spoiler
The SA aliens are back with a vengeance, characters are swimming around in their underwear. Best just to pass on it.
but how bad is it (CW SA)
When the aliens strip and assault Momo in the first episode, it lingers on her in her underwear for like, seemingly minutes. It’s very egregious and seems shot like it was porn, from the perspective of the aliens.
When they did it to Okarun last week, it last just a few seconds and then the story keeps moving. If anything it was a quick comedic moment before the action continues. Didn’t try to eroticize it.
.
So is this gonna be like the first time, or like last episode? Cause it feels like a pretty huge difference in how it is depicted. If we ever get another first episode situation, I’m probably done watching this cute romance anime. Not because the show depicts such things, but because of how they show it.
Having read the manga up to date, it never really goes to the same extent of that first episode/chapter. There’s definitely typical anime fanservice-y stuff and I wish it didn’t have even that, but the most egregious of it is that first episode.
Like the last episode. But I know we had a talk here with many people saying how after the first episode the ecchiness was done, and I feel like anybody who was turned off by the first episode and is reconsidering based on commentary would be probably turned off by it and would be better off spending their time on something else.
Like, if you can’t watch SA content at all because it triggers bad memories etc. then I understand why you’d not watch this.
That said, I gotta say: I have read the Manga quite far in and in that, this stuff is clearly framed as bad/unacceptable. The show’s doing stuff and you should stick around and see what it is.
This is like dropping Edgerunners because it’s clearly a High School anime, or like dropping Breaking Bad because you don’t wanna watch a melodrama about a dying school teacher begging for money. Give your media some time to breathe! They gotta have the bad thing in there in order to comment on it meaningfully. That’s what media is supposed to do.
I have read the Manga quite far in and in that, this stuff is clearly framed as bad/unacceptable.
Bull fucking shit, this is the excuse that Goblin Slayer apologists use, but in both cases the (threat of) SV is eroticized. They could have even kept the alien’s dumb pornbrain motivation but just not stripped her of her cloths and your line of reasoning, while not saved, would be more plausible.
They gotta have the bad thing in there in order to comment on it meaningfully. That’s what media is supposed to do.
It’s really hard to respond semi-civilly to this because it’s somewhere on the range between hopelessly foolish and utterly contemptible. No, they don’t need to depict the lead up to eroticized SV to comment on it, what the fuck are you talking about? Also, they aren’t commenting on it! I’ve read almost all of the manga and they never “comment on it meaningfully”. It’s just hentai-esque bullshit used to grab the attention of teenage boys.
Are you sure you want to compare this to Goblin Slayer of all things? I don’t think that’s a very good comparison, because only in one of these properties are women turned into baby factories byremoved.
Do the aliens threaten this in Dandadan? Yes. Is it depicted? No. Is it made clear that this happens allover the place to many people, like it must in Goblin slayer? Also no. I don’t see how it’s anywhere near the same level.
As for why they depict it: it makes the threat more effective. Obviously this is also true for Goblin slayer but let me finish: Why does the Alien stop to regard Ripley and sniff her and make that second mouth come out to hiss at her? It makes no sense for it to do so. But it’s a horror movie and you gotta do horror right. Doing a story about aliens abducting people without pointing at the pile of interviews and accounts of people saying they do sexual things to you would devalue this and make the whole thing not work. And, of course, they are the bad guys. If the bad guys aren’t allowed to do bad things in your story at all, then what threat is there to them? The difference of course is that in Dandadan, they woulda done it had they not been stopped and the threat of them is taken very seriously, while Goblin slayer will repeatedly and gleefully show thisremoved, but at the same time act like the whole world does not give a fuck and only this one guy is there opposing this clear and present threat.
That’s the difference between them really, how goblin slayer is like ‘well sucks you gotremovedd hundreds of times over the curse of months, let’s show you being rescued and then never speak of it again’, while in Dandadan, the aliens get fought tooth and nail and, thanks to that, don’t get what they want. But while Goblin Slayer will zoom in gleefully on the actualremoved, Dandadan shows our characters struggle successfully against the attempt.
