My wife and I started watching 月詠 -MOON PHASE the other day. It is far from the best anime we’ve seen, but it is definitely entertaining.
The main female character is an adolescent vampire. Given the general idioms of vampire fiction, it should come as no surprise that Moon Phase is full of psychosexual themes that run from the interesting (e.g., awakening of adolescent sexuality) to the disturbing (e.g., sexualization of young girls). The latter is quite common in Japanese anime and manga. Even the relatively innocuous – and extremely popular – Inuyasha stars a female character, Kagome, who begins the series as a fourteen-year old student and is pictured naked on a number of occasions.1 And, of course, it is hard to get very far into anything Japanese without encountering the ubiquitous schoolgirl fetish.
The “interesting” aspects of the psychosexual content in Moon Phase have, so far, largely overshadowed the “disturbing” ones. But every once in a while you get something like the commercial-break still from Episode 3:
Now that’s just icky.
1In the Inuyasha manga Kagome has nipples, but in the anime they are either not drawn or effaced. I guess it isn’t only Americans who can suffer from nipplephobia.
Filed as: anime, manga, and Moon Phase
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
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