#animation meta

Ok my Apothecary fam, this is gonna be a long post but a positive one, so bear with me :3

I’ve loved historical fiction since forever, especially when it’s not centered around Western/white history. But loving the genre comes with a lot of frustration too. Depending on who’s writing, when they’re writing, and how well they researched (or didn’t), it can easily fall into stereotyping or misinformation.

Recently, I read two historical novels set in empires that depicted versions of a harem:

📖 Alamut by Vladimir Bartol, set in medieval Iran, and

📖 The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak, in Ottoman Istanbul.

Both stories include spaces where women live together, sometimes as concubines, nobles, queens, wifes. Sometimes as political actors, sometimes just as plot devices. And both got me thinking: why did I hate those depictions, but love the inner palace in The Apothecary Diaries? Honestly, the way this story handles gendered spaces of power feels smarter, more complex, and more real than a lot of so-called “serious” historical novels.

⚠️ I'm manga + anime only (for now), and this is based on that part of the series (I’ve read up to ch. 80.2 and watched both seasons). Please do not spoil me in the discussions <3

Orientalism vs nuance — how fiction fails (and why this manga doesn’t)

"Harem" is a loaded term in the West. It’s shaped far more by the Western colonial imagination than by actual historical realities. Yes, polygynous systems existed in many empires : Rajput and Mughal India, Qing China, the Ottoman empire, Persia, Egypt, etc. The word harem once meant protection, intimacy, and even a form of soft power. But colonial narratives twisted it into a fantasy, full of sex, silence, and subjugation.

In Alamut, women are brainwashed playthings in a pleasure fortress. Drugs, alcohol, and softcore orgies make it feel like a colonial fever dream. This doesn't surprise me because Vladimir Bartol, the author of the novel, never went to Persia and everything he wrote was inspired by Marco Pollo's writing. Oh ! Another white traveler.

In The Architect’s Apprentice, things are less cartoonish, but still... uneasy. The harem remains this mysterious closed space, romanticized and framed through the male narrator’s gaze. Eventhough the author Elif Shafak, is turkish and a women, I feel that some of her writing does carry stereotypes. And honestly? Even when we’re part of the cultures being depicted, many of us still carry a Western gaze. That’s colonization. That’s the power of dominant narratives.

So I always feel tense when fiction tackles these gendered spaces — especially when it exoticizes women of color as either voiceless victims or sexualized enigmas. Queerness is often fetishized in these depictions too — as a kind of Orientalist fantasy layered over the women’s bodies.

But The Apothecary Diaries? It avoids all that. It doesn’t pretend these systems were fair or ideal. But it also doesn’t pretend they were empty cages.

The inner palace is a social world, not an orgie in disguise

What I love in Apothecary Diaries is that the inner palace isn’t just a backdrop for seduction.

It’s full of life, of power games, alliances, daily routines, and deeply human connections. You see friendships, rivalries, maternal bonds. You see court ladies trained in arts, etiquette, sometimes even politics. Gyokuyou helping Lihua when they are both pregnant. The bond between Lishu and Ah Duo, as a mother-daughter relationship. Maomao’s friendship with Xiaolan and Shisui. All of it builds a world where women are active agents, even in constrained roles.

So many stories rely on shock value when depicting women in these systems : rape, abuse, trauma. Not to say these things didn’t happen, but they’re so often presented in voyeuristic, almost titillating ways.

The Apothecary Diaries shows us something rarer: the real problems and emotional costs of those systems, without sensationalizing them.

The quiet pain of Gyokuyou, who knows she’ll never have the emperor to herself.

Fuyou, a princess who uses the inner palace as a hiding place, waiting for her beloved, and cleverly tricking the emperor into leaving her alone.

Lihua’s illness, shaped by the grief of losing her child.

These stories show us that suffering here isn’t always loud or dramatic. Sometimes it’s slow, soft, made of waiting and quiet resignation.

And yes, even the deeply disturbing behavior of the previous emperor is part of this reality. His pedophilia was known and frowned upon, yet tolerated, simply because he held ultimate power. No one could stop him. That’s part of the horror too.

The ecosystem of the inner palace and the lives of its women reflect the world outside: sorority, friendship, sisterhood, but also rivalry, violence, loneliness, and class divides.

It’s complex. And that’s exactly what makes it such a compelling story.

Women navigating patriarchy with intelligence and strategy

Yes, the system is patriarchal. Of course it is. The emperor decides, men rule. But within this system, women still find ways to carve out space — to survive, to strategize, sometimes even to thrive like Gyokuyou.

