this post was submitted on 19 May 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)
Anime
11210 readers
20 users here now
Welcome to c/anime on Hexbear!
A leftist general anime community for discussion and memes.
Simple rules
-
Be nice.
-
Use spoiler tags.
-
Don't sexualise underage characters, including 1000 year old loli ones.
-
Don't post hentai here. This is an anime community.
High quality threads you should definitely visit
Gigathread: Good Anime Talks, Presentations, Conventions, Panels, etc
Piracy is good and you should do more of it. Use https://aniwave.to/ and https://4anime.gg/ for streaming, and https://nyaa.si/ for torrents. Piracy is the only means of digital protest that audiences have to fight poor worker treatment.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They are, not that that is going to stop the same usual nerds from getting big mad about it being fascist slop or whatever
I want to read some Dungeons and Dragons shit where the characters make use of real world physics intersecting with in universe magic to Do Cool Shit. Goblin Slayer has that, and does a good fucking job of it. Connecting a teleportation scroll to the bottom of the ocean to use the water pressure like a laser? Cool. Using flour as a fuel air bomb? Hahaha cool. Sorry certain people are too fucking obsessed with their hatred of media and media tropes to appreciate it because they think the only Good Media would have the main characters idk building communism with the goblins
I almost want to write some parody shit where I basically take one of the posts criticizing "the settler colonialism of [whatever isekai Nerds Mad About]" and transpose everything to being about, idk, Ghostbusters. Are the ghost busters not a proto fascist escapist stand in for the viewer? Are the faceless, 'evil' ghosts not merely stand ins for the colonized indigenous, encouraging the viewer to Do a Genocide? Idk i think it's a good bit. You can't enjoy Ghostbusters anymore, sorry sweaty
Waitwaitwait hold on a second.
So, first of all- you're free to consume problematic media. Reading Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries doesn't automatically turn you into a Nazi, otherwise we'd have a lot of right wing political graduate students. The only danger these books pose are to those who uncritically accept the author's ideas, and I'm sure there'll be no problems on that front given the general media literacy of people in the anglosphere. If you think there's cool stuff in the show by all means enjoy it.
But Goblin Slayer was written for someone, by someone, to communicate something.
Why are the goblins cunning enough to set traps and ambush people, but too stupid to engage in diplomacy or have their own culture? Hmmmmm, I dunno, my dude Umberto Eco has something to say about that. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” I dunno, seems pretty sus to me...
Why does it open with graphic rape? Oh haha those whacky Japanese and their strange cultural perversions, that's it, it's totally not that fear of sexual assault has a long history of being used to justify racism. It's not as if historically minorities have been lynched on trumped up charges of sexual assault. It must be because the goblins are ontologically evil, the author's not trying to draw some equivalence or something.
If the goblins pose that much of a danger to people, why do the powers that be leave them alone? Why isn't there an organized response by official to deal with them? Why do the powers that be actively suppress information about goblins? Can't possibly be anything to do with conspiracy theories about how the the media in the real world suppresses the real crime statistics that show minorities in a bad light, right? Can't possibly be so that the big, strong MC has to take things into his own hands, go all 'lone wolf' and enact all that cool improvised violence, right? Gotta be a real big damn hero. Oh here comes Eco again: “in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
The answer to the above questions, of course, is because the author wrote it like that. So the next thing we need to ask is why. Who could this story possibly be for? I hope I gave sufficient inferences through the sarcasm.
When people criticize art, they aren't attacking you as a person, they're attacking the ideas presented in the texts. I'm not trying to wokescold people into enjoying only Good Communist Approved Media. Me, personally, I call shit like Goblin Slayer out because I'm the fucking minority in question who racists will call a goblin and say deserves to be genocided, "just like in my le ebin animays". Because the spread of and acceptance of these ideas in the wider culture without pushback is just one more drop in the bucket towards fascism, so I'll point out all the ways in which a show like Goblin Slayer promotes far-right ideas and talking points in the vain, pointless hope that people who watched the show and didn't realize it actually think about what the show is trying to say, and maybe they realize how those messages can be dangerous because too many people are uncritical of the media they consume.
Ask yourself: why do racists 4chan shitheads stan this show so hard?
P.S. Ghostbusters? Really? The movie about how Reagan era deregulation is good actually, where the villain is the EPA and attempting to enforce environmental regulations is what causes the most problems?
No one is immune to propaganda, and in this thread, we can definitely see that with toxic fans that outright refuse to even acknowledge propaganda elements (including fucking genocide apologia) in their slop. If they did, they might feel bad. The slop must be totally harmless and all critics must wrong and stupid or else they might feel bad. :morshupls:
Anime was a mistake :miyazaki-laugh:
great post
i'm regularly shocked at the supposed unwillingness of self-described leftists to read. your comment is a 2-3 minute read at average reading speed.
Wow this is a long post
I spend my time to engage in good faith and this is all you got? tl;dr?
Fuck it, here's the tl;dr: why do racists 4chan shitheads stan this show so hard?
Idk dawg I literally don't care what 4chan nerds like, it does not matter to me. Makes me think of the Republican/Democrat duopoly and how all Americans view everything in that context. Ahhh the fascists like it, must be fascist!
