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Does it, though?
The main criticism of Shonen appears to be that this genre "does women dirty"; and beyond that, these bonafide "critics" have got nothing. Looking at Naruto, I'm going to say something controversial: it's got a neutral position; it's not particularly offensive to female characters, but it's not particularly progressive, either, when it comes to "gender roles"—or whatever that means in the narrative context.
If you look at Naruto's female characters, all of the main ones have defined character arcs. Every single one. You may not like them, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end that make up a character's resolution—or a climax, at the very least. Tsunade's arc is that of a dejected alcoholic who lost everything but came around and took the reins of her grandfather's—uh, tree that grew from a seed? Sounds lame, but that's how it is as it's metaphorically connected to the death of her brother and lover. Chiyo neglected her grandson, egged on Rasa to place the Bijuu inside Gaara, and didn't do anything to remedy the terrible fall-out. In the end, she accepted that she couldn't save Sasori, but she saved Gaara. So she did what she could, because, sometimes, you've got to live with the consequences and that's what she chose; well, she gave up her life, but she gave it after this acceptance. (Why isn't she dragged for her despicable stance on the whole Bijuu affair is beyond me, only Rasa is, when he was pinned down by her and her power over the council; she had him in a political choke-hold that he was left with no choice but to give in; mind you, Rasa didn't make a single attempt on Gaara's life before he didn't kill probably half the village.)
Sakura was shown as an insecure, a mean-spirited girl with a bag of self-esteem issues that couldn't be remedied as, whilst she's talented, she felt inadequate to match up to Sasuke and gain his affections. She worked hard to gain ground as a medic; sure, she didn't overcome her nature, but then again, not everyone does; with her, it's "you win some and you lose some", and that's life. She's also extremely immature (no clue where the "she's the most mature member of Cell-7" claims even come from as she's got zilch to offer in regard to any political set-up at any point in the manga; she's fairly harebrained in this department, and that's canon); usually in over her head, which is why she hurls herself head-first into hairy situations and thinks later—or never; and she's massively overconfident, another reason why she lands face-first to the ground when she tries to take on opponents that are well-beyond her pay-grade; she's not much of a fighter, but she tries—very hard to be one. Part of the reason is that she's young, and another is that that's...how she is.
Now, you can consider this bad writing, but I don't as overconfidence is one of the leading causes of people world-over making colossal blunders and, at times, paying with their lives, and Sakura's no different. It's not a gender issue—it's a human issue; and let's face it, none of you would've been emotionally traumatized, developed a cptsd over it, had a male character gone through these motions. It's expected of men to be shamed and bear through it, no, if they don't toe the line (which is why Sasuke's the irrational to Itachi/Kakashi/Tobirama's rational male; almost sounds like that MRA infested podcast, too)? Women should always be rewarded for some reason or another if they try and climb capitalism's ladder and kick those below them, girl-boss their way up to new peaks, you know? It's almost as if, it's patriarchy, but we'd get to that later.
Ino is along the lines of a Sakura that's more put together: she's confident, free-spirited, and popular; she's basically what Sakura wants to be; and during her arc, she becomes the figure that keeps others in line as she, according to Asuma, is the most mature member of their team; and unlike Sakura, she's got her shit together, doesn't seek attention, and knows how and when to pick her battles—like I said, she's Sakura, only put together. (I challenge anyone to prove to me that Shikamaru isn't a fucking terribly written character; he's got nothing to offer to the narrative, squat, in fact; and, frankly, his intelligence is vastly exaggerated; and the only reason he's popular with this deplorable fandom is its dreadful tendency to believe that it's like Shikamaru, "If I just put my mind to things and stop procrastinating, I, too, am a genius; Shikamaru's just like me, fr!")
