Forum - View topicINTEREST: Bulma Voice Actress Monica Rial Shares Alleged Inappropriate Encounters With Vic Mignogna
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Nimitz
 Posts: 30 |
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So the people outraged by sexual assault are ...threatening sexual assault? Yeah, sure. |
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tygerchickchibi
 Posts: 1461 |
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Yikes, that is supposed to be a lawyer?? That's troll behavior. This is what I was talking about when outsiders try to insert themselves into a situation that didn't involve them personally in the first place. Literally no one asked for this If the tweets are private (or deleted) then I gotta say that it probably was unprofessional to begin with :/ I'm still on a Twitter break so I'll just take what you said with a grain of salt. |
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Lynx Raven Raide
 Posts: 412 Location: Central Coast, AU |
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Secondly, the other location. If you scroll up just, three posts above yours, you will see my post. With this.
The whole Cosplay is not Consent thing has been going for almost 5 years now since NYCC in 2014. It may not be criminal, but it is definitely socially unacceptable in cons now because of idiots who know no social boundaries and take advantage of the situation. No, I am not throwing Vic in with those ones (who were really creeps) but being in his position he should know better. |
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GhostStalkerSA
 Posts: 425 Location: NYC |
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This. I’ve worked NYCC for 9 years now since 2010, and the change in con culture has been dramatic. The “free hugs” signs and yaoi paddles are pretty much nonexistent anymore like they were a decade ago, and “Cosplay is not Consent” signs are all over the entrances. People and con culture have moved on. Sure, one less generous than me can say that’s the result of conventions like NYCC becoming more commercial and no longer focusing on the fan aspect of things, but I can say the change was pretty warranted. NYCC got in a kerfluffle wrt a “fake” YouTube news show of some sort who had gotten a Press Badge harassing female cosplayers on tape the year prior to the Cosplay is not Consent signs going up, and I think that was definitely a precipitating factor. Sure, a lot of people will just roll their eyes at the signs, but if the idea gets through to some people, it’ll help change con culture for the better. About the only backlash I’ve seen to the signs was a photoshopped picture of one of the signs altered to read “Cosplay is Consent, All the Cosplayers here are prostitutes and you can have sex with them all you want” next to a cosplayer in a Naked Beach from Kill la Kill getup, which was making the rounds on one of the chans or subreddits where they bandy these things about. Yes, what Vic did might not rise to the level of criminal sexual harrassment or assault, but as Texas is a Right to Work state where you can be fired for basically any reason that doesn’t fall afoul of EEOC rules, and sexually harassing or assaulting a coworker is definitely a fireable offense... Conventions have it even easier, since they can just chose to not invite you to a convention for whatever reason they chose to. |
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Ryasha
Posts: 101 |
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I didn't dig too deep as that's a can of worms I don't want to open but he seems to only use his lawyer status and his established law firm to make videos on YouTube about how law in some instances works or about cases that he isn't directly involved in. Given what context I can gather, the unavailable tweets came from someone else entirely and not the lawyer and either just informed the fiance that the lawyer had started the GoFundMe or gave the fiance some information about the guy. Either way, I agree the response to the "threat" was rather unprofessional. I'd take screenshots or link the tweets but this is technically off topic so I should probably stop and not go any further. |
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El Hermano
 Posts: 450 Location: Texas |
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I haven't been to an anime convention since I was 20. That was back in 2006. They were tons of fun back then. I stopped going before Homestuck happened, and then the rise of Abridgers, Channel Awesome, Bronies, and now the #MeToo generation. I think I ducked out at the right time and can keep those memories preserved. Vic was pretty active back then too, since it was post FMA, but I don't think Ouran was dubbed yet. I take a lot of these things about him hugging and kissing fans as he's from the older days of convention when that stuff wasn't seen as bad. I remember I got my ass smacked by a random girl with a paddle when I was cosplay as Jing one time out of nowhere and it was just part and parcel for anime conventions. Also there was literally cosplay orgies back then, but I'll just skip over that since they never carded anyone so the less said the less incriminating it is. I guess it's hard for me to really see the big deal since it was everywhere back then, and it was part of my experience that I enjoyed. But I suppose these days are different and all that stuff isn't allowed at conventions anymore. Sounds a bit boring these days to be honest. Early 2000s were a trip for the con scene. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18247 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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^
