Encoding/Decoding Tokyo Revengers: The Gendered Transmission of Violence

There are only a handful of anime shows I have dropped without the courtesy of watching through to the end of a season. Tokyo Revengers is one of them.

I only made it halfway through because one episode sealed its fate for me: Episode 5, Relaps. It left me with a deep, unsettling discomfort, though not for the reasons you might expect. It was not the subject of sexual violence and physical assault itself that disturbed me. It was how the show chose to frame that violence, who it chose to center, and more importantly, who it did not.

The scene involves a young girl, assaulted and hospitalized by a rival gang because of her boyfriend’s affiliations. He is a member of the protagonist group, the Tokyo Manji Gang. The gang leaders, Mikey and Draken, visit the hospital to check on her and are confronted by her distraught parents. Her mother, who barely registers in the scene, is inconsolable, muted by her pain. The father becomes the voice: scolding the boys, blaming them for what happened, and voicing a profound sense of shame in his daughter's "loss of innocence." What stuck with me most was how her pain was rearticulated, not as trauma she had endured, but as a stain on his honour. Her body became a vessel for her father’s shame.

As a woman watching the scene, I felt like an outsider to its emotional logic. It was not speaking to or for people like me. It was speaking around me, through male characters, in a code I recognised but was not included in. This was male-to-male storytelling, a coded conversation between men about violence, vulnerability, and control. I just so happened to in the room.

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding helps explain the strange alienation I felt watching this scene. Hall reminds us that media texts are not simply consumed; they are interpreted through codes that reflect our cultural positioning. Producers encode messages into media, often unconsciously shaped by dominant ideologies, and audiences decode those messages through their own frameworks of meaning. This scene, encoded in a patriarchal structure, was clearly crafted with a presumed male audience in mind. The emotional beats—guilt, rage, shame, vengeance—circulate between male characters. The girl’s body is the symbol, not the subject. 

That kind of framing is not unique to Tokyo Revengers. It appears in other shows too, like Adolescence on Netflix, where the rising misogyny faced by young boys is centered while the girl victim is left in the margins—her trauma backgrounded, her attacker humanized. In both cases, sexual violence becomes less about the woman who suffers it and more about what it signifies to the men around her. The problem here is not only that the female victims are excluded from these emotional conversations, but that the frameworks themselves reinforce misogyny. Empathy, when filtered solely through male shame, guilt, loss, or rivalry, flattens female suffering into a tool for male development. It is a structure that preserves patriarchy, even in its attempts to reckon with harm.

It reminded me of something I have explored in my research on grime music: how young men engage in lyrical battles that often weaponise women to attack other men. Drawing from the work of scholar Tricia Rose, one of the most influential voices in hip-hop studies, who has been writing about the racial, gendered, and cultural politics of hip-hop since the early 1990s, I examined how women often represent a vulnerable axis in male homosocial relationships. This is not because women themselves are weak, but because their symbolic association to a man makes them a soft target. In grime clashes, MCs frequently invoke threats, sexual conquests, or physical assault involving mothers, sisters, or girlfriends in order to destabilise male opponents. Much like in Tokyo Revengers, the logic is the same: women are not the intended audience of the media text. They are not the subjects of discourse. They are pressure points, ways for men to reach each other, to assert power, or to unmask weakness.

In that hospital scene, the girl is unconscious. The mother’s grief is mute. Everything flows through the men: their bonds, their brokenness, their shame. Even the emotional responses are gendered. The mother collapses. The father speaks. The girl’s interior world, what she might feel, what she might want is absent. And that is why I stopped watching. Not because the violence was too much, but because the narrative was never inclusive. The female characters (or audience) were never functional parts of the story. It was about what their bodies symbolised in the story, not about who they were.

There is something deeply unsettling about watching a story absorbed into the egos of the men. It is not just bad storytelling. It reflects something deeper: a culture where women’s pain is narrated not through empathy, but through male shame, rivalry, and loss. These are not just narrative tropes. They are reflections of a larger patriarchal pattern, where stories of sexual violence are still being told in rooms where women are not invited to speak.

 

References
Hall, S. (1980). 'Encoding/decoding'. In Culture, Media, Language (pp. 128–138). Routledge. 

Rose, T. (1994). Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Wesleyan University Press. 

Scott, C. D. (2023). 'Grime Practice as Refusal: Examining the Gender and Sexual Politics of Grime Music and the Scene’s Black Male Dominance'. In Black Music in Britain in the 21st Century (pp. 199–214). Liverpool University Press.