Like, if you can’t watch SA content at all because it triggers bad memories etc. then I understand why you’d not watch this.
That said, I gotta say: I have read the Manga quite far in and in that, this stuff is clearly framed as bad/unacceptable. The show’s doing stuff and you should stick around and see what it is.
This is like dropping Edgerunners because it’s clearly a High School anime, or like dropping Breaking Bad because you don’t wanna watch a melodrama about a dying school teacher begging for money. Give your media some time to breathe! They gotta have the bad thing in there in order to comment on it meaningfully. That’s what media is supposed to do.
I have read the Manga quite far in and in that, this stuff is clearly framed as bad/unacceptable.
Bull fucking shit, this is the excuse that Goblin Slayer apologists use, but in both cases the (threat of) SV is eroticized. They could have even kept the alien’s dumb pornbrain motivation but just not stripped her of her cloths and your line of reasoning, while not saved, would be more plausible.
They gotta have the bad thing in there in order to comment on it meaningfully. That’s what media is supposed to do.
It’s really hard to respond semi-civilly to this because it’s somewhere on the range between hopelessly foolish and utterly contemptible. No, they don’t need to depict the lead up to eroticized SV to comment on it, what the fuck are you talking about? Also, they aren’t commenting on it! I’ve read almost all of the manga and they never “comment on it meaningfully”. It’s just hentai-esque bullshit used to grab the attention of teenage boys.
Are you sure you want to compare this to Goblin Slayer of all things? I don’t think that’s a very good comparison, because only in one of these properties are women turned into baby factories byremoved.
Do the aliens threaten this in Dandadan? Yes. Is it depicted? No. Is it made clear that this happens allover the place to many people, like it must in Goblin slayer? Also no. I don’t see how it’s anywhere near the same level.
As for why they depict it: it makes the threat more effective. Obviously this is also true for Goblin slayer but let me finish: Why does the Alien stop to regard Ripley and sniff her and make that second mouth come out to hiss at her? It makes no sense for it to do so. But it’s a horror movie and you gotta do horror right. Doing a story about aliens abducting people without pointing at the pile of interviews and accounts of people saying they do sexual things to you would devalue this and make the whole thing not work. And, of course, they are the bad guys. If the bad guys aren’t allowed to do bad things in your story at all, then what threat is there to them? The difference of course is that in Dandadan, they woulda done it had they not been stopped and the threat of them is taken very seriously, while Goblin slayer will repeatedly and gleefully show thisremoved, but at the same time act like the whole world does not give a fuck and only this one guy is there opposing this clear and present threat.
That’s the difference between them really, how goblin slayer is like ‘well sucks you gotremovedd hundreds of times over the curse of months, let’s show you being rescued and then never speak of it again’, while in Dandadan, the aliens get fought tooth and nail and, thanks to that, don’t get what they want. But while Goblin Slayer will zoom in gleefully on the actualremoved, Dandadan shows our characters struggle successfully against the attempt.
It’s also very equal opportunity in it’s depictions of ‘the gaze’. Good-looking guys get stripped a fair bit in Dandadan and the whole things plot revolves around getting someone’s sex bits back because a ghost whose first words are about sucking dicks stole them. Meanwhile in Goblin slayer our protag isn’t even taking his helmet off, while every female runs around in the skimpiest of clothing.
As for how the show comments on it all: For one, it never shows it’s ladies as helpless in the face of these aliens. Yea they have to fight them, but they do win by doing that. But far more importantly, it shows the characters actually developing healthy relationships. By showing what love and affection should look like. The show does an amazing job of this and of making every character actually a character that is about more then ‘oh no a ghost/alien let’s fight it’. Over the course of the story, these characters actually feel like people, like we know them and like there is a lot to them. The manga/show depicts good relationships and makes them seem desirable.
Sexualizing teenage girls is not negated by also sexualizing teenage boys, though you really misunderstand what the concept of sexualization even is if you think the balls thing is relevant here. Sex gags are often used as an excuse for sexualization, but the balls plot and associated jokes are clearly not.
You are furthermore making up bizarre criteria to excuse the base facts of the depiction. Whether the women are helpless for the entire scene is completely immaterial, there are countless smut manga that are just as if not more disgusting where the woman does (eventually) escape of her own power.
She didn’t need to lose her shirt to “make the threat more real”, that was done purely for the viewer’s pleasure.
