What nobody stops to ask is whether the comparison was ever fair to begin with. Why are we grading a Saiyan on a curve that was built for a reporter from Kansas?

That instinct is a very American one, and it runs deeper than most of us notice. Capes raised us. Comics handed over a moral template so early that it became invisible, the water we swim in. A hero has a city. A hero has a code. Somewhere behind him sits a tragedy that made him swear an oath, and that oath rides his shoulders like a wet coat for the rest of his life. Peter Parker learned it in an alley. Bruce learned it outside a theater. Clark learned it on a farm from two of the most decent people ever committed to paper. Every version of the lesson says the same thing, and we swallowed it whole: power is a debt, and you spend your life paying it down.

Now hold that template up against a country boy who fell out of the sky, cracked his skull on a rock, and spent his childhood catching fish barehanded in a mountain river.

Son Goku does not have a city. What he has is a mountain, a house, a wife who could probably beat most of us in a fight, and a radish patch. Nobody in West City is calling when a bank gets hit. There is no signal in the clouds, no cave, no watchtower. If a call did come, odds are he would arrive late and hungry. When Earth is quiet, this man trains, eats, naps, fishes, and bothers Piccolo. The notion that he stands watch over humanity is a story we told ourselves, because it was the only story we had on hand.

Go back and pay attention to what actually gets him out of bed. That first Budokai, nobody drafted him into it. Roshi mentions there are strong people out in the world and the kid basically signs himself up. Meets Krillin, wants to fight him. Meets Tien, wants to fight him. Piccolo shows up talking about world domination and cracking the sky open, and instead of dread, what you see on his face is that grin, the one that shows up right before he says something like this is gonna be fun. Nobody guarding a planet grins like that. Athletes grin like that. My uncle used to grin like that walking onto a court against somebody thirty pounds heavier than him. Whatever that feeling is, standing across from a person who might genuinely be better than you, this man has organized his entire existence around chasing it.

And look at where the story even comes from. Toriyama wasn’t sitting in an office trying to write our kind of comic. Dragon Ball started as a loose riff on Journey to the West, with a monkey tail and a talking pig, and the man was soaked in Hong Kong kung fu movies, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, that whole world where a martial artist is somebody’s student for years before anybody calls him a savior. So the bones of it are a training story. You find a teacher. You get your head knocked in. You climb somewhere terrible and do something stupid like carrying milk up a mountain, then you get your head knocked in again by somebody better. Tournaments are the spine of the whole genre, and that is not an accident. Fighting isn’t the thing this character does when danger arrives. It is what he is doing on a Tuesday with nothing on the calendar.

None of the evidence is subtle, either. This man let Vegeta walk. Vegeta, whose invasion had already left a city destroyed and Yamcha dead, gets to limp off into space because Goku is curious about what happens if the guy trains a little more. Frieza gets time to power up because Goku wants to defeat him at full strength. Cell gets handed a senzu bean, and in his mind he is being generous. Then, in the middle of a fight for the planet, he steps aside and puts his young son in the ring. There is reasoning behind it. Chi Chi was still not wrong to lose her mind over it.

Line those calls up in a Justice League briefing room and see how they land. Bruce would have him under a mountain by lunch. Those are not the decisions of a protector. They are the decisions of an athlete who cannot stand the thought of the game ending early.

By the Tournament of Power, nobody even has to squint anymore. He hears there are fighters out there in other universes, stronger than anything he has ever put hands on, and he goes to a god and asks for the smoke. Only afterward does the Grand Minister reveal that the losing universes will be erased. Entire universes are on the line, countless lives gone if it breaks wrong, and Goku still refuses to retreat from the challenge. He wants to know. Say what you want about that, it is the truest thing the character has ever done. The appetite makes the bet, then the discipline covers it, and once everybody walks away alive we go ahead and file the whole mess under heroism.

So no. Not Superman. Not the moral center of his world. Not a man carrying a burden.

Here is where people take the argument too far, though. Selfish is the wrong word. Cold is the wrong word. Few characters in the medium are kinder, and the kindness is not a performance and it is not a duty. He simply likes people. Loyalty comes out of him without explanation, and it never has to be earned twice. When somebody he loves gets hurt, the anger is real, and when he stands over an enemy who has crossed a line, the temperature in the room drops. Namek is the proof. Krillin dies, and you can see the grief sit in his chest for a beat before it comes out of him sideways, and Frieza spends the next several episodes learning what that costs. Even against Buu, Goku openly looks forward to the fight. Righteousness lives in the man. It just does not come from a creed. It comes from his gut.

That distinction is the whole ballgame, and honestly it gives us a better hero than the oath ever did. He is not out there paying down a promise he made to a corpse. Saving the planet just happens to land in the same square as the thing he loves doing and the thing he is best at in the universe, and the idea of Krillin or Gohan or Bulma dying while he stands there is not something his brain will even sit still for. No vow needed. It was never that complicated with him.

Our tradition does not really produce that. American heroes are haunted. They save you because they could not save someone else. Sit with it long enough and it turns a little grim, an entire mythology of men in costumes working through grief in public and calling it duty.

Goku is what happens when a story lets a fighter be a fighter and allows goodness to arrive as a byproduct instead of a mission statement. Nothing is being proven to a dead father. All he wants is to touch the ceiling, and every time he gets close, he finds out there isn’t one.

That has always struck me as the more radical idea. Not the man who protects because he must, but the man who grows because he wants to, and who protects because underneath all that power he is, at heart, decent. Monuments were never the point. A rematch was.

Put down the wrong ruler. Your Superman was never what he was trying to be. Getting stronger was the whole ambition, and Earth just happened to be standing where he was standing.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

I understand the reflex. As readers we spend years praying our favorites get picked up, refreshing announcements, arguing over which studio would do the material justice. Yet somewhere in all that longing we skipped a harder question. There is a real difference between a story that wants to move and a story that only works because it holds still, and confusing the two has cost us more than the community likes to acknowledge.

