Forum - View topicNEWS: Viz Media Cancels Publication of act-age Manga's Last Chapter
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5825 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Yes, you can. I did it for Jane Fonda. It is just a personal choice. No person is an island. Lot of people invested their time and work into these projects. I don't blame you for your choice, it is quite understandable. We are all different. |
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Alesandro Zuzic
Posts: 2 |
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I have 1st English volume and now it's useless, oh well. I won't even read it, it'll just be in my collection as an art-book and nothing else.
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cluesagi
 Posts: 1 |
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I agree. I understand the response to this situation but I don't agree with it. The author's actions and the manga he helped make are two completely different things. Art is about what you, the viewer, get out of it, not what the author put into it. I personally don't see anything wrong with fans of this series continuing to enjoy it, just as trans fans of Harry Potter continue to enjoy that series despite JK Rowling. Separating the art from the artist is not impossible, it's something you can choose to do. |
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nargun
Posts: 925 |
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Eh. The art's a product of the artist's brain: you can seperate the art from the artist, but frankly I don't see why you'd want to. Why would you enjoy filling your brain with the perspectives a sex-pervert narcissist has on the emotional impact of acting on teen girls? Where's the entertainment value that's supposed to offer?
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CrypticPurpose
 Posts: 321 |
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If you look at artists throughout history, you'll find quite a few that were absolutely rotten human beings. Just like with humans in general, not all artists are saints. They are just people. Even the great ones. And terrible people can still create wonderful things. Now, if you asked me whether I would want him to teach at a middle school, that's different. But a person's quality as a human being is generally not coupled to their capacity to produce worthwhile works of art. |
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nargun
Posts: 925 |
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I mean if you want to argue that "insight into the lived experiences of others" is entirely unrelated to "ability to create works that offer others insight into life" then feel free by all means.
Me, my experience has been that arseholes largely create works that are self-indulgent, with the bigger arseholes creating shittier work. Not 100% correlation, but a useful heuristic. But... setting that aside, we're not talking the general case, are we? The current context is as I said: the work needs to have insight into the thought processes of teen girls to have any value, but it's created by someone who thinks so little of the thought processes, the preferences and priorities, of teen girls that he thinks groping them is a fine way for someone to spend their time. The two... do not go together comfortably, do they? The art that you're separating from the artist is inescapably shaped by thaf artist and their... problems, in a way that we can expect to be pretty bad, with this specific work and these specific problems. Why would you bother reading it? What do you hope to get out of it? (We can actually usefully contrast this with Lewis Carroll, btw, where the specific problems the creator had might not cripple the work. Or kenshin, where you might argue that there isn't any significant connection between the artist's problems and the work. But the connections here I don't think let us do that.) |
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 1393 |
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Nobody's saying people can't enjoy whatever they want. The reason Viz (and Shueisha obvs) are cancelling their releases is that to sell them would be to financially support a man who molested middle schoolers, and they as a company do not want to do that. "Separating art from artist" is about whether a reader/viewer/whatever can still engage with the work without thinking about the artist, but you can't separate the creator if you're still giving them money for their work. |
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Tuor_of_Gondolin
 Posts: 3524 Location: Bellevue, WA |
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If I enjoy the work of an artist, why wouldn't I compensate him for it? That aspect is entirely separate from his actions and is not a comment on my view of the morality of his actions as a person. Legally speaking, this guy did something bad and in doing so broke the law. He will be punished by the government (that is, by the collective will of the People of his community) for doing so.
His punishment has nothing whatsoever to do with me. My relationship with an artist is with his works, not with him as person. I don't know him personally and I have no desire to do so, in either a positive or negative sense. If I don't like his works, I won't attempt to purchase them, and if I do then I will. I'll leave it to the law to deal with punishing someone for lawbreaking, and the families of the girls involved can (and probably should) sue him as well. |
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 1393 |
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and? That's your right to do it. My point was that "separating art from artist" necessarily means, well, separating the artist. Which can't happen if you are there, giving the artist money, and thus they are not separate from the art. If you choose to live in a vacuum that's your business but don't obfuscate what you're doing by misusing a turn of phrase. |
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Paulo27
Posts: 400 |
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Absolutely no respect towards the fans. At least over in Japan they let the artist write a last chapter to kinda finish, meanwhile overseas they don't want you to read that for whatever reason, it's dumb what the other publishers are doing.
