=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-3290/short_paper1101 |storemode=property |title=Gender and Power in Japanese Light Novels |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3290/short_paper1101.pdf |volume=Vol-3290 |authors=Xiaoyun Gong,Yuxi Lin,Ye Ding,Lauren Klein |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/chr/GongLDK22 }} ==Gender and Power in Japanese Light Novels== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3290/short_paper1101.pdf
Gender and Power in Japanese Light Novels
Xiaoyun Gong, Yuxi Lin, Ye Ding and Lauren Klein
Emory University, 201 Dowman Dr, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA


                                      Abstract
                                      In Japanese culture, the light novel – a combination of text and anime-style illustrations–is a relatively
                                      new literary form. It derives from the broader otaku culture, which is also associated with video games,
                                      manga, cosplay, anime, and other forms of Japanese popular culture. Though the light novel lacks
                                      the global reach of some of these other genres, such as manga and anime, it nonetheless attracts mil-
                                      lions of readers across a range of gender and age groups. While distinct subgenres of the light novel
                                      have emerged, such as romance, adventure, horror, and harem, issues of gender stereotyping, power
                                      imbalances and other forms of inequality remain strongly entrenched. These issues can be attributed
                                      to how otaku culture is rooted in heterosexual male desire. This paper o昀昀ers a quantitative assessment
                                      of these issues of gender inequality. We analyze 290 light novels, scraped from the Baka-Tsuki Transla-
                                      tion Community Wiki, in terms of the power relationships between female and male characters as they
                                      evolve over the course of each novel. We 昀椀nd patterns consistent with issues of gender stereotyping and
                                      power di昀昀erentials. More speci昀椀cally, we 昀椀nd that female characters consistently wield less power than
                                      male characters, especially toward the end of each novel. We 昀椀nd some variation in speci昀椀c subgenres.
                                      We conclude with close readings of two light novels, demonstrating how a power frames approach to
                                      analyzing gender stereotypes in otaku culture augments existing work on the subject.

                                      Keywords
                                      gender inequality, power frames, otaku culture, light novels, Japanese literature




1. Introduction
In Japanese culture, the light novel–a combination of text and anime-style illustrations–is a rel-
atively new literary form. It derives from the culture of fan 昀椀ction associated with the broader
otaku culture, which is also associated with video games, manga, cosplay, anime, and other
forms of Japanese popular culture. Though the light novel lacks the global reach of some of
these other media and cultural forms, such as manga and anime, it nonetheless attracts millions
of readers across a range of gender and age groups. While distinct genres of the light novel
have emerged, such as romance, adventure, horror, and harem, issues of gender stereotyping,
power imbalances, and other forms of inequality remain strongly entrenched. These issues can
be attributed to how otaku culture is strongly rooted in heterosexual male desire.
   Otaku is a complicated term that encompasses consumer practices and fandom-related activi-
ties as well as media and cultural production [9]. More speci昀椀cally, otaku describes a particular

CHR 2022: Computational Humanities Research Conference, December 12–14, 2022, Antwerp, Belgium
£ kristina.gong@emory.edu (X. Gong); yuxi.lin@emory.edu (Y. Lin); christina.ding@emory.edu (Y. Ding);
lauren.klein@emory.edu (L. Klein)
ȉ 0000-0002-2761-5684 (X. Gong); 0000-0002-4952-1726 (Y. Lin); 0000-0002-5009-7053 (Y. Ding);
0000-0002-1511-0910 (L. Klein)
                                    © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
                                    Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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 Workshop
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               http://ceur-ws.org
               ISSN 1613-0073
                                    CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)




