Forum - View topicInterview: Welcome to the Ballroom's Tetsuya Kinoshita and Shimba Tsuchiya
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AksaraKishou
Posts: 1410 Location: End of the World |
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Chinatsu, my Goddess, is Coming!!!!
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GainaxFanboy
Posts: 60 |
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you couldn't have said it better. |
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Angel M Cazares
 Posts: 5421 Location: Iscandar |
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I wish ANN could have asked these guys why Welcome to the Ballroom hates women.
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Felicity dash
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Er, I'm sorry? But I doubt it hates women, especially when it does have more than one woman, has a major audience of female readers/viewers, and has a female author. |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 2606 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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^The manga doesn't, but the anime has had some problems with the female characters, basically reducing them to arm candy in a few cases. Poor Shizuku had her entire part in the discussion about switching partners taken away.
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Lord Oink
Posts: 876 |
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Talk about a loaded question. Only an unprofessional interviewer would do that. |
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Angel M Cazares
Posts: 5421 Location: Iscandar |
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Of course the interviewer was not going to ask the question in that blatant manner. But it think it is valid to hear from people involved in the show why women in it are portrayed as objects as opposed to actual people. And to those who may think that my feminism is unwarranted, take a look at the show's weekly reviews thread. Other people are also appalled by Welcome to the Ballroom's portrayal of women. |
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danpmss
 Posts: 763 |
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Yeah, They will sure go all like "there are these easily offended 2017 Shonen Jump Weekly people outside Japan saying your show portrays woman in a bad light", as there's no 'non-blatant' way of implying such accusations. People in there would just say "different values and standards for different countries and cultures", like they usually do when people from outside come shitting on hentai, harem/reverse harem and/or ecchi series altogether. You would just piss them off for no reason and make difficult for anyone to get an interview with this site again (reputation is everything in this side of the industry) because the interviewer decided to go with his little accusative agenda (that was based on the opinion of a small crowd of people in the middle of the much larger fandom that is just there for the sexiness of both male and female people in the show, as the erotic element of the dance is a whole plot point in this story). I for one am just here to see giraffes dancing, so, I don't think my opinion matters much, but this is one stupid decision to even think about doing... unless it would be really relevant and EVERYBODY seemed upset about it (which isn't the case at all, and as far as I saw, 80% of the discussions of this series are about shipping & waifu/husbando related stuff anyway, most of them couldn't care less about this possible issue, and on top of that, the ratings are really good overall). |
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BlueBeast33
Posts: 151 |
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Don't really care, and you honestly should knock it off. To think that the people making this show or the mangaka for that matter(who actually happens to be a woman) HATES women is absolutely ridiculous. Thanks for the interview Zac, I really enjoyed reading it. I'm especially looking forward to seeing what the staff will be able to do in the second half with the dance scenes as well as when Chinatsu finally shows up. |
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CrowLia
 Posts: 5504 Location: Mexico |
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None of those prove that the show doesn't hate women. Take for instance Death Note, it has several female characters and a big female fandom, yet pretty much anyone would agree Ohba is grossly mysoginistic (further confirmed by how he treats the female characters in Bakuman). It is also possible to be a woman and be a mysoginist: see for example how many female BL writers always portray their female characters are irredeemable "bitches"
Wait, does that mean Shizuku did have spoken lines and input during the whole "if I win we switch partners" discussion? Because if she did and they were so glaringly ommitted that would be way more condemning for the anime adaptation and the director/scriptwriter
Are they really? As far as ANN, it's sitting in the bottom half of the weekly and cumulative ranks, the latest episode has a community score of 3.7 and Zac mentioned on an ANNCast that Ballroom is not doing all that well in terms of traffic for the site, the BD sales estimates are tragic to say the least and not a lot of people seem to be talking about it. Even fans of the manga are complaining about how it's not a good adaptation
To me this is very telling because it sounds like they're aware that the show has severe shortcomings and that it's not really living up to people's expectations and the bar set by previous shows. Especially because fans of the show will complain about it being "unfairly" compared to Yuri on Ice, I think it's nice that even the creators are bringing up that comparison and admitting that they want to achieve YOI's level in regards to the portrayal of the performances (YOI also had a much better treatment of its female characters even though all of them were secondary characters at best than Ballroom has had with any of its female protagonists...) |
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Mojave
 Posts: 178 |
