This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Yes.
Is this meaningfully distinct from "cute girls doing cute things" anime, I wonder? Most of those tend to be basically this- they have widespread appeal, but it's a very... masculine (or to a point, childish/innocent) way of looking at that concept, since women tend to be a lot more Mean Girls about it.
(Come to think of it, maybe the real root of anxiety mean(er) girls feel is that they sub/consciously realize they don't have any conception of this? I'd certainly feel like a defective woman if I didn't have the "I should fuck with people unduly and take their stuff rather than make anything new myself" bone in my body, so maybe the reverse is true? Come to think of it, do old portrayals of authority gone mad all have more equal gender representation than would otherwise be expected for the time period?)
The difference I see is that CGDCT is usually men's idea of a utopia, with everyone happy, getting along well, and doing fun things. The situation in that book is more of a dystopia, everyone is miserable but they're still stuck following the orders of this random teenage girl. Noone is really friends, it's just this battle of fake-friendships to get more social clout.
I am skeptical of the extent to which CGDCT is a man’s idea of utopia. For starters, I’m skeptical of how much your average guy would enjoy CGDCT: to the extent that I am friends with (1) normal guys who (2) watch anime, they’re not watching Hidamari Sketch [^1], they’re watching series with fights and battles like Demon Slayer or Jujutsu Kaisen and similar “battle shounen”.
That’s fine, these series aren’t intended to portray utopias. But then, if you limit your attention to the subset of series aimed at providing pure escapism for men, you’ll find that this role is largely filled by isekai power fantasy stories, with premises like “I am the strongest in another world and win battles and also a ton of girls want to have sex with me” rather than “a couple of girls talk about chocolate coronets”.
The point I’m trying to get at is that utopia for men seems to require two things (if judging by idiosyncratic tastes in anime is a good way to determine this): (1) competition/fighting and (2) winning. Hell, to some extent, I think that utopia for men is almost impossible to conceive—what men want is utopia for a man, to be the sole victor, the only one desired by women and admired by men. Otaku-targeted series like isekai webnovels and dating sims — which frequently only have a single male character (the protagonist) or two male characters (the protagonist and a bumbling male foil intended to make the protagonist look better by comparison) — might be a pathological expression of this desire, which is more healthily expressed in sports series where you can share victory with your beloved teammates and friends. But at the end of the day, I don’t think that it’s possible to have male utopia without competition, and when you have competition, you gotta have losers.
(As an addendum: where does CGDCT fit into all this? One idea, which I personally relate to, is that it’s intended to be a nice way to relax after a hard day. If you’re an overworked Japanese salaryman who’s been getting scolded by his boss all day, maybe you don’t want to ruin your escapism with more competition and more working hard; maybe you just want to see some cute girls having some fluffy conversations. Another less charitable possibility (which I also relate to) is that men who enjoy CGDCT are men who have “dropped out” of seeing themselves as viable competitors. The idea of competition itself is repulsive. It’s like the old saw about how there’s the rich, the middle class, and the poor, where the rich want to stay on top, the middle class wants to become rich, and the poor want a world where everyone is equal; in this analogy, the CGDCT viewers are there poor.)
[^1] The one time that this came up in conversation, my interlocutor was largely disgusted, presumably by a sense of voyeurism inherent to the genre.
Well, different strokes. I don't want to imply it's like the one singular vision of utopia. But I do think it presents one type of utopia, with lots of happy emotions and cute girls. They can still have competition, it's just more about like "winning the school musical competition" than "fight off an alien invasion."
This is pretty funny though:
I'm not sure if you're aware, but shounen literally means "boys". it's explicitly aimed at children and adolescent boys. The magazines it runs in usually have limits on how much nudity and violence is allowed, and has simpler kanji with the pronunciations written next to it in furigana to help out the kids who aren't good at reading yet. That said, it's also popular with adults because in part because it's so simple and easy to understand, and maybe because there's nothing controversial.
The one you listed, Hidamari Sketch, is a seinen, like most of the CGCCT series. Their manga run in magazines with an older demographic, so they're allowed to have more nudity and more complex words and stories. Some of the seinen magazines also have softcore porn of swimsuit models and ads for beer. The animes for them usually run at night, after children are supposed to have gone to bed. So yes, it's very much aimed at adult men. It might be more embarrassing for adults to admit that they watch/read it though.
