Rules:
Are you:
Do you feel like high school dramas and edgelord power fantasies just don't provide you with the same entertainment value they did when you were younger? Are you skeeved out by panty shots and lewd angles of girls young enough to be your daughter? Perhaps you're bored by the "will they won't they" of a bunch of kids freaking out over their first kiss. Maybe everything is starting to feel like a slurry of tired old tropes. But if despite all this you still enjoy the drawn medium, even after aging out of its key demographic, welcome!
Let's help each other find some animation/comics that are a bit more age-appropriate (or at least that don't make you go "hey, isn't this just a repackaged version of [series from 20 years ago]?"). Reviews, recommendations, requests, laments, memes all welcome.
Other communities of relevance:
Featured: Revolutionary Girl Utena (Shoujo Kakumei Utena / 少女革命ウテナ), a manga and anime series from the 1990s with a bisexual, gender-queer protagonist and an equally 🏳️🌈 colorful 🏳️🌈 cast of supporting characters.
I grew up during the "don't ask don't tell" era, so I didn't even know homosexuality was a thing until late middle school, and didn't personally know any open LGBTQIA+ folks until some of my friends started coming out as gay in high school (and even then it wasn't until years later that I met an out adult). As a result, my first exposure to LGBTQIA+ was through manga, anime, and webcomics. While it was far from the best way to learn about the topic (especially back then as it was almost always presented more as exploitation than representation), it was still enough to turn me into a lifelong ally.
While there are mountains of examples of LGBTQIA+ representation in comics and animation today (Shimanami Tasogare is one of my favorites), I thought it would be fun to highlight some earlier examples from an era when non-straight-cis characters were an extreme rarity.