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So, I'm not part of the crowd that uses feminist critique in discussions on here, and I usually strongly disapprove of them doing so. My interest in the show comes from my background as a male ballroom dancer. But I fully understand why the feminists on here are so unhappy with the show. The show's depiction of gender relations in ballroom dance has been wildly inaccurate, so much so that it's difficult to see it as anything other than demeaning. The show has depicted ballroom dance as a world where men dominate, women shut up and just go along for the ride, and decisions are made unilaterally by the male partners. This bears no resemblance to how partner dynamics in ballroom dance actually work, and implementing the gender relations portrayed in the show into actual ballroom dance would lead to the couples dancing terribly. A partnership of equals is the foundation of any ballroom dance couple, and you are taught this from the very beginning when you first start learning. So the show's depiction of partner dynamics is incredibly jarring, because it's completely inaccurate and entirely detrimental. How were the feminists on here supposed to interpret this any other way, when the show takes a dynamic that is in reality equal and discards that to create a make-believe version of ballroom dance where men are dominant and women are subservient? As an actual ballroom dancer, I find the show's portrayal of gender dynamics in ballroom dance to be demeaning to not just women, but to ballroom dancers as a whole. The show really screwed up here. |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Look, I understand that no interviewer wants to be blacklisted, because lack of Access hurts business. (You cannot make ad money on interviews that never happen, after all.) But I think questions like, "Are you satisfied with the way the female characters have progressed thus far?" and "Are you planning on making the dance sequences longer in the show's second half?" would have been perfectly within an interviewer's rights to ask.
Also from a reader's perspective there's no point in even reading an interview if it's just going to tiptoe around pertinent issues. This show has major problems with both its lack of fully-animated dancing (and the lack of enough dancing fullstop), and the very disturbing way all the characters (but especially the female ones) are handled. For an interview with the producer to avoid even politely enquiring about the biggest issues facing the show is at best being overcautious. Interviews are not about maintaining much-vaunted Access through boring puff pieces, but actually striving to get relevant information to reader's by addressing the topics that we want covered. There wasn't even a question regarding the show's low sales estimates. If ever there was a question that was in a producer's area or responsibility it would be that one. Man, this interview really was the frothiest of puff pieces. |
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Felicity dash
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Well as far as BL goes of course they would be written off most of the time as bitches because they ain`t the main focus of the story. And Ohba being grossly misyognistic....well I dunno much about that considering I love Bakuman and I thought the way he treated the female characters were just fine.[/quote] |
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Lord Oink
Posts: 876 |
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A work of fiction being unrealistic for the sake of drama is a bit of an odd complaint. Do you feel the same way about other sports anime that have characters doing absurd tricks or flat out have magic powers? I guess I've never been one to watch something like Yu-Gi-Oh or Vanguard and say "Hah,no one is using a tier 1 meta deck, how unrealistic". The sport or game is meant to be vehicle for the story and characters, not a documentary.
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CrowLia
Posts: 5504 Location: Mexico |
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Looking at MAL's numbers, it's also firmly in the middle of the pack in terms of viewership though, even if its scores are "high", and it has less than half the viewers as Fate Apocrypha or Kakegurui which aren't even legally available. Looking at illegal sites viewership, Ballroom also falls super short of shows like Aho Girl and even Isekai Shokudo, which is way far from being a popular show this season. Sure it has a vocal and passionate fanbase, but it's certainly not turning into the hit it was expected to be. Again, the sales diagnostics are abysmal, this is a hard hard flop on a show that was expected to reach the success of Haikyuu and maybe even reap on the momentum for artistic sports created by Yuri on Ice. It's not just "ANN's PC dictatorship feminism", Ballroom itself is failing to meet its own expectations because of a variety of factors including but not limited to the lack of actual dancing and the poor characterization all across the board. It's also rich saying it's only the feminists exaggerating about something "no one else cares about" when a lot of people criticizing the show's treatment of the female characters are exactly the kind of people who usually complain about analysing anime through a feminist lense
Another false equivalence. Just because your MCs aren't female doesn't mean you can't treat female characters as actual humans. Look at Yuri on Ice. Pretty much any woman in that show has more agency than the girls in Ballroom. Even Haikyu, whose female characters are as background as can be, have way more development and independence. Also, i don't know how calling girls stupid for showing their ambition vs girls who act cute and girly and have "girl appropriate dreams", making them look like crazy bitches if they don't submit to the male characters' ideology, making the girls' stories and personalities always orbit around a male character's arc, and even forcing one of the girls to "fall in love" and "marry" a guy who pretty much creeped on her for the entirety of the series is treating female characters "just fine". |
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