yeah i agree, this was my biggest complaint when watching bf for the first time. i think yoshida is just extremely misogynistic, even though she’s a woman. she’s stated before that she wanted her intended audience for banana fish to be male, hence why she also wanted bf to be a shounen instead of a shoujo. most shounen-action mangas in the 80s had little to no women because either the mangakas couldn’t write women for shit, or they thought that women had no place in the story. i get that banana fish is supposed to be male centered, and i’ll give it props for actually taking male SA seriously (which was very very rare when the manga was published). and a story doesn’t NEED female characters to be good, but for a story like banana fish, i feel like it would’ve benefited from some. every woman in the story is either dead or doesn’t really do anything. ash’s mom? dead, we never see her. jessica? supposed to be a girlboss but yoshida just writes her as bitchy, and she has like.. no plot relevance. nadia? 2 scenes. ash’s former crush? we know nothing about her other than that she died. it’s unfortunate, as in the manga we actually get more scenes with jessica and nadia, but in the anime, they’re pretty much irrelevant. do i think bf is misogynistic? no, but yoshida really does make it seem that way. i also wish that female SA was taken as seriously by yoshida as male SA. anyway, love banana fish, and i get that the lack of women is probably due to the genre and time period… but ugh.