In your opinion, why do you think Hexbear doesn't stan this show? Partisanship? Virtue signaling?
You have the patience of a saint
:rat-salute:
I think there are like 5 nerds here who think too hard about shit like the big wall of blah blah media literacy i just got from someone else. Someone wanting to write some shit about killing goblins and isn't really thinking too hard about it, just like the people consuming that content, that's just beyond the realm of probability and it must be this fascist dogwhistle propaganda vehicle, lol.
I'm getting these walls of text about how goblins are real world minorities and goblin slayer is the KKK or whatever like my brother in christ it is a goblin it is a fantasy creature it's not like they're fucking coded like the goblins in Harry Potter, like that's actual use of goblins as racial allegory
Don't feel like you gotta write more words at me it's pretty pointless isn't it
Ok, so you think a minority of posters on Hexbear are over-analyzing the show and are seeing Nazi ghosts where there are none. Ok.
Why do you think the goblins in Goblin Slayer aren't coded like the goblins in Harry Potter?
Perhaps because they are fantasy monster and in the case of goblin slayer not meant to be a racial stand in for a real life minority but instead are, you know, a fantasy monster
Why are the goblins in Goblin Slayer fantasy monsters, but not the ones in Harry Potter? After all, aren't they both goblins?
You can point to harry Potter goblins and say that they are clearly an anti semitic caricature
What are goblin slayer goblins meant to represent? Is there some specific ethnicity there? Ah, curious.
"They're an Other!" okay so basically you don't want any humanoid monsters involved because any Other is automatically some sanction of real world racism
Zzzzzzzzzzzz
This is a waste of both our time
What I'm asking is why are you so sure that the goblins in goblin slayer aren't meant to be a stand in for a real life minority? Why do you identify the ones in Harry Potter immediately as an anti-semitic caricature? What is the difference?
I don't feel like I'm wasting my time.
I've read a bit of the manga and, uh, no it does not
🙄
More importantly, you can have you creative violence without a highly racialized narrative of heroic genocide and sexualized rape. There is no need to be so defensive about the story because you think the mechanics of their gas chambers are creative.
I love how hexbear is mad about genocide of rapists. What if they were a species of slave owners :thinkin-lenin:
I think the eroticized scenes of rape that are just censored versions of established eroguro rape pornographic tropes are more about titillating the audience and at the same time tapping into fears of the racialized 'other' defiling and stealing away 'our women'
than they are for establishing a moral justification for murdering the shit out of goblins, seeing as rpg players do that all the time without ever seeing goblins so much as burn down a house.
This
is this
Im glad you brought this up because i find it ironic how frequently I see the VIDEO GAME ISEKAI criticized here. This is not a game world and a lot of the graphic violence is meant to underscore that. That is why it's about goblins, since they are usually an "easy" enemy in a videogame, but here in a world without videogame mechanics they are a threat to everyone no matter how high "level"
Ah but nah I guess the author just likes a rapin' and a murderin' and makin people fascist
I think people see what they want to
Uh, yeah, I am indeed saying that the author included the graphic eroticized rape because the author enjoys having the female characters be continuously threatened with eroticized gang rape.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive???
Oh, in universe it is correct to kill the goblins. They are fundamentally evil and incapable of change. The problem is that the author made a story where genocide is the right option.
Is this really a difficult puzzle for you? Ask anyone if the infants on a plantation should be killed and they would probably say no. Goblin Slayer says yes.
Making a race ontologically evil and also coded as "savages" in order to justify genocide is fucked up. You are still reasoning on the level of a character in the setting when the problem is on the level of the author making the rules of the world.
The author made this rule imo literally to head off nerds going "but wait what about all the little gobbos," that's the point of it. Y'all see the rape scene as some author fetish insert, I saw it as the author going "okay how do I establish that they are evil beyond reconciliation so that nerds don't start to ask if the REAL way to slay goblins is FRIENDSHIP"
Im sorry you wish the manga were called Goblin Befriender
Are you the person I talked about this last time with? God fucking damn it
It's like the most standard thing in smutty reactionary writing to have the big, dark skinned savages molest the fair-skinned lady in a way that is both highly sexualized and functions as a causus belli for the protagonists. Have you seen any of SAO's arcs besides the first one and the Asuna-led one? All the others use this trope at some point as foreplay to their revenge porn.
You are displaying a level of media literacy that would have you defending Birth of a Nation if not for social stigma. "Obviously the black people in this setting are ontologically savage to keep you nerds from worrying about the possibility that there are Good Ones! In this universe, the Klan is heroic, so there's nothing wrong with cheering them on!"
There is no questioning of why this is the story the author wants to tell. Why is it along racial lines? Why is it a story of genocide instead of some revenge porn against a specific gang, like happens in Taken? Why do we have our hero be identified primarily as an exterminator of life-unworthy-of-life and not as a protector of the innocent, despite that being the nominal justification of the story? Why is the evil race coded as savage, with dark skin, primitive tools, and ragged clothes? What relationship does a work like this have with the real world? Having people be wronged by goblins and then monomaniacly fixated on ethnic cleansing because they are all bad sure reminds me of something I've heard of before.
