Forum - View topicAnswerman - Jerkwatch
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818941
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What you're trying to say I think is that you would have written him as an entirely different character right from the very start, because he didn't just have murderous tendencies, he was specifically obsessive about her. It had to end up somewhere. For the rest, I guess that's up to taste.
Whoa, I think we're getting things mixed up here. How is the Episode 1's opening "that blonde uppity bitch getting her just desserts" when we don't know even know her yet and all we see is an action girl in a cool-looking Gundam battling dragons? As for the ending, I'm sorry, I just can't see that as fanservice. Episode 1 ends with thunder, lightining, bleak colors, extremely dramatic tone, Ange screaming in fear and Jill being nothing but frightening and uncaring towards her - and why should she be anything else, given what Norma are and what is the life they are made to live - sad song playing, and focuses on Ange being in shock and tears. If it's fanservice, it's fanservice for horror fans. And that wasn't a rape scene actually, that was a spinal surgery.
With the Norma being seen and treated as beasts rather than humans it'd be like someone acknowledging a dog humping another dog as flat-out wrong, it wouldn't make sense.
Which creates dramatic tension and subsequent immediate relief in the viewer, without necessarily getting off to it. I think you're looking at the wrong anime here if you want sexual violence to be given importance and gravitas. It may not be used to get off but it's used for shock value and drama like every other violence in the show - little girls getting chomped, surgeries while awake, bodies getting torn apart and crushed, etc. etc. Personally I don't put rape as a special kind of horror in the face of these other horrors, in fact these other horrors impress far more than a failed attempt at rape because I can't recover from being crippled or being dead. |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Bamboo covered many hentai on Shelf Life way back in the day. I must say, it was rather awkward (and somewhat unintentionally funny) watching a woman talk about bad plotting and character deficiencies in graphic hentai targeted squarely at men. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a single hentai even got a Rental Shelf rating let alone Shelf Worthy. I certainly can't remember any. Basically, her covering hentai was pointless and uninformative at best and, at worst, just unfair of her to trash those titles week after week. Why she even covered them (especially the really hardcore stuff) when it was obvious that they weren't going to be her cup of tea is beyond me. But there you go. I'm glad she doesn't cover them anymore. Of course, it's not like there's much hentai being legally released these days in America anyway. |
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818941
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I don't think all the porn and smut and romance in the world can convince me I really want someone I don't want
That it does. Where I live, adults have grown up watching anime like Devilman, Hokuto no Ken, Saint Seiya, Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2 and many other titles uncensored, so we expect anime to be somewhat violent and fanservicey and we love it that way. It was never just for kids, american cartoons have that reputation. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Of course--you're smart enough to understand that these depictions are not how they actually are for real. However, not everyone is aware of it, and that's where the real problem lies.
It's similar to how when people get arrested, they frequently refuse to demand a lawyer even though that's the best thing they should do (at least in the United States). This is because fiction so frequently portrays people who refuse to talk without a lawyer as suspicious and evil that they don't want to come off that way by asking for a lawyer. Basically, repeated portrayals of something in the media in the same incorrect way will eventually cause at least some people to believe it. That's the dangerous part. |
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whiskeyii
Posts: 2266 |
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I'm paraphrasing what quite a lot of people who defended the scene on the Cross Ange forum said: That Ange being treated that way was justified in how she acted towards the mother and other Norma. But you're right, maybe I'm looking at the wrong show for this. But maybe it's the aforementioned attitudes, that an invasive surgery/anal rape is justified because the protagonist was an asshole, that bother me the most. :/ And also how strongly this show fixates on the women's suffering. EDIT: I'd be enormously surprised if a male lead showed up who was shown to suffer in equally humiliating ways. |
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818941
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Ah, I see. Well, the spinal surgery was justified in the sense that it's necessary to pilot Para-mail, and it makes sense for Norma to be brutal like that. It is also very hard for people (myself included) to be sympathetic toward a character that acts like that toward a mother and her infant child, or who in the face of the deaths and grief she herself has caused still goes "You people aren't human". No matter who does it, mistreatment toward a small child will always cause very very VERY strong resentment and Ange's acting toward her comrades doesn't help. Is it suffering it is fixating on? Sure they're women and sure they suffer (as inhuman outcasts) but they act more like hot-blooded shonen guys with their will to fight and survive at all costs. If you've ever seen Saint Seiya, the male leads end up brutally beaten and humiliated a lot, but they still fight on because they're the heroes and their spirit is unbreakable. This is my shonen preference speaking, probably, but it's always nice to see that kind of fighting spirit in an all-female cast. |
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whiskeyii
Posts: 2266 |
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Is that actually ever clearly stated in the anime? I know everyone pulls from the manga, but does anyone actually say "Yeah, everyone gets this thing shoved up their butt so we can pilot the mechs"? Because it's even worse if context is never given inside of the show itself since the scene lacks an sense of it being surgical that way.