More centrally to your comment, I’m not saying that Dandadan and Goblin Slayer are the same thing, I’m saying you are engaging in the same fallacy that Goblin Slayer apologists are, acting like something cannot simultaneously be eroticized and narratively “bad.” In many cases, those two things can be closely interlinked, because something being narratively “bad” does not mean that you do not, on a meta level, want the viewer to not enjoy it. That’s not how stories work. The Alien is meant to be scary, but it is simultaneously meant to be cool, made more obvious in the way it basically became a mascot in later enstallments. At the end of Rogue One, Darth Vader slaughtering the rebels is narratively a grim event, but it’s very clearly fanservice in the broader sense because it’s simultaneously meant to be enjoyed as a power fantasy of an action scene watching him carve up and force choke a big group of nameless opponents. This idea that every scene means only its explicit narrative depiction from the protagonist’s perspective is like hearing the words someone says and assuming each word is exactly what it denotatively means with no nuance of connotation or innuendo.
If UT was still with us, I have faith he would say: “The curtains are blue”.
I maintain that goblin slayer earned the artistic right to do that. You couldn’t know from the first few episodes. So I get why However the entire discourse never got passed that. It is honestly better that most Hollywood movies about sexual violence. I was always grumpy the discourse never picked up on the one anime that made progress against the industry standard acceptance of sexual violence.
Eroticized sexual violence is unacceptable. I don’t care if it’s clickbait to get people to watch anime The Second Sex, it’s fucked up and I don’t give a shit how grumpy that makes you. Of course, it’s not that, it’s an ethnic cleansing fantasy, but I’m sure I would never make it very far trying to explain to you that a) that is true and b) that is bad.
Not that there isn’t fucked up sexist shit later too, with the impressively misogynistic human shields. Killing the ontologically evil swarthy sex fiends doesn’t actually mean being progressive.
See, I don’t think it is an ethnic cleansing allegory. It is like something between a parasite and an invasive species. Like, mosquitos or xemomorphs. So that it represents a real biological threat that people of the global South face. Stuff that could be handled better if governments cared to fix problems. I get that japan is fash so that is how they would represent others. I just feel like this author was trying to do something diffrent with the base parts they were given. It isn’t entirely successful I get that. It is however less rasicst and more against sexual violence than any random marvel move and I think that is interesting. I dunno, I feel like the fact that it depicts violence as bad and traumatizing and spends several story arcs going with the characters emotional arcs with ptsd is something that would have been cool if the industry ran with that. Plus in this one thr real enemy are the bourgeois factions and the protagonists greatest strength is community organizing. So like. It had so many interesting things it did that got overlooked because of the things it arguably did no worse than any other anime of the time.
.See, I don’t think it is an ethnic cleansing allegory.
I didn’t say it was an ethnic cleansing allegory, I said it was an ethnic cleansing fantasy. I’m not saying that the shitbag mangaka was hoping the reader would take away from the manga “I think we should do this to Koreans,” I’m saying their desire was for the reader to be immersed in a fictional setting where the ethnic cleansing of this particular intelligent, humanoid species that is able to reproduce with human women is not only justified but righteous. How does that relate to the real world? I don’t think the mangaka cares. You and I aren’t the mangaka, and we have the ability to critically assess things, like what exactly is being appealed to by depicting organisms that are ontologically evil SV machines that force human women to give birth to more of their kind.
I just feel like this author was trying to do something diffrent with the base parts they were given.
“Given”? I’m sorry, were they an artist who inherited a manga-in-progress from an author who quit? No, they fucking chose it. They could have chosen anything and they chose what I just described above.
It isn’t entirely successful I get that.
This is a bad joke. They weren’t just making mistakes to depict this shit in an eroticized way, they made deliberate compositional choice after deliberate compositional choice (and then repeated it but three times worse in Year One’s first chapter just to make sure you know it wasn’t somehow a catastrophic accident). If you want to depict SV as something horrible . . . first of all, really consider not depicting the act itself, it’s gonna be gratuitous, but secondly don’t depict it like that.
It is however less rasicst and more against sexual violence than any random marvel move
I’m sure you find it compelling to say that it deals with issues better than something that doesn’t deal with them at all, but that would be a lame argument even if it was true and it’s not even true! It makes deliberate compositional choices to make sure that isn’t the case.
I dunno, I feel like the fact that it depicts violence as bad
Sure as hell doesn’t depict violence against intelligent humanoids of each species as being bad. Oh! Sorry! You meant sexual violence. It depicts it as being bad in maybe the same way a racist views BBC as being bad, i.e. still something to get off on.
things it arguably did no worse than any other anime of the time.
The first issue of the manga was in 2016! What fucking renaissance has happened since then that let’s us go “let’s not judge the past by the standards of the present”?! Furthermore, most other manga were not depicting eroticized r*** and a great deal weren’t doing ethnic cleansing fantasies.
