right, Lucas. This one is for the moms. All of them. Granted, we probably won't be able to name them all in a single column, nor would that make for a very good column, but we're going to do our best with the time and space allotted. And hey, if we miss your favorite mom, sound off with her in the comments. This is a safe space for moms.

I see we're starting this column off with the mother (ba-dum tss) of all anime moms and the shows they exist in, Mamako (yes, really) from Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?!

Look, if we're going to talk about anime moms, we might as well start with the anime mom whose entire personality and character motivation is that she's an anime mom. We can accuse Do You Love Your Mom of many things (and I have), but it is not a series that tells lies to its audience.

Sylvia, I want you to know that you getting to review this anime week to week as it aired is the most jealous I've ever been of you.

The thing about Do You Love Your Mom in my estimation is that, while it's not necessarily "good," it is interesting in a way that almost makes it better than its more celebrated contemporaries. The entire show can be boiled down to the premise of "what if an isekai protagonist's mom traveled with him into a video game world?" and it pretty thoroughly explores that idea in these twelve episodes (plus a bonus beach episode). However, a mom being allowed to participate in this kind of story makes Mamako and Do You Love Your Mom feel novel, if not revelatory, in a media landscape where so many women's stories end with motherhood.

True! The series could have pushed that angle harder and into more interesting directions, for sure, but that potential counts for something. Even if it's mostly used to put the protagonist into situations like this one.

And Mamako's presence in the action of the plot certainly stands out from the crowd of anime moms who find themselves doomed to lesser side roles, which are typically off-screen and often in absentia. Because they're usually dead.

No knock on Fullmetal Alchemist, but for whatever reason, when I think Dead Anime Mom, the picture that pops into my mind's eye is Trisha Elric.

I see where you're coming from, and WILL knock Fullmetal Alchemist because anime and anime-adjacent media fridging or relegating motherly characters to the background is super annoying and a longstanding sexist trope in fiction. Trisha Elric motivates the inciting event behind the protagonists of FMA, and it's always bothered me that her character is so one-dimensional.

Like, Eichiro Oda's One Piece is an infinitely more sexist piece of media than FMA, but at least he had the foresight to make that series' first dead mom, BELLE-mère, cool and actively participate in the narrative.

Plus, he gave her a great haircut. I crushed on her the minute she appeared in the manga. You don't see a lot of anime moms with...whatever you call this. A pseudo-mohawk? It kicks ass regardless.

By contrast, I guess Trisha Elric feels so archetypal because she's got the Anime Mom Hair. You know, the tied-off side ponytail that rests on her shoulder. It's a sure sign that things are terminal.

She's literally costumed like a mom from the Pokémon games! Which is a character that's explicitly designed to be instantly recognizable in their motherhood, but then instantly forgotten about as the story begins! FMA's treatment of Trisha is such a bummer for a series that otherwise has a rock-solid grasp on character writing.

Now, if we want to talk about some anime moms that play pivotal roles in their story without outright abandoning their maternal framing, I can't think of a better character than Sachiko from ERASED.

(Thanks to ANN's own Rebecca Silverman for highlighting this character during our planning chat!)

Now that's a good mom! And I'm not just saying that because she smokes and because I'm a degenerate.

But she's also great because ERASED is a story about parents and systems failing children when they need help the most. Sachiko, on the other hand, feels like a grounded portrait of a single mom struggling yet doing her best.

Sachiko really is one of the best representations of the dedication and sacrifice inherent to motherhood in anime. Beyond acting as an exemplary parent to multiple characters who need to see that example throughout the show, she also cares for a comatose Satoru, meaning the show's final (and best) twist could not happen without her.

But also, her smoking and having a bit of attitude are also a big part of what makes this character work so well! ERASED easily could have been a time-travel power fantasy where the main character heroically prevents his mom's death and other tragedies along the way, but because Sachiko participates in the story and is more than a cardboard cutout of a mom, the work is made so much better explicitly because of her inclusion.