Think about how you read a book like Vagabond. Takehiko Inoue is not drawing pictures so much as painting with ink, leaving whole stretches of white where a weaker artist would cram in noise. You reach a spread of Musashi standing in a field, blade lowered, and the panel just stops. You stop. Your eye wanders the brushwork, the bend of the grass, the weight sitting in the man’s shoulders. That pause belongs to you. You own it. You decide it lasts three seconds or thirty. Hand that same moment to a director and a clock starts ticking that was never meant to exist. A camera drifts, a score swells, and the choice you were making with your own two eyes gets made for you.

That is the part few want to admit. The gutter, that little gap between one box and the next, is where your brain does its finest work. Scott McCloud named it closure, the way we fill that space with our own imagination. A fighter swings in one frame and connects in the next, and your mind builds the whole arc of the blow. Motion erases that labor. It shows you every inch, spells out the entire swing, and in doing so it lifts the pencil right out of your grip. You slide from co author to spectator.

Now let Junji Ito into the room. His horror does not chase you. It waits. A spiral carved into skin, a face sliding into a wall, a figure standing too still at the far end of a hallway. The dread lives in the frozen frame, in the fact that it cannot move, because somewhere in your gut you know it should be moving and it refuses. Every effort to animate his work has tripped over the same wall. Once the picture starts wriggling, the wrongness leaks out. The thing you feared shrinks into a thing you simply watch. Uzumaki in print is a slow rot behind your ribs. On a screen it becomes a monster reel, and monsters we can handle. It is the stillness we cannot.

Silence is the other casualty, and a heavy one. Inio Asano built Goodnight Punpun around wordless pages, around a small cartoon bird drifting through a life too heavy for language. You turn to a spread and there is nothing, just a figure sitting in a room, and that emptiness says more than any speech could. Now put a voice in that room. Add a piano. The hush suddenly has a score behind it, and a hush wearing a score is only mood in a costume. Mood is fine. It is simply a different creature from the raw quiet Asano trapped in those frames.

I keep circling this idea that the reader runs the tempo. A comic hands you the throttle. You tear through the loud stretches and crawl through the tender ones. A series cannot offer that. It has a runtime, a budget, an opening theme that must land at a certain mark. Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame! makes a fine witness for the prosecution. That book is mostly emptiness, corridors stretching past reason, a lone man dwarfed by structures so massive they feel like a lie. The scale unsettles because you feel small holding it in your hands. Squeeze all of that into a film and the vastness becomes a set piece. A number. Something a computer rendered one weekend. The awe drains straight out through the bottom of the screen.

And here is a smaller thing that matters more than most folks expect. Much of this art was drawn to live in black and white. The absence of color is not a limitation the artist was suffering under, waiting on a studio to come rescue it. It is a decision, a whole grammar of its own. Slap a palette across Inoue’s ink and you have not upgraded a thing. You have translated a poem into a language that lacks the one word it needed most.

Let me be fair, because a blerd who cannot hold two thoughts at once is just a hater with a bigger vocabulary. Plenty of these books get better under the lights. A Silent Voice bloomed at Kyoto Animation, all soft edges and trembling water. Vinland Saga found new muscle in motion. Frieren turned patience into something you could sit inside for twenty minutes and never check the clock. So the claim is not that studios wreck everything they touch. That would be lazy and untrue. The point is narrower, and I think sharper. Certain works are married to the print in a way no budget can undo. The paper is not a container for the story. The paper is the story.

There is a trap to sidestep here too. I am not preaching that reading is holy and watching is for kids. That take is corny and it is wrong. What I am telling you is that these are two separate languages, and translation always costs something. Once in a while the cost is tiny and the reward enormous. Other times it walks off with the entire soul of the thing. A person who loves a work should be able to feel that difference instead of applauding every adaptation like its mere existence is a gift dropped from heaven.

So ask yourself something simple the next time the community begs for a green light. What does this book do that only ink can do? If the answer is spectacle, big fights, wild worlds, sweeping color, then let it fly. Cartoons were practically invented for that. But if the answer is stillness, or a held breath, or the specific gravity of one drawing you could stare at until it burned into memory, then let it be. A love like that is better left uncontacted. Certain volumes were built to sit in your hands, close and private, moving at exactly the speed of you.

We treat every adaptation like a promotion, as if the book was just a lobby you sat in while the real thing got ready. Flip that. That paper was never a rough draft. For a handful of these masters it was the finished cathedral, and pointing a camera at a cathedral does not make it holier. It only proves you showed up. So the next time somebody asks why your favorite never got a series, smile a little. It may have dodged a bullet. Odds are it stayed exactly what it was always meant to be, sitting on your shelf, waiting for the one kind of motion it ever needed, which was you, turning the page.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

I have loved this medium my entire life, a card carrying Blerd back before the word had any currency, the type to argue filler placement in a group chat and defend the original score to people who never asked. That affection is exactly why the current moment worries me. Something has gone soft in how our biggest properties treat their own conclusions. The best of them used to know precisely where to stop. Now too many refuse to, kept alive well past their natural finish and stretched thin until the spark that made them matter is buried somewhere under a mountain of merchandise.

Here is the uncomfortable truth. A lot of what we call beloved franchises stopped being complete works a long time ago. They became real estate. Studios look at a hit and refuse to see a beginning, middle, and end. What they see is a plot of land to keep building condos on forever. And the fans, myself included some nights, keep buying tickets to the fifteenth expansion because we are afraid of the empty lot.

Think about how a great ending used to feel earned. Death Note knew its main character was doomed from the jump, and it walked him straight into the dirt with confidence. Light lost. The lights went out. Whatever your feelings about the second half, that show had the spine to conclude. Code Geass gave Lelouch a payoff so bittersweet it still makes grown men argue about what that ending truly meant. Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood spent every episode heading toward one destination and arrived like it meant it. These were tight. Contained. They respected your time and your heart.

Now look at the machine we run today. The moment a series catches fire, the demand is instant and it is loud. Give us a movie. Then a prequel about the mentor nobody asked about. Maybe a spinoff following the side girl who had four lines. After that, a full reboot because the original animation looks dated and heaven forbid we watch anything older than last Tuesday. The appetite is bottomless. It only grows, and studios feed it because feeding it prints money.

