Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Carole & Tuesday Tries to Fight the Power
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EnableNoClip
 Posts: 8 |
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legit only making this post to say: way to be a defender of xenophobic practices that still do way more harm than they've ever done good or have the last two years of public scrutiny of ICE just not happened in your corner of the universe |
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El Hermano
 Posts: 450 Location: Texas |
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If people wanted a legitimately good analysis of controversial topics, they wouldn't be looking at fictional media for it. They'd read academic journals, scientific studies, any kind of actual research on the issue. Fictional media almost always has lazy, strawman politics and idealized scenarios that only serve to get people who agree with the message to clap along with it while they'll never change any opposing side's viewpoint because strawman arguments and logically fallacies don't make for good tactics. Of course the immigrants who got arrested and faced deportation are famous singers who inspire people and never do anything bad. Of course the politican is so comically over-the-top evil they plan bombings and terrorist attacks to show you just how evil you'd have to be to support any kind of immigration policy. Why talk about any of the myriad of immigration issues Cutiebunny brings up critically and argue actual talking points? Just throw in some strawman arguments and call it a day. That's why most political media is scorned, it's always some simplistic black and white look on a multifacted and complicated topic that never holds up to any kind of scrutiny. I mean, shows are free to still do that if they want, but Carole & Tuesday was pretty much ignored by the anime community and one of the most unpopular shows of the season. Whether because of all that or just the premise itself not being people's cup of tea, who can say. |
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nargun
Posts: 926 |
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It's a shame I never made friends with a member of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, now I'll never be able to have an opinion on the holocaust. |
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Cutiebunny
 Posts: 1754 |
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Like I said, unless you speak to people who work there or are working there yourself, you are seeing only what the media wants you to see. For every instance of abuse, I can point to several instances where CBP, ICE, Border Patrol, etc. have gone to extremes to make sure that people are safe and cared for, regardless of their legal status or where they come from. Of course, you're not going to hear about those because that's not what people want to hear. People tune in to news for scandal, not to hear about kind people going out of their way to do things for others. Unless you're doing the research by speaking to the people in the field and taking into consideration their experiences, your opinion is going to be flawed at best.
Yes, because a strawman argument is a lot easier than actually speaking to people who lived through it. |
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nargun
Posts: 926 |
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So do I have to be friends with people before I can condemn them or don't I?
(how many people smugglers are you friends with?) What I'm doing is a pretty straightforward logical technique called "reductio ad absurdam". You'll probably find that you've got no good answer to my questions; that's how it's supposed to work. Either you say that you have to know people to condemn their actions (which is crazy because it would mean nobody will be able the holocaust)... or people can condemn things they've only read about, like tearing apart families with no paperwork so that they can never be put back together (this is, by the way, a pretty bad thing: technically it's a form of genocide if it's ethnically based). That feeling, "I can't form an argument against what he's saying but I don't want to admit it?" That's what being wrong feels like. Everybody alive thinks their actions are justified. Some of them are right and some of them are wrong: but they all think that they're justified and so that belief -- even mine! -- is meaningless. There are a few tricks to working out whether you're the bad guys, but the key is self-doubt. |
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doctordoom85
 Posts: 2093 |
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Oh come on. The issue of Carole and Tuesday being yet another anime behind Netflix jail has been well talked about among the anime community, In spite of that, it still managed to get an 8.05 score on MAL, and #828 on popularity which is a bit low but not THAT low. Especially since you could point to shows from this season that just ended like Ascendance of a Bookworm which has pretty the much exact same rating yet a far lower popularity at #1837, or Stars Align at #1797. Carole and Tuesday was inevitably going to be ignored by a certain portion of the community regardless of how the show turned out due to the Netflix issue because said portion shows a consistent lack of interest in going back to a show of a past season even if it was only one or two seasons ago. Not to mention the show clearly isn't designed to capture a large audience. It's not an isekai, an action shonen, a comedy, a show that has lots of meme potential, etc. Plenty of more casual anime fans are most likely not going to watch it anytime soon regardless of the show's quality. So yeah, it's pretty clear why the show is where it's at in popularity in the community (and it was nowhere near most unpopular of the shows that season, in fact it's #10 of that season and considering 5 of the ones above it were sequels/reboots I'd say that's pretty good for a show that many couldn't watch when it was airing thanks to Netflix), and I highly doubt the political element, which wasn't even present until later in the series, had much of an impact on it. |
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nargun
Posts: 926 |
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Here's the thing. Carole and Tuesday can't get traction to start their music career because they lack contacts or money. But Angela gets a walk-up start. Literally: she skips the prelims to Mars Brightest, gets introduced to producers. Stuff that C&T can't get access to. But... Angela has as much experience as a professional musician at the start of the show as Carole and Thursday do. She gets to skip the hoops that C&T have to jump through not because she's got demonstrated talent or experience but because she's got access to social [and monetary] capital that Carole and Tuesday don't, Carole because she's a poor outsider and Tuesday because she's walked away from her family. This is all talked about explicitly in dialogue, no? Multiple times. Everything in animation is there because someone wanted to include it. If the production team wanted apolitical "rivals!" or "working with established figures vs striking your own path" they could have equalised the difference in social station between Carole, Angela, and Tuesday... but they didn't, because the social differences and their consequences -- politics -- was something they wanted to include, deliberately, from the beginning. |
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borobor
Posts: 18 |
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I'm just in awe of the way the last few posts have gone from illegal immigration, to condescending Nazi comparisons, to accusations of genocide, and finally to the boldest and spiciest political take of all: "famous models have an easier time breaking into the music industry than complete nobodies."