I have attended Acen (Anime Central) for the past five years, and every year I've walked away from it finding it to be one of the most energizing experiences of the year. Maybe the kind of stuff you're talking about isn't going on as much anymore, but I can feel the excitement and enthusiasm just from walking around the dealer's hall or the various 'con venues, or playing in a Cards Against Humanity event with literally hundreds of other people. So yeah, I don't find 'cons these days to be the slightest bit more boring than anything that went on in the mid-'00s. |
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GhostStalkerSA
Posts: 425 Location: NYC |
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This. For all my complaints about NYCC becoming more focused on the commercial side and the press of bodies crammed into the Javits Center, it still is a lot of fun. You get to see great cosplays, walking around Artist Alley is always fun even when I’m patrolling the place (I’m usually working in Artist Alley, have been since 2014 with only a year min another area last year), and working the annual Charity Auction for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital with my boss is always fulfilling. Helps that my birthday has fallen on one of the days of NYCC for the past 3 years or so, and I have fun with people because of that as well. Going out for food after a night with fellow con staffers is always a great time to unwind. The new major addition to the NY con scene, AnimeNYC has the energy of much larger con as well, and running into all of my con friends is always fun, plus concerts and stuff, the masquerade, and just wandering the show floor and seeing people have fun is great. You don’t need people chasing each other with paddles or whatever to have fun at a con. I will say that I agree wrt the Homestuckers though, they seem to invade any nerd adjacent convention and somewhat take over. I remember working a smaller con in Times Square like 3 years ago doing panels, and the line for their panel seemed to have a never ending chorus of people loudly singing some song referencing it to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (which I thought was before the majority of the singers’ time), while everyone else just seemed to want to go past them in peace... |
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all-tsun-and-no-dere
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 607 |
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Amen! To be fair, I'm in my 30s and I started going in my teens, so the way I enjoy cons is very different now, but I've never felt like they've gotten boring or less energetic. People will take joy in being free to be wild and weird no matter what. And you know what? Even if they hadn't, I'll take a slightly more "boring" con where people feel safe from harassment over an exciting one where transgressing people's personal boundaries up to and including assault is normalized any day. Yaoi paddles were terrible. Glomping was terrible. I'll never forget the time I was cosplaying Winry as a teenager and some middle-aged dude wrapped his arm around my bare waist for a picture. It may not have been assault, and it's fairly mild compared to some of my friends' stories, but it was a major personal space violation, and I spent the next several minutes talking with the other Winry cosplayer he'd posed with about how we wished we'd had wrenches to hit him with. Cons may have had more of a wild west, anything goes feeling 10-15 years ago, but at least the vulnerable people going to them can feel a little safer now. It's a worthwhile sacrifice. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4102 |
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Interesting question... I had just recently seen a Youtube video where at the end of the Event, the Host actually asked his female guest if he was allowed to hug her and she answered yes before he hugged her. Shocking I know. Video has millions of views, the guy has millions of subscribers..... 15 million to be exact without mentioning names. I immediate thought of Vic when I saw the whole thing play out as normal as it actually is or should be. Yes, the days of game show hosts kissing women without question are over and probably never should have happened in the first place and while hugging is a bit more casual... less intimate? But I can immediately think of certain hugs that are more intimate than kissing... Look, the whole thing's a mess so just learn to ask first. Think of it as a common courtesy... like not sneezing on people. |
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Naruto Guru
Posts: 34 |