It’s also very equal opportunity in it’s depictions of ‘the gaze’. Good-looking guys get stripped a fair bit in Dandadan and the whole things plot revolves around getting someone’s sex bits back because a ghost whose first words are about sucking dicks stole them. Meanwhile in Goblin slayer our protag isn’t even taking his helmet off, while every female runs around in the skimpiest of clothing.
As for how the show comments on it all: For one, it never shows it’s ladies as helpless in the face of these aliens. Yea they have to fight them, but they do win by doing that. But far more importantly, it shows the characters actually developing healthy relationships. By showing what love and affection should look like. The show does an amazing job of this and of making every character actually a character that is about more then ‘oh no a ghost/alien let’s fight it’. Over the course of the story, these characters actually feel like people, like we know them and like there is a lot to them. The manga/show depicts good relationships and makes them seem desirable.
Sexualizing teenage girls is not negated by also sexualizing teenage boys, though you really misunderstand what the concept of sexualization even is if you think the balls thing is relevant here. Sex gags are often used as an excuse for sexualization, but the balls plot and associated jokes are clearly not.
You are furthermore making up bizarre criteria to excuse the base facts of the depiction. Whether the women are helpless for the entire scene is completely immaterial, there are countless smut manga that are just as if not more disgusting where the woman does (eventually) escape of her own power.
She didn’t need to lose her shirt to “make the threat more real”, that was done purely for the viewer’s pleasure.
More centrally to your comment, I’m not saying that Dandadan and Goblin Slayer are the same thing, I’m saying you are engaging in the same fallacy that Goblin Slayer apologists are, acting like something cannot simultaneously be eroticized and narratively “bad.” In many cases, those two things can be closely interlinked, because something being narratively “bad” does not mean that you do not, on a meta level, want the viewer to not enjoy it. That’s not how stories work. The Alien is meant to be scary, but it is simultaneously meant to be cool, made more obvious in the way it basically became a mascot in later enstallments. At the end of Rogue One, Darth Vader slaughtering the rebels is narratively a grim event, but it’s very clearly fanservice in the broader sense because it’s simultaneously meant to be enjoyed as a power fantasy of an action scene watching him carve up and force choke a big group of nameless opponents. This idea that every scene means only its explicit narrative depiction from the protagonist’s perspective is like hearing the words someone says and assuming each word is exactly what it denotatively means with no nuance of connotation or innuendo.
If UT was still with us, I have faith he would say: “The curtains are blue”.
I maintain that goblin slayer earned the artistic right to do that. You couldn’t know from the first few episodes. So I get why However the entire discourse never got passed that. It is honestly better that most Hollywood movies about sexual violence. I was always grumpy the discourse never picked up on the one anime that made progress against the industry standard acceptance of sexual violence.
Goblin slayer is not art
It is closer than most anime and if it were less art no one would care. In that it tries to be art people are mad at it for not executing it’s goals fully. I would still prefer anime that tries to be art instead of anime that wants to sell me waifu figures
Eroticized sexual violence is unacceptable. I don’t care if it’s clickbait to get people to watch anime The Second Sex, it’s fucked up and I don’t give a shit how grumpy that makes you. Of course, it’s not that, it’s an ethnic cleansing fantasy, but I’m sure I would never make it very far trying to explain to you that a) that is true and b) that is bad.
Not that there isn’t fucked up sexist shit later too, with the impressively misogynistic human shields. Killing the ontologically evil swarthy sex fiends doesn’t actually mean being progressive.
See, I don’t think it is an ethnic cleansing allegory. It is like something between a parasite and an invasive species. Like, mosquitos or xemomorphs. So that it represents a real biological threat that people of the global South face. Stuff that could be handled better if governments cared to fix problems. I get that japan is fash so that is how they would represent others. I just feel like this author was trying to do something diffrent with the base parts they were given. It isn’t entirely successful I get that. It is however less rasicst and more against sexual violence than any random marvel move and I think that is interesting. I dunno, I feel like the fact that it depicts violence as bad and traumatizing and spends several story arcs going with the characters emotional arcs with ptsd is something that would have been cool if the industry ran with that. Plus in this one thr real enemy are the bourgeois factions and the protagonists greatest strength is community organizing. So like. It had so many interesting things it did that got overlooked because of the things it arguably did no worse than any other anime of the time.
.See, I don’t think it is an ethnic cleansing allegory.
I didn’t say it was an ethnic cleansing allegory, I said it was an ethnic cleansing fantasy. I’m not saying that the shitbag mangaka was hoping the reader would take away from the manga “I think we should do this to Koreans,” I’m saying their desire was for the reader to be immersed in a fictional setting where the ethnic cleansing of this particular intelligent, humanoid species that is able to reproduce with human women is not only justified but righteous. How does that relate to the real world? I don’t think the mangaka cares. You and I aren’t the mangaka, and we have the ability to critically assess things, like what exactly is being appealed to by depicting organisms that are ontologically evil SV machines that force human women to give birth to more of their kind.
I just feel like this author was trying to do something diffrent with the base parts they were given.
“Given”? I’m sorry, were they an artist who inherited a manga-in-progress from an author who quit? No, they fucking chose it. They could have chosen anything and they chose what I just described above.
It isn’t entirely successful I get that.
This is a bad joke. They weren’t just making mistakes to depict this shit in an eroticized way, they made deliberate compositional choice after deliberate compositional choice (and then repeated it but three times worse in Year One’s first chapter just to make sure you know it wasn’t somehow a catastrophic accident). If you want to depict SV as something horrible . . . first of all, really consider not depicting the act itself, it’s gonna be gratuitous, but secondly don’t depict it like that.
It is however less rasicst and more against sexual violence than any random marvel move
I’m sure you find it compelling to say that it deals with issues better than something that doesn’t deal with them at all, but that would be a lame argument even if it was true and it’s not even true! It makes deliberate compositional choices to make sure that isn’t the case.
I dunno, I feel like the fact that it depicts violence as bad
Sure as hell doesn’t depict violence against intelligent humanoids of each species as being bad. Oh! Sorry! You meant sexual violence. It depicts it as being bad in maybe the same way a racist views BBC as being bad, i.e. still something to get off on.
things it arguably did no worse than any other anime of the time.
The first issue of the manga was in 2016! What fucking renaissance has happened since then that let’s us go “let’s not judge the past by the standards of the present”?! Furthermore, most other manga were not depicting eroticized r*** and a great deal weren’t doing ethnic cleansing fantasies.
I think maybe I don’t understand your point. I am not particularly intrested in going over the part of the discourse that is never going to be settled. I think the text has intresting readings that never made it to the discourse and those are better than what we see from the industry today.
It specifically isn’t glorifying violence. Everyone finds it abhorrent all the time. They even specifically call out the fact that if the government tried to help the people all this could be avoided.
I think maybe I don’t understand your point.
How can I be more clear than “deliberate compositional choices”?
I am not particularly intrested in going over the part of the discourse that is never going to be settled.
The only sense in which it is “never going to be settled” is the sense in which obtuse philistines and sickos will continue to insist, as I alluded to in another comment, that “the curtains are blue and nothing more”. For all your talk of artistic rights, you seem to have no inclination to actually analyze something as art instead of just as a bunch of things that a writer said happened.
It specifically isn’t glorifying violence. Everyone finds it abhorrent all the time. They even specifically call out the fact that if the government tried to help the people all this could be avoided.
As I recall, the government helping would be by organizing and subsidizing the violence against the
untermenschgoblins rather than leaving it to the people to handle. I don’t understand how you think this advances your point.
FFS Japan can you make one anime where you don’t sexualise underage people.
It annoys me that everyone is praising this show, as if it’s ok to sexually assult teens as long as the anime is stylish and well animated.
FFS Japan can you make one anime where you don’t sexualise underage people.
They exist, the problem is nobody seems to care about positive reinforcement but rather focus on negative reinforcement to justify their bias.
I mean if you ask this question literaly then there are dozens of good anime in the past 5 years, but its some edgy bad shit that represents the industry.
i think it can start to get into racism when people act like those things are exclusive to anime or somehow much worse in anime than in anglo/american media too. like anglo kids media has plenty of fucked up and objectionable aspects too in the same vein. Japanese culture is far from uniquely fucked in this way. also people ignore that japans culture was essentially westernized by the US when they complain about this stuff and how that’s a not trivial factor in the prevalence of these attitudes and tropes in media.
