Accidental progressivism in anime?

@DigiCat The Bechdel test is a somewhat facetious joke from an instalment of Alison Bechdel's classic queer strip cartoon Dykes to Watch Out For in which one of the main characters expresses that they would only like to see a film with at least two women in it that have a conversation about something that isn't a man. (Incidentally, as Bechdel herself would tell you, the idea for the strip actually came from her friend Liz Wallace who is credited in the title panel for said strip so really it should be called the Wallace test.) I don't think it's intended to be taken completely seriously, it's more just expressive of a desire from a gay woman to see stories about women which aren't completely beholden to a male and/or heterosexual perspective. Anime is quite good at demonstrating the limitations of it as a genuine tool. Like, obviously something like Love Live absolutely passes the test but is also completely predicated on catering to the interests of a heterosexual male audience, actually to such a blatant extent that I find it kind of offputting. It's not that I'm above enjoying moe fanservice, moreso that I can't enjoy moe if I become consciously aware that I'm being pandered to.

I wouldn't call it accidental progressivism, it's just a story developing naturally

I also don't belive in the Bechdel test

Does a woman only have value if she is strong? Does a man only have value when he supports a woman?

The answer to those is obviously NO

Yet those are the kind of things the Bechdel test promontes

Everyone has their own streangths and weaknesess, everyone needs support at times, and (hopefuly) everyone has someone they care about enough to support when they're in need

It's funny how the nation which censored Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune now has to say what is progressive and what is not.
There's no such thing as "accidental progressivism" (I mean there could be, but only once in a blue moon), only outsiders who from their limited point of view arbitrary see random stuff as progressive or not.

You are kind of into it, our consideration of what is progressive is sensitive to our consideration of its complement. Particularly in the West, I feel that the concept of representation feels bold as conservativism hinges a lot on suppressing the aesthetic of "degeneracy." I suppose you can notice this in how much conservatives care about preserving aesthetics, and in a concrete example, in how Disney can't release a single trans character because conservativism sees it as spreading immorality.

In Japan, conservativism expresses itself differently because they have another cultural heritage. Maybe homosexual relationships are not seen as a defiance of what is moral, but they are perceived as an obstacle to social expectations such as forming families, so they are trivialized by associating it with the juvenile (You can see this everywhere in anime). Hence, progressiveness may not express itself through portrayal, but by what the portrayal is actually trying to do. An interesting outcome of this mismatch is that some "progressive" anime fans are deaf to what is defying such status quo, so they may brush off authentic progressive works while engaging in this "accidental progressiveness"

btw, most anime-watchers are terminally reactionary so they are not going to take your thread well

I wouldn't call it accidental progressivism, it's just a story developing naturally

I also don't belive in the Bechdel test

Does a woman only have value if she is strong? Does a man only have value when he supports a woman?

The answer to those is obviously NO

Yet those are the kind of things the Bechdel test promontes

Everyone has their own streangths and weaknesess, everyone needs support at times, and (hopefuly) everyone has someone they care about enough to support when they're in need

It's funny how the nation which censored Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune now has to say what is progressive and what is not.
There's no such thing as "accidental progressivism" (I mean there could be, but only once in a blue moon), only outsiders who from their limited point of view arbitrary see random stuff as progressive or not.

@DigiCat The Bechdel test is a somewhat facetious joke from an instalment of Alison Bechdel's classic queer strip cartoon Dykes to Watch Out For in which one of the main characters expresses that they would only like to see a film with at least two women in it that have a conversation about something that isn't a man. (Incidentally, as Bechdel herself would tell you, the idea for the strip actually came from her friend Liz Wallace who is credited in the title panel for said strip so really it should be called the Wallace test.) I don't think it's intended to be taken completely seriously, it's more just expressive of a desire from a gay woman to see stories about women which aren't completely beholden to a male and/or heterosexual perspective. Anime is quite good at demonstrating the limitations of it as a genuine tool. Like, obviously something like Love Live absolutely passes the test but is also completely predicated on catering to the interests of a heterosexual male audience, actually to such a blatant extent that I find it kind of offputting. It's not that I'm above enjoying moe fanservice, moreso that I can't enjoy moe if I become consciously aware that I'm being pandered to.

I don't know, but Takahata accidentally made a conservative anime.
https://myanimelist.net/anime/1044/Taiyou_no_Ouji__Horus_no_Daibouken
This movie is anti-immigration. I wonder if any of the director's later movies contain similar messages?

You've said this and now all my monkey brain can do is think about counter strik source being progressive in other places but not in the US. Kind of a funny thought.

but to answer the question, Yeah. I mean its not something wholly unique to anime as you point out.

I can think of a handful
- Haruhi is an omnipotent female good - typically in a western society media would portray that character as a man
- Queer coding in Revolutionary girl Utena or in Sailor moon (potentially?)
- Fruits basket having vulnerable masculine characters

When you push it, you can make a lot of things seem progressive.

Let's assume that some author who never intended to write such thing (because those don't sell that well, if at all) accidentally did it..lets assume their editors greenlith it...
How the self-proclaimed connoisseurs of progressiveness will even identify it? It wouldn't be on their radar to begin with.
The people who randomly will stumble upon it, probably will judge it only through the lenses of how well written it is.

jesus christ kid!! what the hell are they teaching you in schools these days!? ...holy shit

take a walk get some exercise, clear your head, breath some air

I mean, the implication of this would be that western stories develop "unnaturally", as they don't do that.

Neither do I, but I felt like mentioning it.