                                                                                                    256
type of fan who actively seeks comprehensive knowledge about the media they consume–to
the extent of having “erotic fantasies” about them [7]. It has been argued that the abundance of
eroticism (and also violence) within these media forms–Kumiko Saito studies anime and manga,
for example–is not necessarily due to the reader or viewer’s (or creator’s) actual sexual desire,
but is understood to be both created and consumed within an “imagined autonomous world of
representations” that is detached from reality [7]. While there exist categories of both male and
female otaku, with female otaku characterized by stories of male homosexual romance, otaku
culture remains dominated by men, with most otaku characterized by an abundance of female
characters depicted in ways that ful昀椀ll the desires of heterosexual men [6] [4]. As a result, most
of the characters in these stories occupy typical–and very o昀琀en stereotypical–gender roles.
   At the same time, the rising popularity of the light novel has resulted in a proliferation of
genres, not all of them targeted at heterosexual male readers. For instance, the shoujo (young
girls) genre is aimed at young female readers and features themes of romance and emotion
from a young heterosexual female perspective. On the other hand, the harem genre is aimed
at adult heterosexual male readers and as a result, contains more explicit sexuality. Across
these genres, a de昀椀ning feature is the light novel’s emphasis on introducing many and multiple
characters over the development of a detailed plot [7]. This feature prompted the research
described below, in which we analyze the aggregate power relationships of male and female
characters in di昀昀erent subgenres of the light novel. Our goal was to determine the degree to
which the characters adhere to stereotypical gender roles, whether the power relationships
in these novels shi昀琀 over time in meaningful ways, and whether there are some genres that
consistently subvert gender stereotypes. (We did not consider non-binary genders, as our focus
was on stereotypical male and female roles).
   In this way, we contribute to the growing body of work that employs computational ap-
proaches to analyze gender, including Underwood 2018, which investigates the changing sig-
ni昀椀cance of gender in 昀椀ction written between 1780 and 2007, both in terms of authorship and
characterization [10]; Kraicer 2019, which examines the ”social positions” of female characters
in novels written between 2007 and 2017 [5]; and Cheng 2020, which assesses several historical
trends in anatomical depiction and its correlation with gender [3]. Our study explores similar
themes of gender inequality in 昀椀ction but from an East Asian perspective. We also bring a
”power frames” approach to this question [8], and devise our own methods of validation.


2. Data
2.1. Data Collection
In order to create our corpus, we scraped the English translations of 56 light novel series that
were listed under the category of Light Novel (English) on the website of Baka-Tsuki Transla-
tion Community. We choose to collect our data from Baka-Tsuki because it houses the largest
collection of light novels in English on the Internet, and because the translators voluntarily
upload their translations to the site for sharing with the public. When scraping the novels, we
employed the following criteria for inclusion: 昀椀rst, it needed to have at least one genre label;
and second, it needed to have a complete English translation in a relatively standard format.
We treated di昀昀erent volumes in the same series as separate books, in keeping with how light




                                               257
novels are published and read. We excluded any “side stories,” which are sometimes included
in volumes of light 昀椀ction, which otherwise include stories in sequential order, because it is
di昀케cult to determine whether a side story comes before or a昀琀er the main story in terms of plot,
and we did not want to disrupt the main storyline. Finally, because di昀昀erent translators use
di昀昀erent words to indicate a distinct volume, such as “phase” or “part,” we took these additional
terms into account in the scraping process.
   Our 昀椀nal corpus consisted of 289 volumes across 17 genres (16,914,599 total tokens; 98,563
unique tokens). The majority of volumes in the series were tagged with multiple genre labels,
as pictured in Figure 1. While the corpus represents a small sample of all light novels ever pub-
lished, most of the series included in the corpus can be considered “classic” novels, as indicated
by the fact that about 71% of the series in the corpus have been adapted into anime.




Figure 1: Distribution of genre tags in the Baka-Tsuki corpus



2.2. Data Cleaning
A昀琀er scraping the text from the website and removing the side stories, we also manually re-
moved all of the series that did not adhere to the volume structure, and all of the volumes that
did not adhere to the one-story-per-chapter structure. (These were outliers; a typical series is




                                                258
broken into volumes, and a typical volume consists of 5-10 chapters). We also removed all nov-
els in which the translator opted not to translate the text owing to its mature content. (These
were indicated by the phrase, “the text may be inappropriate to people aged under 18.”) We
then manually con昀椀rmed that all chapters were placed in the correct volume, and all volumes
were placed in the correct order, and 昀椀xed any incorrect placement or ordering. Finally, we
removed the series that contained more than 20 volumes, as we were concerned about issues
of over-representation.


