The Sousou no Frieren manga began to be published in 2020 and in 2023 it received an anime adaptation that was a huge success. The manga is the joint work of two people, Yamada Kanehito is credited for writing Frieren’s story while Abe Tsukasa is the one who draws the manga itself.
However, it seems that there is some confusion regarding the genre of the creator of Sousou no Frieren on the internet. A Twitter post reached more than 5 million views when CerberusXt posted: “Frieren and Dungeon Meshi helped me realize how much I hate isekais.”.
Frieren and Dungeon Meshi are pure fantasy anime, without the element of a person from the modern era going into a fantasy world and messing with it, but what I want to highlight is the discussion that followed.
Florence then responded by saying the following: “It also makes us realize how necessary female mangakas are, because they are both written by women and you can say that none of the female characters are sexualized, to my knowledge we have never had a scene of breasts being touched, they are just good animes. of fantasy”.
Another person then came to “confirm” without confirming that both Yamada and Abe are women, as “fans and websites speculate and prefer to think that Yamada is a woman because her writing makes it seem that way”.
So Sunny comes to talk more about why she thinks Frieren is written by a woman: “Intimacy, situations and feelings in Frieren are portrayed with empathy and respect in situations such as death, loss, growth, among others. Frieren never objectifies anyone because of their gender or appearance, or to attract more viewers. Male authors abuse this.”
Another point they cited as “proof” that Frieren is made by a woman is that they banned produce hentai doujins of the series, as said here. However, there are other franchises that also had their adult doujins banned, such as Uma Musume It is Evangelionin the end this doesn’t mean anything.
But after all, is Sousou no Frieren written by a Man or a Woman?
This statement then led to a discussion that female manga artists are “better” than men because they don’t put “unnecessary ecchi” in their stories… but what do we know about the gender of the person who created Sousou no Frieren?
As mentioned above, Yamada Kanehito is the one who creates Frieren’s story, and Yamada Kanehito was once described as a man, and how do we know this? Because of the author of Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai.
Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai is a harem romance manga where a boy begins to conquer several girls, the author of Frieren was Wakaki’s assistant during the publication of the manga. In 2012 Yamada published a one-shot and Wakaki then publicized his assistant work in a post on his blog.
And in this PublicationWakaki uses the term “man” to talk about Yamadathis is, as far as I know, the only confirmation of Frieren’s author’s gender, obviously Yamada does not show or reveal himself and the only clue about his gender that I could find was this post by Wakaki.
However, saying that because Frieren doesn’t have fanservice and the creator is a woman doesn’t mean that all of Yamada’s manga don’t have a little something.
Below you can see two pages of a manga written and drawn by Yamada, Bocchi Hakase to Robot Shoujo no Zetsubouteki Utopia, which is about a teacher and a little robot girl living in the post-apocalypse land where no one is alive anymore, ecchi is not the focus but there is scenes with a certain fetish in the manga:
It is not right then to say that because Frieren did not have ecchi that the author never drew anything of the kind. And we also don’t know the influence of Abe (who illustrates the manga) in creating the story or if Abe just draws.
Take for example Oshi no Ko, which is made by two people, Akasaka Aka is a man and is responsible for the story, Yokoyari Mengo is a woman and she draws the manga, but we already know from interviews that Mengo is only consulted in the story when Aka feels stuck.
Most mangakas like to keep their identities secret. And there’s more, wanting to convey the idea that fanservice is only made by men is also wrong, since there are many female authors who have created many animes with fanservice, take for example My Dress Up Darling, which is made by a woman and is full of naughty scenes.
In the end, don’t try to guess an author’s gender based on the work they’ve done, a manga can have well-written female characters and no ecchi and be made by men, just as a manga can have ecchi everywhere and have been made by a woman.