Some rely on wit, alliances, or sheer luck to stay afloat. Others, like Shenmei, actively choose this world, seeking honor, influence, and status, even when their heart lies elsewhere. They become part of the palace’s political machinery, navigating its codes and ambitions like anyone else trying to rise within empire.

And then there are those like Lishu, quietly protected — not because of their own agency, but because the palace, for all its rules, still offers more safety than the world beyond its walls.

And what I found particularly brilliant is how the series draws parallels between the inner palace and the pleasure quarters.

Both are systems where women are sexualized, yes. But both also offer women a kind of agency. The courtesans of the red light district, much like Indian tawaifs or Japanese geishas, are shown choosing who to marry, managing their careers, teaching the arts — even sexual education.

Remember when Maomao teaches a noblewoman about sex based on what she learned from the brothel? That’s cultural memory, feminine expertise, and class intersection all in one.

Class, gender, and masculinity deconstructed

I also love how the story explores declassed masculinities.

By that, I mean men who don’t sit at the top of the patriarchal hierarchy. They don’t hold full institutional power, nor do they always benefit from sexual or social dominance.

Take the eunuchs, for example. In a lot of Western fiction, eunuchs are mocked, caricatured, or reduced to tragic figures. But The Apothecary Diaries offers a much richer range of portrayals.

We have two doctors: one naïve and kind, Guen and, the other competent and respected, Luomen. There’s also Gaoshun, who has a family — something rare to see in fiction for an eunuch but historically accurate ! These characters are layered, each have different stories. Some are influential and respected. They represent a masculinity that exists outside the norm — marginalized, yes, but far from powerless.

Even Jinshi, with his complicated background, plays with gender expectations. He’s perceived as delicate, elegant, “too beautiful to be taken seriously” — which creates a tension between his apparent softness and his hidden political strength. He performs fragility to disarm people, while holding real authority.

Lihaku, on the other hand, is more of a traditional male figure but his tenderness, his devotion to Pailin, and his friendship with Maomao make him stand out. As a man from a lower class, he also faces barriers and prejudice. He doesn't coast on masculine privilege alone — he has to fight for space in this strategic, stratified society.

Even the current emperor isn’t reduced to a brutish patriarch who exploits women. He cares for Lishu, Gyokuyou, and Ah-Duo in different ways — as a father, a companion, a partner in trust. He’s witty, clever, emotionally attuned. But he too is trapped by his role. He has to marry for political reasons. We see this when he visits Lolan because her family is powerful — despite clearly having no physical interest in her and no admiration for her personality. It’s duty, not desire.

None of these men fit the traditional mold of patriarchal power.

And that’s what makes it so refreshing. The Apothecary Diaries doesn’t just explore how women survive under patriarchy. It also shows how men who don’t fit the dominant script navigate it too.

Some of this is clearly designed to appeal to modern audiences — no, this isn’t 100% historically accurate. But it still breaks many stereotypes about men in palace life with harems. They’re not just simping 25/7 for the women. They’re not defined solely by desire or power over the harem. They have their own lives, their own griefs, and their own constraints. And that’s rare to see.

When the Gaze Isn’t Male or White

Western historical dramas like Versailles, The Tudors, or The Crown are full of royal mistresses, political marriages, lovers used as pawns. And yet. We don’t exoticize Anne Boleyn the same way we exoticize, say, Hürrem Sultan or Nur Jahan.

The reason? Racism. We romanticize white women’s sexuality and political maneuvering, but frame women of color in imperial settings as either victims or temptresses. It’s tiring.

I honestly think this complexity in The Apothecary Diaries and how it breaks stereotypes, is one of the reasons the anime is so popular. It has layers. And one major reason is that the story is told through the eyes of a woman.

Maomao doesn’t romanticize or demonize the Inner Palace or the Pleasure District. She observes with curiosity, empathy, and sharp analysis. It brings in a rare kind of female gaze: one that sees both pain and resilience, both survival and ambition.

That’s the beauty of Maomao’s narration. It doesn’t flatten or moralize, it understands.

These types of point of view are essentials in fiction. Because how we tell history affects how we see each other. Because stories like The Apothecary Diaries offer us a view of the past that isn’t filtered through a white, Christian, male lens.

Let’s talk about the absolute psychological horror camouflaged as a "comedy filler" episode in the 2003 Teen Titans series: "Date with Destiny."

Pull up a chair, lock the doors, and grab your favorite waffles, because the media literacy deficit regarding how this show treats Robin’s autonomy needs an immediate, brutal intervention.

For over twenty years, a loud, selective section of this fandom has written Kitten off as a quirky, bratty, "funny" valley-girl villain. But if you filter this episode through a real, mature lens of bodily sovereignty, Kitten isn’t a joke. She is a textbook predator utilizing high-stakes sexual coercion and extortion to violate a teenager's boundaries. And guess what? The animators knew it.

