this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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seeing this made me just break down crying. if you'd asked me yesterday what i thought of akira toriyama i would have probably said i respected him immensely, but his work didn't hold a special place in my heart. but realizing that he's gone is just devastating. such an iconic, important artist. the world is worse without him
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Japan in general still has a sexism and homophobia problem. Even huge current pieces (pun intended) like One Piece constantly follow the general trope of women being weak and lgbtqi+ being weird. So Toriyama is kinda just a product of his environment.
certainly true to an extent, i don't think he was ever malicious with his stuff and i think there are many people who are much worse on those fronts. you mentioned one piece, which includes one of the most transphobic plotlines this side of silence of the lamb, and there are plenty of other way more problematic works out there. for contemporaries, zeta gundam was 86 and is real bad about gender, and of course there's a lot of bad stuff about queer people as well
but it's important to remember that anime was seen as much more progressive than western stuff for a lot of people at the time. they had kids shows full of sympathetic queer characters and women who fought in ways the west could only dream of. sailor moon is massive and isn't much later than dragon ball, classic anime like dirty pair included kickass women and trans positivity. that's not to say there wasn't plenty of bad stuff, it's just to say he wasn't simply a product of his time. there were others at the same time doing much better on those fronts, and finding success while they were at it