Holiday Review: WHO SAYS WARRIORS CAN'T BE BABES?

That being said, there was a lot more fantasy manga starring women this year, especially after the success of series like Ascendance of a Bookworm and My Next Life As a Villianess.

Of course, just because the protagonist is a woman doesn't mean a manga series will be fair or decent to her.

WHO SAYS WARRIORS CAN'T BE BABES? (Onna Senshitte Motenain Desu!), by Taijiro.  First published in 2018 and first published in North America in 2020.

PLOT:

Long ago, a young girl was inspired by a handsome hero.  She trained hard so that she could fight at his side as a warrior.  Now she's a super-powered warrior woman, but she's so strong that no one (least of all the Hero) thinks of her as a girl! Now she's on her own personal quest to make the Hero love her, and she will fight anyone or anything that gets in her way.

STORY:

It's strange to come across a modern fantasy manga where I actually appreciate that it's set in a video game.  Of course, it helps that this isn't isekai - no one here was reincarnated, no one was sucked into a video game.  It's just a fantasy setting that's meant to evoke old-school JRPGs like Dragon Quest.  The characters even go by their roles as their name, something which felt random in Goblin Slayer but works here.  Taijiro makes good use of a lot of those conceits without being overbearing or too meta.  It's fun, and I feel like that not enough fantasy manga these days get to be just plain fun.

There's just one thing that spoils that fun.  Like some of the other, lesser manga I've looked at here this week, this series revolves around a single joke and it's a bad one: Warrior Woman isn't feminine enough.

Over and over, the story dunks on her for not living up to a whole bunch of stereotypes about women.  Women are small and frail.  Women should be able to cook.  Women shouldn't be physically strong, but instead let men be strong for them.  It's not just that the Hero is oblivious to all of Warrior Woman's overtures.  Strangers misgender her.  When she tries to change class through magic, she gets a male-exclusive class because has too much muscle mass for it to register as 'female.'  

This is a problem you can find across all the major manga demographics in almost every genre you can think of.  Over and over they tell you the same thing: to be a 'proper' girl you must be tiny, conventionally cute, and perform traditional household roles (or in the case of this series, perform  RPG roles like mages and clerics that focus more on support than raw strength).  Anyone who deviates from that particular box is an aberration who is either held up for mockery or encouraged to change and suppress parts of themselves to fit that box. After all, the nail that sticks out must be hammered down.

That's precisely what this series does.  It punches down on Warrior Woman, her frantic efforts to change her personality and looks, and her desperation for the Hero's love with little to no sympathy for her plight.  It doesn't matter that she's so ridiculously strong and over-leveled that she can pretty much beat anything set before her or how the Hero inspired her in the first place.  All that matters is that her brand of femininity doesn't fit the norm and every time it was the butt of the joke I grew more sad and frustrated with it.

ART:

Part of why I liked the old-school JRPG  set-up is that the artstyle works really well with it.  Some characters are designed to be explicit references, but the character designs evoke a style of manga art more typical of the 1990s.  That's most obvious with Warrior Woman herself, as her poufy hair, wide eyes, and little fang evoke the genki girls of the past.  Taijiro also indulges in a lot of wild takes with her that work better as humor than the events that inspire her to make them.

That said, he also indulges himself in other ways.  In his author's note, he comments on how Warrior Woman's standard outfit was actually a compromise after his original, skimpier version was shut down by the editors.  He notes that he had become so desensitized to erotic content that he simply didn't notice.  That much is evident in the kinds of fanservice he inserts.  He does seem to find a lot of excuses to have her strip, dress in skimpy costumes, and in one instance have a slime make her have an ahegao moment.  Most of it isn't creepy or inordinately inappropriate, but as we've seen it's just another indicator of a mangaka who's not particularly thoughtful.

RATING:

The question to ask here is not Who Says Warriors Can't Be Babes but instead "Who Says Warriors Can't Be Women?"  Whatever fun it has to offer is spoiled by the shitty, misogynist attitude that's baked into its very premise.

This series is published by Seven Seas.  This series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes available.  2 volumes have been published and are currently in print.

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