I think maybe I don’t understand your point. I am not particularly intrested in going over the part of the discourse that is never going to be settled. I think the text has intresting readings that never made it to the discourse and those are better than what we see from the industry today.
It specifically isn’t glorifying violence. Everyone finds it abhorrent all the time. They even specifically call out the fact that if the government tried to help the people all this could be avoided.
How can I be more clear than “deliberate compositional choices”?
I am not particularly intrested in going over the part of the discourse that is never going to be settled.
The only sense in which it is “never going to be settled” is the sense in which obtuse philistines and sickos will continue to insist, as I alluded to in another comment, that “the curtains are blue and nothing more”. For all your talk of artistic rights, you seem to have no inclination to actually analyze something as art instead of just as a bunch of things that a writer said happened.
It specifically isn’t glorifying violence. Everyone finds it abhorrent all the time. They even specifically call out the fact that if the government tried to help the people all this could be avoided.
As I recall, the government helping would be by organizing and subsidizing the violence against the untermensch goblins rather than leaving it to the people to handle. I don’t understand how you think this advances your point.
To my mind the goblins are goblins. Where you see terrible little creature and think they might be a minority I don’t think the anology holds. For most the text they are like chimpanzees. Which would be a legitimate threat to smalls towns in even our modern era. Just like the bourgeois in the setting we aren’t willing to consider the difficulties the peasants have unless it is through a lens we care about. That creature feature aspect would be intresting enough. I see the sexual violence aspect as not being a fully considered theme. The author put it in to raise the stakes. They had some intresting things to say in terms of the anime industry. The author is right that in modern society that is a real problem that the government doesn’t work to fix and leaves huge scars across society. Every story arc is based on people handling their trauma and that is way more intresting than the generally pro sexual violence stance of most anime. If we look at it’s contemporary SAO we can see what scenes of sexual violence composed to be enjoyed look like. They don’t look like that. It doesn’t handle it perfectly. It is the author trying to make things grimdark. However it is closer to a good point than lots of works and that is intresting. Tot he rest about it being a power fantasy about killing that is a genre staple. Almost any work in the fantasy setting is about killing the evil races. Every DnD inspired work has that aspect. Look at the demons of friren. Violence and power fantasy are why male centered fantasy exists. Capitalism requires it. It seems to me like the author is coming from a place where they are trying to figure out how to critique that. If they actually succeeded the work would not have been made. So in that it got made, it is closed to being right on things than normal and that is good.
It is closer than most anime and if it were less art no one would care. In that it tries to be art people are mad at it for not executing it’s goals fully. I would still prefer anime that tries to be art instead of anime that wants to sell me waifu figures
Like, if you can’t watch SA content at all because it triggers bad memories etc. then I understand why you’d not watch this.
That said, I gotta say: I have read the Manga quite far in and in that, this stuff is clearly framed as bad/unacceptable. The show’s doing stuff and you should stick around and see what it is.
This is like dropping Edgerunners because it’s clearly a High School anime, or like dropping Breaking Bad because you don’t wanna watch a melodrama about a dying school teacher begging for money. Give your media some time to breathe! They gotta have the bad thing in there in order to comment on it meaningfully. That’s what media is supposed to do.
Bull fucking shit, this is the excuse that Goblin Slayer apologists use, but in both cases the (threat of) SV is eroticized. They could have even kept the alien’s dumb pornbrain motivation but just not stripped her of her cloths and your line of reasoning, while not saved, would be more plausible.
It’s really hard to respond semi-civilly to this because it’s somewhere on the range between hopelessly foolish and utterly contemptible. No, they don’t need to depict the lead up to eroticized SV to comment on it, what the fuck are you talking about? Also, they aren’t commenting on it! I’ve read almost all of the manga and they never “comment on it meaningfully”. It’s just hentai-esque bullshit used to grab the attention of teenage boys.
Are you sure you want to compare this to Goblin Slayer of all things? I don’t think that’s a very good comparison, because only in one of these properties are women turned into baby factories byremoved.
Do the aliens threaten this in Dandadan? Yes. Is it depicted? No. Is it made clear that this happens allover the place to many people, like it must in Goblin slayer? Also no. I don’t see how it’s anywhere near the same level.
