So my last post, highlighting some of the more obnoxious responses from Anime Nazis and other terrible people to the Brexit vote somehow managed to draw some even more obnoxious responses from other Anime Nazis and terrible people.
You can see some of them in the responses to this tweet of mine.
Naturally, the comments some of these lovely people tried to post here on WHTM were if anything even worse. Let’s take a look at some of them, shall we? We’ll start with some of the milder ones.
NOTE TO WOULD BE COMMENTERS: If you call yourself “GASTHECUCKS” and post in ALL CAPS, I probably won’t be letting your comments through.
This fellow either knows something about my sex life that even I don’t know about, or doesn’t understand what the word “literally” means.
But these comments were pretty tame compared to this weirdly sexualized example of supervillain monologuing from “Sure Whatever.”
Apparently this guy is not a big fan of Starbucks, huh?
@Ooglyboggles
All of the anime Nazis.
As for the medium itself, I don’t really watch any of the harem stuff and I don’t mind the fanservice unless the context of said fanservice is sexual abuse towards the character.
I’m more into stuff from people like Satoshi Kon (like Perfect Blue), Mamoru Oshii, Hayao Miyazaki, Hideaki Anno (I’m a massive fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion so Voltron is definitely up my alley), Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop obviously but I just started Samurai Champloo), and Katsuhiro Otomo.
I am open to suggestions from everyone on what new anime to watch.
I haven’t seen JoJo or Little Witch Academia but I’ve heard fantastic things about the former and I’ll be on the lookout for the latter.
@pocketnerd
Cultural Marxists do not exist. There are only Marxists. What the alt right call ‘cultural Marxism’ is the same thing as Hitler called Jewish Bolshevism. Oridinarily, Facism and Communism are economic systems unconcerned with race. Communism has been very good for women and racial minorities because it’s central tenant is equality. The alt right like to read equality and homogeny, which is a different thing entirely. Their horror at the prospect of mixed race cookie cutter kids is a complete misunderstanding of communism.
The eugenicist element of Nazism came from a completely biased and misunderstood reading of Nietzshe, the idea of the Ubermenshe was not intended to be anything other than the idea of human potential, not a reccomendation to cull the disabled, homosexual and races who did not conform to the Aryan idea. Nietzshe actually did not wish to even publish The Will To Power, it was published by his sister after his death.
@ Virgin Mary
Was that the same sister he disowned because of her anti-Semitism?
If so, wonder how much ‘editing’ she might have done.
Thus Spake ZaraVirginMary:
My point was that “Cultural Marxists” is an alt-right dogwhistle for “Jews.” It’s the modern iteration of “European bankers” or “dual citizenship.” After all, paranoid bigots need a way to discuss their bigoted paranoia without sounding like paranoid bigots.
@alan
Who knows? It was never meant to be published and was compiled from old notebooks. She had it printed to cash in on her brother’s work, and of course, it found influence in tne emerging Nazi movement which she was a supporter of. I wouldn’t be surprised if she added bits here snd there.
@Alan
Please don’t. Ever.
The thing is, except for the occasional american black persons from the US military bases and some searchers, there are not that many POC in Japan. If i am not wrong, the major part of “POC” there are people from south Asia, mainly from the Philippines (and who are, sadly, treated as modern slaves). So, i fear i am going to sound racist, but i think you can not expect the same POC exposure in Japanese (and maybe other East-Asian countries), especially for black people, than you have in US and Europe.
I think you can dismiss Afro-Samurai, which is not only cliche in the title but also in the story (but the hero is strong, at least), and Terraformars. But maybe Dutch in Black Lagoon can be see as a “good” POC character. And the commandant of the space station in Planets which is a strong WOC (but who appears less after the two first books – of four -).
On the other side, there are more and more manga including and/or dealing with gender questions. May i suggest the manga The Phantom Tower (Yûreitô)(Mystery/Thriller manga, based on a novel) ? There are more manga dealing with woman homosexuality (mainly drawn by women) than man homosexuality (strangely, often woman authors here too). I can not name one of the former (but i know i have read a lot of abstracts telling it), and for the last, i remember having reading the abstract of a manga titled “The husband of my little brother” (slice of life style manga). When i say homosexuality, this is not the one like in yuri and yaoi, i mean it in the everyday one (the one not full of cliches and, i hope, with no useless “fanservice”).
Finally, i fear the choices of publication – at least here, in France – just do nothing to help to fill the gap between women and men (both tran- and cis-). The pool of available manga in Japan is humongous, but it seems we always get the same styles of manga on our shelves. Manga can be blamed, authors can be blamed, but i think editors and publishers should be blamed first.
On a last note : if you want a manga not too cliche, with women as lead characters (and who are not magical girls), you may read Hôkago Saikoro Club, a manga where the characters discover along the story various “western” board games (occasionnaly, there is also rare japanese games presented too). Note that if you read japanese only by the book, you may have a little problem sometimes as the characters are from Kyôto, and thus speak with some expressions from this city, which can lost you.