Kind of?
Although, stuff like Ranma 1/2, or Dragon Ball, or ストップ!! ひばりくん! all play off of gender stereotypes a lot and I (mostly!!!) don’t mind them so much (but certainly see why others might).
I guess if you think about it as three criteria:
- my personal fun of the series wasn’t ruined by feeling uncomfortable about gender-related stuff
- there’s nothing related to gender in here that makes me uncomfortable
- there’s nothing related to gender in here that would make me think twice about recommending it to anyone
Dungeon Meshi meets all 3 easily.
Something meeting 1 and 2 but not 3 would probably be like… Food Wars? I thought the constant fan service was juvenile but wasn’t really bothered by it otherwise.
A lot of stuff would meet 1 but not 2 or 3 - where I like it (and it might even be one of my favorites) but parts definitely make me uncomfortable, like Dragon Ball w/ Master Roshi etc., or how when trans characters show up in the Yakuza series it’s usually really bad. Or the occasional gay caricatures in Mother 3. Or even Wandering Son just because it’s so fraught all the time. If that makes sense.
It might be hard for me to think of specific examples that meet none of those criteria, since I’m not really all that sensitive to this stuff and if something does set me off I’d be likely to stop reading and not remember it. But there’s a lot of harem stuff and eroge premises out there that I’m sure would not be fun at all to me.
One non-manga pet peeve that sucks the fun out of a movie for me, is wife revenge movies where the wife only shows up in airy flashbacks with no dialogue or personality. I can’t stand that.
I guess that’s all I mean - anything that might be one person’s “huh… that’s a weird choice” but another’s “I had no fun with this because of this gross element”
Like not necessarily even outright bad stuff, just like - peanut allergies, some stuff’s gonna be a lot more unpleasant for some people than others.
Gender just seems like the most usually fraught vector for that kind of thing, and the one I’m most used to having to warn about to people I’m usually recommending things to… I guess anything else could slot in.
If it were race, Dungeon Meshi would get a “I have some minor qualms with how fantasy races are sometimes handled in character motivations, but it definitely clears the low bar set by a lot of canon fantasy in this type of setting,” Dragon Ball would get a “Mr. Popo is a problem,” etc.
I mostly just want to coax people into reading the stuff I like but also I’m always kind of worried I’ll cause people to read something they’ll be frustrated and dismayed by.
Metaphorically speaking, I don’t wanna recommend eating a bunch of brownies full of peanuts without a little label attached, and I want people who might die if they eat peanuts to be comfortable eating my amazing peanutless brownies by reassuring them.
I think I’m good on Dungeon Meshi though… I think it would be hard to be dismayed by it.
probably they do cook with peanuts at some point though, no guarantees there