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The story
It started with a post claiming “there are works with strong old men, but none with strong old women” — and 5ch users responded by rattling off example after example, from Frieren to Umineko no Naku Koro ni’s Featherine to the female characters in Mangatarou’s manga.
Partway through, the discussion branched into how few “auntie” (middle-aged woman, おばさん) characters there are, with posters trading familiar examples like Nobita’s mom from Doraemon and the long-running drama Wataru Seken wa Oni Bakari.
What people said
Well, most of the time they're drawn looking young for their age instead of as an actual middle-aged woman.
The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Gagaran from Overlord.
Never actually seen it though
You think Sayuri's granny looks like sexy loli bait? You feeling okay?
Yuuyami Tobentai (Twilight Spirit Explorers), I think
Also Seikimatsu Leader Den Takeshi, Toriko, and Shimabu's works all have strong granny characters
She'd lost her stamina due to old age, but when she got revived later she was somehow younger again and that weakness was gone too
This is hilarious
You showed up way too early! Deflecting bullets left and right that early in the story, and pulling a two-stage transformation battle on top of it?! Come on!!
Are there any aunties among main characters at all?
In anime currently airing, maybe Samurai Troopers?
Tobe! Hissatsu Uragoroshi (Fly! Deadly Backstab)
Doraemon's Nobita's mom has gotta count as an essential auntie character
You're supposed to call her "onee-san" (big sister) there, not granny
Aren't weak named old man/old lady characters the rarer ones?
Yodomi-san is also a granny on the inside.
Her voice is an old woman's too
She's only strong at table tennis, otherwise she's a total weakling
Background and Key Points
The “hidden-power elder” is a stock trope in Japanese manga and martial-arts fiction going back decades — the frail-looking old master (think karate or aikido dojo stories) who turns out to be the deadliest fighter around, a trope rooted in the cultural respect for age and experience in Japan’s martial traditions. That’s why the original claim — that strong old men exist but strong old women don’t — collapsed almost instantly: obaa-san (granny) characters with cheat-level powers are common enough that posters could list them faster than the thread could keep up, from Featherine’s god-tier reality manipulation to the time-stopping librarian in Bantorra.
What the thread actually split on wasn’t grannies at all — it shifted to oba-san, “aunties,” meaning ordinary middle-aged women rather than elderly ones. That’s the demographic posters agreed is genuinely rare as a strong character type, and multiple replies (Gagaran, Nobita’s mom, the Doraemon example) struggled to produce more than a handful of names, unlike the flood of granny examples.
What outside readers may miss: obaa-san and oba-san are nearly homophones in English transliteration but denote very different life stages and character archetypes in Japanese media — the thread’s pivot hinges entirely on that distinction, which is easy to lose in translation. Also unmentioned is the industry-side reason for the auntie gap: most manga and anime are written for young male or young female demographics (shonen/shojo/seinen), so characters are skewed toward youth by market convention, not because writers can’t imagine a formidable 40-something woman — elderly characters, by contrast, get a pass as sages or comic relief regardless of gender.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread「Works with strong old men ← exist. Works with strong old women ← don’t exist」.
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