I am not pretending money is evil or that artists should starve for purity. That would be a lie and a corny one. Folks got bills. Animators in particular get worked to the bone for wages that should embarrass the whole industry, so I get the pressure to keep a proven hit breathing. But there is a cost we do not talk about enough, and the cost lands on the stories themselves.

When a narrative knows it must never end, it starts to rot from the inside. Stakes evaporate. Nobody important can truly die because a dead character cannot sell figures or headline the next film. Villains who were terrifying become allies, then comic relief, then playable roster additions. The clean emotional logic that made the early run sing gets bent and stretched to accommodate arc after arc after arc. You can feel the writers straining to justify why the fight is not over yet. And you, the viewer who has been riding since episode one, start to feel a little used.

Dragon Ball is the granddaddy of this pattern, and I say that with love because it raised half of us. That world found its natural finish more than once. The Cell Saga had a real ending baked into it, a passing of the torch to Gohan that meant something. But the register never stops ringing, so here we are decades later with power levels so inflated they mean nothing, with a kid who once appeared ready to inherit everything repeatedly pushed aside while the franchise keeps finding ways to return his daddy to center stage. That is not a knock on people who still love it. It is a diagnosis of what happens when a thing is forbidden from resting.

Bleach felt the squeeze too. The Soul Society arc was lightning in a bottle, a genuinely great run of television. Then the demands piled up and the story bloated into arcs that even devoted heads will admit dragged. The recent return has been gorgeous, no argument, but part of why it works is that it finally has an ending in view. Funny how that happens. Give a tale a horizon and suddenly it remembers how to move.

Attack on Titan is my proof that the other way still exists. Love the finale or hate it, and plenty of my people hate it, that show committed to a conclusion. It built toward a specific point and refused to pump out endless victory laps. When the credits rolled for real, the world was changed and closed. You could argue about the meaning for the rest of your life, which is exactly what a real ending invites. It leaves a mark instead of a subscription.

The remake wave deserves its own side eye. I understand wanting a beloved property to shine with modern animation. The recent redo of certain classics looks unreal, no lie. But there is a creeping message underneath all of it, which is that nothing from before is allowed to simply exist as it was. Everything must be resurfaced, updated, made current, kept in the storefront window. We are teaching a whole generation that a piece of art is only valid while it is actively producing new content. That is a poisonous idea. Some of the greatest films ever made are exactly one film. They do not need a cinematic universe to justify their existence, and neither does your favorite twenty six episode gem.

What gets lost in all this is the specific magic of a finite thing. A story with a true end has weight because every choice inside it is permanent. When you know the hero might really lose everything, you lean forward. Accept that the final episode is truly the final one and you start savoring every second. Endless franchises trade that intensity for comfort, and comfort is fine, but comfort is not the reason any of us fell for this medium. We fell because these shows dared to hurt us on purpose and trusted us to handle it.

I think about Evangelion, which has been reborn so many times that the reboots became part of the point. Even so, Thrice Upon a Time gave Anno’s Rebuild cycle a deliberate sense of closure. Evangelion itself has not disappeared, and new projects have already followed, but that does not erase what the film accomplished. A particular journey was allowed to reach its destination. One approach is an artist wrestling with closure. The other is a spreadsheet wearing the skin of a beloved character.

So what do we actually want here. I want writers allowed to plan a real destination and actually arrive there. Studios should feel brave enough to say this world is complete, thank you for watching, something new is coming next. And fans, myself very much in that number, need to quit treating a satisfying finish like a betrayal. When a creator gives you a clean conclusion, that is a gift, not an insult. Clapping for it teaches the industry that we can be trusted with finished things.

None of this means every long runner is trash or that One Piece owes anybody an apology for being a planned marathon with an actual finish line in sight. The problem was never length. It is the refusal to ever stop, the conversion of art into an eternal product that cannot risk anything because risk might interrupt the flow of sequels. A campfire kept burning forever stops being cozy and starts being a chore to tend.

The bravest thing a beloved series can do in this era is bow, thank the crowd, and walk off the stage while people still wish it stayed. That kind of exit becomes legend. The other kind just becomes wallpaper you scroll past on your way to the next thing. Give me the legend every single time.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Truth is, both of these kids were alone, and that’s the part people love to skip. Our orange one had a demon sealed in his gut and a town that treated him like the monster itself, so parents pulled their children back, shopkeepers watched his hands, and grown folks decided a baby was guilty of something he never chose. Sasuke had a whole clan instead. A mother who loved on him, a father he was breaking his back to impress, an older brother he damn near worshipped. Then one night all of it got erased by that same brother, and this little man was left kneeling in the blood of everybody who had ever known his name. Two kinds of empty. One boy sat outside that table his entire childhood. The other watched somebody flip it and stroll off whistling.

Same wound, opposite instinct, and right here is where the fandom lost the plot. Naruto took his hurt and turned it into reaching. Every fight, every mission, every rival, it was one prayer running underneath. See me. Choose me. Let me belong to somebody. That code about never breaking his word was not simple courage. It was a lonely child building a self other people could finally trust, since trust was the one currency he had no coin of. When he says he wants to lead the village, translate it plain. He wants to become so undeniable that a place which once spat on him will stand up when he walks in. Call that acceptance dressed in bright colors.

Sasuke wanted something else entirely, and this is the piece I need you to really sit with. He wanted justice. Not friendship. Not a warm bowl of ramen with the squad. Justice. When your family gets slaughtered and the killer strolls off telling you to grow strong and come find him, all that reaching his teammate does becomes a luxury you no longer have access to. You cannot heal toward belonging while the person who owes you the world is still breathing. A whole lot of viewers kept begging him to choose love, to come home, to let his friends fix him, as though a hug undoes a massacre. It does not. That boy had a moral debt outstanding and no institution willing to collect it.