3. Data Processing and Preliminary Analysis
3.1. Main Character Identification
We used BookNLP [1] to extract the names and mentions of the characters in our corpus. We
then ordered the characters by number of mentions, as we wanted to focus our analysis on
the major characters of each volume. Depending on the genre of the novel, there is signi昀椀cant
variation in the number of characters in each volume (with a minimum of 10 and a maximum
of 193). In order to determine the cut-o昀昀 point between the major characters and the less
important ones, we normalized the number of mentions of each character in each volume across
the corpus. Below in Figure 2 we plot the sum of normalized character mentions for characters
with di昀昀erent frequency ranks. We then picked the point of maximum curvature, which is 9,
as the cut-o昀昀 point for the de昀椀nition of a major character.

3.2. Main Character References and Referential Gender
A昀琀er identifying the nine main characters for each novel, we used BookNLP to extract the
proper references and referential gender for each. Because the referential gender is inferred by
the references to the characters with the text, it is sometimes inconsistent. Therefore, we used
the argmax of the gender distribution provided by BookNLP to assign the gender of the charac-
ter for the purposes of this project. We then further divided each volume into 昀椀ve sections of
equal length (without breaking sentences), and we ran BookNLP again on each subsection-or
stage-of the volume. From this, we obtained information about each of the nine main charac-
ters by matching proper references. (A match was met if the character in the subsection was
mentioned by at least one of the proper references of an identi昀椀ed main character). A昀琀er lo-
cating the main characters, we extracted the actions (verbs) for which the character was agent
or patient in that stage, as well as the objects they possessed, and any modi昀椀ers. We use this
verb list to calculate the power score, as described in the next section.

3.3. Main Character Power Scores
We employed the power frames lexicon curated by Sap et al. in order to determine a power score
for each of the major characters [8]. In the lexicon, each verb has a label that indicates whether
the agent or the patient/theme associated with the verb has more power, or whether the two
have equal power. In order to employ this lexicon, we lemmatized the verbs in the lexicon and
the list of verbs we obtained for each character from BookNLP. Then, we compared the list of




                                               259
Figure 2: The sum of normalized mention frequency for characters with di昀昀erent frequency rank (i.e.
importance in the story) across the corpus


verbs for the characters with the lexicon, adding or subtracting from the total power score of
the character as indicated. We then normalized the power scores by dividing the current score
by the total number of verbs in the list. In this way, we were able to take into account the
di昀昀erences in length and number of verbs in each novel. The 昀椀nal power score was a value
between -1 and 1, with 1 indicating high power status, and -1 indicating low power status.
   A notebook documenting these analyses can be found here: https://github.com/kristinagxy
/lightnovel_gender


4. Results
4.1. Power Over Time – All Genres
In Figures 3 and 4, we plot the mean power scores of the male and female characters in each
stage of each novel, separated by genre. The bold gray line indicates the mean across the whole
corpus.
As is evident in the visualizations, most of the genres follow a similar pattern, with female
power decreasing over the course of the novel, and male power remaining consistent through-




                                               260
Figure 3: Mean power scores of female characters Figure 4: Mean power scores of male characters


out. There are some outliers, however. For instance, the female mean power for adventure
novels is higher than the others; and for josei (adult women’s) novels, it follows a di昀昀erent
path altogether. This pattern seems intriguing, but upon closer look, the josei genre has the
least number of volumes in the corpus. Therefore, it may not be statistically signi昀椀cant.
   We were eager to evaluate the statistical signi昀椀cance of these scores. But we could not use
standard methods such as the t-test, since the scores were calculated from volumes in di昀昀erent
series, meaning that they came from di昀昀erent distributions. Even for volumes in the same
series, the distribution was not guaranteed to be the same. To circumvent this issue, we decided
to take the average of power score for each gender in each stage of each novel, and calculate a
boolean score to indicate whether the average power of the female characters was larger than
that of the male. In this way, we sidestep the problem of between-volume di昀昀erences since
the resulting booleans come from a binomial distribution. Then, for each stage, we perform
a one-tailed binomial test with the null hypothesis of �㔋 = 0.5. The null hypothesis describes
a situation of balanced power where the probability of female having a higher power score is
0.5. The p-values of the test, which represent the likelihood of seeing an outcome at least as
extreme as the actual result given the null hypothesis, are reported below.

