1. Preface. Is Strike Witches a horrific paedofest that no responsible human being should watch or enjoy?

Yes and no. Let me be the ten-thousandth person on the internet to say that if you are bothered by the sexualised fashion in which the Japanese media often portrays young girls, then you probably won’t get on well with Strike Witches. If you find that watching this kind of thing makes you want to commit some kind of crime, please get yourself to a therapist and talk that shit out, you’ll feel better for it, and may avoid jail. Both of these statements are pretty-much common sense for most people. Most people. It’s interesting (like a clown interesting) to me that the same kind of people that might be reading my article on this show are also often the same kind of people who insist on this kind of disclaimer; I’ve shaped the disclaimer in this way to highlight the fact that this debate is fairly simply resolved – if this (or anything) bothers you, don’t watch it. If it makes you want to do something criminal, don’t do it. Following these simple guidelines, we can enjoy this corner of anime, should we want to, without having to worry about whether it ‘makes you a paedophile’. Just a little piece of advice before I launch into the main drag of my argument.

2.World War II Revisionist Anime
Space Battleship Yamato is very popular in Japan, like Gundam popular. It’s maybe a little less in the public eye, but I think it is safe to say that ‘Yamato and its storyline underpin Japanese pop-culture like Superman or Starwars in the West. To summarise, it’s the future, and aliens are nuking Earth quite a lot, forcing us to live underground. Time is running out, because even the underground War of the Worlds cities are going to start getting irradiated pretty soon. But, in this darkness, there is a light of hope! Nice aliens contact the Earth, and can save us and the planet with some special technology – if only we can get to them on the other side of the galaxy. Luckily, they attach some plans for an awesome spaceship in which to do this to their message, and we use those plans to rebuild the WWII battleship Yamato – a symbol of real-life Japanese patriotism that never sailed due to the abrupt end of the war, and the new Yamato blasts into space to save the human race. Rocking.

What this is roughly taken to mean is that a symbol of Japanese military might is going to save the world from the terror of nuclear war, simultaneously healing the psychological scars of both being the ‘baddies’ in WWII and being the only country to have firsthand experience of being nuked. It’s stirring, powerful stuff to a foreigner, so I guess this is even more poignant to the Japanese.

3. The 501st Joint Fighter Wing
In Strike Witches, our heroines are a group of young to very-young girls whose magical birthright allows them to pilot magical-tech devices that essentially look like stockings made from the tails of WWII era fighter planes. In turn, their use of these devices allows them to not wear any trousers; or pants, if you prefer. The world of Strike Witches, a renamed version of 1940′s Earth, has been overrun by the Neuroi, a mysterious and inscrutable alien race that tends to resemble the bosses at the end of vertically scrolling shoot ‘em ups (that their designs are based on experimental WWII planes that never saw active service speaks of the level of military fetishism going on in the show); the Strike Witches are humanity’s, last, best hope for peace.

Each member of the squad is very-loosely (very) based on a real WWII flying ace, and each represents a different country – Europe, America and Japan are all represented; the heroine is of course Japanese.

Click here for a breakdown of the Strike Witches, their historical basis, and panty configuration. This is simultaneously breathtakingly intriguing and a sign of the last days of civilisation.

4. Moe
I first encountered this term years ago as a word describing the attraction to a fictional character. As I knew it then, ‘moe’ (which is, among other explanations derived from the Japanese ‘moeru’, to burn or burning) is what one felt when Chun-Li did a spinning bird-kick, when one wished they knew a girl as spunky and interesting as Kitty Pryde, or when Bugs Bunny dressed up and pretended to be a girl bunny – YMMV. It is commonly employed as an expression, with an exclamation point: “moe!”; you can hear Otaku-Jesus Travis Touchdown say it right at the beginning of No More Heroes. These days moe is usually a descriptor given to shows in which the main characters are somewhat sexualised underage girls (it doesn’t matter what underage is in your part of the world, you can usually find anime to oblige) – part of the agreed meaning of moe is that the attraction one feels to these characters is paternal and asexual, things which aren’t necessarily indivisible, like that of a ‘big brother’ to a ‘little sister’. Anyone who has watched a bit of anime will know that this is a fairly flimsy argument for a non-sexual relationship, but I digress. Either way, this ‘protective’ attraction, the desire to ‘look after’ the innocent young girl is used as the primary defense of moe content against suggestions of impropriety.

