By David Futrelle
Several years ago, I wrote about a holographic “virtual companion” that seemed designed to fulfill the romantic fetishes of every anime-obsessed incel. “Azuma,” as she was known, was basically a tiny, chatty waifu encased in a jar she could never escape from — seemingly a Black Mirror episode waiting to happen.
Unfortunately, at least for Western weebs, the tiny kidnapped princess only spoke Japanese.
Now, the company behind Azuma has announced an English language version of the device is on the way. But it’s not going to look much like the original. The holographic image has been replaced by a 2D version on a tablet. And the tiny waifu herself has been swapped out for more “realistic”-looking characters, including a gym bro and a stern-looking adult woman. The makers hope to sell the device not to lonely men with anime fetishes but to companies looking for “virtual concierges” and greeters to help customers check in on cruise ships and at gyms.
The world’s creepiest dudes are, not surprisingly, outraged by this development. Billy D., the histrionic cultural critic who runs the One Angry Gamer site, shouts his disappointment to the heavens, lamenting that the new version of the device has replaced a perfectly good “anime waifu” with
a bossy looking feminist in a purple pantsuit, and a douche bag personal training assistant who looks like he injected steroids into his jowls. …
[T]here’s zero sex appeal or attractive qualities to the Westernized models they are using … Instead of being comforting and welcoming, they have a cold, stand-offish design for the female, making her appear like a typical Left-wing feminist that no one wants to talk to; follows Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on social media; and spends all of her free time with her cats while complaining about President Donald Trump on Twitter. She’s also probably a lesbian.
In short, the design for the female assistant in the Western version of Gatebox is nothing short of a cancer-inducing wench.
I don’t know; she sounds kind of cool to me.
On the Incels.co forums, meanwhile, the regulars are if anything even angrier.
“Why can’t they realize we want to escape reality with cute anime grills and not std-ridden sjw banshees?” asked one commenter. “Why do companies bend the knees to shrill, shrieking feminists on Twitter?”
Another replied:
Whoever made this decision should commit sewerside in roblox
JFL THE BITCH LOOKS LIKE ANITA SARKEESEAN
Well, vaguely, I guess.
“Women shouldn’t wear pants,” still another commenter added.
But one incel shared his idea for a possible workaround: Just learn Japanese!
“Jesus fucking christ,” he wrote.
I’m learning Japanese and Kanji right now just to play porn games and because I dont have a life, but I guess another good reason for it is so I can import Japanese [jailbait] holo girls instead of getting ugly feminist western bitch versions.
Lovely.
If you want to see what non-Japanese-speaking incels will be missing, here’s the creepy, cringey promo for the Japanese model.
And if you want to see what the Westernized version of the device will look like, check out this report from Endgadget.
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@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
I use BitTube Browser. Being asinine on the Internet literally makes me money.
Everyone serves in one way or another. Assistant isn’t the worst thing in the world. Maybe they just prefer a female voice?
Pretty sure they’d be abusing & insulting regardless of the type of voice. It’s just curiosity on how it will respond. I’d say the novelty eventually wears off like it does with potty humor.
Assuming we’re dealing with people who don’t know the difference between fiction and reality.
I’m talking about the Paretto distribution, where 80% of women are chasing 20% of men.
If you’re referring to sex robots, if you’re going to go through the trouble of buying one then you might as well make it look perfect. You’re not going to give it skin blemishes & love handles & varicose veins on purpose. That doesn’t mean you have unrealistic expectations about real women. Remember these are being marketed to men who feel that a relationship with a real woman is not an option for them.
I was referring to the attention they specifically look for on social media. It has made a lot of women very narcissistic. Also the lack of geographic limitations that used to place practical limits on the pool of men a woman could possibly meet. Gone now. Again thanks to the Internet.
And no, I’m not arguing that we should try and wind back the clock on history or take away womens choices, so cool your jets. I’m saying it has made women a lot more picky. That’s the new social reality that men have to operate in. If it becomes too difficult to find a woman to have a relationship with, men will seek out greener pastures in one way or another. You can’t blame them for that unless you expect them to become monks.
I suspect that that iswhat some of you expect.
@IronCthulhu
Studies would beg to differ.
Which it is clear you and your manosphere buddies do not.
[Citation needed]
[Citation needed]
Translation: “If women start actually having standards for who they will date, men will get sad.”
Nobody mentioned the GymChad™ avatar in the Engadget clip? Obviously, maximum trollage would be achieved by replacing all instances of waifu with GymChad™.
Give me one that acts like an evil sidekick, reporting on the status of my orbiting death-ray platform and I’m sold.
Would using on of the female voice pack from here be that misogynistic?
https://www.hcsvoicepacks.com/
I plan on getting one or two for Elite:Dangerous.
Also, seeing “girl in a jar” over and over has got Cristina’s “Deb Behind Bars” stuck in my head now…
This statistic gets flung around a lot, but it’s pretty meaningless outside of Tindr.
I think it’s a win-win for everybody. I’m fascinated by the idea of men for whom treating women as equals is so onerous, so burdensome, so incredibly unrealistic, that buying and maintaining a $20,000 sexbot looks like the easier option. And equally fascinated by the idea that this somehow represents a loss for women. Men who view women as fungible were never going to make good partners anyway, so why not improve the dating pool? I don’t see what the problem is here.
@Tripoli:
Be careful what you wish for. What if Microsoft brings back that infamous paperclip?!
@Naglfar:
?? A blank page? <disables CSS> Still blank? So there’s no text anywhere in the body tag? WTF?
@IronCthulhu
IDK if this is true, but when you consider
a) a majority of men (by looks) seem to not give a fuck about their appearance
b) really handsome men (again IME) tend to be privileged assholes who aren’t used to being told ‘no’
c) something like 15% of men are serial predators*, and will generally present very charming and then exploit us once they’re in our good graces
it’s pretty obvious why women don’t chase men very much – it’s simply not worth the effort, since so many men are boring and ugly and some of them will even abuse us in return for our attention. (And again, the abusive ones have a higher chance of being handsome and charming.)
Growing up as a bi boy, with mostly female friends, teaches you things about this. You see the fear hit your friends around age 15 – the realization that they’re smaller than the boys now, and adults don’t believe them as much, and a boy who doesn’t like their flirting could actually physically murder them. Watching that happen was one of the most depressing things I’ve ever experienced, and now I get to see it happen all over again (all the fucking time) with new trans fems.
Do I sound angry? Oh hell yes I am angry. The tip of the iceberg you see is us not openly chasing you. The part under the water is what patriarchy does to us. Even as a teenager what I saw of patriarchy made me want to murder the sadistic male God who had imposed it, and learning the details (and accepting the absence of a prime mover) has not calmed me any. It wouldn’t calm you either, if you’d seen the same shit in person.
@Surplus
I linked to the UN website, which uses an embedded viewer. Try this link to directly download the PDF:
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/in/rest/annotationSVC/DownloadWatermarkedAttachment/attach_import_77988d38-b8bd-4cc1-b9b4-3cc16d631bf9?_=367416eng.pdf&to=146&from=1
O/T: Boy George has come out as transphobic, also seems to not know what pronouns are. I’m actually rather surprised, seeing as he originally was known for a gender non-conforming aesthetic and is openly bisexual one would expect him to have some respect for trans* people but apparently not. Fan response seems to be negative, but TERF organizations are stepping up to defend him.
@Buttercup:
I suspect that that’s what infuriates these guys about cats and women both. We’re not robot slaves, we’re living creatures that have to be convinced to like someone. And these guys hate having to do any such convincing, because life without algorithms (and cheat codes) is haaaaaard.
Yeah I know incels hate this but you actually have to be a person worthy of love to be loved when your an adult. This has nothing to do with looks but about working on your toxic baggage before entering a relationship so your shit doesn’t become someone else unhappiness. The adult world hurts but if you want to be loved you have to be loveable.
I do think it’s weird, from a marketing and profit-making perspective, not to put out some version of the original waifu program translated into various languages passably enough that incels around the world will spend money on it.
That said, I feel like if you really wanted one of these things, you could either learn Japanese, like that one guy from the post is doing, or find/create a dubbed program for English-speakers or speakers of whatever non-Japanese language you speak. Aren’t these people always bitching about how they’re the Real Nerds (and women are Fake Nerds), and they’re the ones whose brains are evolved for STEM/tech? So mod the program, guys.
Or hell, just write to the company and let them know there’s a market for this.
(I mean, ideally they would work on themselves to the point where they can interact and be satisfied and respectful with real women, but that’s probably not going to happen.)
@IronCthulhu
It’s not an art. You’re not an artist. Nor is it a science. And you’re certainly no scientist.
Nah, a troll composes the online equivalent of what were known as poison pen letters back in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_pen_letter
you heard it here first! the female equivalent of a fake girlfriend in a jar, is an actual living man. because… men are robots? because women never deserve attention so it must be a trick? who knows! but IronCthulhu is sure that actual human interaction is just like an algorithm, and you should definitely trust him, because he thinks bitcoin is money.
@MK
I was thinking the same, but the creators perhaps don’t think there are enough incels in the West that would buy it (and they’re right). Hell, there’d probably be a bunch of mocking press releases too which would damage the brand image.
I really don’t know much about Japanese social or cultural issues so take what I say lightly, but from what i understand the lonely men/”otaku” market is greater in number so they assume this waifu version of the product would sell well enough as is. But they adapted it based on what they perceived a Western audience would want.
Not gonna lie, that promo video filled me with existential dread. I mean, I allow fictional characters to run around my brain and like everyone, indulge in plenty of fantasy in the comfort of my own surroundings, but candle-lit dinners for an anime girl in a jar? How does your soul not run screaming out of your body like it just saw Kabal’s face?
I mean, this isn’t the Blade Runner universe or Star Trek where AI is advanced enough to obtain sentience, but sentience alone doesn’t necessarily indicate the kind of emotional intelligence necessary to offer the kind of reciprocity required of companionship (Data crashed and burned his first time out). The best this thing can do right now is mimic those emotional cues, and even then, I foresee plenty of purchasers getting bored and annoyed by it very quickly.
And I’m really not sure what’s more terrifying, that people actually sat down to program this thing or that there’s enough of a demand for it that it got the investment capital to get off the ground.
Get off the internet, incels. Make human connections. Anything.
@Katamount
Be careful what you wish for. They’d probably interpret that as “harass random people” if not worse.
@naglfar
They have to rediscover empathy for others somehow. That online community is an IV drip of poison.
Thank you for recommending that service whoever mentioned it, looks like I’m gonna get myself a slice of the pie and use it for my own means or against what you stand for eventually.
@Katamount
I know, and I would hope they could reintegrate into the real world and break free of their horrid ideology. Some have done it, so we know it’s possible. I was just worried that they might then simply try to bring their ideology into force in meatspace.
Regarding ‘you remind me of the babe’…
While I loved Labyrinth, am I one of the few remaining people on the planet that remembers Cary Grant doing the same ‘hoodoo/who do?’ routine back in the 1940s in The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer? (Granted, it was ‘man’ instead of ‘babe’, but otherwise…)
Back more on topic… social interaction is a good thing. There was a neurobiologist on the radio this morning who was noting that social interaction was a good way to help ‘age gracefully’, because it’s a complicated subject that requires a fair bit of brain activity and flexibility. A ‘bot in a box is somewhat sub-par for that.
Sadly, we have already had plenty of examples of incels who had no intentions of getting old at all.
@Jenora:
I couldn’t recall the movie, but I knew the meme went back to the 1940s (if not earlier).
@Kat:
So, to summarize, “Donald Trump’s tweets”.
sunnysombrera says:
It should be noted that the Gatebox is a platform which was created to have uses beyond emotional support for lonely misogynists. There’s already a market for robot receptionists and concierges and, more globally, for virtual home assistants. Gatebox is trying to get a slice of that. Rather than adapting the Gatebox to a different purpose in foreign markets, they’re simply choosing to promote the concierge/assistant half of the business which already existed.
The pantsuit woman and gymbro characters themselves, on the other hand, certainly appear to be deliberately tailored to a Western audience. But the platform was always meant to run custom character designs and interaction scripts. In fact, the company itself says the “waifu” character is inappropriate for business purposes and other options are available.
@Surplus to Requirements
Yes, the man and his messages are pure malice.