4.2. Power Over Time – Statistically Significant Genres
In this section, we focus on genres with interesting trends that have a reasonably large number
of samples (�㕁 > 20). We begin with action novels (�㕁 = 155). As is pictured in Figure 5, at
the beginning of the story, the di昀昀erence between the power of male and female characters
is small, although the male characters’ power is always a little higher than that of the female
characters. However, while the power of the female characters gradually decreases over time,
the power of male increases dramatically at the end of the story, resulting in a comparatively
large gap in power scores. The p-value at the 昀椀nal stage is 0.0005, indicating strong evidence
that the gap exists.
   In Figure 6, we show the resulting evolution of power in fantasy novels (�㕁 = 138). Before
the 昀椀nal stage of the story, the power of male and female characters have relatively balanced
values as well as high p-values, favoring the null hypothesis of equal power. However, at the
昀椀nal stage, as in the adventure genre, the two powers diverge, also with a small p-value.
   The power balance in mature novels (�㕁 = 27) follows a di昀昀erent pattern. Here, in Figure
7, the power of female characters remains higher than that of male characters until the 昀椀nal




                                              261
                                       Table 1
                                       Proportion estimates and p-values for action novels
                                                     proportion of novel that
                                         stage    follow the mean power trend    p-value
                                        stage 1               0.57               0.0540
                                        stage 2               0.58               0.0337
                                        stage 3               0.53               0.255
Figure 5                                stage 4               0.55               0.124
Gender and power in action novels       stage 5               0.64               0.000497


                                       Table 2
                                       Proportion estimates and p-values for action novels
                                                     proportion of novel that
                                         stage    follow the mean power trend    p-value
                                        stage 1               0.54               0.208
                                        stage 2               0.47               0.787
                                        stage 3               0.50               0.500
                                        stage 4               0.54               0.215
                                        stage 5               0.63               0.00232

Figure 6
Gender and power in fantasy novels


                                       Table 3
                                       Proportion estimates and p-values for mature novels
                                                     proportion of novel that
                                         stage    follow the mean power trend    p-value
                                        stage 1               0.46               0.721
                                        stage 2               0.64               0.115
                                        stage 3               0.36               0.946
                                        stage 4               0.50               0.581
                                        stage 5               0.69               0.0375
Figure 7
Gender and power in mature novels


section of the novel. In fact, the power di昀昀erential increases until the middle of each story–an
intriguing trend. However the p-values for the 昀椀rst four subsections are quite high. It is only
in the 昀椀nal section, when male power is higher, that the p-value indicates more than chance.
   Figure 8 describes novels in the “slice of life” genre (�㕁 = 42), a genre typically aimed at a
female readership. Interestingly, at the beginning of the story, female characters possess higher
power than male characters, with a relatively low p-value of 0.100. As the story progresses, the
power of female and male characters gradually become balanced, as demonstrated by high p-




                                              262
                                           Table 4
                                           Proportion estimates and p-values for slice of life novels
                                                         proportion of novel that
                                             stage    follow the mean power trend      p-value
                                            stage 1                0.63                0.100
                                            stage 2                0.47                0.708
                                            stage 3                0.47                0.702
                                            stage 4                0.56                0.304
                                            stage 5                 0.4                0.912
Figure 8
Gender and power in slice of life novels