As for why they depict it: it makes the threat more effective. Obviously this is also true for Goblin slayer but let me finish: Why does the Alien stop to regard Ripley and sniff her and make that second mouth come out to hiss at her? It makes no sense for it to do so. But it’s a horror movie and you gotta do horror right. Doing a story about aliens abducting people without pointing at the pile of interviews and accounts of people saying they do sexual things to you would devalue this and make the whole thing not work. And, of course, they are the bad guys. If the bad guys aren’t allowed to do bad things in your story at all, then what threat is there to them? The difference of course is that in Dandadan, they woulda done it had they not been stopped and the threat of them is taken very seriously, while Goblin slayer will repeatedly and gleefully show thisremoved, but at the same time act like the whole world does not give a fuck and only this one guy is there opposing this clear and present threat.
That’s the difference between them really, how goblin slayer is like ‘well sucks you gotremovedd hundreds of times over the curse of months, let’s show you being rescued and then never speak of it again’, while in Dandadan, the aliens get fought tooth and nail and, thanks to that, don’t get what they want. But while Goblin Slayer will zoom in gleefully on the actualremoved, Dandadan shows our characters struggle successfully against the attempt.
It’s also very equal opportunity in it’s depictions of ‘the gaze’. Good-looking guys get stripped a fair bit in Dandadan and the whole things plot revolves around getting someone’s sex bits back because a ghost whose first words are about sucking dicks stole them. Meanwhile in Goblin slayer our protag isn’t even taking his helmet off, while every female runs around in the skimpiest of clothing.
As for how the show comments on it all: For one, it never shows it’s ladies as helpless in the face of these aliens. Yea they have to fight them, but they do win by doing that. But far more importantly, it shows the characters actually developing healthy relationships. By showing what love and affection should look like. The show does an amazing job of this and of making every character actually a character that is about more then ‘oh no a ghost/alien let’s fight it’. Over the course of the story, these characters actually feel like people, like we know them and like there is a lot to them. The manga/show depicts good relationships and makes them seem desirable.
Sexualizing teenage girls is not negated by also sexualizing teenage boys, though you really misunderstand what the concept of sexualization even is if you think the balls thing is relevant here. Sex gags are often used as an excuse for sexualization, but the balls plot and associated jokes are clearly not.
You are furthermore making up bizarre criteria to excuse the base facts of the depiction. Whether the women are helpless for the entire scene is completely immaterial, there are countless smut manga that are just as if not more disgusting where the woman does (eventually) escape of her own power.
She didn’t need to lose her shirt to “make the threat more real”, that was done purely for the viewer’s pleasure.
More centrally to your comment, I’m not saying that Dandadan and Goblin Slayer are the same thing, I’m saying you are engaging in the same fallacy that Goblin Slayer apologists are, acting like something cannot simultaneously be eroticized and narratively “bad.” In many cases, those two things can be closely interlinked, because something being narratively “bad” does not mean that you do not, on a meta level, want the viewer to not enjoy it. That’s not how stories work. The Alien is meant to be scary, but it is simultaneously meant to be cool, made more obvious in the way it basically became a mascot in later enstallments. At the end of Rogue One, Darth Vader slaughtering the rebels is narratively a grim event, but it’s very clearly fanservice in the broader sense because it’s simultaneously meant to be enjoyed as a power fantasy of an action scene watching him carve up and force choke a big group of nameless opponents. This idea that every scene means only its explicit narrative depiction from the protagonist’s perspective is like hearing the words someone says and assuming each word is exactly what it denotatively means with no nuance of connotation or innuendo.
If UT was still with us, I have faith he would say: “The curtains are blue”.
I maintain that goblin slayer earned the artistic right to do that. You couldn’t know from the first few episodes. So I get why However the entire discourse never got passed that. It is honestly better that most Hollywood movies about sexual violence. I was always grumpy the discourse never picked up on the one anime that made progress against the industry standard acceptance of sexual violence.
Eroticized sexual violence is unacceptable. I don’t care if it’s clickbait to get people to watch anime The Second Sex, it’s fucked up and I don’t give a shit how grumpy that makes you. Of course, it’s not that, it’s an ethnic cleansing fantasy, but I’m sure I would never make it very far trying to explain to you that a) that is true and b) that is bad.
Not that there isn’t fucked up sexist shit later too, with the impressively misogynistic human shields. Killing the ontologically evil swarthy sex fiends doesn’t actually mean being progressive.
See, I don’t think it is an ethnic cleansing allegory. It is like something between a parasite and an invasive species. Like, mosquitos or xemomorphs. So that it represents a real biological threat that people of the global South face. Stuff that could be handled better if governments cared to fix problems. I get that japan is fash so that is how they would represent others. I just feel like this author was trying to do something diffrent with the base parts they were given. It isn’t entirely successful I get that. It is however less rasicst and more against sexual violence than any random marvel move and I think that is interesting. I dunno, I feel like the fact that it depicts violence as bad and traumatizing and spends several story arcs going with the characters emotional arcs with ptsd is something that would have been cool if the industry ran with that. Plus in this one thr real enemy are the bourgeois factions and the protagonists greatest strength is community organizing. So like. It had so many interesting things it did that got overlooked because of the things it arguably did no worse than any other anime of the time.