Karin's part Ino and part Sakura, only brash, quite bold and a little lecherous—hey, come on, now; you know it's true. She's basically what Sakura and Ino try to hide with great desperation; and where Ino, at least, is honest with herself, Sakura (and her fandom) wraps up her lustiness in the "virtues of lurrvee" but only manages to tick Sasuke off; and, I don't know, but she gives massive cuck vibes to me (another topic for another day); Karin basically kills this hypocrisy with her blatant objectification of Sasuke, and she's not particularly shy about it, either. She thinks what she wants (she stole Sasuke's sweaty shirt to diddle herself, for Lord's sake, and isn't afraid to speak her mind in front of him; she's basically how Sakura Fandom write Sakura to be like in their abysmal Sakura-Centric endeavours) and is surprisingly clever about the world about her. She's the saboteur, "I take no shit from no one", and the "bad-arse bitch" that Sakura Fandom turns Sakura into. Basically, she, Nagato, and Kushina showcase what the Uzumaki Clan could've been like, unlike Naruto; so that's interesting in that she's the female lead Sakura Fandom want Sakura to be like and the male lead Naruto Fandom think Naruto is, with all the Uzumaki perks that Naruto Fandom's mad about that he doesn't have. (I could've used Nagato here as a case-in-point, but he's not only older but also quite out of Naruto's league, so Karin fits more here as she's from his age-group.)
Hinata, albeit I don't like her, does have an arc. Blasphemy, I know, but it's there, and you can't ignore it. She's shown to be untalented, a pushover, and a very shy individual who can't seem to find any place to belong because she's so…plain in every sense of the world—yes, including her looks. Newsflash: Kishimoto never wrote The Last; SP did; so now, you all can hold a vigil to mourn that version of Hime-Chan that doesn't exist in Kishimoto's canon. (Sorry, Naruto meat-beaters, but "beauty Hinata" is just your fanon as she literally committed suicide for Naruto to notice her, and he didn't; heck, she's been referred to as plain and crumpy by Kishimoto and a freak by Naruto; if you haven't noticed, then she's never, uh, noticed by anyone, which is why she's able to effortlessly blend in and follow Naruto around; her plainness isn't an accident; it's who she is.)
In the end, she got a little better and learned…uh, a thing or two (sorta?) and tried her best to support Naruto; this is the best you can hope for someone like Hinata, a girl who's simply too plain in all walks of life, someone who got her teeth kicked in regularly by a sibling five years her junior. I'm not sure what's there to fix as her being less-than-mediocre is how her character is constructed; and you can't simply grow out of being that, because not every story is the story of "the ugly duckling that transforms into a swan"; many a time, the ugly duckling just grows up into an ugly swan, and, to utilise the "therapy speak", that's O-K.
Tenten is—all right, she's garbage, so you got me there; but so are Kiba and Shino and many others; they barely have any personalities. They're just colourful caricatures that add more oomph to the narrative, make its world feel alive as it makes no sense to delve deep into everyone's smaller world within the larger world. That's just how it is in narratives—even real life. Some people eclipse us, like Sasuke and his Clan eclipse that world.
So, after that detour, we can venture a safe guess that the female characters are in no way narratively thin compared to their male counterparts (yes, they might not be in focus, but that's a separate debate altogether); where they lose worth are the battles; and as it's Shonen, it makes a big difference as flashy battles are everything in this genre. They make or break your manga!
Now, why do you think that is? Let me use an example to elaborate on this, one that most people would get: the Tomb Raider Reboot Games (TR) have fairly brutal deaths; the most infamous one being the "impalement" in the rushing waters; and the way she's impaled is that the broken pipe goes through her mouth and comes out the back of her head; she thrashes about and tries to pull out the pipe, but, naturally, in vain and dies a fairly horrible death. Yes, it's bad, but is it that bad in the grand scheme of "shocking videogame (VG) deaths", enough to label this as torture pornography (TP)? Think!
If you aren't aware of this, you can just youtube it. Now, most people who're avid gamers or into the horror genre would be aware of the Dead Space (DS) series; and boy, are the death scenes in those games absolutely harrowing; its step-brother, made by the same development team after EA disbanded it, The Callisto Protocol (TCP), one-ups even that in spite of DS's Remake, which EA put out very strategically to shut down TCP. Evil Within? The manner in which Laura murders Sebastian if she catches hold of him? That's extremely brutal; she just bashes his face in with the palm of her very large hand—literally; and these are just few of the examples in this regard. (Still Wakes the Deep would be yet another one of the latest examples in which the male characters go through extremely grotesque transformations, and albeit they're assimilated into the creature off-screen, their bodies are utterly brutalised, another aspect it has in common with TCP.) You can bring up Alien: Isolation (AI) in this regard, but the deaths happen off-screen—most of them save the one in which she gets impaled through the belly; you see the spiked-tail sticking out from there, but that's it; it's a top-down view as the game is in first person, as in she's looking down at her own belly. You don't see much of the brutality; it's very muted. (Mortal Kombat games are an exception to the rule in which the fatal attacks aren't gender-specific.)
