What do you think about the latest anti-fanservice controversy?

@AnimePedestrian But how can we explain that teenagers in a Western civilized country in 2023 are obsessed with these medieval stereotypes?

@RobertBobert they aren't but are. They don't realise what there masters (parents, teachers, elders, influencers, politicians) are inspired by they are more like indoctrinated. They just absorb what they here in school, see on TV.

So they don't realise the hypocrisy in everything they do because they are full developed and have been educated for strict obedience to a dogma.

So they are sympathetic in that sense. They weren't encouraged to explore, to challenge, to investigate. They were instead taught to obey and agree with whatever they are told.

Some people,both young and old will resist. Some can be turned into counter revolutionaries such as our very polite forum friend from earlier.

Regardless the young and simple minded are turned into tools. To push and agenda wherever and whenever they encounter what they see as against the 'common good' which they have been taught.

So TLDR; the former youth turned elders have created new terminology to demonise that which displease them - the young and simple minded are turned into believers of the new dogma.

@RobertBobert No rather that conservative censorship existed say back in the fifty and sixties, and slowly as generation passed we now are under a liberal censorship age.

Censorship is censorship, I'm not arguing that it's positive. Just a concept that as people age and become more conservative (as in the definition not the political leaning) they become pro censorship.

I think the Churchill quote you posted early summed it up.

I think it's part of generation theory. Or how the youth rebel from the dogma of there parents but in there adult and elder years they often end up coming up with new reasons as why they should impose the same restrictions there parents did on them on there children.

So women should dress modestly because of god, to women should dress modestly to avert the male gaze. Both stem from the route belief that sex is sinful (even this is changed to the environment or over population) and men are more driven by there impulses than women.

Going to stick my oar in here to point out how to see that "liberal censorship age" is bollocks, and it's still the right who want to censor things.

They've learned to take terms like "male gaze" from feminist theory, in order to be more convincing. But being right-wingers, they don't understand the theory, and you can see it in how they're misused.

"Male gaze" is a description of a certain type of film direction. For instance, one might compare how two films present a female character.

One has lots of shots of her face, her facial expressions, expressing her feelings. This conveys her interiority. it is not "male gaze".

The other alternates between long-shots of the character, and extreme close-ups, say of just the eyes. It rarely uses face-shots. it's not interested in her interiority. This presents her more as a thing rather than a person. That is "male gaze".

But the right-winger just hears the term, knows it's respected, and thinks it must just mean looking at sexy parts of a girl in any context. And uses that to try to control what she wears. While the left consistently backs the right of women and girls to dress as they please, and not get accused of "asking for rape", "distracting the boys" or whatever. Notions like "female-presenting nipples" being fundamentally different to male ones are always mocked in my circles.

@logopolis I'm just pointing out the censorship of both sides. I mean right and left do tend to censor things. My point was just how someone who use to be very liberal minded, liberated and all that can through age change there position and this leads to the need for new justifications to censor things they now dislike.

So male gaze, hated of beauty standards, is one approach many on the left use to justify self censorship and wider censorship. So the twitter melt down over big breasted women is instigated by this mind set.

The right see lewd due to it being against God'. It's lustful and sinful. This would be what inspires right wing commentators on YouTube to want censorship against anime.

Both are the same as they are anti fun.

@AnimePedestrian This is the classic "this is different" technique. When your side is objectively doing the same thing as the other, and you cannot blame the latter for this, simply use the technique of “situational add-ons” and say “this is different, you can’t compare.”

@RobertBobert Wait... which side are you on. In this I'm in the centre. Both sides are pushing censorship for different reasons.

Or are you responding to how quoted before me?

@AnimePedestrian I'm talking about the attempts of the dude above to declare that liberal censorship does not exist. Previously, he used the classic "fake Scotsman" to argue that people who oppose fanservice are crypto-right-wingers and therefore fanservice debates are supposedly only between right-wingers.

Um, these are tendencies we're talking about. Pretty much all types of people exist. Some are just a lot more common than others.

I can't be bothered, I eventually just think people got more time to trash talk on internet than old days because no way u convincing me that it was not like that before, always been there even nudier and Gore than times now. It's just any anime can get attention easily now just put the correct ratio of sauces. Japan shouldn't care about foreign viewers it will be best as always been.