@Gween_Gween
I think you managed to grasp "the heart" of my thread very well.
One thing I was pondering while writing was whether progressivism "was the reasoning behind the thing" or "was the thing itself", which you managed to explain better than I ever could as "Hence, progressiveness may not express itself through portrayal, but by what the portrayal is actually trying to do.".

One thing that has influenced a few of my thread is a part of NeverKnowsBest's An in-depth look at Romance in video games quoting Action Button's video on Tokimeki Memorial: The west simply didn't get romance games here because, in the 90's and early-2000's cultural zeitgeist, that was seen as "gay" (This also had implications on the 'manime vs moe' discourses of mid 90's to the mid 2000's and in video-game localizations of the 80's and 90's, but I digress).

I'll likely write a thread of CD on how things like that make me feel somewhat "alienated" from culture wars, as I never feel there's a "place" for my "third opinion" there.

lmao this site is becoming more reddit by the day it's hilarious

I'm here with the popcorn

It is always the reasoning behind the thing, of course, but in the West the prior of having representation means the author doesn't see such representation as morally wrong, which implies they are away from the conservative normalcy. That prior is a bit more fuzzy in the case of Japanese media because they don't necessarily see it as morally wrong but as away from the norm. In both cases, the point would be to understand whether the media is trying to reject regressive normalcy. That is why one of my litmus tests is unironically the first season of Dragon Maid.


What do you mean by "third opinion"? I don't engage in culture wars because it is nonsense, but it is not an unknown that a lot of progressives are slightly reactionary to certain things depending on their upbringing. However, there are a lot of people who acknowledge such and point it out, the problem is that the antagonist is the soy-right

This dude spends his whole day on MAL just getting clowned on.

I'm curious here, why is that?


For instance, I feel alienated in the discussion of "Music that becomes popular nowadays suck" because while I agree with the premise, the "solution" the "other side" presents in "therefore we should teach everyone to like Bach", while a solution I think would be better is "Just change your lifestyle to not be reliant on what's popular. With the internet you can now find every single niche of music from worldwide, including indie-stuff".

Every single culture war fight seems to be of elements in western culture that I usually feel alienated from, since I mostly just consume weeb media.
One thing I mentioned was a problem I had with a video called "Video Games & the Sexy Gender Binary" as it seemed to only be aware of the way western games do sexualization, and that some of the arguments presented would break if I presented some examples on how Japanese media does it.
I also mentioned how I can't relate to the "uglyfication discourse" because I always considered the western realist artstyle ugly (And therefore see what they argue is "current uglyfication" as simply the logical conclusion of a realistic artstyle) and preferred stylized artstyles.

That's why I always felt "alienated" from all that, ever since the GamerGate days, I thought "I mean, in the media I'm consuming, you always had diverse casts and cool female characters, so I don't get what people are complaining about" as well as "Uhm, the way this is being done is western games feels kinda bad, though".
There was never a place for "This idea is good, but the execution is bad, here how it can be well executed", it was always "The only way it can be done is like this, and if you don't like the execution, then you don't like the idea" vs "You see, this 'diversity' thing is a plan from Soros to destroy the west and-".

Maybe it's because I don't consume Disney products nor play western AAA games, so I always felt that 90% of those discussions never had anything to do with me, like I was living in a parallel world.
It confuses my head on how by simply liking loli and disliking censorship I'm somehow put in the same side of the culture war as the people that called the things I liked "gay and cringe" 15-20 years ago.

But you correct: For the longest time I didn't use to classify myself as a progressive because I saw the term as referring to a very specific type of person that I disliked (And still dislike), I only started openly classifying myself with it two years ago upon discovering that "Wait, there's a lot of different people here using that term, many at odds with one another, and some that look like me".
I felt (And still feel) that progressive arguments and way of thinking just make more sense and are closer to how I think.

TL;DR: Culture wars always present some form of dichotomy (Usually based on western things), and I always feel that the position I hold (By not consuming western things) don't align with either, and thus has no place in the debate.

You answered yourself with this



Dragon Maid is incredibly progressive as it defies traditional gender roles, traditional nuclear family formation, societal expectations, and the distrust of the foreign (Proxy to anti-racism, in simple). It scrutinizes what we deem normalcy, using dragons that are alien to this current order to move each aspect forward. The problem is that the source is doing so in a rather unconventional way because the author is a "degen," yet the anime strips these aspects away to focus on its uniqueness and rather unashamed exploration. However, because of the "degen" way of portraying relationships, a lot of seeming progressives have a problem with it. The work is stained because showing a proper childhood romance is morally wrong because kids are pure and have no agency under the conservative mindset. In the same case, the infatuation that a pre-pubescent may have with the opposite sex is deemed egregious because of the way it is explored.

Hence, people who otherwise would be okay with progressive framing feel alienated by a show that actually portrays a healthy and progressive understanding of human relationships because of their fixation to what is considered "degeneracy." I see this fixation as a proxy to non-repressed reactionary beliefs

@alshu

It's funny you mention Sailor Moon since that was where my mind immediately went when I saw a topic about "progressivism" in anime.

Interestingly enough, the original manga for Sailor Moon introduced characters called the Sailor Starlights, a group of three female aliens that disguise themselves as male singers on Earth. When the anime introduced them, however, they were female aliens that transformed into males. The mangaka was pretty upset about the change since a big part of the series had always been female empowerment, yet the anime implied females had to (sometimes) be male to get the job done.

In a way, the anime was "accidentally progressive" since it went all-in on changing genders rather than simply changing clothes.

@Richard_drizzle
Your list is almost 100% shounenshit and you took 133 episodes before deciding to drop something.
If I'm getting clowned, it's because you're the clown here, lol.