2017
Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to discover an anime from 1985 that had just recently been added to Crunchy Roll. The Dirty Pair anime ran for one season, and follows the adventures of a pair of young women heroes-for-hire who fly around the galaxy solving people's problems. (I heard about it because it has one episode with a trans character, who is treated much better than trans characters generally were on American tv in the 80s.)
In the anime, Kei and Yuri both appear to be in their early 20s, they constantly wish they had more time off (and keep trying to negotiate bonus pay for working overtime), they're interested in finding cute boys to date, and they're best friends who quarrel with each other constantly, which I find very relatable. The call themselves 'the Lovely Angels,' but everyone else calls them 'the Dirty Pair' because inevitably their problem-solving involves a lot of chaos. (And presumably because a salacious-sounding name for the series helped attract an audience.)
Having watched the show, it's a lot of fun, and I think it was actually made with the idea that girls would be the primary audience. Kei and Yuri are depicted psychologically realistically within their wacky scifi universe - as two young women who are balancing the demands of their first professional jobs, their close friendship, and their desire for a more active social and dating life. The two main characters have costumes that look like swimsuits - but the camera never does the kind of gross, leering male-gaze close-ups that you sometimes see in more recent anime for boys.
The 1985 anime was based on a series of light novels (semi-equivalent to American YA) from the late 70s and early 80s, and the 2019 manga omnibus, which is what I just read, was written by the author of the original light novels. Unfortunately, basically everything I liked about the show was missing or changed in this new manga. It's probably my least favorite book that I bothered to finish this year.
The omnibus tells two stories, with Kei and Yuri solving two different space mysteries, although the details of each case are pretty forgettable. Both the text and Hisao Tamaki's art depict the girls as literal teenagers, which is made gross by the facts that their costumes are drawn as more revealing, they're explicitly sexualized by older men they encounter, and the panel art has a lot of voyeuristic close-ups.
Also, in the anime, the girls fight using lasers, and their chaotic problem-resolution is shown as humorous. In this manga, they're basically psychopaths with machine guns, and their actions across the two stories result in millions of deaths, when, for example, they shoot down a fleeing corrupt politician's giant starship and it crash lands on the densely populated capital city.
Everything fun or funny, everything I liked on the show has been replaced with more explicit sex, gorier violence, and a general mean-spiritedness that I found impossible to enjoy. I found this manga while looking into whether I could locate a copy of one of the original light novels, but after reading this, I'm not going to bother. I liked the anime series, and clearly, what I liked was brought in by the people who made the show.
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