Think about it plainly. Who was supposed to hold the murderer to account? A village? That same village power structure we learn much later used his brother to carry out the massacre in the first place? His rage aimed at what the audience assumed was random evil, but the story keeps quietly showing you machinery underneath. His clan got cornered, boxed out of power, painted as a threat, then wiped clean by a decision made in shadow rooms while a seven year old inherited the nightmare. When he finally learns the truth, that his brother carried out the massacre under orders and wore a villain mask on purpose so a little kid would have someone clean to hate, everything detonates. That is not a boy who needs to touch grass. That is a boy handed proof that a system he was told to trust ate his family for breakfast and expected a thank you.

Here comes the real question, then. Did the writers understand Sasuke better than the fans did? I think they absolutely did, and the discomfort people felt around him is the evidence. Not once does the series frame his hunger for justice as insanity. It frames the world’s response to that hunger as the tragedy. Every time he escalates, receipts get handed to you. He is allowed to be right about the rot even as his methods go wrong. Writing that takes real nerve, and if I am being honest, it is a very familiar thing to feel. Plenty of us know intimately what it means to be told our anger is the problem while whatever produced that anger keeps its good name and its pension.

Which is why the loneliness matters so much when you line them up. Naruto’s isolation left room to imagine a future where people love him, since nobody had personally destroyed his ability to hope. Sasuke’s isolation came stapled to a betrayal so complete that hope itself started to look like foolishness. Naruto could dream because his tomorrow was still open. No use telling a man to reach for it while yesterday still holds a debt over his head. One of them became a symbol of perseverance. His counterpart got cast as the cautionary tale. But strip off the plot armor and the harder story lands as the more honest study of what unaddressed harm does to a person never offered a legitimate path to repair.

Here is what stayed with me. This show does eventually let them meet in the middle, and that ending gets argued into the ground, yet the meeting only works because the writing respected that these two were never the same story in a different coat of paint. An offered hand lands precisely because it delivers the one thing the survivor was denied at every turn, which is somebody who refuses to walk away even after seeing all of it. Not a system. A person. That distinction is the entire show. Institutions failed both boys. Only individuals saved them.

So no, I do not read Sasuke as a villain who lost his way. I read him as a kid who wanted the books balanced in a world with no intention of balancing them, and who paid for that clarity with his peace. Fans needed him to crave acceptance because acceptance is comfortable to watch. His story knew what he actually carried, knew justice is a lonelier road, and followed him down it anyway. Fifteen years later I finally believe it understood him the whole time. We were just too busy loving Naruto to notice.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Simply put, the villainess trope consists of a female character who acts as the protagonist of a story which from a different perspective could have them actually be characterised as the antagonist. They are often hated or misunderstood by one or more characters in the story. Unfortunately, as time moved on and more villainess stories are written and released, some authors have forgotten the selling point of a villainess character by just having them inherit the label of one without the personality traits and motives that come with it. And that is why this article means to name some villainesses who live up to the title and should serve as textbook examples of how an actual villainess character should be written.

DISCLAIMER: This list consists of villainesses written as protagonists of their respective manhwa/manga, not those actually written as antagonists.

Remilia from The One Within the Villainess

In no particular order, the first incredible villainess is Remilia from The One Within the Villainess. This is a recognisable manga known for its faultless use of the villainess trope in its characterisation of the protagonist, Remilia. She is a character who became a villainess because she was seeking revenge for the person she loved, Emi. In her eyes, Emi was the only person who truly loved and cared for her and that is why when she sees her be mistreated by the people she had helped in the past, Remilia finds it in herself to get back at them for hurting her.

The One Within the Villainess is one of those manga that nicely switch up the portrayal and motivations of the typical villainess protagonist – which is that she doesn’t act for herself but for someone else. And they do this by almost having Remilia occupy an omniscient narrator position instead of just having her be transmigrated, reborn or isekai’d into a story. She is an original character of that world who so happens to find out what happens to herself in the future and manages to change it for the better.

Roxana from Roxana

Although left discontinued and incomplete, Roxana is a chef’s kiss of a manhwa of the villainess trope. It is one of those manhwas that remain a classic for readers of the trope and a must read for those just starting out in the scene.

You can say the manhwa has a convoluted plot with how many characters and plot points there are involved in the overall premise, but it is that complexity that makes it special. The intricate dynamics of the Agriche family members, and what classifies them as an ‘evil family’ brings into perspective how and why Roxana is the way she is. Her twisted personality makes sense, but we as the readers can still hold her liable for the malicious acts she commits – even though, we can’t help but cheer for her when her plans succeed.

From raising poisonous butterflies to facing murderers for siblings, Roxana showcases how she survives in a world governed by a ‘kill or be killed’ rule.

Celestine from The Flowery Path of Evil

This manga is unique in its depiction of relationships with the leading lady Celestine first being introduced on an altar getting married to a man twice her age. Surprisingly, she takes on the situation with open arms because she in fact loves and prefers older men. The manga almost immediately shows us how Celestine and her husband are a couple so strongly supportive of one another, even when faced with gossips of their involvement in criminal acts and activities – which is true that they are. Nonetheless, Celestine is written as a villainess who holds her head high and uses the political and financial power her husband – the prime minister – to shut down all those who get in the way of her happy life.

The Flowery Path of Evil is honestly more of a wholesome read than anything, but the main reason Celestine is on this list is how she – a girl isekai’d from the 21^st century – is so accepting of some of systems of the era she is in. Such as, medieval torture, slavery, and child marriages.

Lass from I Will Fall With the Emperor

Just like Remilia, Lass is a villainess driven by revenge. Now reborn, Lass was abused by her family, cast away by her country and left to die as a prisoner of war at the hands of her enemy; the once kind, pushover of a princess turned sinister to avenge a version of herself that died in another life.

Lass is an interesting villainess compared to most out there because of how humanised she is. Even though she schemes to bring down her family, burning people alive and conquering countries and taking their resources along the way to do so, she finds the time to build strong friendships and a healthy, romantic relationship with her husband. There are scenes where she gets flustered, laughs, and jokes like any regular person that it has us forgetting the premise of her character – even for a moment.

I Will Fall With the Emperor should be considered underrated because it is a rare manhwa where a villain-villainess couple are the protagonists. So not only can you enjoy a villainess main character but change perspectives to a villain main character.