                                           Table 5
                                           Proportion estimates and p-values for drama novels
                                                         proportion of novel that
                                             stage    follow the mean power trend      p-value
                                            stage 1                0.55                0.247
                                            stage 2                0.51                0.455
                                            stage 3                0.58                0.0910
                                            stage 4                0.63                0.0138
                                            stage 5                0.46                0.777
Figure 9
Gender and power in drama novels


values indicating that the power gap is most probably due to chance.
   In the drama genre (�㕁 = 93), the power scores show yet another trend. Before the 昀椀nal
section, the power of female characters decreases and the power of male characters increases,
widening the power gap. The power gap reaches its maximum in section four, supported by
a low p-value. However, by the end of the story, the two power scores converge, admittedly
with a high p-value that favors the null hypothesis of balanced power.
   Figure 10 shows the evolution of power in harem (�㕁 = 89), romance (�㕁 = 182), and ecchi
(�㕁 = 69) genres. The three are very similar genres and have many overlapping titles. We
observe that their trend lines are also similar, with an increasing power gap and small p-values
at the end. For harem and ecchi, which are two major male-oriented genres, the power of
female characters decreases consistently throughout the story.
   Figure 11 shows the comparison of power across all genres. We can see that the power of
female characters decreases over time, while the power of male characters remained relatively
high. Interestingly, the p-value decreases as well as the story progresses, implying that the
power gap is supported with increasing certainty.

4.3. Power Over Time - Additional Validation
To test the validity of the power frames approach to measuring power, we shu昀툀ed all the verbs
for each stage and randomly reassigned them to the characters, with each character receiving




                                                  263
Figure 10: Gender and power in harem, romance, and ecchi novels



                                      Table 6
                                      Proportions estimates and p-values across all genres
                                                     proportion of novel that
                                        stage     follow the mean power trend    p-value
                                        stage 1              0.45                0.948
                                        stage 2              0.48                0.807
                                        stage 3              0.55                0.0784
                                        stage 4              0.57                0.0183
                                        stage 5              0.59                0.00276
Figure 11
Gender and power across all genres


the same number of verbs he/she originally had. We performed one hundred simulations for
each of the 昀椀ve stages, and compared the simulated mean power scores for female and male
characters across the whole corpus with the original mean scores. Speci昀椀cally, we wanted
to know the likelihood that the original means came from the same distribution as the simu-
lated means. A reasonable assumption is the simulated power scores come from a Student’s t-
distribution. We obtained the p-values by calculating the probability of getting a more extreme
value than the original mean using the cdf (cumulative distribution function). The results can
be found in Table 7.
   Interestingly, the random assignment of verbs gave a higher mean power score than the
original mean for both female and male characters. For the female characters, the calculated
power score in the 昀椀rst two stages does not have much di昀昀erence from random assignment.
The later three stages clearly depart from the simulated random results, as indicated by an
increasingly low p-value towards the end. This coincides with the pattern of p-value for power




                                              264
Table 7
Calculated mean, and simulated mean, and p-values across all genres at each stage
  stage                       female                                            male
           calculated mean   simulated mean      p-value    calculated mean   simulated mean   p-value
 stage 1        0.203              0.203          0.972          0.199              0.201       0.808
 stage 2        0.200              0.209          0.318          0.185              0.211      0.00658
 stage 3        0.171              0.195         0.00588         0.188              0.196       0.500
 stage 4        0.164              0.203        2.484e-05        0.190              0.204       0.172
 stage 5        0.158              0.204        1.202e-06        0.210              0.205       0.577


gap in Section 4.2. For the male characters, however, most of the time the calculated power
is similar to random assignment results. Therefore, it seems that it is mainly the decreasing
power of female characters that contributes to the power gap, also similar to what we observe
in Section 4.2. Also notice that the simulated means for female and male characters at each
stage are very close to each other, further supporting the validity of the power frames method.


