Backlash wrote:
Anyone ever noticed how a ton of comics by Baby Boomers tend to center around hating your partner? (An egregious example.) From the perspective of that generation, it makes sense: Strong societal pressure led them to marry early, often as young as nineteen or less, so it's understandable why they'd see "getting hitched" as the end of their life. But as someone who got caught in the eddies of that mindset, I can't help but wonder how many relationships it's ruined.
Happily, I did recently have the chance to befriend a few people who waited till their late twenties to thirties. From everything I've heard, that couldn't be further from the truth. ^_^
-snip-
I see a related trend in the depiction of family in Anime and Manga. Ever noticed how in a lot of works the dad is either entirely absent (i.e. "abroad on a buisness trip") or solely shows up in the customary "family has dinner" scene with his head buried in a newspaper the only piece of interaction with the main character being a short inquiry about "how school is going".
On the flip side, mothers are sometimes depicted in exactly the opposite way, appearing as angle like figures that the main character is completely devoted to.
I wonder if this reflects the family situation the authors grew up with. After all, these types of family are most of the time depicted as pretty "normal" by japanese standards. One might argue the absence of parents is used as a convenient plot device by the outhers, but I think the reason has more to do with gender roles in japan.
I found this essay on Gender and Gender Relations in Manga and Anime quite interesting. A quote:
And too many men are expected to sacrifice themselves to their jobs, to the point of having no family involvement. When a man retires, he sometimes becomes trapped in a family he doesn't know, with nothing to do, and he tends to die soon after from his sudden lack of purpose.
[...]
As I've said of men before, often they are expected to spend most of their waking hours at work, or on business-related entertainment outings. He feels he must shoulder the entire burden of financially supporting the household, and for this, he needs to sacrifice himself to his job. Children sometimes grow up without knowing their fathers, and sometimes the mother will admit she prefers not having her husband around, because he gets in the way.
Of course, there are a lot of great dads and families depicted in Anime and Manga, too (like eg. in Kare Kano). This is just a thing I notice sometimes and I'm always wondering what the authors intentions are, when depicting a family in that way.
