spoiler

The SA aliens are back with a vengeance, characters are swimming around in their underwear. Best just to pass on it.

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    28 days ago

    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.

    • CrawlMarks [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      28 days ago

      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.

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        28 days ago

        .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.

        • CrawlMarks [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          28 days ago

          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.

          • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            28 days ago

            I think maybe I don’t understand your point.

            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.

            • CrawlMarks [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              28 days ago

              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.

              • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                26 days ago

                You’ve now gone from avoiding the eroticized SV to denying it. You are contorting your self worse than Fighter’s spine contorted so you could have her chest and buttocks shown so clearly in the same panel, right after her clothes were vaporized in one panel.

                But you’ve gotta work with the pieces you’re given! It was needed to get printed! It’s not eroticizing SV because . . . fuck . . .

                • CrawlMarks [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  25 days ago

                  I mean, you cannot meet an objective assessment of art but I don’t think the portrayal does that. There is a strong split in the criticism amongst the Fandom where a significant element don’t think it is either. To the point that in Fandom spaces when someone brings that up as a positive they are shunned. Conversely there are specifically fandoms for that kind of thing and they do not appreciate the work. So that’s two voted against. Now I know the generla level of medica literacy for the anime Fandom is slow so I don’t know how to weigh that evidence. So in the end I don’t know. I just think that the work appart from that has intresting artistic value. I feel like since the property is not going to get another season it never going to be resolved and I see no artistic value in trying to do so. For sure if that is your take I respect that and I no reason to disagree with you or try to change your mind. It is ultimately not the part of the work I find Intresting or valuable to consider. Given that positive depictions of sexual violence are the industry standard. It’s not great. I think GS comes close enough to a critique of that standard that it is creatively intresting. However as we have here the discourse doesn’t go past the first episode so that conversation never goes anywhere.

                  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    25 days ago

                    “There’s no way to tell if these anime girls are being sexualized during the violence, art is subjective after all”.

                    You’re a fucking coward and telling me what the consensus is among the hives of illiterate philistines who agree with you is not the point you think you scored.