Forum - View topicThe Mike Toole Show - Love Live! The School Idol Column
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Lili-Hime
 Posts: 569 |
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The Bechdel test is a pretty poor indicator of misogyny or sexism. Technically badly acted lesbian porn would pass the Bechdel text, and that's about as pandering as you can get. Meanwhile an awesome movie with a strong female protagonist like Gravity fails the test because the writers don't give her another female to talk to in space. >.> This year's Ex Machina is also another great example of a movie with a strong feminist message that fails the Bechdel test. It's hard to take a show like K-on! seriously as female positive. Yes they may talk about their hopes and dreams, but the camera lingering around their thighs as they rub together kind of dehumanizes them. That said I liked K-on! for a while due to the female friendship aspect that as others have pointed out is pretty non-existent in western media. I just wish the girls in these moe shows actually you know, acted like real women. But they don't. They act like how guys think (or fantazie about) how we act with no guys present. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4577 |
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I'd like to say that I understand the appeal of this franchise and things like it, but yeah, I got nothing. Mike is probably about the last person on the planet I would have pegged as a fan of it though.
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vonPeterhof
Posts: 729 |
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Greboruri
Posts: 378 Location: QBN, NSW, Australia |
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I don't recall that scene at all in the show. Anyway most of K-ON!'s staff was as female, especially in the key roles; director and storyboarder Naoko Yamada, series composition and head screenplay writer Reiko Yoshida, character designer Yukiko Horiguchi etc. Plus a fair wack of the episode directors and storyboarders. These are the people that determine what the show looks like. To me the whole "K-ON! is viewed through the male gaze" argument is just nonsense. It's unsexual, it's been broadcast on the Disney Channel in Japan. Seriously. |
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2262 Location: Online Terminal |
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You'd think they'd have individual ranger colors after five years. Also, King Blade or you're trash wota. |
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Mr. Oshawott
 Posts: 6773 |
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I recall watching Chance Pop Session sometime around June of last year. I thought it did pretty well showcasing the differing lives of the three girls to become idols, perhaps in a realistic way.
I find it hard to say which girls of the μ's that I like most. Their differing personalities and their coming together to save their school from being shut down is what's keeping me from ever choosing... ...although I will say that I like Hanayo in a special way that her birthday just happens to be that of mine. 
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Lili-Hime
Posts: 569 |
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It was an example I threw out there not just for K-on! but other shows in the genre. I just used K-on! as an example I guess, but it really isn't terribly offensive in this area. It still has shots like this and thisthough frequently. (Or this too)
So? Women work on hentai. When the vast majority of media we consume is from the male gaze, it's easy to emulate it even if we're not male. Gender doesn't neccessarily HAVE to influence one's indivudual creativity. The most feminist anime ever created (Utena) was made by a man (Ikuhara).
The male gaze doesn't necessarily have to be sexual. It literally means just placing the camera angles where a straight man would look. Most straight girls aren't going to focus their gaze on the area where the skirts meet the thigh on another girl (as in a couple shots above). K-on! is very smart about this because it caters to men by portraying the girls as cute,youthful, energetic and innocent. If they went too sexual it'd ruin the appeal. Again though there are shots like the ones I posted above. Is it female friendly? Definitely. Lots of girls like it. I used to. But let's not kid ourselves who the target audience for stuff like this is. Again I didn't mean to pick on K-on I just shortened the list of shows in the quotes. I watch stuff like Cutie Honey and Dirty Pair, fanservice doesn't offend me. What bothers me is that the women in moe shows like Love Live! act nothing like real human women so it feels a bit empty trying to convince myself moe stuff is being progressive when women are not the audience and the girls in these shows are written as the sort of girls otaku men want them to be. For my money I'd rather have something with fanservice like Dirty Pair, Claymore, or the Lupin Fujiko anime where the female characters act like normal women and are protrayed as capable... and having an IQ above 50. Seriously Yui has the mental capacity of a 3 year old. |
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Megiddo
 Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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I had already watched Tari Tari a season or two prior, so when I learned that the whole shtick was that the girls wanted to be idols so they could save their school I rolled my eyes pretty hard. Then I saw examples of the performances were laughably bad CG and so I just never got into Love Live. Completely understandable why it's so popular though what with the mobile game and initial fan involvement.
