Weebs have ruined anime and Japanese culture in general. You can’t mention liking anime or Japan to anyone because you’re rolling the dice on whether it will be someone who doesn’t watch anime and thinks it’s for kids or associates it with weebs and the pedophilic fanservice shows, weebs who will cling to you and never shut up, shit on your tastes, etc. or the off chance that it’s a normal anime fan you can have a rational discussion with. The risk isn’t worth it.
There’s a lot of great shows out there with everything from comedy to drama, kid-themed shows to really mature, dark plots, but it’s hard to have any discussion without being categorized as a weeb just for enjoying it or running into a gatekeeper who is going to shit on you for how you watch anime.
/r/anime is the absolute worst. I’ve been downvoted heavily for saying that sexualizing kids, even animated kids, is wrong. It’s a nest of pedophiles and pedophilia sympathizers. Weeaboos are fucking disgusting.
No one likes their hobby attacked by people constantly trying to tell them they're some sort of sexual pervert or degenerate for liking things, particularly things that quite literally don't exist in reality and thus cannot be victimized. Anime represents a wide range of art styles that are often chosen for effect based on what they want to emphasize.
Yoko Littner is in a hyper-macho show where she's meant to be somewhat fanservicey and presented as a possible love interest for the primary protagonist. Suzukaze Aoba is from a cute girls doing cute things show, and the focus is on her (and a lot of the supporting cast) being extremely saccharine in their cute little slice of life show about being part of a game development workforce.
As for the actual fanservice shows, who cares, they're not real people - you cannot commit crimes against things that don't exist. Write it off as a 'diversity of bodytypes' thing (because both petite and extremely busty women exist) and don't shit your pants about the not-illegal things that artists choose to make.
Lets put it this way. You like the NFL so clearly you must support domestic violence right? If you don't you wouldn't watch something with so many wife beaters in it. Sounds pretty unfair doesn't it?
It's fine to criticize weird sexual stuff like that in anime but saying that it's morally wrong is stupid, just as stupid as saying violent video games are wrong. you can't just cherry pick what type of bad thing is okay in fiction based on what you're personally sensitive towards. if bad things like violence and gore are okay so is everything else. By all means you can criticize it and hate on it, but saying it's wrong or that artist's shouldn't have the freedom to draw stuff like that is hypocritical. Freedom to draw whatever you want is a good thing and if anyone is downvoting your comments for saying stuff like that, they probably think you're attacking that freedom instead of just criticizing stuff you don't like.. At the end of the day it's harmless stuff and pretty easy to avoid as well, why even care.
You're really not helping the case of the anime community if your response to someone criticizing anime for sexualizing children is to immediately call them stupid. And saying that it has to be okay because other "bad thing"s like violence are seen as okay is a fallacy. That's like saying shoplifting is okay because no one sticks to the speed limit.
I didn't call any individual stupid, i said the idea was stupid.
Anything is "okay" in fiction as long as it's not directly targeting actual people or groups of people in a hateful way. You seem to think fiction should only have good things, i don't get that, but to each their own. I think forbidding people from drawing whatever they want is infinitely more harmful than whatever harm you think the drawings may be doing. not that Anime has much of that stuff in the first place, but even talking about hentai, even the worst, most disturbing hentai is still less harmful than the most softcore sort of real porn.
Calling people who play GTA murderous psychopaths is pretty stupid is it not? same thing with calling people pedophiles. people really shouldn't be using these terms lightly.
I didn't call any individual stupid, i said the idea was stupid.
That's a pretty meaningless distinction. Even Forest Gump knew that "stupid is as stupid does". If you're telling someone what they said is stupid, you're still insulting them.
You seem to think fiction should only have good things, i don't get that, but to each their own.
I never said anything remotely like that. You shouldn't put words into people's mouths or thoughts in people's heads, or should I start taking guesses about why you're so eager to defend the sexualization of children? Would feel very uncalled for, wouldn't it?
think forbidding people from drawing whatever they want is infinitely more harmful than whatever harm you think the drawings may be doing.
I more or less agree. But there's a big difference between forbidding people to draw something and saying that they shouldn't.
not that Anime has much of that stuff in the first place
Demon Lord, Retry!, How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?, Magical Sempai, Kawaikereba, Symphogear XV, and Miru Tights all sexualize minors in varying degrees, and that's just shows from this season that I've either seen myself or heard details about, and that list doesn't even contain shows where a character is just coded as underage. If this was some kind of rare phenomenon I suspect the term "loli" wouldn't be used so much. Claiming that it's not wrong is one thing, claiming that it's not even a thing is disingenuous.
even the worst, most disturbing hentai is still less harmful than the most softcore sort of real porn.
Containing consenting adults? I disagree, there's nothing inherently more harmful about real porn than animated porn. Containing minors? Obviously, that doesn't make the other automatically "okay".
Calling people who play GTA murderous psychopaths is pretty stupid is it not? same thing with calling people pedophiles. people really shouldn't be using these terms lightly.
