WARNING: Discussion of the depiction of sexual assault in popular media below. Reader discretion advised.
It all began when...
I like a nice anime every now and then. I've re-watched Season 1 of "One Punch Man" so many times Netflix now regularly displays recommended anime shows on my home page.
One such show, bearing the proud mark of "a Netflix original" and a "93% Match", appeared to me a few days ago. It's an anime called "The Seven Deadly Sins." It looked to me like a schlocky generic fantasy anime at first glance, which almost caused me to skip it. I hesitated, remembering Bill Burr's bit on how he fell in love with "One Punch" after trying it out on a whim. So, I decided to be adventurous and give it a shot.
The first episode was what I expected out of any first episode; slow to warm up, the introduction of a cast of characters I thusfar had no reason to care about who would no doubt be fleshed out in later episodes, and a dramatic intial scene that established the setting and the stakes of the plot. It turns out, the show isn't about the Seven Deadly Sins in the biblical tradition. The eponymous "Sins" are actually disgraced knights from a medieval fantasy world who are wanted criminals, each personifying a different "Sin." There's a character for gluttony, wrath, lust...and so on. I thought this was a cool premise and continued watching, eager for the "Sins" to make their first appearance.
After watching the first episode, I concluded it was a competent if run-of-the-mill medieval fantasy anime with one crucial flaw, a flaw which totally soured my impression of the whole thing.
After watching the first episode, I concluded it was a competent if run-of-the-mill medieval fantasy anime with one crucial flaw, a flaw which totally soured my impression of the whole thing.
One of the show's main characters, a young male named Meliodas, gropes an unconscious female character named Elizabeth within the first eight minutes of the first episode. I'll write that again...within the first eight minutes of the first episode, the main character sexually assaults a sleeping girl.
It's played off as a "light-hearted" joke; the unconscious character was seen walking around in a heavy suit of armor before passing out from exhaustion, and the groping was explained by the character to be his attempts to discern the sex of the poor girl. As if he needed to touch her breasts to, you know, fucking see that she had them.
SDS: Get it? It's funny because he's a creep!
ME: ...can you put your pants back on, please?
 |
| Most of these, the supposed central characters, hadn't even been introduced before this took place. Though she's not pictured here, this includes the sleeping girl Elizabeth, whose name was only mentioned after she had been established as an overtly-sexualized character. |
Besides the egregious sexual misconduct, the odd thing about this scene is that Meliodas seems puzzled that a woman was walking around with a full suit of armor, which would normally imply that she's a knight. It's later established that female knights are not an oddity in this world and that he has close personal friends who are so.
"Fan Service" and its role in anime
This kind of shit, unfortunately, is a rampant problem in anime. It's called "Fan Service", in that the creators of the media in question are attempting to "service" fans by indulging in their assumed, unspoken desire (in most cases presuming that the audience is male and heterosexual) to see a female character in a revealing or deliberately tantilizing state of dress, regardless of its contextual congruousness. "Fan Service" often manifests as blatant objectification, sexual assault, or even rape.
Anime that are guilty of this attempt to file the edges of these acts down by painting it as an "endearing" trait of a character. The perpetrators aren't sexual predators, they're "scampish" or "hopeless romantics". "Fan Service" is so common in anime it's often treated like an invisible, inextricable element of it. Most fans claim that they watch such shows for things like magical sword fights and interesting characters, and that "Fan Service" is something they don't pay attention to. Yet, "Fan Service" is a prolific feature of a shocking number of popular anime shows, most of which do not have plots that actively revolve around the sexuality of its characters.
"Neon Genesis Evangelion", for example, is an extremely popular and venerated anime show that features a character-driven plot and copious giant robot fights, not to mention tremendous amounts of this manner of gratuitous titillation. One could make the argument that a significant aspect of the plot is the ascent of several protagonists into puberty amidst the show's other plot elements, but keep in mind, we're talking about the sexualization of children there.
The story of "Evangelion" is of humanity's struggle against powerful monsters and is streamlined with copious metaphors and imagery from Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Hideaki Anno, creator of the show, originally promised that fans would have "something to drool over" in every single episode. In later episodes, he stopped doing this, and episodes that did include something of the sort often included the character in significant emotional distress - one might presume this was an attempt by Anno to retract his former attitude and express that the objectification of women is harmful to them. I'm not sure if that's a genuine attempt at redemption on Anno's part, but it seems the guy might have taken a step backward when he meant to go forwards.
 |
| Pretty sure this character is like, fourteen. |
"Shonen/Shoujo" vs. contextually-ambivalent titillation
"Shonen" and "Shoujo" are genres of Japanese books, movies, and television shows specifically tailored to fit either a primarily male or female audience. Plot-oblivious nudity and sexuality are widespread in both of these genres; in many "Shonen" shows, for example, there are typically numerous instances of characters in revealing swimsuits, scenes where the audience's point of view is specifically angled to best view a female character's breasts or butt, or outright female nudity. Female characters in this genre, even young girls, often have large breasts and slim figures. In "Shoujo", this trend is present as well; male characters are either extremely slim and handsome or have physiques akin to superheroes. They also frequently appear in tantalizing situations.