While I totally get it’s not going to be for everybody, I really don’t think that’s fair either. As someone who has read a lot of YA and paranormal romance slop over the years I don’t see Dandadan breaking any ecchi ground that hasn’t been trod over countless times before. If anything I’d say it’s uniqueness is in how it’s using it (so far!🤞) to reframe the audience’s feelings towards things like violence against women and relationship issues. For example, in the past two episodes because of a typical misunderstanding trope, the boy mc has been lamenting his poor communication towards girl mc and in the middle of this latest episode’s battle starts doing therapy shit blurting out to her how important her perception of him is to him and how he wants to work to avoid future miscommunications.
Again, it’s not for everybody, but there is a demographic shows like this are targeted towards and it is saying interesting things to them.
Since the show came out, and with the manga’s latest arc, I’ve been meaning to make a “In Defense of Dan Da Dan” post. Because the manga is actually very progressive. It’s been such a crazy ride catching up to the current arc.
I’m gonna hit the manga after this season.
Oh my god the manga art is so good. It’s legitimately one of my favorite reads right now.
Cool. Looking forward to it!
I’ll give it a chance. But the older the get, the less tolerance I have for that kind of thing.
I’m not advocating that you should, it’s very likely not going to be for you if the first episode is a turn off. Just that it shouldn’t be discounted because it’s not for you.
Honestly, it’s rather tame compared to both Japanese and non-japanese stuff (I just read Cuckoo last month😅) I’ve read, but as anime’s general audience grows, it’s reputation is always going to lower the tolerance people have for the ecchi stuff.
i think that there’s a difference between nudity (not that these scenes are limited to nudity) and actual sexualization, and the “awooga
sexy sexy lady!!” aspect isn’t really played up. Like the episode today, at the very beginning there’s a bit of a fight where they could have easily done 100 panty shots and really focused on it, but they didn’t. Everybody ended up naked or in their underwear but it wasn’t really a focus of any of the scenes? idk.
okay okay sure, those aliens are back, BUT using the male MC as a naked surfboard was kind of funny
These days I operate under the assumption that every single anime or manga involving teenaged main characters is a gross pervy SA-fest, and simply avoid them all.
Mob Psycho 100 is cool
my top 1 anime
It is so good and wholesome and wraps up wonderfully.
which is basically every new anime. I really wish we would get more animes with adults doing adult things and having adult emotions like back in the 90s/early 2000s.
When I watch anime these days I’m usually going back to 1980s/1990s OVAs that I’ve not seen before or haven’t seen in decades. I’m willing to overlook the far-less-polished animation in exchange for interesting stories about adult characters facing adult problems (in the sense of “problems that happen to people over 18”). And there’s often some really great high-concept stories that aren’t as common in other types of media before or since.
Of course if someone has suggestions for any modern series that lack teens as main characters, I’d be open to watching those as well.
Well but then your fans cant goon over a totally 18+ nine year old looking
These days
You must’ve missed the entire 80’s OVA boom, tbh.
I was speaking more to my better-developed understanding of media, not of differences in a specific work of media. Haruhi for example has a whole lot of problematic shit, and it always has. What’s new is that I recognize the problematic shit for what it is.
Fair point.
The SA aliens are also reliant on gigification of labor to exploit/attack humans and threatens their workers with rate cuts, mid gig. So am I the only one picking up what Yukinobu Tatsu is putting down: critique of pervy salary men, eugenics, SA culture in Japan, fascist “replacement theory” nonsense, etc?
NGL, I see the SA aliens as Musk.
Oh like 100% we must reproduce with “high value females” it’s white supremacist eugenics. Like for the love of god, it’s so obvious.
That’s such a sad way to summarize one of the funniest episodes so far :/
I know, but if they had problems with the first episode, they’re not gonna be on board for the rest.
The first episode is easily the most lurid. The SA aliens retain that motivation, but there is never another “staging” of those intentions like the one that turns up early on. I’m maybe two chapters short of caught up to the manga and the generic anime problem of sexualizing teenagers obviously remains, but I don’t think things ever get nearly as bad as the first episode or the water level.