I think part of what I like about CGDCT is to get away from that shit. Like I can't hang out with other men without this constant struggle for domination, with guys trying to fight over every little thing, even the most irrelevant shit that doesn't matter like "who's got the best fantasy football team?" Women just seem to have better friendships, at least in theory.
Regarding demographics: I’m well-aware of who the target audiences of CGDCT series are, versus the target audiences of shounen mags. The point I was making that your median, “normal” guy is probably going to be watching/reading shounen series rather than CGDCT. Even if P(adult male | enjoys CGDCT) is high, I imagine that P(enjoys CGDCT | adult male) << P(enjoys shounen | adult male). The latter distinction is what I was originally referring to. This matches my experiences in real life (albeit in the West), although maybe statistics collected on manga consumption in Japan across a broad demographic would differ.
As for your latter point, I agree! My vision of an ideal life contains a lot less oneupmanship and putting-your-friends-down-when-a-girl-walks-in-the-room than real life does; to that extent, it’s more similar to CGDCT. But I’m unsure that I can speak for the median man in having this vision.
Well sure, shonen just gets way bigger numbers so it has more of every demographic, including women. I don't know any adult men who are still super into it though, just casual fans and nostalgia from childhood.
Men's friendships... yeah. Men's loneliness epidemic is a thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, it is now. I think CGDCT kind of ran its course through the late '00s but things were less polarized back then.
It's not possible to have female utopia without this either, but women express that differently than men do. You kind of have to go beyond male and female to tolerate more than one winner in either case.
Interesting; actually, that reminds me of something.
The only gender-swapped CGDCT series, Free!, is about a sport that isn't really competitive in this way.
No, I think it's because a zero-shot response to the genre is "wow, this has definitely got to be for people attracted to little girls".
I don’t disagree — but whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, so Lord knows I’m not gonna try and pretend that I know enough to speak about women. A fortiori, I don’t know what kinds of series women watch, although I suppose that this does match up with my intuitions regarding otome games (e.g. replace the bumbling male foil with the unlikeable villainess rival).
Man, that’s a fascinating writeup. Although that one reply seems to call into question the extent to which this is universal.
Yeah, but men aren’t watching Free! from what I understand. (Now, if the idea is that female-targeted gender-swappped CGDCT exhibits this same “lack of competitiveness” as normal male-targeted CGDCT (which, interestingly, is often written by women), then that’s an interesting cross-gender commonality.)
Tomayto, tomahto.
I never heard of Free! before, but from looking it up it seems to be a standard sports anime with massive amounts of yaoi baiting. They do the sports seriously, but it's got a bunch of cute, lean guys posing shirtless.. that's for the yaoi fangirls. They seems to like their seme/uke dominance battles. (But I don't think this is some big truth about All Women, it's just one weird niche community)
They also have "Axis Powers Hetalia," which, despite ostensibly being about war, doesn't really have any serious fighting and is much more "Cute Boys Doing Cute things." Or "Daily Lives of Highschool Boys," which is just a parody of the whole genre.
More options
Context Copy link
That's the claim, anyway. The closest thing I can think of is "Yuri on Ice" which is, as far as I'm aware, not that- it would be interesting to see who the modal Free! watcher is.
Yeah, it's almost like a strict identarian view of sexuality isn't useful when evaluating relationship dynamics or the worthfulness of those that happen to like body type X or Y (and the replies that assume that was about identarian sexuality and assumed the post was an attack on their worthfulness are... missing the point a little, I feel).
The old understandings of gender and sexuality are the correct ones; identarianism is just blank-slatism but for sexuality instead, both were originally born from a desire to fix the cultural contexts about the worthfulness of the non-default ones, and both are wrong in the same ways.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So basically, just Mean Girls then.
Yeah, but the problem in reality is that this state of affairs if not defended inevitably becomes Mean Girls.
In the same way, any such organization not explicitly and constitutionally oriented around doing fun things will sooner or later end up with everyone miserable and fighting each other; this is Conquest's Second Law.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link