Not Everyone Gets Married and Has Kids: Challenging Amatonormativity in Anime

You know that feeling you get when you scroll down your Facebook timeline and feel like everyone is getting married and/or having a baby simultaneously? I’m fairly certain no one experiences that and thinks to themselves, “Gosh, what I’d really love is to duplicate this, only this time after spending hours of my life devoted to watching anime.” If we’re honest, however, it probably happens to us pretty often. Now, there’s nothing wrong with ending a globally popular anime on a “happily ever after.” For some people, that happiness just happens to take the form of their favorite character(s) marrying the love of their life forever and ever and bearing beautiful, flawless children. Fine. More power to you and the fanfiction you wrote that’s now canon. But when 99% of the characters, especially ones that have historically shown little to no interest in such a lifestyle, are suddenly roped into this Disnified family portrait as if by magic? That’s when you have a problem. The term used to describe this pervasive belief is amatonormativity (defined in full here by Elizabeth Brake), which basically means thinking true love and joy can only come from pair bonding with a single, exclusive romantic partner, and all other forms of relationships must fall below in the imagined hierarchy. Like any other culturally-entrenched bias, it assumes people behave or should be portrayed in one way, while effectively erasing everyone who doesn’t fit in that box. Although I don’t necessarily believ…