I didn’t say it was an ethnic cleansing allegory, I said it was an ethnic cleansing fantasy. I’m not saying that the shitbag mangaka was hoping the reader would take away from the manga “I think we should do this to Koreans,” I’m saying their desire was for the reader to be immersed in a fictional setting where the ethnic cleansing of this particular intelligent, humanoid species that is able to reproduce with human women is not only justified but righteous. How does that relate to the real world? I don’t think the mangaka cares. You and I aren’t the mangaka, and we have the ability to critically assess things, like what exactly is being appealed to by depicting organisms that are ontologically evil SV machines that force human women to give birth to more of their kind.
“Given”? I’m sorry, were they an artist who inherited a manga-in-progress from an author who quit? No, they fucking chose it. They could have chosen anything and they chose what I just described above.
This is a bad joke. They weren’t just making mistakes to depict this shit in an eroticized way, they made deliberate compositional choice after deliberate compositional choice (and then repeated it but three times worse in Year One’s first chapter just to make sure you know it wasn’t somehow a catastrophic accident). If you want to depict SV as something horrible . . . first of all, really consider not depicting the act itself, it’s gonna be gratuitous, but secondly don’t depict it like that.
I’m sure you find it compelling to say that it deals with issues better than something that doesn’t deal with them at all, but that would be a lame argument even if it was true and it’s not even true! It makes deliberate compositional choices to make sure that isn’t the case.
Sure as hell doesn’t depict violence against intelligent humanoids of each species as being bad. Oh! Sorry! You meant sexual violence. It depicts it as being bad in maybe the same way a racist views BBC as being bad, i.e. still something to get off on.
The first issue of the manga was in 2016! What fucking renaissance has happened since then that let’s us go “let’s not judge the past by the standards of the present”?! Furthermore, most other manga were not depicting eroticized r*** and a great deal weren’t doing ethnic cleansing fantasies.
I think maybe I don’t understand your point. I am not particularly intrested in going over the part of the discourse that is never going to be settled. I think the text has intresting readings that never made it to the discourse and those are better than what we see from the industry today.
It specifically isn’t glorifying violence. Everyone finds it abhorrent all the time. They even specifically call out the fact that if the government tried to help the people all this could be avoided.
How can I be more clear than “deliberate compositional choices”?
The only sense in which it is “never going to be settled” is the sense in which obtuse philistines and sickos will continue to insist, as I alluded to in another comment, that “the curtains are blue and nothing more”. For all your talk of artistic rights, you seem to have no inclination to actually analyze something as art instead of just as a bunch of things that a writer said happened.
As I recall, the government helping would be by organizing and subsidizing the violence against the
untermenschgoblins rather than leaving it to the people to handle. I don’t understand how you think this advances your point.To my mind the goblins are goblins. Where you see terrible little creature and think they might be a minority I don’t think the anology holds. For most the text they are like chimpanzees. Which would be a legitimate threat to smalls towns in even our modern era. Just like the bourgeois in the setting we aren’t willing to consider the difficulties the peasants have unless it is through a lens we care about. That creature feature aspect would be intresting enough. I see the sexual violence aspect as not being a fully considered theme. The author put it in to raise the stakes. They had some intresting things to say in terms of the anime industry. The author is right that in modern society that is a real problem that the government doesn’t work to fix and leaves huge scars across society. Every story arc is based on people handling their trauma and that is way more intresting than the generally pro sexual violence stance of most anime. If we look at it’s contemporary SAO we can see what scenes of sexual violence composed to be enjoyed look like. They don’t look like that. It doesn’t handle it perfectly. It is the author trying to make things grimdark. However it is closer to a good point than lots of works and that is intresting. Tot he rest about it being a power fantasy about killing that is a genre staple. Almost any work in the fantasy setting is about killing the evil races. Every DnD inspired work has that aspect. Look at the demons of friren. Violence and power fantasy are why male centered fantasy exists. Capitalism requires it. It seems to me like the author is coming from a place where they are trying to figure out how to critique that. If they actually succeeded the work would not have been made. So in that it got made, it is closed to being right on things than normal and that is good.
Goblin slayer is not art
It is closer than most anime and if it were less art no one would care. In that it tries to be art people are mad at it for not executing it’s goals fully. I would still prefer anime that tries to be art instead of anime that wants to sell me waifu figures