Sarang Yu from I Dare You

Four words; Puts. Mom. In. Freezer.

Sarang Yu is just insane that it is hard to figure out what she is thinking. And when she explains the reason for her actions in an inner monologue, you find how much sense her strange and sometimes brutal actions mean even though you still think there was a better way for her to handle them.

The manhwa – a modern-day psychological thriller – is still ongoing but the chapters that have already been released all have a gripping effect on its readers. Since its still in its early stages of release, there isn’t too much to reveal besides the main premise of how a group of high schoolers try to gauge Sarang Yu’s sanity by making her complete dares from their made-up ‘Embarrassment Game’. We also figure out Sarang Yu’s living conditions, about her abusive father and, of course, how she keeps her deceased mother in a kimchi freezer.

I Dare You is an interesting addition to the (modern) villainess trope and more so in the psychological horror scene.

Even though only five characters were listed who act like actual villainesses across manga and manhwa, there are obviously a lot more out there. But because the respective manga and manhwas are treated like they are overrated or simply pushed back to make room for more mainstream content, readers are left unsatisfied when they read on villainesses that act preppy and kind than cruel and deceptive. Hopefully this article helps someone out there to finally quench that thirst.

Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

A South African who brings her love for fiction, manga, and storytelling into every piece she creates. Her writing is shaped by imagination, curiosity, and a true appreciation for the worlds stories can build.

Feel free to drop a note at; FadzaiN@AfroGamers.com.

Let me back up for anybody who only knows the green hair from a cosplay at the cookout. The story follows Izuku Midoriya, a boy born without a Quirk in a world where almost everybody has one. Powerless in a society built entirely around power. If you have ever been the one in the room without the obvious gift, the one who had to study twice as long and grind three times as hard just to earn a seat at the table, then you already understand why this character grabbed so many of us by the collar.

Midoriya does not get strong because the universe owed him anything. He inherits his ability from the closest thing his world has to a living legend, and from the first day he is breaking his own bones trying to live up to it. That image stuck with a lot of folks. A young dude shattering his fingers to hold onto a borrowed gift, scared to death he might waste it. Anybody who has carried somebody else’s hopes on their back felt that one land in the chest.

Here is what the closing stretch did so well, and why grown men were texting each other whole paragraphs at two in the morning. The series stopped pretending that saving people is ever clean. It leaned all the way into the cost. The mentor figure, All Might, spends the entire run pouring himself out until there is almost nothing left in the tank. He grins for the cameras while his body falls apart in private, because the public needs to believe somebody upstairs has it handled. Real ones recognized that picture instantly. That is every auntie holding a whole family together, every pops working doubles, every coach and teacher handing out strength they do not always have in reserve.

By the final arcs, the show asks a harder question than who wins the brawl. It asks what is left of a person after they give away everything they had. Midoriya does reach the mountaintop in the way his world needed. But the receipt is written in plain ink. The body breaks down. The borrowed power fades. The boy who once would have traded anything just to be special spends the back half learning that the cape costs far more than anybody mentioned at the start. The finale refuses to hand him a shiny prize and a sunset. It hands him a quieter peace instead, the kind you only reach after the bill has already been paid.

So why did this hit the younger crowd so hard in particular? Because they watched it grow up right alongside them. The first episodes dropped back in 2016, which means a twelve year old who pressed play then is a whole adult now with rent, a job, maybe a little one of their own. They did not simply watch a story unfold. They aged inside of it. When the credits rolled on that last episode, it was not just a cartoon wrapping up. It was a chapter of their own youth clicking shut, and that is a separate species of grief entirely.

There is also the plain truth of how massive the medium has become, and who is standing in the room now. More than seventy three million fan votes were cast this year, a number that buries every total that came before. Across recent Anime Awards shows, you have seen names like The Weeknd, RZA, Winston Duke, and Megan Thee Stallion step into the anime space without apology. The Black nerds who used to catch slick comments for loving this stuff are nowhere near the margins anymore. We helped build the center of it. Watching a coming of age tale about an overlooked underdog take the top honor, presented by an artist out of our own world, felt like a receipt for two decades of quiet devotion.

There is one more layer that lands different the older you get. The power at the center of it all gets passed from hand to hand, person to person, a literal chain of people choosing to give their strength to whoever comes next. That is the whole engine of the thing. A lineage. Each holder adds a little of themselves before handing the torch forward and stepping out of the way. Anybody raised by folks who poured into them so the next one could climb higher understands that math without needing a single subtitle.

The piece I keep chewing on is the promise baked right into the name. Being a hero is framed as a weight, never a flex. The show flat out refuses to sell the fantasy that doing right is easy, or that the powerful sleep soundly at night. Every act of rescue subtracts something from the one doing the rescuing. That is a heavy notion to hand a teenager, and yet teenagers are precisely the ones who needed to hear it, because they are the same kids being asked to carry their households, their blocks, and their futures, often with no special gift to lean on besides raw grit.

I think about my own little cousins watching this, the ones with big dreams and not a lot of cushion under them. A show told them, over years, that greatness is real and reachable, while never once lying about the toll. That is a rare and honest thing to put in front of a child. Most stories aimed at young people promise the glory and skip the invoice. This one made them sit with both.

When people ask why a Japanese cartoon about super powered students left a bunch of grown Black men misty during an awards broadcast, the answer is not complicated at all. We saw ourselves in the boy who had nothing and chose to give everything anyway. We saw our elders in the man who smiled clean through his own decline. We saw the price up close, and we recognized it on sight, because plenty of us are paying a version of that same bill right now.