Let's look at the actual canonical visual receipts. 👇

🧠 1. Visceral Discomfort: The Animation Doesn't Lie

Critics love to hide behind the "comedy shield," claiming the episode is just campy fun. But look at how the actual animation team frames Robin’s physical and emotional reactions.

When Killer Moth delivers the ultimatum—"take my daughter to prom or I mutate the city"—the animators don't give Robin a standard, funny anime sweat-drop reaction.

The Dead Eyes: Throughout the entire prom sequence, the animators deliberately draw Robin's mask with completely dead, flat white eyes. His usual expressive, sharp, dynamic expressions are entirely wiped out. It is a visual representation of dissociation. He is mentally removing himself from a deeply violating situation because his agency has been stripped away.

The Physical Flinch: Watch the scene in the limousine. When Kitten slides into his personal space, wraps her arms around him, and attempts to forcefully kiss him, Robin doesn't just look mildly annoyed. He recoils. His shoulders tense up, his chest pulls back, and he actively uses his arms to create a physical barrier to protect his personal sanctuary.

The "Mask" of Compliance: When he is forced to walk into the prom, his posture is rigid, stiff, and completely unnatural. The animators intentionally contrasted Kitten’s hyper-animated, bubbly movements with Robin’s absolute, stone-cold paralysis. That isn't "funny pining," dudes and dudettes. That is a visual depiction of a person whose body is in survival mode 24/7.

⚔️ 2. The Absolute Erasure of Robin's Autonomy and Agency

Let's talk about the structural math of Robin's choice in this episode, because the math is not mathing!

Robin is the ultimate leader, the protector, the anchor who keeps Jump City safe. Kitten and Killer Moth weaponize his core virtue—his radical selflessness—against his own body. Robin does not consent to going on this date. He is forced into a transactional invoice where his bodily autonomy is the currency used to purchase the survival of millions of innocent citizens.

This is the ultimate violation of agency. Robin is reduced to a human shield and an emotional caretaker for a spoiled predator. He has to sit there, endure unwanted touching, endure physical harassment, and let down a manipulative girl soft enough to keep her from pressing a button that mutates his city. To see the "brain and brawn" of the Titans completely paralyzed by systemic extortion is a heartbreaking blow to his emotional safety, and the show handles it with an unblinking look at his complete helplessness.

🎀 3. The Toxic In-Universe "Shipping Culture" Spectator Sport

But you know what makes this episode an actual psychological horror story? The way the rest of the characters—and the narrative itself—react to his violation.

While Robin is literally fighting for his sanity and his boundaries in a black tuxedo, look at how the in-universe "shipping culture" treats it:

Starfire’s Monopolized Grief: Starfire’s reaction to Robin going to prom is treated as the primary emotional anchor of the episode. The show hyper-focuses on her jealousy and heartbreak over Robin "choosing" another girl. Excuse me?! Robin didn’t choose anything! He is being legally and physically extorted! By framing the conflict around Starfire’s romantic insecurity rather than Robin’s active violation, the narrative accidentally participates in the erasure of his trauma.

🏁 The Boy Wonder Verdict

Let's be completely honest here. If Kitten were a nineteen-year-old boy threatening a city to force a sixteen-year-old Starfire into a dress, to sit in a car, and to let him touch her neck, the entire internet would have labeled him a psychopathic, irredeemable monster. But because Kitten is a "cute-looking," cartoon girl with a funny voice, a bunch of hive-minded, selective, ignorant idiots write it off as iconic filler.

Fandom accepts peak physical trauma instantly—we cheer when Robin gets thrown through a brick wall by Slade—but the second a male character faces emotional and sexual misconduct, the empathy is completely broken.

“Jax is an NPC” isn’t the problem. The fandom’s reaction to the theory is.

We don’t talk about Bruno — but I will. A personal reflection on Encanto, family secrets, and being the one who vanishes.

I’m not Colombian, but I’m South Asian, a refugee in Europe — and the themes of family, intergenerational trauma, silence, and hierarchy in Encanto spoke to me deeply. Especially through the character of Bruno.

I also realized something very early on in the film: my family wasn’t just watching Bruno’s story. My dad was Bruno. And later in life, I would become Bruno too.

A bit of personal context: I come from big families on both sides. My dad has ten siblings, and my mother was very close to her cousins. So growing up, I had a huge extended family — a network of voices and love. But also, eventually, a lot of distance. Some of it was geographic (most of them lived in India), but the rupture came when I was eight. My father had a major falling out with his siblings over my grandmother’s inheritance (classic). After that, my dad became estranged from the family — and by extension, so did I.