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Well that's the most measured take on it, I think. Better safe than sorry. Still, as someone who has had to take photos and seem friendly with lines of people myself as quickly as possible (no, I have nothing to do with Vic or anime in general) I still think asking each person when 90% are fine with it and 9.9%, usually male/male, are obviously not based on body language is a bit ridiculous. See, that's the thing. Certain hugs can be plenty intimate, and then there some cultures use a kiss as a greeting the same way we would a handshake. I try to put my arm around most people to leave them with a good photo, and I've had the occasional creep touch *me* inappropriately and suggestively. For me, the lesson learned was that it's necessary to speak up then and there. When you take something so common and grey as that and then add a vague and amorphous rule like 'consent', nothing good can possibly come of it. Consent doesn't mean a darn thing; creeps are always going to be able to get away with claiming somebody consented who didn't, and morally corrupt individuals or groups are going to incite witch hunts by revoking their consent retrospectively. Everything that's been happening over the past few months ought to be a wakeup call that clearer rules need to be established. If we need a verbal yes or a written contract, so be it, but consent isn't gonna cut it. As for all of the workplace regulations and such... ok, but dealing with enthusiastic fans and dealing with co-workers are two completely different animals. I think me too started off as something good. People who dealt with real creeps (especially in the entertainment business; those film directors, Bill Cosby, etc) finally started to speak up. But at this point, it's become a social media fad more than anything else, and half of the people I see get accused and lose their jobs end up proven innocent shortly after. Chris Hardwick, Enzo Amore... there are plenty. |
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nargun
Posts: 926 |
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Jesus. 90% success is 10% failure. You should not be accepting a 10% failure rate in your general social interactions, that's massively unacceptably high and will lead to severe negative social outcomes. Seriously: flip the proportions. Instead of 10% of your interactions causing offense-or-fear, imagine if one out of ten of your interactions made you offended or scared? Because that's the same situation mirrored: if other people acted as you've declared you intend to act, that's the result you'd experience. Golden Rule, you've probably heard of it: do unto others as you would wish to be treated by others. But it works when you're considering ranges of possible outcomes too. Like a rainbow: each drop produces its own rainbow, but each part of the rainbow you see is scattered by a different drop. What comes in is what goes out, scattered and recollected. Like, seriously, if you halved that, one-in-twenty of your interactions going pear-shaped, you'd qualify as "horrible arsehole". Even 1%, an order of magnitude less, is pretty bad! Actual one-in-ten as a ruling rate, a rate you've described as "ridiculous" -- what's your actual target for causing offense or fear? One in five? one in four? -- is just mind-blowing. It is impossible to overemphasise quite how far out of line with social expectations your described behaviour is: eyeballing it, I'd say you're probably causing offense and fear at a rate around fifty times what's actually socially acceptable, quite possibly significantly higher. |
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Ryasha
Posts: 101 |
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Well....it should honestly be the other way around. They should be asking you if they can hug you. If you don't want to say "yes" to a line full of people, just put a sign up that says "Yes I can give you a hug". Or have one of the people at the event that are there monitoring things tell people that its okay on your behalf.
The difference in those cases and this one is that the investigations for Hardwick and Amore didn't turn up anything and Hardwick was rehired. Amore stayed fired because he "didn't tell them he was being investigated". Hardwick's accuser refused to be part of the investigation and there wasn't enough evidence to do anything to Amore. For this one, Funimation cut ties with Vic AFTER doing their investigation. So that means they found something to warrant getting rid of him. Monica Rial was part of the investigation and there are stories dating back over a decade about Vic so evidence probably did turn up in one form another. |
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Naruto Guru
Posts: 34 |
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Don't get me wrong, everyone. My comments aren't meant as a knock on Monica Rial or Funimation. It's more a matter of reading through some of the arguing and extremely one-sided viewpoints that turn up here and elsewhere and thinking, wow, something is very wrong with society. Everyone is far too eager to be judge, jury, and executioner these days. If investigations were done and he was found guilty, fine, fire him. But being fired up in a self-righteous rage toward a guy you'll never even meet, or directing hate toward those who accused him for that matter, is foolish. There's nothing cut and dry about these kinds of situations, even when someone does do something wrong. It's messy and hard to pin down what actually happened, and acting like it isn't only encourages more people to cry wolf. |
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all-tsun-and-no-dere
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 607 |
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This is a big thing going on in childcare as well. We're teaching children set their own boundaries and respect others' by asking for hugs unless the child is clearly eager for, giving them options (if you don't want a hug, how about a high five) and, if we have to touch them for their own safety, clearly explaining why (I have to pick you up and move you right now because you're standing on a chair in a way that's very unsafe). It may not be the cultural norm now, but it absolutely should be. Don't touch people you don't know without consent. Don't. |
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