Hey, this isn't necessarily a One Piece question but I think it heavily relates to One Piece so idk if it's okay to ask but. Do you ever get really tired of female characters always having less direct superpowers to male counterparts? I'm talking the soap powers from Kalifia and other stuff. That in order for women to be strong they have to be nondirect. I've been recently thinking about this since One Punch Man's strongest woman (and only one at the top) is strong because of being a psychic.
This isn’t directly something I’ve thought about before. I can think off the top of my head of a fair number of female characters whose powers sometimes are pretty direct. Even in Naruto, Sakura was the one with the super strength while Naruto and Sasuke were running around with the most convoluted complex abilities. The problem there was more just the basic fact that the story was overwhelmingly about the two boys of Team 7 with Sakura playing backup to them rather than being on truly equal footing. Still, there probably are fewer female characters, proportionally, with direct powers like super strength than male characters. But it’s not something that I’ve specifically thought about before.Â
Plus I’ve always liked stuff like psychic powers over raw punching ability. For me, the problems concerning this stuff are the basic things I’m usually talking aboutÂ
female characters only making up a small portion of the cast (often less than 25%)Â
female characters having less significance in the story because all the most important characters (the MC, the main villain, the mentor, the MC’s rival, the gifted kid with a tragic past, etc., etc.) are all maleÂ
female characters not being as strong as the male charactersÂ
female characters having less diversity in their designs
And all of those things have an impact on what you’re talking about here. Like that last one about designs--your average male author isn’t going to create a female character like Satima or Deku, who have super strength as their abilities and are both shredded because ~ew a girl with muscles no thank you~. Even characters who are super strong like Supergirl and Wonder Woman and Sakura/Tsunade are usually drawn with very little muscle on them. So if their are disparities in the nature of characters abilities between men and women (which I don’t doubt), I think it’s a symptom of the trends above