If it bothers you you could not
my brother in christ it is a goblin it is a fantasy creature
Because it is a dnd setting and it's easy to write it that way
Again i'm sorry it's not goblin befriender. That'd be a good show too but ya know, this ain't it
Yes, a fantasy race one might even say. Tell me, was Birth of a Nation's biggest problem that it didn't make the black people have little cloven hooves and call them satyrs? Would it be above criticism if it merely depicted the revival of the Klan as a way to terrorize and slaughter these dark-skinned, lustful, savage satyrs with no relation to black people?
I promise you that it's just as easy to write the enemy as being bandits. Hell, even writing them as slimes (an even-more-common bottom-level enemy, #1 along with rats) would be better, since those aren't remotely humanoid but can have basically whatever properties the author wants because they are so literally amorphous.
No because then you have the nerds going on about "what about their families" and shit. Revenge porn about bandits is imo worse than making it about a "race" shown to be objectively evil in universe but I guess then basically you just have fantasy batman idk
Anyway I am annoyed with nerds taking race essentialism from dnd and mapping it to the real world like tolkien's treatment of orcs is another Armenian genocide. "This goblin is a stand in for ME" :jesse-wtf:
Focus on the slime counterproposition then, instead of cherrypicking the weaker example like it's all I said
That said, it's hilarious how you readily concede that Rowling's goblins are fucked up tropes but here when you see goblins that have a single-minded motivation to rape and murder, live in Caves with crude tools and loincloths, have dark skin, low intelligence, and no empathy for the light skinned population that they terrorize, you go "Tropes? Tropes? Nononono, no way"
Even when you get someone directly saying "these are tropes of people from my race" you dismiss that person as a "nerd" like that just solves the issue.
What race?? What fucking real world race are any of those traits associated with? My god. They're... green! Rowling's goblins are literally a list of Jewish stereotypes. You're like... "Tolkien's gollum is racist caricature, he lives in a cave like a primitive and those are racial tropes" like :jesse-wtf:
I could and argue about how it's weak as shit when the only difference is one is humanoid and the other can be humanoid. A slime can be portrayed as just as sapient, and Im sure there'd be nerds arguing with me then about how they're a stand in for their ethnicity or something. Slime genocide is still genocide after all
Several! It's literally the most common racial caricature of aboriginal people and Africans, hence my mentioning Birth of a Nation.
Gollum is a) an individual, b) a creature transformed into a lower state by the ring, c) a member of a race that we see many examples of and d) doesn't really conform to a racial stereotype anyway
The confluence of tropes I mentioned is, again, specifically the "savage" caricature whites used against Native Americans, Africans, and Australian aborigines, which involves many specific features other than living in Caves, features I listed and you feign ignorance of.
Slimes could be used in a racist way, but it would be exceedingly easy not to because they are capable of things that primate-likes aren't, such as mitosis or a more credible way of being both mindless and complex through hive or colonial functioning since they literally don't have brains. They can exist in the wild without being cavemen because they can form their bodies into tools, they can introduce many features that flat don't apply to people such as seeping through the cracks of stone fortification, being acidic, etc
This really isn't that hard if you try to think about it instead of shouting "nerd" over and over like it's a chant to keep evil spirits at bay.
the concept of a primitive society living in caves in a fantasy world is racist because if you squint you can make it look like nonsensical, false ideas about a disparate group of unconnected ethnicities
This is just like if you asked 4chan to design a character named "the evil jew" and made your goblins look like that
Literally mad that they use stone tools just lmao my god
In a small way we're making progress because the rhetorical knots you are tying yourself in are increasingly poor.
Standard of a racial caricature, or do you think Jews are really greedy?
They are not especially close genealogically, but they are socially quite connected as colonized first peoples
Taking these things in mind, you question is if the depiction of goblins:
And suddenly the question is just the squinting part, i.e. "How similar is this to those caricatures?" which is what I've been trying to discuss, though you keep cherry picking individual elements when my argument is that it, like most caricatures, is a confluence of traits. It's like if the defense in a stabbing case said "Yes, my client owns a knife, but so do many people. Are you going to convict him just for that?" "Yes, my client was at the park at the time of the attack. What? Is it illegal to visit the park? lmao" "Yes, my client was seen disposing of what may have been a pair of gloves. What? Do you propose that just taking out the trash makes them a killer? Is that really all you have?"
Like, it's inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. I am not proposing these elements in isolation.
You can look at Dr. Stone and see primitive societies that aren't racial stereotypes, even though one of them is indeed quite violent. That's not what I'm saying and I think you know that's not what I'm saying, which makes me wonder why you even bother. Are you that upset by criticism of this obviously sexist, racist shit that you think you can just string me along until I get bored of it and then you can enjoy your wholesome rape softporn and genocide series in peace? I'm going to keep re-explaining myself every time you mischaracterize me, so you're going to need to develop a new coping strategy or just learn to wank while keeping your mouth shut. Do what you fucking want, but don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining.