Men are oppressed by cartoon women driving guys around in cars, incel insists

So, if your ambulance driver is a woman, you may as well die on the way.

Got it.

Pshaw!

Basically all these alt-right subcultures grew out of 4chan, which started out as an anime fansite. So getting radicalised is often combined with getting into anime.

@Naglfar

As somebody who was formerly in the 4chan scene before getting smart, when you’re kind of weird and have social problems, it’s easy to just lose yourself in your interests and in discussing them with others, even just anons.

Plus if you don’t really have any idea how things outside your experience works, it’s easy to take what you see in your favorite choice of media as what’s true. Which explains a lot of the weirdass stuff incels believe: they take porn comics as gospel about sexual and relationship matters, instead of the overexaggerated erotic stuff they’re meant to be.

Hey, don’t blame anime. Anime is just anything Japanese creatives can think up and get funded. It’s like blaming bald eagles for sTrumpian “patriots” fetishizing them. Just like eagles are beautiful and inspirational, but can be savage, and eat carrion, some anime is beautiful and uplifting, some of it is just plain fun, some of it is exploitative, sexist trash. Guess which content the incels and mgtows are most attracted to…

Also, a lot of them come to anime through gaming, and while, like anime, gaming is a vast entertainment medium containing multitudes, it’s also the home of a lot of misogyny and Gamergate.

Which sucks for guys like me and all other decent anime fans when you have such craven ilk infiltrating and appropriating both our fan communities and our favorite series with their hate mongering bs.

It’s disappointing and infuriating that, as a fan of Strike Witches; I have to contend with the fact that one of my surprisingly pro-feminist, pro-women series with strong female characters who save the world and whom men rely one to fight the supernatural aliens and whom have some cute and heartwarming Yuri moments of believable character interaction; that the series fandom has a small but vocal number of jerks who are militantly anti-yuri and deny that two of the few biggest lesbian characters in the series “only like each other as friends” (despite the creator of strike witches saying outright that they are more like “a boyfriend and girlfriend who can’t convey their feelings for each other), Misogynists who write crappy, dime a dozen “Gary Stu” fanfics that steals the witches thunder and relegates the girls to shallow comfort battalions of incompetence than they actual are, and Incels who think Trevor Maloney and his Warlock project to replace the witches “Was a great idea” (despite the series tone showing how dickish and dangerous that idea was) and complaining that only witches can actually use magic and asking “where are male magic users” when the series is branded as a “magical girl” series where humanity relies explicitly on the fact that only girls can awaken to having and using magic to defend them from the supernatural aliens .

Only sliver lining that the majority of the fanbase loath this ilk and denounce them for their toxic nonsense. Still ticks me off to no end though.

What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck? The world is full of legitimate things to stress about; I can’t imagine getting enraged by woman drivers in cartoons.

doomcup:

Plus if you don’t really have any idea how things outside your experience works, it’s easy to take what you see in your favorite choice of media as what’s true.

Uh-huh. I was just thinking that I’d rather be driven by Maggie from R.O.D. The TV than Batou from Ghost in the Shell, which reminds me that I believe that under the British Museum there’s a secret bunker which houses the British Library special forces, who protect the UK against literature-based attacks using agents with the power to summon and control paper.

(I must watch Read or Die and R.O.D The TV again. Glorious nonsense.)

Also: imagine believing that Playbook had a sinister feminist agenda.

what

Sounds a bit like GamerGate in that a few obnoxious people ruin it for everyone else.
I’m guessing similar to GamerGate a lot of the troublemakers are also not real fans and are entryists looking to stir up shit, which always sucks.

I’ll have to make a small correction. Gamergate was always a misogynistic hate mob, from the day it congealed in the sewer that is 4chan.

@Naglfar

I’m not sure I’d say Gamergaters are “not real fans”. If nothing else, they seem to enjoy watching and talking about anime, even if they often don’t understand it. (Personally, I’m not one for gatekeeping anyway).

Some people watch Strike Witches for the history jokes. Others watch it for the dogfights. And still others watch it for the underage girls flying about in their undies carrying heavy weapons.

They might be shit fans, but they’re still fans 🙁

@Naglfar

Ah, fair enough. Those slimeballs can precisely go get bent.

Though I’d argue that they wouldn’t have found a receptive audience if those tendencies didn’t already exist in the fandom in the first place.

I think the game industry has a particular key difference from the anime industry in that the game industry seems particularly hellbent on attracting precisely the kinds of consumers who will stake their identities on being a Consumer of Games, the types of people who fell into GamerGate in the first place. I play video games, and my habits and sub-interests as such seem to be different from the mainstream norm, but also I’m so turned off by “the game industry.” I saw a subway ad for EGLX this year and I honestly can’t imagine looking at that ad and being convinced to go. When did appearances by “influencers” become a selling point for these things? So now I feel stuck because saying “I play games but everybody does, so…” isn’t quite accurate, but neither are the ideas and worldviews implied by claiming to be a “gamer.”

For similar reasons, I say I’m interested in “current events” instead of “politics.”