5. Close Reading the Gender Power Gap
What does this power gap look like in writing? To explore this question, we returned to the
text of one light novel, associated with the harem genre, that exempli昀椀es the growing power
di昀昀erential between male and female characters. The novel, the 昀椀rst volume of the Absolute
Duo series, centers on Tor, a young man enrolled in Koryo Academy, a high school in which
students battle each other with weapons known as Blaze. The novel opens with a depiction
of the entrance test required to enter Koryo, in which Tor must battle his enemy, a young
woman named Imari. He states his goal very clearly: “I will show her the di昀昀erence in our
ability and make her give up” (Chapter 1). Here, Tor is the agent of the verbs “show” and
“make,” resulting in an increase in his associated power score. This is con昀椀rmed by the power
conveyed through the sentence itself, in which Tor envisions a one-way battle in which he
“shows” Imari his skill and “makes her give up.” A昀琀er Tor enters Koryo, he encounters several
female teachers who are more skilled than he is, contributing to the female character power
score. But Tor retains his dominant position in the novel. As Tor becomes a stronger 昀椀ghter, the
female characters around him grow to both trust and adore him. By the end of the novel, Tor is
consistently making statements such as, “I will de昀椀nitely protect you” (Chapter 7). Again, Tor
as the subject of the verb “protect” contributes to the male character power score, an indicator
of the increasingly dominant role that Tor assumes in the novel.
   We also wanted to explore one of the novels associated with high female power scores, even
as there were few of them in our corpus. For this close reading, we turned to a josei novel,
the 昀椀rst volume of the series Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day. Anohana tells the
story of six childhood friends who once formed a group called Super Peace Busters, but who
grew apart a昀琀er one of the friends, a girl named Menma, died in an accident. The story is
told from the perspective of a boy, Jinta, another one of the friends, who realizes that he (and
only he) can see Menma’s ghost. The beginning of the novel mostly serves to introduce the




                                               265
characters and the backstory of the group, and contains lines such as: “That wish could only be
ful昀椀lled when everyone in the Super Peace Busters was together” (chapter 3). Here, the passive
construction of the verb “be ful昀椀lled” avoids assigning agency to any of the characters. As the
story unfolds, Jinta tells the others in the group that he has seen Menma, but they don’t believe
him. His decreasing power is represented in lines such as, “Every kind of sophisticated feeling
was stuck on my body like glue, making me maximally displeased” (chapter 10). Here, Jinta is
the object of the displeasure, rather than its agent. By the same token, Menma’s ghost emerges
as a more powerful character in the novel, in昀氀uencing Jinta and the other friends even as they
cannot see her.


6. Discussion and Next Steps
In her qualitative study of gender representation in hentai (pornographic anime and manga),
Kristina Barancovaitė-Skindaravičienė (2013) argues that masculinity and femininity are pro-
duced through bodily representation, what she describes as “indexical signs of gender” [2].
These include size, age, race, genitals, dress, and magic power attributes. Barancovaitė-Skin-
daravičienė claims that male characters appear to be more powerful and dominant than female
characters due to these indexical signs. We 昀椀nd that this same power imbalance is encoded
in language–and more speci昀椀cally, in the relation between the agents of verbs and the objects
those verbs act upon. Furthermore, by tracking the changes in power over the course of the
novels, we 昀椀nd that any equal power relationship between male and female characters that is
present at the beginning of these novels becomes more unbalanced over time, with male char-
acters consistently gaining more power by the novels’ end, with strong statistical signi昀椀cance.
   There is some variation based on theme, however. For genres that target female audiences
(e.g. shoujo, josei, slice of life), as exempli昀椀ed by Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day,
novels o昀琀en begin by positioning the female characters with more power. As the story pro-
ceeds, however, the female characters cede some of their power. By the end, male and female
characters o昀琀en have balanced power. One group of novels we did not explore were those
where young girls act as heroines and protectors; most of these novels involve only female
characters, and so would require a di昀昀erent approach to a power analysis. In the future, we
hope to incorporate these as well as additional shoujo and josei novels into our study. The
pattern of power in josei novels is clearly di昀昀erent from the majority of the other genres, but
we require additional novels from the genre in order to con昀椀rm our hypothesis.


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