I was reading the other week a post by Paul Brislen (CEO of TUANZ) about the lack of women in the top ten movies in a leading role. Paul’s point lead on to discuss about the lack of females within the Information Technology & Telecommunications (IT&T) industry. You can check out the blog post here.
This got me thinking from my creative and writer side about my writing. I thought back to the many stories I have started and I looked at what they usually started with or looked to have. Every one of them had a lead female, going through a crisis and showing her true strength.
Looking back at my inspiration and why I originally picked up the pen is quite interesting. A lot of it has to do with Anime, it’s plain and simple.
Let’s rewind about 12 years. I was 15 and started to get into a new genre of movies and television called Anime. It is a Japanese style animation. I was hooked and watching Anime like Akira, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, Noir, Ghost in the Shell and many more. But the thing about Anime is that there are a lot of female lead characters, some are very strong. Some examples are:
- Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 is all about four women thrown together who fight to save the world
- Noir is about two women assassins who go in search of their past
- Ghost in the Shell is about a female cyborg who is within a police unit that investigate technology related crime
Even when there was not a female lead there was at least strong female characters along side the lead male characters. I frequently watched DragonBall Z and loved that the character Bulma was a scientist. She was intelligent, funny and held her own against the men. There are a lot of examples of this happening, sometimes even the strong female characters are the evil/bad people they’re trying to run from or kill.
I grew up inspired by these anime films and tv series. These are the stories that have encouraged me to start typing my thoughts and dreams. These are what I hope inspire the future generation whether they’re girls or boys.
Amber Craig 