That AI example aside, can you hear the outrage that's directed towards the treatment of Sebastian, Issac, Jacob, etc. in these VGs? The naysayers clamouring that the games have gone too far? That perhaps this violence and brutality against men needs to be toned down a wee bit? Crickets—no? Well, there's your answer as no matter how much the female readers, and their faux-leftist white-knights, claim that they want to be involved in violence, they're pretty two-faced in regard to bracing the brunt of that violence.
Another good example, a real-world one, would be how the IDF women are treated in western media: when they're brutalising the black/brown people somewhere over there in some scary sounding country, even subjecting them to sexual violence, they're girl-bosses; the moment that violence is aimed towards them, suddenly, they're fragile women, instantly infantilized and turned into victims. It's almost as if women can only dole out brutality and not take it in the domain of liberal/pop/white feminism.
That presents an interesting facet of fascistic military idealism, Capitalism's strong-arm, in which women exist as "tough but fragile and dainty" face of the military/capitalism, ones who are there to sell the military as hip, cool, and sexy and not receive the blow-back from the opposition; and as nothing in media is non-political (it can be apolitical at times, but you can still see biases there, too), this very same mentality exists in what these women want to see: avatars of themselves engage in repressive violence, but not experience the consequences of the said violence; they want to take charge but not face the music when the chickens come home to roost. (It's not a surprise that "believe women" and "don't mansplain me" are being predictably and thoroughly weaponized by white women in pro-Israel and pro-imperialism spaces to shut down discussions that question the authenticity of sexual violence claims against conscripts, the "innocents" of a theocratic fascist state, and legitimize the use of violence against these women, who, for all intents and purposes, are military personal and settler-colonials and fair targets.)
The interpretive aspects of these politics, socio-political, penetrate all life aspects, and you have this hysterical lot on your hands that's only cool with female characters murdering people, mostly men who challenge their (very white-centric) supremacy, left, right, and centre irrespective of context and not being shown the same courtesy in return. Why else are you lot under the impression that Sakura beating up Sasori, though she got beat up far more, is "female agency", yet Sasuke grabbing her by the throat is suddenly misogyny, lack of agency, and wife-battery or something? (They so want her to beat him up, "humble him," in their words; and it's always the minority-coded characters that attack back to safeguard their lives for some reason; it ought to make you equally suspicious and curious.)
It's not hard to see that her lack of agency, apparently, is proportional to her lack of ability to inflict violence; if the target, unlike Sai, retaliates, the mangaka is not only a misogynist but is also using male-centric devices in the narrative, of which Sasuke is a "prime candidate", to reinforce that concept. As farcical as this sounds, this, may Allah save us all, is actual discourse that plagues all white-feminist spaces. Has your mind blown yet? Cream-pied by Itachi's brand of fishy philosophy to transmute and assimilate the sins Jesus died for? Oh and, their reverence of military women is so fucking laughable, entirely despicable, like you're generally dealing with someone so entirely brain-dead, especially when all the alt-right, fascist, and/or nazi organisations/movements in the west, basically, are populated by ex-military veterans (Captain Marvel is one long Airforce commercial that not only resulted in a massive rise in recruitments, like Top Gun, but also made over a billion dollars at the box office; so white feminism's blood-lust and its penchant for selling it as barely concealed white supremacy and racism isn't anything surprising, because these are the "heroes" their women want to become); but they use and abuse female-quota-system military-inductions in their grandiose fix-its, the likes of which spit in the face of Shakespeare's glory, as some bedrock of "commie feminism that'd liberate cartoon women, the true proletariat, in and out of manga/anime", even when the manga itself criticizes it relentlessly and via many case-in-points (we don't talk about the ending on here). I mean, who else would liberate us from the shackles of patriarchy if not these rancid, politically illiterate FF writers, whose go-to source of knowledge on politics are hallowed ventures like Kill Your Heroes? Believe it!
