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Thing X is not meant for you and your Western sensibilities, Gaijin!

ChibiKangaroo wrote:

My point wasn't that everyone has the same likes and expectations.

It very well may not have been, and certainly wasn't if what you really meant to say was something more along the lines of what you posted here. What I was pointing out is that regardless of intent, your initial wording which caused things to go in this direction did imply that they do, or at least ought to. To be exact:

ChibiKangaroo wrote:

Blood- wrote: I have a pretty strong, "sigh, that's anime for ya" filter. And that's the problem Blood-, you shouldn't have to. But anime producers know we have these filters so they often don't care to do better.

Whether it's East versus West, otaku versus non-otaku, connoisseur versus philistine, or whichever labels one agrees with, what you were suggesting there is that anime producers rarely put in enough effort in general, as opposed to them putting too much effort into pleasing people whose preferences differ from yours and Blood-'s. That's what was originally being refuted, and it's hard to see it as a misunderstanding when you clearly stated that nobody should need to ignore certain aspects of shows that are aimed at an audience they're not part of, because the producers should simply "do better" instead.

I am fine with people liking the harem genre (...). So there was simply no issue presented by me about that particular fetish being below mine or Blood''s standards on a whole.

But either way, when I spoke to Bloods comment on filters I wasn't criticising personal tastes in genres, I was saying that the execution is bad

@ CK - my "sigh, that's anime for ya" was not, as you thought, a comment on a show's execution. It was a comment about how anime will go to conceptual areas that make me (and others) uncomfortable. Like having a female student kiss a teacher and that teacher doesn't point out the inappropriateness of it or when a female student confesses she has a crush on a teacher and another teacher appears to condone it.

So when you said that I shouldn't have to have that kind of filter, I thought you were talking on the conceptual level, but if I understand you correctly from what you've written above, you were talking about execution of a concept, not the concept itself.

On the one hand, he is initiallY presented as a perfectly above-board, innocent guy who has no prurient interests in his underage all-female students and simply wants to "study" them. Yet, one of them kisses him and he doesn't firmly establish the red line that we are lead to believe was being established.

ChibiKangaroo wrote:

On the one hand, he is initiallY presented as a perfectly above-board, innocent guy who has no prurient interests in his underage all-female students and simply wants to "study" them. Yet, one of them kisses him and he doesn't firmly establish the red line that we are lead to believe was being established.

If something's aiming for realism, then absolutely such an act with an educator should have resulted in no less than a stern lecture, but we are talking about an escapist fantasy monster girl show here. Considering this context, whether an adult male tolerating a kiss on the cheek from a teenage girl is indicative of prurient interest is a cultural issue, just not a strictly "Japan versus elsewhere" one, as it can even vary within the same country depending on the region and generation. Anywhere I've ever been, and at least among people the same age as or older than me, simply ignoring it would considered the wisest thing to do, because an adult telling someone that age to not do something is the same as encouraging them to do it or worse. The standards would of course still be different for teachers, but once again we are dealing with fantastic fiction here, so there's no clear reason why the rules of this imaginary world have to be the same as ours.

No, there is no scenario in either Western or Japanese society where a grown ass man would go on a "date " with an underage girl and she kisses him and it's just totally normal.

Maybe in some third world countries where child sex slavery is allowed

Well I was reacting to you indicating it was totally normal for adults to accept flirtation including kisses from underage individuals as long as they aren't a teacher.

In Interviews with Monster Girls, Hikari kissed the teacher on the cheek. That was to tease him, to get a reaction out of him, to embarrass him. Instead, the teacher's reaction was very mild which was to show Hikari that her attempt failed which embarrassed Hikari instead. It's not that he was "ok" with it. He instead showed Hikari that such an attempt was ineffective, that Hikari is too immature to perplex him that way. So, in a way, he did set boundaries.

@ CK - I guess I wasn't following the Monster Girl thread terribly closely because I did not notice/did not pick up on that you or anybody else was casting the kiss or confession in an execution light as opposed to conceptual. But now that you have clarified for me, I can say, no I don't see those as examples of poor character development. faulty internal logic or bad writing.

What I get from the MC so far is that he is an inquisitive person from a scientific standpoint, but perhaps not so swift on interpreting social situations. To wit, he seems afflicted by the same disease that seems to afflict 99.9 per cent of all anime males: he can't recognize when a female digs him. With the students he may actually have an excuse in that it may not occur to him that young girls would have a crush on a male teacher of his age. With Sakie the Succubus, she's probably going to have to wrap her legs around his neck before a clue drops.

As for Sakie not commenting on Kyoko's crush on a male teacher, I actually think that's pretty good writing because 1) it is a surprising reaction 2) yet, given the context, it kind of makes sense. The standard way for Sakie to react would have been to be jealous and to exhibit that jealousy by harrumphing to Kyoko that it is inappropriate for her to have those kind of feelings for a teacher. Alternatively, the other expected reaction would be to be genuinely appalled, jealousy or no, and earnestly urge Kyoko to suppress those kinds of feelings. Instead, Sakie chose not to treat Kyoko as a child (even though conceptually this would have been appropriate and the right thing to do) and having recoginzed that she herself may have feelings for Sensei, acts sympathetically. They have a discussion of how just because adults appear to be mature and together, that's a facade. Sakie's reaction to Kyoko fits in with that concept: she didn't react in an "adult" way, which I think is interesting. Maybe you consider writing where you can accurately predict how a character will react in any situation given what you know about that character as "good" writing, but I don't. I think that would be rote writing. Lazy or unexplainable character behaviour is bad writing, but surprising behaviour that, once you think about it, has its own sort of logic is good writing.

Sakie's reaction to Kyoko fits in with that concept: she didn't react in an "adult" way, which I think is interesting.