Kill La Kill

Here's a weird thought: I love the anime Kill La Kill, but I'd hesitate to recommend it. That's odd, isn't it? Why wouldn't I recommend a show I enjoy?

Kill La Kill has fantastic fight and action sequences. Everything about the show is over-the-top, so the fights are just crazy awesome. The fights are easily some of the best I've seen anywhere, on a level with Gurren Lagann (of course, because it's the same creators). One of my favourite little details is how the show does debris in explosions - instead of rocks and dust, it's often dozens of people thrown screaming into the air. It's just a background detail, but it's hilarious. 

It's also got some surprising depth to it with commentary on fascism, our relationship with clothing, self-confidence, and rejecting society's hangups. There's a lot of subtext if you're paying attention. It's notable that the first scene opens with a history lesson on Hitler's rise to power.

The big reason I hesitate to recommend Kill La Kill is because of how fine a line the show walks . 

The show frequently and extensively sexualizes its high school girls. From what I understand that kind of stuff isn't taken as seriously in Japan, but here in Canada, the amount of skin and butt shots and voyeur gags make me want to avoid having the anime on around other people. The main character's outfit is very revealing, and action scenes work in gratuitous butt shots or excuses to show more skin. Male characters frequently gawk openly and it's treated as an "oh, you" thing, as if the writers are shrugging their shoulders and saying "boys will be boys".

On the other hand, the four most important characters in the show are all women, and of those, the three fighters are the most powerful people on the planet (and the other most powerful is also a woman). They have unique personalities and complex relationships with each other and with the supporting cast. They deal with challenges to their viewpoints and relationships that force them to confront themselves. The hero and the antagonist actively reject society's conventions on how women should dress and are stronger for it. The show mostly doesn't even acknowledge romance as a thing - everyone's too busy dealing with more pressing issues - which strikes me as very unusual for a series about high school girls.

(as an aside, male characters spend more time naked than female characters, but it's usually played for laughs rather than titillation)

Whether Kill La Kill is empowering or demeaning or awesome or embarrassing is going to come down to individual taste. I'm usually very good at judging whether someone I know will like a given piece of media, but I'm really not certain about this one because of how it takes both sides of its issues to the extreme.

So rather than recommend it to anyone I know, I'll just leave this here and you can decide for yourself if you want to give it a shot.