The series earned its trophy, no question. More than that, it earned the long silence that follows the last frame, the one where you just sit there with a dark screen and let the whole thing settle into your bones. Ten years, one underdog, one borrowed gift, one heavy crown. That is what a legacy actually looks like. And the boy who started with empty hands ended up teaching an entire generation that the truest measure of a savior is never the strength itself, but what you are willing to lose in order to use it right.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller… He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Ranking Systems in the Imperial Palace

This goes back to Ancient China when emperors were permitted to take as many women to be their wives as they wanted – within the bounds of traditional rules and customs of course. The women who would enter the palace to wed the emperor were made to follow one of these traditional customs, which was the imperial concubine ranking system. This entailed them occupying a position that granted them a certain amount of comforts and power within the imperial palace. As simple as it sounds, there were factors that went into which rank a woman was placed in. To begin with, the emperor, their husband, was the one that ranked them and he did that by looking at how prominent a woman’s family background was, their ability to have children, and also whether they were talented enough to receive his favour – in other words, were they worth enough to receive his affection. Different Chinese dynasties had different ranking systems that were sometimes based on what the emperor at the time wanted.

Simplified, the ranking system consisted of the empress, the emperor’s main wife, consorts and concubines. In all these systems there would only ever be one empress. Other ranks could come and go, but she always remained. Nonetheless, the ranks of the imperial wives served different purposes but the predominant purpose was to maintain court dynamics. Which often spawned court and palace intrigue.

Is the Web novel any good?

To answer whether or not The Job of an Imperial Concubine is a good read: Yes, the web novel is a first-rate read. On the surface, it is well written, the characters are properly fleshed out and although it feels more slice of life, there is enough plot and drama to keep the reader wanting more. The protagonist of the web novel, Zhaung Laoyan, is the perfect definition of a go getter and a woman who strives to live comfortably and luxuriously – even if it means throwing her dignity away to make that happen.

Like a lot of Asian web novels out there, The Job of an Imperial Concubine is tagged as a transmigration story. Zhaung Laoyan, our female protagonist was an older woman working corporate as a PR manager before she passed away and found herself in the body of one of Emperor Feng Jin’s concubines in ancient China. The era can be described as a fictional version inspired by the real-world Han and Qing Dynasties. Throughout the coming chapters, Zhaung Laoyan is consistently bound by strict palace rules whilst being forced into the schemes of the emperor’s other wives. But what the story is unique in is its not so unique type of plot of how our female protagonist does not have a golden finger. What that means is, Zhaung Laoyan doesn’t have any special talent or skill that really distinguishes her from the other characters, besides being a transmigrator who is smart enough to survive the imperial palace’s treacherous schemes. In that way, she can be mistaken as a background character turned protagonist.

An interesting detail that makes the web novel a great read is how well Emperor Feng Jin doesn’t love any of his wives or at least is good at pretending he doesn’t love them. Anyone can find this type of character refreshing. Moreover, he constantly manipulates even the ones he cares just a little for, simply to maintain the systemic relationship the women of the harem are all meant to fit into. At any part of the novel, whenever you read from his perspective, there is an involuntary feeling of holding one’s breath because you never know what he is really up to. Just like when – SPOILER ALERT – he married a performer because he “liked her dancing”, only for him to later on let her be framed for a murder she didn’t commit. The reason for that? He was letting his other wives vent their anger and jealousy on her for being the ‘new, pretty’ wife in the harem.

Similar Chinese Short Dramas

There have actually been a couple Chinese dramas that follow the same or similar plot as The Job of an Imperial Concubine. Especially Chinese vertical short dramas – just like the ones you see on TikTok and YouTube. An example of this is the short drama called: Reborn, she was forced into palace for sister, won emperor’s heart, and became supreme empress and Modern Consort’s Guide to Rising in Rank, that you can both find and watch on YouTube.

Modern Consort’s Guide definitely differs from the web novel and the similarities lie in how the transmigrator concubine, strives to survive in the cutthroat palace environment by seducing the Emperor and rising to be his most favoured wife. Unlike the novel, however, the concubine blatantly says she wants to be the most powerful woman in the palace whereas Zhaung Laoyan just wants to relax and stay out of drama as much as she can – she just knows the only way to do that is to stay on the Emperor’s good side, always. Another obvious difference is how the web novel takes on a more serious tone but the short drama is more comedic with a couple of overly exaggerated scenes, like how the emperor “called for water” seventeen times during his first night with the female protagonist.

But then we have the Reborn…and became supreme empress short drama that matches the web novel’s tone the most – excluding the mandatory cringey and exaggerated scenes found in every Chinese vertical drama. The drama focusses on Shen Zhinian, the female protagonist, and how she gets revenge on her sister for murdering her in her past life by gaining the emperor’s favour and rising in rank in the harem. The whole drama shows how Shen Zhinian manipulates the emperor and makes sure the schemes of the other women in the harem go back to bite them. It is an interesting watch when you are someone who appreciates a character who, against all odds, uses their brains more than their brawn.

To sum it all up, The Job of an Imperial Concubine is a Chinese web novel that encapsulates the transmigration aspects of most Asian web novels but introduces realistic characters, in a realistic setting with realistic consequences. Those of us who consciously look out for good, bingeworthy reads set in historical eras can really value this one.

Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

A South African who brings her love for fiction, manga, and storytelling into every piece she creates. Her writing is shaped by imagination, curiosity, and a true appreciation for the worlds stories can build.

Feel free to drop a note at; FadzaiN@AfroGamers.com.

First of all, What is a Yandere?

A yandere refers to a person who introduces themselves as loving, gentle and kind when they in fact become mentally unstable when it comes to their romantic interest or other object of their affection. Yandere is derived from Japanese words ‘yanderu’, meaning ‘to be sick’, and ‘deredere’ meaning ‘love-struck’. Most of them are possessive and obsessive over their romantic interest, are exceptionally jealous, emotionally aggressive and brutally violent. The term is typically used in anime, manga and light novels to refer to a character archetype or as a fictional trope. Although yanderes tend to always be assumed as female, male versions do exist and they aren’t any different from their feminine counterparts.

1: Noel Gautier

In the first instalment of the anthology, Noel is the male lead who is shown as a rather timid, quiet and ‘soft’ character. He does not express his thoughts outwardly but when he does, it is through his actions and not always his words. In one panel, he offers to use his hobby – cooking – to express his affection towards his romantic interest, Alicia.

