Anonymity and a lack of moderation are key points of 4chan’s notorious identity. Graphic Sylvia Dai
Hannah Scott-Talib,
Local Journalism Initiative
Exploring deep-rooted racism, misogyny and transphobia in online discussions of the animation style
ontent warning: This article contains mentions of transphobia.
In 2003, 15-year-old anime fan Christopher Poole took inspiration from the Japanese forum site “2chan” to create his own anonymous, discussion-based online platform in the Western world.
He called it 4chan, and while it began as a site from which users could share and discuss anime—particularly hentai, a form of animated Japanese pornography—it rapidly transgressed into something much more sinister.
“[With 4chan], you had a group of people who were really holding onto these ideas and they needed a space to express them,” said Aurélie Petit, a doctoral candidate in film and moving images studies at Concordia University.
Petit pointed to anonymity and a lack of moderation as key points of 4chan’s allure, the freedom for users to post whatever they want with no repercussions, under the safety blanket of a fake name.
Petit’s thesis, entitled “Of Tentacles and Men: How anime shaped the internet as we know it,” explores the progression of the online anime fandom and its deep-rooted ties to misogyny, racism, homophobia and more.
But the problematic nature of the fandom, she said, traces back decades, even before the creation of 4chan. According to Petit, the role that online forums have taken in the anime fandom since the 1990s—as well as who is using these forums—is distinct.
“It’s like a way to socialize, very often between heterosexual men,” Petit said. “It was the same on 4chan: for them, it was about translating hentai—because people were watching hentai online in the ‘90s—and then sharing it with their friends.”
She added that the fact that these forum sites’ users were primarily white, cisgender, heterosexual men lies at the origin of the online anime fandom’s ties to alt-right ideologies over the years.
And for one Montreal-based anime fan in particular, this demographic breakdown is what has steered her from previous heavy involvement in online discussions about anime.
“So often, when I go on Reddit or some other [site] where people are talking about an anime series that I really like, there are so many gross and sexist opinions on it,” said Ayra Megan, who has been granted a pseudonym for safety reasons. “Unfortunately when I was young, I used to chat [on these sites] and naively go along with what people were saying.”
Megan added that the discussion of women’s bodies in anime on these online forums led to her having self-image issues in her teenage years.
“In some animes, young women in particular are shown as having big chests but small waists, and they are often [wearing] short skirts or a form of revealing clothing that so obviously sexualizes them,” Megan said. “The way these characters are talked about online, by men, is just appalling.”
According to another long-time fan of the art form, racism in anime can be traced back to the start of the art style.
“It’s really baked into anime from the beginning, in my opinion,” said Embraline Schuilenburg, a 21-year-old anime fan. “It got created as a medium at a time when a lot of these ideas—misogyny, racism in particular—these were common thought trains in society, and they definitely reflect in the work.”
Schuilenburg noted that, as an example, stereotypical and offensive portrayals of Black characters can often be found in anime, as well as racist depictions of other Asians besides Japanese people.
“[Some animes] will give other Asian characters the classic ‘squinty’ eye, which is really interesting considering it’s reflecting an almost internalized self-hatred,” Schuilenburg said.
According to Schuilenburg, it’s not just racism that can be found in dated anime TV series and movies, however.
One stand-out example of transphobia, she recalled, stems from the 1992 show Yu Yu Hakusho.
The show features a fight scene between a man and a woman, in which the male fighter, Yusuke, grabs the woman’s genitals mid-fight to “check and make sure” his opponent is biologically female. At the end of the fight, Yusuke exposes the woman—who is described as a transgender demon on the fandom wiki page—to his friends, exclaiming, “It turns out our ‘Mrs.’ is a ‘Mr.’”
According to Petit, this deep-rooted alt-right rhetoric within the online anime fandom even supersedes the fandom itself.
She pointed to an instance involving Arizona Representative Paul Gosar, who, in 2016, edited himself killing New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a fight scene from the popular anime series Attack on Titan.
As another adjacent example, Petit mentioned Gamergate, an online harassment campaign from 2014 to 2015 that sought to shun women within the larger online gaming community. Traits of toxic masculinity within the gaming community are largely connected to the online anime fandom, where similar rhetoric is perpetuated.
Moving forward, Petit emphasized the importance of recognizing the problematic nature of the fandom to prevent furthering it.
“As long as we’re not confronting this history,” Petit said, “we’re just going to keep repeating it.”
A previous version of this article had miswritten Aurélie Petit’s thesis title. The Link regrets this error.
This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 11, published March 18, 2025.