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Maybe these days she'd be lumped in with the "not like other girls" trope, but to me, she did the exact opposite, by teaching me to not look down on my more "feminine" aspects, nor look down on girly girls by extension. It was a real revelation for young me at the time, to meet Akane Tendo and see my first model of a girl who didn't have to be a girly-girl, NOR a complete (sports) tomboy, NOR a girl who did all the "boy" things while looking pretty/sexy. Her girly traits didn't take over her life, but she also didn't have any need to "prove" she wasn't "feminine".
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She loved martial arts, but she still wanted to play Juliet. She wasn't boy-crazy, but she did have a crush. But Akane made those "girly girl" things, just other aspects of my identity, instead of bowing to the limited, rigid list of what a girl was "supposed" to be, that I feared it was. There was a lot of toxic feminine assumptions back then.
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But why should I feel insecure enough to reject "feminine" things? Akane wore skirts, took pride in her long hair-which anime repeatedly described as "a woman's treasure", right alongside a woman's face, as leverage to attain marriage partners. So I felt I had to "prove my masculinity" by rejecting everything "feminine". She really helped me feel validated as not fitting into the "girly girl" standard at the time, and as not fitting into even the "tomboy" stereotype at the time. But before that, I found Ranma 1/2 and Akane Tendo. Mermaid Saga had a female protagonist with agency and no romance on her mind, without being primarily sexualized by other characters or for the audience. And of course, the PG version of boy-crazy, all female characters being constantly preoccupied with romance or their love interest, was in every other anime/manga I could find at the time.Unless it was by Rumiko Takahashi. Outside of being a demon hunter, Devil Hunter Yohko was primarily defined as preoccupied with her crushes, dates, and getting laid. Hell, even when I finally found some different anime with female protagonists, they were still primarily defined by being boy-crazy. And made me feel invalidated as a female for not being a girly girl. Like a lot of people, my first Shojo anime was Sailormoon, and if you're the type of girl who can't relate, at all, to revolving so much of your life around being boy-crazy, that got tiring fast. She loved martial arts and wasn't boy-crazy, but wasn't afraid to wear dresses or want to play Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet".
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It took Ranma 1/2's Akane Tendo to teach me that it was okay to be any mixture of traits considered "male" or "female". When I was little, I became so shamefully anti-girly-girl, even before the trope "not like other girls" became a term. But I think that a lot of younger girls don't realize what it was like to live during a time when everyone and everything was telling you that if you weren't a "girly girl", or hyper fem, or this narrow list of stereotypes, then "you weren't a valid female". I had the sudden thought that maybe Akane would be dismissed in present day, as a "not like other girls" character.