Throughout the short story, Noel doesn’t do anything remotely like a yandere would. The only taste of a yandere we get are two or three panels where his facial expression shifts from shy and cute to unsettling. Another example was how he helped Alicia’s sister steal her fiancé so he could have Alicia for himself. Even then, that didn’t feel like he was acting out as an unstable, love-struck man but as someone taking advantage of a situation in order to shoot his shot with the girl he has always liked. There are yandere characters out there who hide their true feelings behind the shy act – just like Yuri from Doki Doki Literature Club – but unlike her, Noel doesn’t cross over to an obsessive or possessive extreme.

2: Alber Jeniess Zeckelm

The second anthology story is somewhat mediocre, so a proper, strong opinion can’t be given about the characters – even so, Alber is not much of a yandere. He met Lucia when they were both children and almost immediately, he offered to kill her family before mumbling about wanting to kidnap her. Which, to be fair, does qualify as a mental issue for a literal child to say that – whether it was because he fell for her at first sight or not is uncertain.

Unfortunately, that idea falls apart after the characters are older. Alber no longer speaks the way he did when he was a child – threatening murder and all – and actually chooses to maturely propose marriage to Lucia in order to remove her from her abusive family’s custody. After that Alber punishes Lucia’s family for abusing her with, lawful, imprisonment with Lèse-majesté (the crime for insulting royalty) as an additional charge for insulting the prince – him. In the end, Alber gets to be with the woman he loves and Lucia gets to escape abuse and live a comfortable, loving life. Not sure where the violence and insanity is when the story sounded suspiciously like a retelling of Cinderella.

3: Cedric

Out of all three of the so-called yandere, Cedric from the third anthology story made the most sense to be classified as a one.

The short story takes place in 20^th century France where the commoner people will use any chance to abuse a noble. And that is what happens to the female lead, Noella, who has been forced to work as a maid after her noble family lost all their wealth. It is in the mansion she works at that she meets the male lead, Cedric, who disguised himself as a servant to keep an eye on her. On top of that, he even had people spy on her and report everything she had said and done throughout the day to him, whilst acting like a secret admirer and sending her flowers and letters every week.

At first, Cedric seems like the overprotective, gentlemanly type. But the more you read the story, an eery feeling slowly creeps up. And lo and behold, we find out that Cedric fell in love with Noella when she was around 13 years old whilst he was around 17 – based off a flashback panel where a younger her is seated on an older him’s lap.

Now what all these short anthology stories have in common is how they have the romantic interests play off the yandere male lead like his actions meant nothing. Which seems to make sense since the male leads really aren’t doing anything extreme and violent enough to classify them as yanderes and warrant the ladies or those around them to be worried or scared. Another strong give away is how the title of the anthology series clearly states, “obsessive” duke and not “yandere” duke, but those who have read the series have broadcasted the misconception that the men are in fact yandere.

Cedric is a slightly different story, but even he can be brushed off by some readers with a “Based on the story’s era and setting, it makes sense why he is the kind of man he is”. Nonetheless, these men honestly aren’t that bad; they are only drawn with scary facial expressions and say creepy statements that they later in the story don’t actually act on, making them NOT yandere at all… at least not in the conventional sense of the term.

Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

A South African who brings her love for fiction, manga, and storytelling into every piece she creates. Her writing is shaped by imagination, curiosity, and a true appreciation for the worlds stories can build.

Feel free to drop a note at; FadzaiN@AfroGamers.com.

Tongari Boushi no Atelier, or Witch Hat Atelier, is a Japanese animated series (an anime) that started airing in April 2026. Produced by BUG FILMS, it took approximately 3 and a half years for the adaptation process of the manga, of the same name, to be completed before its premier. The hype following the announcement and release of the series was to be expected considering how the manga received critical acclaim after winning the Best Manga Award of 2025 at the 37^th Harvey Awards – outshining even One Piece.

Because of this, it felt only right to watch and review whether the anime lives up to the standards of the manga it is based on. It has already been a couple of weeks since Witch Hat Atelier came out, but it is never too late to express your thoughts on something that directly captures your attention when it does. This review only looks at the first episode of the anime because first impressions always matter.

Summary and Analysis

Overall, the plot of Witch Hat Atelier features a little girl named Coco who aspires to become a witch due to her immense love and admiration for the art of magic. Unfortunately, in the world she lives in, only those born and blessed with magical powers can be witches. All of this comes to head when Coco, after seeing a witch named Mr. Qifrey use magic, discovers all she needs to wield the mysterious and alluring power is a pen and a casting seal. From then onwards, adventure and intrigue ensues.

The series opens with our main character, Coco, questioning in a neutral tone whether the identities every person adopts is inherently known – thereafter she answers herself by stating how “These things aren’t decided at birth”. This opening scene already speaks to what kind of person Coco is. It insinuates that she is perceptive about the world and realistic about what she can be and cannot be even though she has an intense desire to become something she admires. Her optimism, however, almost attempts to blindside the viewers and have her appear as ignorant and naïve about how the world worked – even though that is not the case. We can see this in a flashback when her mother explains why and how she could not be a witch, leaving her disheartened, only for the next scene to be Coco enthusiastically trying to cast a spell whilst role-playing a witch. These scenes of the episode did well in revealing the duality of her character.

The overall mood of the episode is relatively down-to-earth. It is calming in a sense whereby we as the viewers are getting to know the characters, especially our main character. We can feel this mood shift when Coco tells the story of the time she met a “witch in a mask”. The change is not drastic, but there is something about the way Mr. Qifrey contemplates Coco’s story that gives it a sense of foreboding. Another scene in the episode that gave off this feeling is when Coco began experimenting with the pen and casting spells from the book. Just watching this scene would put any adult with a child on high alert because Coco, a 10 or so year old child, is evidently ignorant on how magic worked and the potential scale of its destructive power. The episode did well is setting up these shifts in tone and mood as the viewers can now anticipate how the upcoming episodes can make them feel and whether or not they are willing to go through that.

Another noteworthy aspect is the recurring image of the book. Not just the book Coco got from the masked witch but throughout the episode – from the start with Coco’s monologue to the end where the episode ends with a shot of a book’s page flipping to the next. This recurrence obviously points to the masked witch and how them giving Coco the book of spells started the whole story, but it can also symbolise a newfound knowledge and experience. In the series’ case, that is the recurring image of the book symbolises Coco’s new enlightenment into the world she had always dreamed of experiencing. That is why the episode ending with a page turning signifies a new set of ideas and understanding that Coco is about to acquire about the “mysterious and sparkly, valuable and pretty” world of magic.