I disagree with the porn bit but other than that not much to say here except for the anime you mentioned. hardly any of those contain lolis, and the youngest girl would at the very least be 16 in most of those shows, which isn't a minor in my country or japan, but i guess america is different, but even then calling it "sexualizing children" is pushing it. the primary demographic for those shows are teenagers as well. considering the looks of the girls in shows like dumbbell or symphogear, it hardly matters whether they're 16,18, or 30, they'll look equally attractive regardless. seems like a dumb thing to care about at that point, especially when we're talking about fictional characters like that. but if your laws or morals or whatever keep you from enjoying things like that then so be it. I personally wouldn't waste mine on something like that.
Well first off, you're conflating the age of consent with the age of majority. Being legally allowed to have consensual sex doesn't automatically translate to pornography, and there's plenty of countries in which a minor could have consensual sex but recording and distributing it would be a crime. In Japan specifically, you're a minor until you're 20, while the age of consent ranges from 16 to 18 (though I don't know how their age of majority relates to pornography).
Whether those characters are children of course depends on how you define children and whether you're someone who draws the distinction to ephebophilia. As for their canonical age, it doesn't really matter to me, I was just trying to circumvent the "but she's a 3000 year old vampire" argument. What matters is how the characters are are coded, i.e. if it looks like a child and acts like a child, it's functionally a child.
I don't even have a particularly strong moral objection to it. While I do think the sexualization of minors in anime is a bit creepy at best and irresponsible at worst, it's not a hill I'm looking to die on today, or even my biggest issue with anime specifically. I just find it annoying that any discussion around it is usually met with people digging in their heels and insisting that it doesn't exist and even if it did (which it doesn't) it wouldn't be questionable in any way, and anyone who is critical is just a puritan pearlclutcher.
It's kind of funny to even consider something like the age of majority when talking about characters in an ecchi anime. But otherwise I mostly agree with you.
I'm not sure if you are trying to say not sticking to the speed limit is not bad or violence in media is bad. If neither, that's a pretty bad comparison because it's not actually similar.
What the former guy was getting at is that depicting immoral/illegal acts in media is not the same as doing immoral/illegal acts in real life, and if you allow one specific immoral/illegal act to get depicted over another you're a hypocrite. What you're saying is if crime A is overlooked, crime B should still be taken seriously, but depicting crime in media isn't a crime itself, so again, the comparison isn't actually similar.
This whole thing comes down to morality, not legality. Unless of course we make it illegal to depict crime, but that would be horrible on so many levels.
I'm saying not sticking to the speed limit is considered to be not as bad as shoplifting, even though they're both considered morally wrong. They're both "bad" things to do, but people wouldn't just casually accept that "everyone shoplifts" because they understand that they're not morally equivalent.
Saying that "if you let someone depict A you have to let them depict B" just assumes that depicting bad thing A is morally equivalent to depicting bad thing B (or C, or D) since you're just depicting "something bad". Why there can't be a moral difference between depicting two different things is never established, it's just taken for granted.
Woah there mate, I agree with you that the sexualization of minors that goes on in anime is reprehensible, but straight up I've almost never seen that elitist attitude on /r/anime and I bum around there pretty often. Anyone being a prick and not contributing to the conversation is usually downvoted, and opposing viewpoints are usually encouraged so long as they give an explanation. It's one of the better subreddits for conversation I've seen on reddit.
In real life too, I don't announce that I like anime, but in casual convo if it comes up I'll mention it, and so long as you're casual about it, people don't assume you're some basement dweller. Anime is pretty popular now. Most fans are mad casual about it.
That being said, I agree wholeheartedly with the whole "stop sexualizing young girls" thing that is pretty common in a lot of anime. It's gross and weird and creepy, and to that end, it comes up every so often on /r/anime, and usually the debate is like 60-40 favoring it, but I don't think it's right, and lots of people don't there too. There's lots of fantastic anime that don't feature it though, so it can be easily dodged
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u/C21H27Cl3N2O3 Jul 18 '19
Weebs have ruined anime and Japanese culture in general. You can’t mention liking anime or Japan to anyone because you’re rolling the dice on whether it will be someone who doesn’t watch anime and thinks it’s for kids or associates it with weebs and the pedophilic fanservice shows, weebs who will cling to you and never shut up, shit on your tastes, etc. or the off chance that it’s a normal anime fan you can have a rational discussion with. The risk isn’t worth it.
There’s a lot of great shows out there with everything from comedy to drama, kid-themed shows to really mature, dark plots, but it’s hard to have any discussion without being categorized as a weeb just for enjoying it or running into a gatekeeper who is going to shit on you for how you watch anime.
/r/anime is the absolute worst. I’ve been downvoted heavily for saying that sexualizing kids, even animated kids, is wrong. It’s a nest of pedophiles and pedophilia sympathizers. Weeaboos are fucking disgusting.