A growing number of female anime fans dislike objectification of women whilst simultaneously liking yaoi and pretty boy anime. Compounded with growing numbers of white knights who think objecting to a panty shot is going to win them female affection. The norm-ification of anime as a culture also contributes - fans who squarely watch JJK/AOT/Mid battle shonens will want to distance themselves from more 'degenerate' genres like ecchi or even fanservice to feel superior (they probably watch porn tho).

@RobertBobert

Well yeah as any fandom becomes more mainstream the more extreme aspects are toned down to appeal to a wider audience. Animation studious aren't going to produce products that will flop after all. As more normies consume anime, a lower proportion of the audience will be interested in outlandish shows that go against normie standards.

I don't think there's any "controversy", it's just you being on twitter a lot and seeing fringe ideologue-deepthroating zoomers say things for attention. I can't think of why anyone would be into the game anyways unless they like the character designs which only vindicates the criticisms people have of the fandom; nothing wrong with a character having naval mine size breasts, but if most of the character roster is designed like that (or in any analogous sexual fashion) then it becomes beyond egregious and frankly you have a deep seated mental problem if you find that worthwhile... But to each their own and if you wanna rot your mind with bathtub-sized tits and gatcha rolls then be my guest, just keep it to yourself.

It seems that half the people in this thread had their brains fossilized during the early 2010s because these "oh erm, well they're just insecure and prudish and hate sex and themselves and others having fun!!!" takes are almost me making nostalgic; that isn't going to cut it anymore if you want to have a serious discussion, and the alternative is hardly "evil western" depictions of women who are ugly and manly or whatever. There is no conspiracy to make you accept ugly characters in media (diversity pandering hardly proves anything, and only shows the demographic which is being exploited has now shifted), if anything, the only conspiracy is to make you waste your time and money on cartoon boobies instead of doing something constructive with your life - like having healthy sexual relations with a human being and not with your hand. Muh freedum of speech isn't going to be negated by you accepting that its abnormal, and not conducive to living a healthy life, if you spend so much of your time on media that does everything it can to prey on your lizard brain. It's telling that these types think Japan is some vanguard of sexual expression (read as: neurodegenerative escapism) when their society is filled with an insane amount of dysfunction in this respect particularly, like the worrying reproduction rates, downright headache-inducing commodification of sex, and epidemic of isolation-related mental illnesses.

Personally I think it's inevitable that you're going to have coomer elements in all sorts of mediums to some degree, I just wish people didn't try to make constant excuses for it and admitted, even a little, that it's a problem. Anime fans of this variety, like some of the posters in this thread, have become this corner of the internet's furry equivalent; they constantly try to normalise expressing their degenerate mode of wasting time, and the moment people (who, like a self-adjusted person, realise seeing half-bare ass and tits all the time is concerning) rightfully point out that this is a problem they soil themselves and think that there's not enough "gatekeeping" going on. Only thing that should be gatekept out of anime communities is wastes of space who try to pass off their porn addiction as being an otaku. They stick their nose in the air and act like anyone who thinks otherwise is just a "tourist". What's touristic is acting like anime discourse is just another one of your insipid fetish clubs.

Pornography has always been an aspect of anime "otaku" spaces before they even were known about in the West, but it's hardly ever been such a central aspect as some want it to be, and criticism of the more extreme and shallow side of it has always been there also. It had many other things going for it, and the word "anime" was hardly synonymous with softcore porn the way it is to some now. Anime for the past decade at least has been, on average, fucking terrible, with each season having multiple of at least one of the following: cringy self insert LN adaptations where half of the female characters are waifu-bait and the other half are designed like pornstars, straight up ecchi with no attempts at obfuscating that this is the only appeal, or adaptations of manga who's entire premise is trying to force a particular fetish the creator has as an integral part of narrative. The reason for this being the case is that making actually good and worthwhile productions with more value than "please make porn of these characters" is actually kind of difficult, and on average it seems that brainlets would rather daydream with their dick in their hand than accept they're hurting themselves and others. It's hardly just a bit of exposed skin here or there: it's the type of attitude that is invoked in people. Stop going deeper into your issues whenever someone brings this to your attention, and take it as a compliment that they even bothered wasting their time.

