Another dead woman.

That is gratuitous for reasons unknown to me at the moment other than “THEY ARE EVIL.” A lot of women have died in this anime. Died is an understatement too. Horribly mutilated is a better word.

Murdered.

Groped.

Kidnapped and groped again while being filmed.

There’s just a lot of violence towards women.

You might say, “There’s violence towards men too. What about these guys? Didn’t Sasha just kill them?”

Well, they were guilty of a crime. None of the female victims we’ve seen are guilty of anything as far as I can tell. Plus, I don’t think these guys are dead.

Mafuya ties them up and tells the others to call the cops. You wouldn’t tie them up if they were dead, would you? And isn’t that hilarious? Pervy rapists slash kidnappers suffer a better fate than schoolgirls in this anime.

Oh yeah, these guys did die:

The thing is… magnesium lady probably killed more innocent schoolgirls all by her lonesome (which makes me wonder… why wasn’t the mass disappearance of girls on campus a bigger deal?).

While we’re running around going “Teehee breastmilk teehee ecchi,” we’re ignoring the fact that this anime is downright hateful towards women — women who haven’t done anything to deserve their grisly fate. Before anyone starts going off about how this resembles real life, let’s be honest without ourselves: Seikon no Qwaser is not going for realism. This is supposed to be a shounen fantasy, which is fine but not when your fantasies includes the raping and murdering of innocent schoolgirls. The bitterness isn’t just portrayed in the violence and the sex either.

Women are often damsels in distress. By itself, putting women into perilous situations for men to rescue them reflects an old-fashioned attitude but not necessarily blatant misogyny (the keyword here is “blatant”). Where Seikon no Qwaser enters misogyny territory is when all the violence towards women is just one part of a distinct pattern of hate. Sasha isn’t just a regular ol’ do-gooder. He actively insults women, judges them by their physical appearance and sexually harasses them, which the anime plays off unfortunately as humor. He goes further, however, in this episode.

Sasha continues his moping from the last episode over a little shopping. “Even though Japan is a wealthy nation,” he bitches, “this is outright shameful.” As he utters the second half of his complaint, the camera pans upward from the shopping bags to the girls. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe he’s just being a dick because he came from an impoverished past or whatever. I gave him that benefit of the doubt although I really had no reason to. We’ve known from past episodes that he’ll just insult and grope girls when he feels like it. Anyway, he got the benefit of the doubt until the following exchange:

Sasha: Teresa, how the hell did you guys get into such a mess?
Teresa: I was too carried away from shopping…
Sasha: Hmph, I see…

This is what women get for going outside and spending money! We men never waste our money on commodities.

The point is that both sexes buy a lot of stupid nonsense. I personally buy a lot of junk that has little value to others. Bitching about women and their shopping is just downright hypocritical, but I guess this isn’t surprising in an anime that glorifies a woman’s body yet often has her restrained, molested, murdered, robbed of agency, etc. The sad thing is that the rest of the internet is too busy raging over the censorship to notice the misogyny. I admit that censorship is stupid, but after four episodes, everyone’s just ignoring the elephant in the room because they can’t see some cartoon breasts and blood.