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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I've seen the lack of female characters in Hollywood productions attributed to something similar to learned helplessness: if you make a female character too "weak" and give her too many flaws for someone's taste, you get yelled at. Make them too "strong" and give them little or no flaws and you're left with a bland, inhuman piece of cardboard that you can doodle genitals on as you please(and you might get yelled at anyway). Much better to leave them out and just get the usual din of "why u no write female characters?" and not let the outrage machine constrain your story.
That might not be "the" cause, but it's almost certainly a contributing factor. @Lili-Hime: Aside from the swimsuit thing, what you're talking about are "pillow shots". If memory serves, KyoAni made them popular, so talk about their studio's composition isn't meaningless. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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This is a profoundly stupid-sounding question, but: what should they act like in order to be like real human women? They certainly exaggerate their cuteness and tendency to grab each other's breasts, but the extent of that depends on the show, and besides that it's pretty hard to make all your protagonists totally unlike real people. For 100% inhuman women you'd have to go to a particularly terrible harem or something. They're often immature and dumb, but... they're teenagers. Teenagers are almost universally immature and dumb, especially from an adult perspective. And these kinds of shows are mostly light and comedic so they have little reason to make them 20-somethings in the bodies of 15-year-olds (as in practically every serious anime). Most shonens also have profoundly immature protagonists. If you used to like K-On, maybe you just grew out of it? Of course, I'm kinda skirting around the issue of otaku apparently preferring immature and/or stupid women... then again, the popularity of things like Madoka indicates that most men don't really want to marry completely childlike women, they just, y'know, think immature goofiness is cute. Love Live seems to have plenty of female fans, and K-On has a few, so they probably aren't totally unrealistic. I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate; Love Live certainly isn't feminist in the same sense as Utena. But a hell of a lot more guys watch Love Live, because it's more accessible and isn't a direct attack on sexism and bigotry, which many people will find offensive and confusing even (especially) if they need to hear it. Love Live is just girls doing stuff, while being cute enough to make you care about them. If nothing else, shows like this can sort of incept the idea that women are people into the heads of men who were just drawn in by the cuteness, and that's an important part of teaching people not to be sexist. |
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bhl88
Posts: 255 |
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Part of original: No, instead of (K-On! having) female superiority, that’s just absence of men. It looks like girls are being prioritized, but if men don’t appear to begin with, it’s like nothing more than building a farm where there can be no antagonism. In that sense, women become more like mascots… it might mean looking down on them. Not by the creators, but by the audience: http://glee-is-epic.tumblr.com/post/120154872274
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Jedi Master
 Posts: 400 |
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The scene in the airport when they return to Japan from the U.S.: men! Men... in Love Live! I was shocked. Apparently, I was the only one here who noticed.
Best girl yelled,"You'd better not be serious!!" towards the end of Season 1, episode 12. The character interactions in that scene seemed realistic enough for me. |
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kufirst
 Posts: 86 Location: Kansas |
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Watched the two seasons, saw the movie at a theater in KC yet could not care less for the game. Total time and money waster if you ask me.
Nozomi best girl btw ♥ |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14767 |
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Would ya believe even Hollywood passes the Bechdel test quite easily too 
Seems N. America is going the other way - instead of having separate label for boys (shounen, seinen, etc.) and separate label for girls (shoujo, josei, etc.), the trend is the stores are now moving away from gender-based designations, so no more boy's stuff or girl's stuff, just "stuff."
You would be off the mark - the separation of roles by gender in Japan is more rigid and strict. It's not that men are mars, women are venus, let's try to understand each other - it's more like men are men, women are women, there's no reason to understand the other, just keep it separate and all will be fine. Many of the so-called pandering that you mentioned earlier is kinda like that - it's the idealized version of the other half. The all-girls interactions are what the idealized version what they want to see, and vice versa, the fujoshi version of all-males interactions they want to see. Without the need bridging the understanding of the other half. Heheh, if ya guys are curious how Japanese school girls are really up to these days........ 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X0sFtN5Uk0 
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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Not exactly. The point (or what is now generally accepted as the point) of the Bechdel test is that it's absurdly easy to pass (the male equivalent happens in almost everything) and yet, apparently, more than a third of Hollywood profit comes from movies that somehow manage to not pass it. And many of the ones that pass do so on a technicality (Iron Man and Man of Steel don't exactly have a lot of women in them because, well, look at the titles). But based on the rest of your post, you seem determined to believe that sexism is over in the US and Japan is a wasteland of misogyny or something so... I'll leave you to it, I guess. |
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