That's a very sweet and touching point, which is why I feel compelled to ruin the moment by mentioning the muscle mom from Heybot! right now.

Don't really have a deeper thematic point here. I just wanted to mention Heybot!.

Hey, I am all for including moms of different aesthetics and body shapes in this column! Sometimes moms are distinctly mom-shaped and stylized, sometimes moms rock a six pack and hair that she can punch people with, and sometimes moms are the coolest (meat) mechs you've ever seen!

To this day, I'm still not sure why Shinji's mom, Yui, has her soul inside of EVA Unit-01, but it's in there, and that means one of the most visually striking and influential character designs in all of anime is a mom!

You can't talk about Evangelion without talking about motherhood. And fatherhood. And a lot of other things. But the motherhood part in particular is as Freudian as it gets. Piloting the Eva means Shinji literally crawls back into his mother's womb, amniotic fluid and everything.

And Yui is far from the only mom in that series. Misato acts as a kind of surrogate mother to Shinji and Asuka. Asuka's mom looms over her like a ghost, similar to Yui over Shinji. And one of the more memorable episodes deals with Ritsuko's checkered relationship with her mom, who, like Yui, transcends humanity in her own way by putting together Nerv's supercomputer. Just a whole lot going on here.

Not to mention the whole "Rei is a clone of Shinji's mom" thing. That's also kinda relevant.

I know that no work of fiction can be a complete encapsulation of the human experience, but my god does Evangelion get close with its consistent and informed depictions of parenthood and how these imperfect people mold the lovable but broken teenage cast at the center of the show. I know this is a cynical view of parenthood, but if a mother or father's primary responsibility is to mitigate the amount of trauma their child inherits, Evangelion is a great look at how kids inevitably take on some degree of their parents' damage.

Many such cases. Although I am admittedly partial to stories like Evangelion that sublimate these themes into a high-concept and often prickly package, there's plenty of straightforwardly poignant art about being/having a mother. Anime in particular should be allowed to get weird with it once in a while. Like with Flip Flappers, which touches on the experience of marrying your girlfriend and fighting your mom in surreal magical girl combat.

© FliFla Project	© FliFla Project
© FliFla Project	© FliFla Project

Also, your girlfriend knew your mom, got age-regressed, and then it's also heavily implied that she might have eaten your placenta. Just normal girl/mom stuff.

That might be the first description I've ever heard of Flip Flappers after hearing people praise the show for years now, and I understand why nobody ever bothered to explain to me what Flip Flappers is about. That is incredible, and it is now at the top of my backlog!

Do we know why the mom in Flip Flappers is evil? Is there a confirmed homophobia element, or am I signing up for 12+ episodes of inspired and affecting symbolism???

Buddy, Flip Flappers needs an entire column and then some if you want to know everything that's going on here (and maybe we should do that at some point; it does turn 10 this year). But trust me, it's good.

We don't have to keep things complicated here, though. Sometimes, a girl has a mom. Sometimes, that girl is a horse. And sometimes, that horse girl has two moms. This is normal and good, and we love to see it.

So the Uma Musume girls hooking up is real and not just something I see from time to time on my alt-account! Awesome and inclusive!

searches the internet briefly

Oh, so this is a "raise my friend's daughter as her dying wish" situation. That's a little less cool, but I'll take even implied lesbian mom rep from anime, considering the well of anime that depict two women coparenting is pretty shallow.

Look, you can't convince me this woman isn't a lesbian. They knew what they were doing.

Well, she does have the backwards baseball cap vouching for her. I can't argue with that.

Though if we're taking lesbian mom rep in anime where we can find it, Hahari from The 100 Girlfrineds Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You is absolutely in a lesbian relationship with her maid, Mei Meido, even if Mei is too polite to make that clear to her and the both of them are in a polycule with a teenage boy and Hahari's biological daughter.

Yeah, that all sounds about right for 100 Girlfriends. They're always innovating over there.