Reason why scanlators will continue to be more reliable. |
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Blanchimont
 Posts: 3448 Location: Finland |
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Chapter 123 got translated quite fast, in fact by the time the site I frequent which normally puts up links to MangaPlus chapters on Viz's site(as in redirects there, for clarification) had the current batch of links going up, that version went up as well... |
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 1393 |
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Yeah that's not what happened. The actual sequence of events is that the chapter that was published was completed weeks before the writer was arrested, and the issue of Weekly Shonen Jump it ran in was already mass-printed, shipped out to retailers, and more than likely sitting in the storage area of convenience stores and bookshelves across the country when the news broke of Matsuki's arrest. At that point the only way to avoid publishing it would be to cancel and recall every copy of the magazine less than 12 hours before it was set to release. Since Viz's Shonen Jump is a digital service, all they had to do was not populate the chapter to their servers, which is why they didn't release it. (Sidenote: the way work schedules for weekly manga work, this also means there's at least a 2 or 3 completed chapters that will never see the light of day because Shueisha will never publish them.) |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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I can't speak for everyone of course, but for me its three reasons. The first and perhaps the most important is simply because they are fundamentally two different things. Perhaps that sounds pedantic but it is the literal truth--one is a human being and the other is an inanimate object; and that inanimate object--be it a sculpture, song, book, poem, manga, film, etc--is subject to interpretation by the viewer just as much as it is created by the artist. The second is that I think we humans must separate the art from the artist and the work from the worker otherwise our society couldn't function. Everyone has their shortcomings and problems, therefore if we apply the theory that we shouldn't engage with people or works if they are somehow connected to things we don't like there is simply nothing we could consume. Put anyone or anything under a microscope and you can find something to complain about. We interact with many people on any given day. Statistically, many of them are in fact criminals. The third is that "canceling" a work because of something the creator did something inappropriate deprives us of a teaching tool. Keeping those works around gives us an opportunity to discuss those issues and fight the problem. For example, take JK Rowling's recent comments on trans women and the Harry Potter franchise. If society "cancels" her then it's all swept under the rug and ignored. No progress is made. But if society still engages with Harry Potter works then every time that Harry Potter is discussed there is an easy segue into the discussion of trans issues and how Rowling's comments offended a lot of people and how that needs to stop. Likewise with this manga: whenever fans talk about it the issue of the author's inappropriate groping can be raised in the context of how to stop it from happening in the future.
When I read a book, watch a movie, listen to music, etc, the circumstances of the author/artist don't even enter into my thought process. It's entirely absent. It's no different when I eat a new restaurant or test-drive a new car. I'm thinking about what the food and the service is like or how the car drives; I'm not wondering if the chef has a drug problem or if the engineer who designed the brakes is racist. I evaluate the work based on what message the work itself is promoting. If a manga conveys the message that it's OK to randomly grope people then I'd find that highly offensive. If the manga did not contain any offensive content then manga wouldn't offend me even though its author did. While I consider the author a scumbag for what he did, that doesn't extend invalidate his work. People do both good and bad things. |
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nargun
Posts: 925 |
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But his crimes do directly relate to the text. Here, in dot point form.
+ he's writilng a book where he needs to be able to draw a convincing character of a teen girl putting herself into the position of other people. + this means he needs to be able to understand the emotional life of teen girls, etc, see things from their perspective + from the above, to do his job he needs to be able to understand that teen girls don't want to be groped. + but he went and did it anyway + which means he doesn't actually understand teen girls and thus probably can't characterise them effectively + which means he cannot write the book he's trying to write, + which means you shouldn't read the book he's writing because it will suck. Tldr: a book about teen-girl actors written by a person who gropes teen girls can be reasonably predicted to have unconving characters without convincing interior lives, hollow and complyant vessels for the men around them to project their desires on. Lolita written by humbert. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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I may be mistaken since I've only read a little Act-Age, but I think it's been out for about 2 years now and has over a hundred chapters. Not to mention that even getting in Jump in the first place is a pretty high bar. It seems like a popular title, so I can't imagine that too many people find it to be "unconvincing" or have problems with the writing. Its success would suggest the opposite, actually. Nobody complained about anything until the author decided to act like a giant turd. The success of the manga before its cancellation seems to imply that he had no trouble writing despite his inexcusable behavior. |
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