Me being a hetero cis woman enjoying Gushing over Magical Girls and Interspecies Reviewers with my brother: this is entertaning lol :P As long as one can clearify what is fictional and what is real, keeping your moral standards in real life, I don't think "problematic" media is such problematic
I mean, there's fetish porn out there where the actress is interviewed before and after the scenes. I let this statement stand here without further context.
I like Gushing Over Magical Girls, I was one of the people that actually was reading the manga before the anime came out. It's EVEN MORE lewd than the manga. It's a work of fiction that I wouldn't recommend for everyone, that's for sure, but damn hell I would be lying if I didn't say that this piece of media was the most fun I had reading a manga and watching an anime that I had in years.
I’m Latino, lived in Bogota Colombia the first few years of my childhood, and I love other Disney movies like Coco & Luca… I HATED this movie. Lin Manuel Miranda’s lyrics were awkward & bad (and I say that as a fellow boricua🇵🇷), Bruno is treated HORRIBLY by his family & never gets a real apology for it, and the whole conflict with Abuela seemingly causing the house to break & powers to disappear by putting too much pressure on her family was incredibly half baked in execution and its resolution extremely underwhelming & unsatisfying. I liked Mirabel, the Bruno song, the song Carlos Vives did for the movie, and the animation; everything else ranged from underwhelming to actively annoying. Such a disappointment 🤦🏾♂️
this was a lot of rambling to justify yourself, you don't have to but this tell me you may need to work some inner contradictions this show had brought to light, you mention how someone felt like liking it felt like a betrayal, why is that
I think it'd be fun and cool if they female students also got sold off to be married to monsters. The only difference is the the girls should be husband to monster wives
Fictional content is fictional content and having a moral existential crises over it is fucking stupid. If someone enjoys shows that feature a lot of "questionable" sexual content then oh well who cares they aren't hurting anyone so what's the fucking problem?
Goblinslayer payed off its scene in time. It had to include it to give a start point to the recovery of trauma, which is the whole theme of the show. I am a full supporter of media literacy. If one wants to add something to their story, add it. Its not some sin to depict something. I say this as someone who has gone through a lot of traumas, very relevant to works like Beserk. as..I hate the term victim for me, but as someone with experiences like that, goblin slayer is one of my favorite animes as it shows a story of struggling with traumas. I have to say, you are more respectable than most who think there should be any sort of censorship in media. you at least put some thought into it, unlike other twitter users. and to any possible story tellers reading this. Dont worry about if your story is "ok", as there will ALWAYS be someone that will say you did something wrong. Make your story, share your ideas. I may not agree with some ideas, but I will NEVER tell someone to never share what they believe. You hate men like me? ok, make a story about that if you like, for one should always have the right to share their beliefs, even if its "harmful".
The issue with these online discussions always manifests the exact same way: one side feels so strongly about the morality of the situation (often ignoring any actual logic) that they immediately start off far too aggressively. And of course when that happens the natural human response is to get defensive and either mock or ignore them, resulting in the exact opposite of what the first person wanted. I love shows like Made in Abyss and Mushoku Tensei, in part because of the questionable aspects, because it doesn’t feel overly sanitised like a lot of media these days and feels like a deeper depiction of life than the surface level stuff you see everywhere. So when I see people attacking these shows, with the implication that they think all media should be sanitised in the exact way I hate, it does feel incredibly minimising, like my tastes aren’t even a consideration, and whether that’s a reasonable emotional response or not, it does make me feel the urge to minimise them back. It’s a vicious cycle that could so easily be avoided altogether by people just not coming out swinging whenever they slightly disagree with someone.
I feel like the solution to "but what if this media reaches a person who could be harmed by it or learn a harmful life lesson from it" is to INCLUDE CONTENT WARNINGS. In my own experience as an artist and writer, trying to create art that will never upset anyone (or that could never be misinterpreted in a harmful way by someone) just leads to sanitized work that doesn't tackle the issues that I want to tackle. On the other hand, if I warn someone that my art contains potentially-upsetting topics, then they get to avoid it if they would find them upsetting... and if they choose to engage with it despite knowing that it could upset them, then that is their decision, not mine. I really like the allergy comparison: if your dessert contains peanuts, you shouldn't stop selling it, but you should add a label that it contains peanuts, so that people who like peanuts can still enjoy it while people who are harmed by peanuts can avoid it. Similarly, if a story deals with a potentially-upsetting topic (for example, sexual violence), then you should warn people that it contains sexual violence, so that people who are upset by it can avoid it, while people who are not can still enjoy it. Hell, let's take this comparison a step further. Some takes of "but what if it reaches someone that could hurt them" include the idea that by sharing media with possibly-hurtful elements, you could expose it to someone who will share it uncritically OR share it in a way that hurts others. I don't think the blame falls on the original sharer for that either, because you cannot control the behavior of others or how they interpret the media that you share with them. To take the allergy comparison even further: if someone else takes the label off of your peanut-containing dessert and gives it to people without telling them, or intentionally gives it to someone with a peanut allergy, that isn't your fault unless you told them to take the label off of the dessert. You cannot be expected to control what others will do with something that you give them.
When I was younger I would look anyone who watch this kind of show with so much disdain but as I growing older, I grow to understand that different folks had different strokes, so if you like it then good for you, if you didn't like it then just look the other way.
Fictional anime characters, not children. Shows with loli characters won't turn you into a pedo any more than playing violent video games will turn you into a school shooter and arguing for censorship of what art gets to exist reeks of authoritarianism.