"Mom" can also be a state of mind, not just a consequence of a biological relation. Akari from March comes in like a lion fits that mold as the oldest of three sisters, who takes it upon herself to raise them after her mom's death. She ends up being a maternal figure for the protagonist, Rei, too. Look, she's even got The Hair.

March is very good at making her a compelling and three-dimensional character, though. She's not a matronly cipher. She works as a hostess. She struggles to support her family while also helping them with their own issues. I think it's a great and nuanced portrait of a "non-traditional" motherhood.

While I bounced off of March comes in like a lion (or perhaps a college anime club wasn't the ideal setting to experience this kind of work), I've heard nothing but good things about it, and I'm glad its compassionate character writing runs deep!

Speaking of more grounded depictions of motherhood in anime, I'd love to bring up Haruka Inokuma from Chihayafuru who, to my knowledge, is the only anime character shown juggling the maternal responsibility of breastfeeding with other parts of her life.

ANN contributor Lauren Orsini's write-up of this character, her experiences, and how a lot of moms can relate to them for Anime Feminist does a better job of explaining why and how this character and this exploration of motherhood is important better than I ever could, and I encourage everyone reading this to go check out Lauren's article.

One of many reasons why Chihayafuru is the best!

It's also worth noting that series like March comes in like a lion and Chihayafuru might hit differently because they are written by women who are commenting on motherhood. I'm also thinking of Mari Okada's directorial debut, which is a movie singularly dedicated to Mom Feelings.

We've got a whole column on that, of course.

Oh, we've gone from moms in anime to mom movies! I love the escalation and hope we see a lot more of both in this industry.

As we get to the tail end of this column, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the undisputed most popular anime mom of the 2020s, Yor Forger from SPY x FAMILY. A secret assassin, adoptive mother to Anya, and fake wife to the (unknown to her) spy Loid; Yor's character is less about motherhood and more about fitting into a found family when you're a person living outside the norms of society. However, she's also the first character a lot of folks will think of when you say "anime mom" nowadays, so she at least deserves a shoutout.

Plus, she is an absolute freak in all the best ways in the early parts of SPY x FAMILY, and we respect that here!

True, it's difficult to compete with Yor's popularity. But in my books, when I think about contemporary anime moms, I have to (yet again) bring up Journal with Witch. It's such a rich and complex portrait of many of life's facets, but motherhood is one of its chief concerns, explored both through Makio and her deceased sister.

Like, for all the anime moms that exist out there, Journal with Witch is one of the few examples that prompted a real discussion with my own real mom. That counts for something.

Now, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, there's all of the mom stuff in Gundam. Which is mostly just very funny.

Nothing weird and psychosexual happening here, nope.

Oh, wait, we forgot to talk about bad moms in anime!!!

Suletta's mom in Gwitch, Prospera, built a giant robot that runs on the souls of her cloned babies! That's like, advanced evil!!!

What's a baby fuel here and there? It's fiiiine.

Kill la Kill has another sterling example of a mom who is as normal as can be to her daughters.

Haha, is anybody normal about anything or anyone in Kill la Kill?

And I also remember thinking that Hayato's mom in JJBA: Diamond is Unbreakable, Shinobu Kawajiri, is a great example of someone who became a parent too early, and grew frustrated and bored with her daily life to the point where a serial killer replacing her husband provided more of a jolt of excitement than a cause for concern.

And if we want to get really regressive about the concepts of motherhood, gender, and just human existence in general, there's always DARLING in the FRANXX.

RIP, Shinzo Abe.

All right DARLING in the FRANXX popping up in a TWIA column is the anime equivalent of your conservative uncle starting to pop off about politics at the family function, time to shut it down, people!

If you're a mom, we hope you enjoyed this column and that you had a great Mother's Day! If you're not a mom (but have one and have a good relationship with her), we hope you liked this column as well and encourage you to call her! She loves you, and she'd appreciate that!

And if you're an aspiring anime mom, be sure to practice your "ara ara"s. Or else.