[Matrim]

I've always enjoyed studying how gender roles are portrayed in anime. As a gaijin with little or no exposure to Japanese culture and mores before watching anime, I wasn't prepared for the frequent appearance of feminist themes in many series aimed at girls and women. I thought of Japan as a place where traditional gender roles still held sway and expected to see girls and women portrayed more submissively than in American programming.

Still the series depicting such themes are few compared to the myriad of series full of over the top fanservice, blushing moe girls, one-dimensional tsunderes or no character development at all, let alone nicely crafted female characters. I think there are a lot of submissive females in anime and often they look strong until their love interest appears and then they start to behave like total morons who will do absolutely everything for him, yet are too shy to express their feelings, which of course does happen in real life but not exactly every time as some anime sub-genres seem to suggest.

Well, "older" in that they're 16-20. Anime has remarkably few heroines over the age of 20. Hiro, at 28, thus joins Balalaika as one of the oldest female principals that I've seen in an anime.

Remarkably few "old" main characters, too. And by old I mean over 25 but yes, the case with female characters is particularly dramatic.

Don't get me wrong; I'm quite happy that we're left to judge this for ourselves. I was more curious about whether people thought the series' creators were more sympathetic to Yumi's or Hiro's point of view.

Since Hiro and Yumi is chosen to be the main character I think the creators should be on her side, if Yumi was more interesting to the manga creator(s) she would have been the main character, I guess. But they both were portrayed in symphatetic light because of the bad position they are put in due to the sexism vibes in the workplace - Yumi's approach relies on the men's condescending way of treating of "kawaii" women, while Hiro has to work much harder than everyone else and when does she still gets laughed at. It's actually remarkable how this bleak situation can be shown along with many comic scenes and still ring true.