My take regarding this is: As long as it doesn't hurt any real people go ahead, but you should at least acknowledge that you're "interests" aren't exactly normal and should definitely be kept to yourself and your preferred search engine.
I'm so happy to see a lot more people discussing the importance of media literacy, it's something that I've felt but haven't been ablt to put to words until someone called it as such. Understanding context and intention when looking into media is vital, even more so with foreign things like anime.
I admit I've been, to an extent, jaded by the anime community over the past few years. I'm not one to judge a community by their bad eggs, kind of have to be open minded if I parade around with a Sonic icon ... :p But I definitely feel like I ... can't always speak my mind when it comes to certain issues and the assumption that I'll be regarded in bad faith. I feel like we would fundamentally disagree quite a bit with GOML, but on the other hand I also hope that we would be able to discuss it maturely. Nice video. (That being said, man, I wish GOMG was with decidedly adult characters and less explicit (at least in a tintilating manner), because the concept and world building seems fine! I also have no idea if the creator is queer, but if not, that feels like another missed opportunity)
The thing about writers needing to repay debts reminded me of the controversy with Urbanspook's "The Painter" series. Most people hated it because it was low quality "analogue horror" and relied on shock value(infamously having an image implying that a kid was roped by a serial killer before dying). Some people were conflicted about where to draw the line, considering that other horror media which tackled the topic better weren't as hated.
I would argue that Harry Potter is a special case, and that is only because JK Rowling has gone out of her way to say buying Harry Potter merch is the same as as supporting her views so... She said it, not me
Theirs's a collective responsibly when consuming & sharing media, but a certainty level of empathy is required & given the whole fact over feeling nature of most nerd communities, it's a pretty unrealistic expectation. So a higher level of personal/individual responsibility is required.
In the original version's defense "So socially incompetent you committed manslaughter" is indeed how I would describe many players of MMOs. /light-hearted
They werent highschool girls. They were middle school girls. Thats the age were people are full in puberty and their hormones are going the most crazy and they are the most perverted and have the greatest s*xual stamina. Oh I miss those times. To be young again...
Hot take take but there is a way for the anime to put Rudy on full blast by changing how Eris’s son is introduce by making him the direct result when Rudy and Eris had sex for the first time. That point is taking even more when Aisha question him why what she did was wrong when Rudy did the same thing to Eris, because Aisha knows Rudy’s real age.
I'd have to say I disagree with some of your points here. Absolutely problematic media should get called out on what it is, but you shouldn't be expected to no every facet of scene in a show in order to be able to recommend it to someone else, nor should a particularly heinous scene be something that prevents you from recommending something to someone. Taking Goblin Slayer as an example, no one in their right mind is gonna dispute that r*pe is horrible, which is why I felt that the first scene was necessary for the story, the authors wanted goblins to be considered absolutely irredeemable in the eyes of the audience, yes there were probably better ways to do it, just because a subject is taboo doesn't mean one should have to walk on egg shells if they want to use it. For me the big thing is whether or not the show is actively glorifying it, for example Redo of Healer actively glorifies r*pe and as such was collectively dunked on by the internet. People still watched it, by they weren't watching it because they enjoyed the story (or at least I didn't) they watched it to see how much of a train wreck the show could be. For that reason I honestly think that the scene from Ouran is worse than the one from Goblin Slayer. That doesn't make Ouran a worse show than Goblin Slayer of course, nor does it mean that the show (or any show in my opinion) should be cancelled, only that these things should be analyzed on a scene-by-scene basis. Similarly, I don't think Ranking of Kings is problematic at all. I watched Ranking of Kings and thought it's only flaw was that the art style made it look like it was designed to be watched by toddlers. How am I to know that it has depictions of harmful stereotypes of Koreans? For that matter, how would someone I recommend the show to know that either? It's at its center something for entertainment, one doesn't have to read that deeply into it. I believe it's a case of separating the art from the artist, the author of Ranking of Kings might be a racist piece of shit, but that doesn't have to taint an otherwise beautiful piece of work, I believe once a piece of media has been made it takes on a sort of life of its own, it's the audience that gives it it's true meaning and legacy in the long run, not the author (like Harry Potter being the poster child for fantasy novels as a teen which you look back on and realize was painfully mid). On the other hand, I don't think GATE is inherently problematic for the opposite reason, it's so blatantly propaganda (assuming a competent audience) that it circles back to being harmless fun, similar to Top Gun: Maverick. In short, I don't think any show that becomes becomes popular are inherently all that problematic (with the relatively rare exception of shows that became popular BECAUSE they were problematic), because the shows that are problematic without any other merits are simply ignored and fall into obscurity as abject failures. The slavery trope of Shield Hero comes to mind (though I'm doubtful that Shield Hero is the only one to blame here, many of the later isekai shows with slavery originally came from Light Novels which would've had slavery well before Shield Hero took off as an anime, though you could blame it for the adaptation of more slavery including LNs), Shield Hero was good in spite of slavery, not because of it, the number of shows that were ignored despite having slavery because they had no other substance are innumerable. TLDR: you can't expect someone who recommends a show be well-versed in every possible harmful thing the show could contain, nor is a show or even a scene necessarily problematic if it contains problematic elements as long as it isn't actively glorifying said elements. I hate to paraphrase The Good Place, but I feel it illustrates my point best: Why am I going to hell for buying a tomato?