5. Twilight
Twilight is the first of a series of novels (and a film, which I’m mainly addressing here) following in the Anne Rice mold of sexy vampire stories for girls. These novels feature a brand of vampires who are kind of gay (in that they have intense homosocial relationships with one another and are largely not interested in Other Girls), emotionally mature but sexless (because lust for blood has replaced icky non-fictional urges), non-threatening (because their pure love for whoever prevents them from drinking their tasty bloods) and really, really dreamy. Like Rice’s Interview with a Vampire before them, these stories are popular with teenage girls because they provide an outlet for feelings of desire that bypass the usual problems found in the real-world versions of these feelings – i.e. that teenage boys are stupid immature pricks who only want to get laid, and often don’t care about girls’ feelings or their own personal hygiene. These vampires are dark in a sexy way but essentially portrayed as non-threatening and safe.

6. The New Otaku
Strike Witches provides two social functions – it’s a new revisioning of Japan’s cultural relationship with WWII, with a simpler mechanic at its heart. Whereas ‘Yamato can be seen as an attempt at symbolic redemption or atonement (Japan’s national pride and Imperial war machine saves the human race from the peril of nuclear attack as a way to say sorry), Strike Witches retells the war with a new bad-guy, one that sidesteps issues of nationalism and loss, both personal and human, allowing the whole human race to band together to confront it; later episodes paint the Neuroi in a more human light, and it’s our Japanese heroine that first perceives the humanity in them. If we consider a person’s relationship to national identity, war and violence to be on some level intrinsic facets of masculinity, Strike Witches provides a safe framework for fantasist explorations of these feelings – there are no impossibly stoic or invincible men to compare oneself too, and the spectres of the past become identity neutered sci-fi spaceships to be defeated in a systematic, video-gamey way, essentially by ‘shooting the core’. It does this too with sexuality, in a way similar to the service Twilight provides for its female audience. The characters in Strike Witches aren’t interested in boys, and their relationships with each other hover on the border of titillation without ever seeing expression physically or verbally – enough for it to be sexy, not enough to make it ‘gay’. They are constantly portrayed in a sexualised fashion, but this is never transparently about sex – they don’t wear any trousers because they have to use the Striker Units, the camera is perpetually between their thighs because this is how you would see a fighter plane, they compare the size of each others breasts because that’s the kind of thing teenage girls do, or teenage boys hope they do, at least.

Moe itself suggests that the sexual feelings one might have towards these girls are passive, about looking after them not having sex with them, creating a parallel with the show’s abundant military fetishism (the girl’s weapons are lovingly depicted WWII era technology for example) which is also de-clawed by the revisionist setting. Like the boys of Twilight, both the girls and the guns of Strike Witches are safe to lust after.

7. Conclusion
So, Strike Witches is for masculinity what Twilight is to femininity? Perhaps. I certainly feel that it’s interesting as an example of how boys find safe expressions of their heterosexuality in a fashion different in some ways but also very similar to how girls do the same thing. One could argue that Strike Witches‘ sexuality is less generally problematic than Twilight‘s, because at least it doesn’t de-normalise sexual attraction, but then again, those girls are all pretty young. The counter arguement, well, other than the ‘paedofest’ arguement, is that Twilight at least values emotional and intellectual maturity. Both are fairly dangerous naratives of the otherness of the opposite sex. In the end, mainly because I was able to identify with the main character’s dilema of being a pacifist in wartime (not that I’m at war, but I do consider myself a pacifist), making her a viewpoint character rather than an object of moe for me, I started thinking about the stuff presented here in this article, and enjoyed the show. It’s not amazing, but I got something from it, simply from not dismissing it out of hand as a terrible paedofest that no responsible human being should watch. By all means find Strike Witches and its moe, furry, anthropomorphised fighter-plane girls repugnant; by all means never watch it or any show like it. It’s fair to say that a lot of other, similar shows have all Strike Witches‘ icky flaws and no interesting subtext to justify watching them; in which case, don’t watch them. I feel that Strike Witches is a little more interesting than that due to its relationship with anime-past, with its audience, and with the wants and needs of the new, current, generation of anime fans. Let’s not miss that in case someone calls us paedophiles.