Because of this practice of compartmentalization by genre-to-sex, corresponding characters whose sex are opposite the show's intended audience tend to be overtly sexualized. However, acts of sexual violence or misconduct are far less common in "Shoujo" than in "Shonen".
Though this example is of a show that often manages to succeed at this, in many cases attempts by "Monogatari" and anime like it fail to create effective parody and end up simply indulging in the same tropes.
 |
| Is it hot in here? |
Not just an "Anime Thing"
While gratuitous titillation may be a common thing in many popular anime shows, movies and manga (a specific style of graphic novel originating in Japan), similar examples of non-contextual gratuitous titillation can be found in other cultures, including that of the United States.
Cheerleaders in the NFL are one example. They don't need to be there. The point is supposed to be football, not hot women doing high kicks. Also, have you ever noticed that football is the only sport that engages in this practice?
Another is Marvel Comics' release of "Marvel Swimsuit Specials", in which popular Marvel characters were drawn in lithe, form-fitting swimwear. This sort of "Fan Service" was supposedly extended to female readers, as male superheroes were depicted in roughly similar circumstances...despite the audience of Marvel at the time being overwhelmingly male. This is to say nothing of the frequent gratuitous sexualization of female characters throughout the Marvel universe.
Captain James T. Kirk of "Star Trek" and James Bond, lauded as pop culture icons, are frequently sexually aggressive, transgressive, and abusive towards their female counterparts. Though these "romance" scenes are meant to vicariously actualize the (male) audience's presumed sexual attraction to their female leads and supporting characters, in the case of the original "Bond" films especially, this sometimes includes physical violence against sexual partners and several instances of rape.
Normalization and wider influence
"Fan Service", gratuitous titillation - whatever you want to call it, isn't simply harmless or merely annoying. It normalizes things like, well...groping an unconscious woman on a whim, and worse.
Back to that horrific scene in "The Seven Deadly Sins"...I managed to push through the rest of the first episode after that, despite it and the vapid characters and plot. I wanted to see if there was more to the show, and if the aforementioned transgressive scene was thrown in as a one-time thing out of some twisted sense of genre-specific obligation, like the first episode of an HBO show usually includes gratuitous nudity in the hopes that viewers will tune in for the rest of the season.
There was no further groping, but the blatant objectification of Elizabeth continued. Then, it happened again in Episode 2, even sooner than in Episode 1. Pissed that this show apparently intended to constantly force me to watch a young girl get sexually assaulted ad nauseum as a condition for hearing the rest of the story, I immediately shut it off.
I began reading articles about "SDS" online, and apparently, I'm not the only one to have been super upset by this show. As I suspected, it doesn't stop in Episode 2. It actually gets worse.
Later in the series, Meliodas is propositioned by a potentially consenting sexual partner, whom he rebuffs, saying with haunting sincerity, "sorry, but it's not the same if you're told to do it." Yep, he specifically says that someone consenting to sexual behavior is a turn-off for him. He literally says, "non-rape just doesn't do it for me." And this is the guy we're supposed to be rooting for!
I've heard the argument that since the characters aren't real, there's nothing to fault the creators of the show because no real people are actually getting hurt, and that "if you don't like boobs, then just don't watch the show, bruh."
These and other equally flawed arguments are of course part of the problem. They end the conversation just as it begins by concluding that there is no problem, without presenting any evidence. The thing that makes this dangerous is that it prevents anyone from addressing that there are very real consequences to things like this. If sexual assault in fictional media is considered, not even necessarily normal, but morally acceptable or "okay", then those unable to dissociate fiction from reality, or those lacking real-world experience or guidance from a trustworthy teacher, may also conclude that such things are "okay" in the real world as well.
This show is marketed towards teenagers and mature adults, but with its TV-14 rating on Netflix, you bet your ass that kids even younger and more impressionable than 14-year-olds have and will see it. Teenagers are in a part of life where they are particularly suceptible to influence, and the things that influence them at this stage in life are readily internalized for life. This is even more true for younger children.
Young boys don't need more negative influence from any culture. Boys and young men are encouraged by cultures across the world to view sexuality as a "challenge", a contest of will and determination, rather than a means to emotional and physical connection with a consenting partner.
Dog trash like this show is why college athletes get pardoned from blatant sexual assault because serving time would "hurt their sports careers." It's why women all over the country fear walking alone at night and carry a can of mace in their pockets. It's why sexual assault and rape survivors, tragically, don't always come forward and report their encounters or pursue justice for them...because it's seen as so normal, a male character can do it in a kid's show, and it's just par for the course.
Originally posted on Raebelyell.blogspot.com
11/09/2017
Comments
Post a Comment