This thread's got a better narrative arc than C&T. |
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ryanvamp
Posts: 419 |
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I don't really see a point in checking these forums as often as I used to but just wanted to say I 100% agree with you. |
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2251 |
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I have a coworker who used to work as part of Border Patrol in Arizona about five years ago, and at least where he worked, he described them as being very trigger-happy, uber gung-ho about seeing who was the "toughest" during pepper-spray training, and seriously lacking in empathy--the kind of folks who would try to hit small animals in their trucks while out in the field--in part to stave off boredom. John Oliver pretty completely covers the public misconception of what they think Border Patrol work is like (catching "bad guys") vs the mind-numbing reality of it, and I think my coworker's experience is a prime example of this disconnect in action. |
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DavetheUsher
 Posts: 505 |
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John Oliver is a late night talk show comedian, not an expert or informed source I really hope people aren't getting their American news and information from British comedians.  To say nothing of how bias that source would be on this topic. And just to be clear, Border Patrol isn't ICE. Nor are ICE police officers. Border patrol are also not police officers They're all very different and distinct groups with different jurisdictions, regulations, authority, and purposes even if they all get collectively shat on by people thinking they're all the same.
Either way, to me C&T is clearly modeled after the Japanese immigration scene, not America's. The whole 'overstaying your work visa' thing is a very Japanese issue, since most illegal immigrants in Japan are foreign workers who were brought over on temporary work visa and then flee when their time to go back home arrives. Japan's an island country so it's not that easy to sneak in like America's two huge borders you can just walk across. The whole Earth and Mars thing seemed like a pretty apt analogy to that. Japan's actually way stricter than America is when it comes to enforcing immigration policies and deporting people. I remember seeing a Japanese reality TV show where they'd go around finding the work visa overstays and then arrest and deport them ala Cops. Don't think even we do that here. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18248 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Oh, that's not just a Japanese issue. In the U.S., illegal immigrants who have overstayed visas actually outnumber illegal border crossings by almost 2 to 1. That's one of the main reasons why anti-wall groups in the U.S. think that building a wall is a waste of time and resources. I wondered myself at first if the whole anti-immigrant thing in the series was commentary on Japanese politics (since that has been an issue for at least a couple of decades now), but the inclusion of MICE clinched it for me that a reference to American immigration was intended as well, if not instead. Besides, although anime doesn't do it commonly, this would be far from the first time that an anime title has poked at American politics and social issues. |
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nargun
Posts: 926 |
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Eh. When the most recent volume of Hataraku Mao-sama went on a lengthy digression on the economics of Nauru, now that surprised me. [but it probably shouldn't have: gating from Ente Isla was always framed as "migration" back from v1, when Rika linked it to her internal-migration experience coming from Kobe [and hiding her accent, &c]. And the decision to write a story about "migration", textually, for young adults in the japanese cultural context really has to be a product of strong and grounded personal beliefs. Which means knowledge of international refugee politics, &c, on which my country is shamefully rather prominent and where Nauru plays a fairly large role.] |
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bludgeonParagon
Posts: 6 |
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Just wanted to pipe up and mention that music and political activism have been strongly intertwined with each other since probably the beginning of time, and if I wanted a music anime from Shinichiro Watanabe that didn't explore a different angle I could go and watch literally anything else in the genre.
Also echoing that the Netflix release format has been the direct cause of the show's relative lack of popularity given there was a goddamn 5 month window between the first and second half (and not because of politics or whatever). People who do actually watch it have been generally reviewing it pretty well. I do think the pacing is a bit whack and some of the plotlines are rushed but it's nice to see another anime that tries representing music production from multiple walks of life, and doesn't try to pretend the creative process always occurs within some apolitical vacuum |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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Immigration seems to be a topic in many recent anime shows. GeGeGe no Kitarou (2019) uses the conflicts between humans and yokai to symbolize the gap between natives and foreigners. It reached its peak in episode 84 where a foreign yokai is mistreated by his Japanese foreman and co-workers. Cop Craft also explicitly pairs a human police officer with an alien partner who came through a gate. Other shows are less explicit but still touch on these issues. Demi-chan wa Kataritai can be seen as a show about the "other," in this case represented by a vampire girl, snow maiden, dullahan, and succubus. The show persistently advocates inclusion and the "demis" eventually end up as friends with the humans. |
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