Is there any reality to this? No, it's simply benign sexism: women deserve power but not the consequences of that power; they can be the chaste faces to sell this system, but they can't be made to pay for the propagation of that system; they're complicit in the fascistic system, however, they should also be kept safe from the comeuppance that's simply a matter of inevitability; they can engage in battles, but not be made to experience retaliatory violence; etc. In fact, no one affected by that violence, somehow, is allowed to put their heads under the guillotine of justice, proverbial or real. You know, make things equal, politically or otherwise for long- or short-term wins.
It isn't even about something as big as the military; it's about how this entire premise is approached; and over and over again, it's the same thing: women shouldn't be brutalised as if they're some sort of protected class that can't be touched regardless of their actions, status, and/or privilege; and as privileged women interact with these media, it gives an ugly racial spin to the entire thing, because then, not all people/cultures are equal; or so they say, and you've got to protect these poor women from the "barbarian hordes" that come for them, after all. Only if they win, show the "savages" who's boss, is the mangaka/writer freed from the charge of sexism; the moment they're shown to go through the violence of their own making, an outrage occurs. It's almost as if we've all normalised the notion of the brutalisation of men, especially if they're minority-coded like Sasuke is. It can happen in lurid details and no one bats an eye. In fact, how many have been shocked at the various people, characters even, choking out child Sasuke, victim of genocide who's being severely beaten in that specific meme? Heck, we also have this pedophilic image as part of the joke, to make things extra spicy. (You can check the image and the links on AO3.)
Even sexually charged imagery like the one above is acceptable as long as it's a male character (Kotaku included it in their article, when this is child pornography; I'm not even being fast and loose with this term as it's literally just that; and you can also see that "alexis moore" chick in the list, as well, the one who drew that tacky, tasteless, and trashy "beheading of Sasuke" painting, one in which he's only fifteen, so it's just TP that involves a minor; yes, the very same unhinged cunt, apex of white trash). Flip the tables and change Sasuke's sex, and tell me, with complete honesty, how many would've found any of this palatable? Not many. It's strange how, in spite of their claims, all of these "feminist types" abide and swear by patriarchy: violence being a male domain, even its reception. So why on earth would the male writers go through the headaches of writing battles in which female characters lose, especially when the male characters lose all the time and are brutalised in intimate details during that loss. (Look no further than what Itachi did to Sasuke—even Kakashi: he stabbed him over and over again for 3 days and nights; replace that with, say, Kurenai, and you'd have a pathetic mob at your heels, hollering about how "she was done dirty during this TP", especially when a little kick from Itachi still has this "feminist mob" snivelling about the sexist nature of writing.)
And when they're given a change to expand on these characters—and I say that very loosely, given their petty tendency to over-engage in romance and capitalistic notions of desirability as they lack that very specific male validation in real life—all they do is "fix" the scenes in question to "humble" these men through extreme violence, even torture; and how do they fix them? They make a platoon of powerful men, who're also very hot, grovel by their feet, validate their every action, and beat up the men who even so much as slighted them at their command. (I'm shocked that Itachi in Kill Your Heroes didn't take off his Akatsuki robes and wipe Sakura's shit-stained arse; all the ingredients for this "commie emancipation of cartoon women" recipe are there.) Men are turned into mutts-cum-sexually-available-objects that exist to function at the my-manga-stand-in's beck and call; basically, their fixing mechanics involve extreme sexualization and brutalization of men, which is dependent on the categorization they choose for them in regard to the validation of their "desirability factor" and whether they showed restraint when the moment came to inflict violence on them; you know, "she was so beautiful, special, and different that he just couldn't do it!" trope that exists in every fucking romance they wallow in. In all honesty, the perpetuity of "not like the other girls" that's kept alive and well in this media landscape that's so fucking patriarchal that, even if you play in the sewage that's white feminism, you can't pretend that it's not there. (Why else is Kage Summit Arc's Sasuke so hated? The dasher of a Sakura Wanker's smelly, wet dreams? The steeple of their goals? He didn't think she was "not like the other girls" and was ready to cave her mug in, without hesitation; she was "just another girl to him"; whoopsie!)