This is hardly puritanism, it's wanting something better for the community and its members than being constantly associated with degenerates and risk interfacing with them if they dare to find anime spaces. And beyond that, I hope that those who disagree continue to have further rude awakenings which remind them how incredibly abnormal and damaging their normalisation of this perverse nonsense is. If your standard for being a prude is criticising the shit being talked about by OP then it's over for you, and I'm happily surprised some in this thread agree.

As an aside: Being a digital prostitute is just as bad as spewing apologetics of ecchi like your life depends on it, and fan service of all varieties is what I'm talking about.

@WelcomeNyaster In fact, this has been discussed in Japan itself for several years. One popular author suggested that since overt censorship is obviously unacceptable, many authors will censor themselves in the hope of getting a better reaction abroad at the expense of Western normies. Many simply took note of this, not expecting such a development, but when in 2021 one of the major producers literally expressed similar thoughts, it caused a scandal and he had to take back his words. Japan itself also has its own "anti-fanservice" people, but as far as I can see, they are mostly outside the community and despise anime in general.

@RobertBobert

And this kind of appealing to Westerners is what caused anime to decline so badly from the Spring 2016-Fall 2022 seasons. Onimai gave them all a middle finger and decided to take risks again, and it looks like the creators over there are responding positively to Onimai's success, and are taking risks again with anime. They're not Westernizing things as much and it looks like fanservice is slowly coming back too.

A growing number of female anime fans dislike objectification of women whilst simultaneously liking yaoi and pretty boy anime. Compounded with growing numbers of white knights who think objecting to a panty shot is going to win them female affection. The norm-ification of anime as a culture also contributes - fans who squarely watch JJK/AOT/Mid battle shonens will want to distance themselves from more 'degenerate' genres like ecchi or even fanservice to feel superior (they probably watch porn tho).

@WelcomeNyaster
Pretty accurate summary from what I seen. Reminds me when Oda said he will not nerf his female designs based on the complaints of people outside his target demographic of shounen. I wish more creators had that attitude against this ridiculous trend of trying to globalize anime.

@ForgotEyeWasHere The problem is not so much Westernization as such, which is a separate conversation, but that the tastes of Western audiences are traditionally assessed by trends on Twitter. Not adaptations of popular works in the West like Shield Hero or I'm in Love with a Villainess, but rather that "oh, people in the West love slash shipping with our franchises, let's make the characters gay" or "oh, it's popular on Twitter to complain about Trump and capitalism, so let's make the new show a metaphor for American politics or replace the traditional villains with evil capitalists" etc. This works easier with Chinese audiences because the Chinese fanbase is usually a more extreme version of the Japanese fanbase, but for some reason every time Japanese authors want to appeal to Western audiences, they turn to Twitter.

@RobertBobert I don't think that gay characters and evil capitalists came from Westernization. All of Sailor Moon's magical girls were LGBT (this was cut out of the English dub) and Kill la Kill had an evil capitalist as the main villain. In fact, it seemed quite common in the past for female characters to ask each other to get married and to ask each other out on dates in anime before the Westernization happened. Honestly, I think LGBT people appear less often in anime ever since Westernization happened. Also Westerners are very much against nudity or any kind of fanservice, especially in America. Japan doesn't view nudity alone as sexual, but most of the west does.

And the Westernization I was mostly pointing to was about stuff like My Hero Academia (based on American comics) and Attack on Titan (based off of Germany), but also stuff like Chainsaw Man and Vinland Saga, which are clearly made for Westerners. Shield Hero would also likely be one of these in my mind though, as it seems to be quite Western.

I do think it is Western influence that causes fanservice controversies, including this one. Nobody in Japan seems to be offended by fanservice.

This thread finally began to fizzle out and turn into the banal “you’re a moron! - no, you’re a moron!”

Mod Edit: Removed quoted post

@RobertBobert I noticed this happens on MAL a lot. I just wish people where more willing to have civil discussions instead of mindless name-calling. Besides, I find discussions/debates to be more fun.