Random Female Anime Character Generator

What this list is

These are female anime characters, and behind them lies one of the most interesting and least-known stories in the history of comics: how the entire tradition of storytelling for girls was seized, transformed and elevated by a small group of young women in the 1970s, whose innovations then spread to conquer everything else, including the stories made for boys.

Press Generate and it hands you one. A few from the list:

• Mikasa Ackerman
• Asuna Yuuki
• Hinata Hyuga
• Rei Ayanami
• Historia Reiss
• Emilia
• Yoko Littner
• Madoka Kaname

The range there, from fierce warriors to gentle romantics to unsettling enigmas, is not an accident. It is the inheritance of a revolution that made the female character, and the stories built around her, far richer than they had been, and this page is about where that richness came from.

Drawing a character

1. Press Generate for one character.
2. Ask for a few to build a cast or a comparison.
3. Type into Contains to search by name.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these come from

Female anime characters gathered and checked by hand from across many series. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

A world for girls, first drawn by men

There is a whole category of manga aimed specifically at girls, and it has been enormously important to how female characters are written. But here is the surprising part of its history: for its first decades, this category made for girls was drawn almost entirely by men.

In the early post-war years, the comics aimed at girls existed, but they were mostly produced by male artists, and they were often thin: cute, simple, decorative stories designed to fill pages and sell to young readers, without much depth or interiority. The girls reading them were being given a version of themselves and their concerns as imagined, from the outside, by men, and the results were frequently shallow, the category regarded even by the industry as a minor, unserious corner of comics not worth taking seriously.

This is a familiar shape in the history of media: a form supposedly for a group is, for a long time, controlled by people outside that group, who produce a limited and often superficial version of it. The stories for girls were not written by the people who actually knew what it was to be a girl, and it showed, in a flatness, a lack of the inner life and complexity that the readers themselves possessed. The category was waiting for the people it was meant to serve to take hold of it.

The women who took it over

Then, in the 1970s, a group of young women artists, many of them born around the same year, arrived and changed everything. They took the shallow, decorative category made for girls and transformed it into something of extraordinary depth and ambition, and in doing so they became some of the most important figures in the entire history of the medium.

What they did was to bring real interiority and real subject matter to stories for girls. Where the earlier male-made comics had offered cute simplicity, these women wrote about psychology, about the inner lives of their characters, about gender and sexuality and politics and philosophy. They wrote historical epics, science fiction, complex tragedies, stories that took their young female readers seriously as thinking, feeling people capable of engaging with difficult things. They treated the category not as a place to fill pages but as a place to make art, and critics who had dismissed stories for girls as unserious were forced to recognise that the category had entered what came to be called a golden age.

They were shaped by the rebellious, questioning spirit of their era, and they brought that spirit to their work: an iconoclasm, a willingness to break rules and tackle forbidden subjects, that pre-war comics for girls had never been allowed. They were, in effect, wresting control of girls' media away from the men who had held it, not through any organised campaign but simply by being better, by making work so much richer than what had come before that it could not be ignored, and by winning the loyalty of readers who recognised themselves in it at last.

The result was that the category for girls became, from then on, drawn primarily by women for an audience of girls and women, and it became one of the most graphically adventurous and emotionally sophisticated forms in all of comics. The people it was meant for had finally taken it over, and made it great.

The eyes that conquered everything

These women did not only change the content of stories for girls; they changed the very look of them, and one of their visual innovations went on to conquer nearly all of anime, including the stories made for boys.

They developed a distinctive style, aimed at conveying emotion as directly and intensely as possible. Its most famous element is the large, luminous, deeply detailed eyes that most people now think of as simply the anime look: enormous eyes that can hold tears, catch light, and express subtle feeling, because the eyes are where emotion reads most clearly on a face. They also broke the rigid grid of rectangular panels, letting panels overlap, dissolve, and take expressive shapes, so that the very layout of the page conveyed a character's inner state rather than just presenting events in order.

These innovations were developed in the service of emotional storytelling, of getting the reader as close as possible to what a character was feeling. And they were so effective that they escaped the category they were invented in. The large expressive eyes, born in comics for girls to convey emotion, spread outward until they became the default look of anime as a whole, adopted even in the action stories made for boys, because the ability to show feeling clearly is useful in any kind of story. The visual language everyone now associates with anime in general was, to a significant degree, invented by women making comics for girls.

There is a quiet justice in this. The category that was once dismissed as a minor corner ended up supplying the visual grammar for the entire medium. The eyes you see on every anime character, in every genre, are the descendants of an innovation made to let girls' comics feel more deeply. The revolution did not stay in its own category; it reshaped how everything looks.

Why the female characters are so varied

Return now to the range in that opening list, the warriors and the romantics and the enigmas, because that range is the direct inheritance of this history.

Once stories for girls were being written by women who took their readers seriously, the female character stopped being a single limited thing and became as varied as the girls and women reading. She could be a fierce fighter or a tender lover, a brilliant strategist or a haunted mystery, a leader, a rebel, a scholar, a monster. The interiority that the revolutionary artists insisted upon meant that female characters were given real inner lives, real complexity, real range, rather than being confined to a handful of decorative roles imagined from outside.

And because the innovations of that revolution spread across the whole medium, this richer conception of the female character spread too, into every kind of story, including those aimed at boys. The complex, capable, fully realised female characters who now appear throughout anime, in action stories and dramas and science fiction alike, are downstream of the moment when women took control of storytelling for girls and proved that a female character could be anything. The variety on this list is what happens when the people who understand a kind of character from the inside are finally the ones drawing her.

So a list of female anime characters is, without announcing it, a record of that transformation. The sheer breadth of who these characters can be, the fact that no single type dominates, is the achievement of a small group of young women half a century ago who decided that stories for girls, and the girls in them, deserved to be taken seriously. They were, and the characters have been richer ever since.

Questions people ask

Comics for girls were really drawn by men at first?

Largely, yes. For its first decades the category aimed at girls was produced mostly by male artists and tended to be simple and decorative, a version of girls' interests imagined from outside. It was only from the 1960s and especially the 1970s that women came to dominate it and transform it.

Who changed it?

A group of young women artists, many born around the same year, who arrived in the 1970s and brought real depth to stories for girls, writing about psychology, gender, politics and much more. They elevated a category once dismissed as trivial into what critics recognised as a golden age.

Where did the big anime eyes come from?

To a significant degree from artists making comics for girls, who developed large, expressive eyes to convey emotion as clearly as possible. The style proved so effective that it spread across the whole medium, becoming the default look of anime even in stories made for boys.

Why are female anime characters so varied?

Because once women were writing stories for girls and taking their readers seriously, the female character gained real interiority and could be anything, a warrior, a scholar, a mystery. That richer conception then spread across the medium, which is why complex female characters now appear in every kind of anime.

References

1. Year 24 Group, on the young women artists who transformed comics for girls in the 1970s, expanding their themes and elevating the category to a golden age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_24_Group
2. Shōjo manga, on the shift to female creators and the visual innovations, including expressive eyes and non-rigid panels, that later spread to comics for boys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Djo_manga