Animation and Voice Acting

The animation style is nothing short of breath-taking. It is smooth in the way the characters move in the settings they are in and how natural and realistic these movements are. The scene where Coco cuts a piece of fabric for Mr. Qifrey directly captures how delicate and precise the animators of the episode (and perhaps series) were in every frame they animated.

The only downside – but not too much of a downside – is the voice-acting in the series. This judgement is specific to the Japanese voice-acting. There is nothing bad about it, but there is nothing special either. It almost felt as though it was done to serve a purpose; the script said Coco needs to be happy, so the voice actor spoke in a happy voice; the script said Mr. Qifrey needs to be carefree, so the voice actor used a light-hearted tone in their speech. Not to diminish the work put into bringing the characters personalities to life, however the voice acting can be praised in the same light as some other anime already out there.

Closing Words

In closing, the series is a definite watch, especially if you are interested in fantasy, magic and adventure. The medieval fantasy aesthetic makes it even more appealing to watch, and it really gives off the vibe that the anime takes place in an alternate world where magic is part of people’s everyday lives though strictly observed by the witches who can use it. Which makes it even more exciting for what’s to come in the following episodes regarding the worldbuilding and magical systems put in place.

So, if you are a blatant fan of the Harry Potter franchise, The Lord of the Rings trilogy or literally any isekai anime with magic and overpowered characters, then Tongari Boushi no Atelier is without doubt made for you.

Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

A South African who brings her love for fiction, manga, and storytelling into every piece she creates. Her writing is shaped by imagination, curiosity, and a true appreciation for the worlds stories can build.

Feel free to drop a note at; FadzaiN@AfroGamers.com.

Now, the prices for a tape featuring two episodes were always dicey but you were guaranteed to find something you’d dig. Flipping through it, I noticed a lot of classic mecha series.

Mecha are the anime, manga, and video games involving giant robots that can either be piloted from inside or controlled. Usually, the series are sci-fi in nature but things have been mixed up and new concepts have been explored.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at big three pioneers of mecha anime and manga.

Voltron (1984)

This franchise holds a very legit claim to being the best of the classic mecha franchises. This franchise was just satisfying to watch. It wasn’t overly complex, too violent, or even too lengthy.

I’m not a big fan of monster-of-the-week writing but it worked with Voltron. This was like an animated version of Power Rangers which began airing a few years before Voltron.

Another thing that works for Voltron is that this is mecha in a sci-fantasy setting. It’s like if you mixed Power Rangers with Star Wars when the back story comes into play.

Of course, anime that was broadcast don’t really hit story-wise when you’re ten. You’re just looking at the cool fights, suits, and robots, really.

Robotech (1985)

Now Robotech and Voltron aren’t as old as pioneers such as Mazinger Z or Gigantor but it is one of those series that pioneered mecha in the West.

This was thanks to anime’s best friends during expansion and exposure: dubbing and broadcast television. Dubbing—replacing the audio of exported content with that of the import market—wasn’t that great in the late 80s and into the early 00s.

However, just the idea that this was some new, fresh content in the West was enough for Robotech to catch on. It’s military-focused but it’s also a space opera with half of it being about the protagonist doing his duty and protecting the woman he loves only for it to no be reciprocated.

Of the three mentioned series, Robotech kind of sits in the middle. It’s not as action-heavy and fast-paced as Voltron tends to be but it doesn’t move at a slower pace like our next entry often does.

Also, lore-wise, Robotech isn’t as technical as our third franchise but it explains more than Voltron usually did. Progression-wise, this series moved along well and ran in chronological order.

Which is different from the third and final series on this list.

Gundam (1979)

This is such a hard series to explain. Gundam does a lot. It’s a long-running series which predates Robotech and Voltron by a few years but comes over a decade after Gigantor.

Like Robotech, Gundam is a space opera obsessed with a lot of lore and timeline events. Unfortunately, the franchise is fractured into multiple series taking place in different timelines or even different worlds.

As I said, this is a franchise that is hard to explain. Some of the series are sequels or prequels of others while some are standalone series. Then you have a series like G Gundam which kind of steps away from the slower-paced high drama of the franchise into straight-up shonen territory.

On the one hand, I’d say this is to be expected if a franchise has run as long as Gundam and needs to freshen things up for a while. I don’t know if this was the right direction but I enjoyed it!

For the most part, you could get someone into Voltron or even Robotech. As a matter of fact, Robotech is offered on most streaming platforms and for free on Crackle.

Gundam is a harder series to get people into. It really depends on if you introduce them to the more modern stuff, the late anime boom stuff like Gundam Wing and G Gundam, or take them back to the throwbacks.

It’s a gamble because Gundam’s pace is such that if the series you picked for someone to watch doesn’t stick, it’s going to be hard to suggest more Gundam. At that point, you’re just pushing it.

Bonus Classic Mecha Anime: Gigantor (1963)

Gigantor is pretty much the godfather of modern mecha anime. It’s old school as hell, black and white, and features a super simplistic storyline from episode to episode.

When I first saw it, it was more for historical purposes. Watching the series years later and I don’t care for it, to be honest. This is not a fun series to sit through.

That’s hard for me to say because I’ve sat through and enjoyed Astro Boy which was released around the same time. There’s just something I can’t get into with the original Gigantor.

I will say that this was a big broadcast for me since I heavy into finding the origins of certain genres in music, comics, and animation.

Seeing the birth of so many tropes is why I enjoy watching Kinnikuman and Fist of the North Star so much. Once Toriyama took from those two series to make Dragon Ball manga history was made.

That could be the thing. I went in thinking I’d witness the same thing in Gigantor that was inspire Gundam, Robotech, and Voltron. I guess that would be the case if those series were heavily in the old 1940s Danger Boy and Mystery Lad novels vein like Gigantor.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.