I'm talking more about how the camera delights in showcasing them suffering. In particular, I'm thinking of how we got that wonderful cut away to Ange peeing herself in fright. I think it's great that you can extrapolate what the creators intend vs. what happens on screen, but for me, all I can hear are the directors whispering over my shoulder "Isn't it just awful? :3 They suffer sooo much, poor ladies." And I have seen Saint Seiya, albeit briefly and very long ago. As far as I can recall, the camera focuses on their strength; the way they clench their fists and grit their teeth as they literally struggle to stand against impossible odds. Not odd buttshots and low-angles focusing on the breasts. :/ The heavy focus on fanservice, for me, goes a long way in taking away from the struggle the women go through, because it's intentionally distracting. |
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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Yeah, very weird, most of the enjoyment of an eroanime is finding pleasure in the design or the sexual acts with a good story or characterization being secondary. It also helps if the work has some great animation and detailed design work like Front Innocent. |
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navycherub
Posts: 233 |
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http://myanimelist.net/anime/6114/Rainbow:_Nisha_Rokubou_no_Shichinin |
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whiskeyii
Posts: 2266 |
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Thank you, but I meant I'd be surprised if a male lead in Cross Ange were treated (by the camera and the characters) the exact same way the Norma were. |
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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I would hope ersatz Jesus Yamato was brutalized in the same fashion. Someone in some anime has to pay for his crimes.
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nargun
Posts: 930 |
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You got it backwards. Remember, this is fiction, so the entire thing -- including anything "required" -- comes from inside the head of the creators. In nadesico you need a nanite injection, in EVA you need dead-mother-in-a-box, in this show you need stuff shoved painfully up your backside: all these are choices of the creators of the respective programs. External critiques of the show are critiques of the decisions the creators made, so it extends to what-causes-what stuff like the present case. [this actually applies generally: in-universe "watsonian" responses are no good answer to out-of-universe "doylist" critiques.] |
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~UnknownEntity~
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Yes, I know that this is what identifies the two from each other, but not everyone knows this. To anime fans, of course it is easy to distinguish between the two, but that is a different story to outsiders. They basically lump everything animated together and don't give a crap, in which case it really isn't worth it to try and convert them to the moe culture. What I meant when I said "loosely" was that it was too broad of a term. "Anything that is animated"...
Well, what's done is done. There's really no way to remove the connection between hentai and anime nowadays. I basically shut myself in my house all day watching anime and playing video games, so what room do I have to talk about things like this, much less try to convince others the same thing. |
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鏡
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Enjoying a fantasy, regardless of its content, shouldn't be used as a criteria for judging the moral character of someone because morality is concerned with the decisions of moral agents in relation to other moral agents. The idea that empathizing with the rapist in media that depicts rape says anything about your character other than that you did that thing is absurd, and the idea that we have an empirical basis for asserting that it does harm to us is likewise completely unfounded.
The last few paragraphs in that response where Justin is trying to correlate Japan's actual human rights problems with the consumption and production of rape media are offensively illogical. Even if there were a significant correlation between the two, IE the attitude toward rape in Japan degrades as the depiction of rape in Japanese media does, that would still be no basis for arguing against the depiction of rape in the media because correlation isn't causation, and indeed in this case can't be, because media does not decide what people do, people do. Whether the depiction of rape in Japanese media is a symptom of the idiosyncratic sexual culture or vice versa isn't really relevant to moral discussions about sexuality in Japan: arguments against the culture should be arguments against the culture, not the media which is either an accessory to or indifferent cause of it. |
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818941
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I can't remember it being explicitly stated in the show, but if it isn't it's likely one of those things the japanese public already knows.
That's not the message I get. I do see Ange peeing herself in fright (which is something I've seen in modern war movies too) but I also see her getting herself together and killing a monster. It's not distracting, as far I'm concerned. And Saint Seiya had its own way of doing fanservice as well, at least for female viewers.
That it's out of the creators' heads goes without saying, but the creators are free to make whatever choice they want, even if you don't like it yourself. There is NO valid "Showing this will make violence against [insert here] skyrocket!!" critique here or anywhere. It's the responsibility of the viewer to already know, late night anime are not for kids, and if there is a massive percentage of adults who still lack that ability in america - I'm sorry but your society is disgusting and what needs to change isn't anime, it's you. Makes one wonder how has Game of Thrones and other such media become so popular without causing a massive spike in violence against women, though.
Considering I come from a Tier 1 European nation that before switching to Japanese products used to produce and consume even more extreme rape/torture media, which nowadays is still seen in a positive light as it's just a bunch of absurd comics, I agree. Your whole post is the best in the thread. Last edited by 818941 on Mon Oct 20, 2014 6:38 pm; edited 4 times in total |
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