And here's a thing before I run ahead and say more: you're not automatically on the left just because some guy was mean to you in any space, domestic or otherwise. To put it simply, you don't turn into Che Guevara simply because some gamer chud called you a name over twitch chat or some brown guy punched you as you invaded his homeland/attacked you back. Why's this even a thing? Really, it's A-OK to accept that, many a time, these women are just...bitches. That's it! This isn't how it works; otherwise, we'd be dealing with more Brianna Wu types in every space. A perpetual victim of the fiasco that was the Gamer Gate (GG, a chud-brigade gift that never stops giving), when she's, for the lack of better words, just a white supremacist who spends her "valuable hours" these days to cash in on this "white women tears and their victim-hood" phenomenon from the GG era and doesn't stop flapping her useless gums about how mean the left is to her in regard to the genocide; that how trans activism has gone too far; and that, maybe, we need to apply brakes on the whole thing for "normal people" like her. Okay? Not sure who asked her to air her laundry, but we have to listen to her, because "you should listen and respect all women", for some reason? Frankly, there are too many of these Wu-type cunts in fandom spaces, the "normal ones" that pass of their supremacy under the guise of "leftist discourse".
That's why Intersectional Feminism is so unappealing to these harpies; because that'd require them to locate these women (and by extension themselves) in the domain of privilege and find context to the violence that they're subjected to—in reaction; however, they simply work night and day to deconstruct all the manga scenes that sully their "lofty choice-feminism" clichés and restructure them to helm patriarchy and do it like "girl bosses" in men's stead, because vag equals left, don'tchya know? You can be just like men but get away with it as progress is when "more female prison guards, CIA ghouls, and military killers" and not the end of patriarchal institutions; and it's this same pigshit mentality that they drag to every single media discourse, a tendency to find pay-offs for their hard-earned investments (time and money) in this capitalistic machine. Let's not pretend that the deliberate overlooking of Tsunade's direct involvement in choking out Ame's lifeline and butchering and starving people for her cause and Chiyo's influence that resulted in misery for Gaara happen without reason; it's yet another aspect of "women are good" that infects patriarchal spaces; but, and make sure you're sitting down for this one because it's heavy, it's O-K for women to eat shit from time to time, especially if they're chummy with capitalism; then they can eat more than just turd. (This reminds me of when violent protests broke out in France in retaliation to the killing of a seventeen-year-old in cold blood by the police; the white feminists were quick to come out and claim, "it's always the men" when the hopeless youth that are systematically killed by the state apparatus torched public property. They weren't concerned with why the young men were doing any of that but that they're "violent and brown and men", when over a million dollars were accumulated over gofundme to facilitate the officer who got fired, sending a clear message that you can kill minorities and hit the jackpot; and that, my friends, is the crux of white feminism and its fascism that's merely rebranded to give white women a turn to be unrepentant racists. Just absolute maggots, this lot.)
And if they're not screeching about that and having an existential crisis over their cartoon lives, they can't resist to locate everything under the unending and vast umbrella of "she's following a man, so her agency is irrelevant"; never mind the obvious fact that people live in communities and that, naturally, would compel them to attach themselves to the individuals around them, which could be fathers, brothers, sons, lovers, etc. Is that too hard to imagine? Is there no ventilation system in your musty basements to bring in the communal air from the outside alien-world that's foreign to your shipper brain-rot? Some grass to touch? Fucking anything? (Konan catches a lot of heat for that, when it takes two seconds to figure it out that her shared experience with Nagato and Yahiko allowed them all to follow the same philosophy and not "she follows a man, so she's dumb, fam!"; even the "feminist extraordinaire" Tsunade is given shit for daring to love her brother and lover for some reason; which is very funny as this same crowd is comically obsessed with the romance genre, to the point that that's all it writes in its spare time, slavering over endless possibilities to be fictionally validated, considered important to the point of tragedy.) But hey, they can't locate intersectionality even if it deposited shit in their mouths, which splooshed out of their nostrils (hentai style), and cling to liberalism's hyper individualism, but only to the point when they themselves don't have to suffer through the consequences, so...what can you do?
In the end, I'd say this: why's it so difficult to imagine that male writers, most of them, anyway, who want to bypass this mess can only accomplish that via not having female characters in the focus? That we've internalised patriarchy to such a degree that we still pedestalize women and expect them to be treated as the weaker, fairer, and daintier sex that deserves protection regardless of how much violence it doles out? That we fully expect violence against men, extreme violence, even sexual violence, but not women? This is what happens when you don't contextualise the reasons behind these absurd demands; and until we don't recognise the intrinsic reasons behind this uproar, we'd keep running in circles, or coddling Tobirama's ball-sack to reach liberal nirvana. Make your choice!
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