The Anime Feminist Will Lose in The Battle for Japan’s Greatest Treasure
A few days ago, tabloid site Kotaku published two articles over the last week. The first one is a vapid, poorly argued opinion piece decrying the newest hit anime, Keijo!!!!!!!! (pictured above), where the author wishes for the source material to have never been given the light of day, and for it to have faded into obscurity. She bemoans that the anime adaptation of the manga is now legally streamed on the former-pirate website, Crunchyroll, which I am a paying member of.
The second piece is an interview with the Anime Feminist, Amelia Cook. Suffice to say, the doublethink in the article can be summed up with the following quote from Cook herself: “We’re not asking people to ban anything. What we’d like to see is more anime being created to give more options to people”. I can confirm with you, ladies and gentlemen, that this is a disingenuous lie.
The typical workaround argument that SJWs use whenever they’re accused of advocating for censorship is to deny it and throw the almost-rehearsed reply of “we only want to make X better for everyone”. This is patently false. When an SJW says, “I don’t like X, because of Y”, they are in fact advocating for less of X in favour of Y, even though they claim to want more options for everyone. I would know this, because when I used to be a feminist, that was the mindset I had, and I consciously accepted that fact at the time; I knowingly advocated for less fanservice in anime because I believed objectifying women was wrong, and that such a thing should not be there in anime in order to be more inclusive. I said all of this, yet at the same time, I made excuses in my head to justify moments of fanservice in some of my favourite shows, like Code Geass. I did this because I desperately wanted to cling to the anime I still love to this day.
The doublethink I enforced upon myself ended up making me a miserable, bitter person. But the biggest victim of my antics weren’t my friends online, nor myself. The person who suffered the most through my phase was my brother. I shamed him for liking fanservice to the point that I actually nearly succeeded in converting him into a feminist like me. Thankfully, I snapped out of it before it was too late, with Shirtgate being the final straw for me.
When it comes to SJWs, I see two kinds of them: the ringleaders who want to bully and control people, and the true believers. The true believers make it their mission to spread the Word of Feminism, fully believing everything told to them by their peers and the narratives promoted by the media. I fell into the latter group after I was converted by a former friend of mine, whom I pretty much ceased all contact with at this point.
It should be acknowledged that the anime industry in Japan is what you would expect it to be: Japan-centric. Their primary market is their own country’s people, with the global market not being a high priority for them. So when Cook says she wants to make anime better for her sanctimonious and shallow friends, she has to understand that Japan as a nation will not listen to her. Japan already has its own busybody moral crusaders to deal with, yet the continued success of fanservice-heavy anime is a testament to the fact that creative freedom (and money) is more important than what a lollygagging harpy thinks about the boob sizes of Highschool of the Dead’s characters.
Because of this, the target for the SJWs’ hissy fits are clear. If they want to enact changes to make everything appeal to them, they have to aim their sights on the domestic market. Anime Feminist is already garnering support from some people in the Western anime industry, including a couple of people who work for Crunchyroll (the link here is a thread that includes archive links). This shouldn’t surprise you, considering Crunchyroll is based in San Francisco.
And unlike what the Kotaku article states, this Social Justice-flavoured “conversation” on anime is not “just starting”. It has been going on behind everyone’s backs for years now. I became a feminist back in 2012–2013, spouting the same rhetoric on DeviantArt long before Amelia Cook decided to begin her media-endorsed campaign. A year after that, in 2014, SJWs started a petition addressed to FUNimation against voice actor Vic Mignogna, demanding they recast someone else as Rin Matsuoka from Free! Eternal Summer because the man is supposedly “openly homophobic”. He condemned the attacks against his character, stating in a video at a convention that the people accusing him of homophobia are “mean-spirited children who are desperate for some attention”. Last year was the Prison School controversy, where FUNimation’s Tyson Rinehart and Jamie Marchi thought it would be funny to diss GamerGate in the English dub for the most fanservice-heavy show of 2015. And finally, who could forget the war on moé from The Mary Sue just earlier this year?
You are most certainly going to see more attacks on the medium from this point forward. If their past track records within the comic book and gaming industries are anything to go by, SJWs will do their best to shame and harangue Western distributors into no longer publishing certain kinds of anime in their domestic market, effectively ensuring socially enforced censorship on physical releases, which would allow for the “fading into obscurity” that Kotaku wants.
I would like to address the following declaration to Anime Feminist and her supporters: you will lose this battle if you are to continue it. There was a time I fought for the exact same things you are fighting for. But that time is gone, and I prefer it that way. Your trendy buzzwords, and the transparent bile you puke from your mouth and spill out of your orifices that you call an argument, will be insubstantial and meaningless outside of your circle of timid men who want women to have sex with them, and ball-busting bull-dykes.
Anime is one of Japan’s cultural treasures. You are not, and you never will be.