It was a sudden, devastating void for a child who had spent her first nine years talking every Sunday to her uncles, aunts, and cousins on a phone card. My foundest memory was going back to India in my grandmother's house with all of my cousins. It never happened again since.

In that sense, Bruno represented the family I had lost.

So when Mirabel tries to understand who Bruno was, I recognized that feeling — wanting to know someone who’s become a ghost in your own family.

When we're first introduced to him, it's through Mirabel's song The Family Madrigal. She knows almost nothing about him — just his gift, and that he left. He's surrounded by mystery.

Later, in We Don’t Talk About Bruno, we witness a collective silence — a patchwork of half-truths and projections. Each family member gives their version of him, their interpretation, their fear. But Bruno is not there to speak for himself. He becomes a screen onto which everyone projects what they don’t want to face.

To Mirabel, he’s an enigma. To her mother, perhaps a pain too tender to touch. To the family at large — a source of shame, danger, drama.

It’s not unusual: every family, especially in POC communities, has its ghosts. When someone disappears, we create stories to fill the gap. And often, those stories are shaped by fear. Bruno becomes a scapegoat — a figure onto whom the family displaces its unresolved pain.

The moment Mirabel steps into Bruno’s abandoned room gave me chills — because some rooms in my own family feel like that too. Full of things no one dares to say.

The room is still there because even when someone is erased, their place in the family never fully disappears. But it’s collapsed, fragmented, filled with crumbling paths and dangerous edges. This is the landscape of taboo. Still, Mirabel steps in. She dares to enter the ruins the previous generation left behind. Narratively, she's the child who descends into the buried memory — the one brave enough to look at what everyone tried to forget.

And then comes the twist: Bruno never actually left. He’s been living in the walls, present but invisible. He sees, hears, even quietly fixes things. But he's hidden — erased from the center of the story, yet never truly gone. It reminded me so much of what happens in families like mine. We don't always cut people off — we silence them. We leave them in the walls. They become the unresolved presence, the unacknowledged truth that still shapes the house.

In systemic family therapy, we often draw family trees — not just to show who’s alive, but to mark absences, deaths, secrets, affairs. Because every hidden thing in a family still lives in the structure. Bruno embodies that exactly: he’s both gone and still here. His presence whispers through every room, through every silence.

When Mirabel discovers that Bruno has carved himself a spot at the dinner table, I cried. Because moments of togetherness — birthdays, festivals, special occasions — are where you feel the separation the most. And I’ve felt it at every special occasion since childhood.

In many POC families — South Asian, Latinx, and others — cutting off family isn’t always an option. Instead, we dim them. We un-name them. We bury the conflict without resolution. Bruno becomes the weight of the unspoken — the thread that was never cleanly cut, just tangled and hidden.

And once again, it’s Mirabel — the younger generation — who breaks the cycle. She finds Bruno. She listens. She honors him. She doesn’t want him erased from the walls. She wants him back in the home. That act, as symbolic as it is simple, undoes years of silence.

As someone who grew up with bitter uncles and aunts, whispered conflicts, and family rifts that were never named… this hit hard. I’ve tried, many times, to repair family drift. Sometimes it worked — my cousins and I managed to build bridges. Other times, it didn’t. Some of our “Bruno-ed” uncles and aunts weren’t kind. They weren’t hiding in the walls waiting to be heard — they were bitter, toxic and petty. And I also realized: we, the children of the estranged sibling, became the “Bruno” of the new generation. A quiet curiosity. A mystery. A missing branch that the younger cousins wanted to meet, understand, recover.

A year ago, I had a major fallout with my parents. Even though our relationship was toxic, I never wanted to cut ties. I wanted confrontation and transformation, like Mirabel did. Instead, estrangement happened anyway. And when I became the one no one asked about, it hit me even harder: I wasn’t just watching Bruno. I was living in the walls too.

Thankfully, the rest of the family stayed in touch, even if they didn’t understand what had happened with my parents. Living through this has taught me: Bruno was never the problem. He just held up a mirror — and sometimes that shatters a system so much that it rejects you.

And like Bruno, what’s left for me is that quiet longing — for better times at each special occasion, for a table that feels whole again, even when I know it won’t.

Family healing is complex and never linear. In some families, it happens. In others, it doesn’t. In mine, some branches are slowly mending: I see my uncles and aunts transforming, challenged by my cousins. Some, like my parents, won’t change. And that’s okay. I still believe in intergenerational healing. If it won’t be with them, then it will start with me — for the next ones.

Stories like Encanto, even told in the form of a Disney film, matter. They give shape to the traumas we don’t always have words for. They remind us: silence has weight. And sometimes, what we don’t talk about… defines us the most.

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