Recently, there has been a drastic increase in outrage against loli and loli-style artworks and characters.
Unable to separate the concept of “young females drawn with baby-like big eyes, a chubby face and a small build” from the real world, critics of the art style and fandom have falsely accused both of promoting sexual violence against real-world minors.
Believing themselves to be performing a societal good, the vocal condemnation campaigns undertaken by opponents have resulted in such outcomes as a Japanese mangaka being harassed, Patreon blanket-purging any art even slightly fitting the style’s standard, and a player being banned from a fighting game tournament for liking the genre’s numerous loli characters.
In light of this ongoing attempt to erase any trace of the loli-style from anime and video games and curious as to how this attitude has affected the actual industry, Bounding Into Comics reached out to an insider for their insights.
Graciously taking time out of their day to speak with us after we reached out, writer, 3D artist, developer of Japanese video games, Haru47 spoke with us about this rising trend and what it means for the future of Japanese media in the West.
I’m hopeful that these attacks on fiction and free expression die down, or they’re not as serious abroad as they are in the west.
There’s no excuse for conflating fiction with reality the way these zealots do. None. A fantastical drawing depicting a fictional character cannot and is not on the same ground as a photograph of an actual child.
I am fully supportive of the need to rescue and protect children, as well as secure their futures. But such motives as these are tainted with unnecessary harmful law motions that overextend the main goal into a territory of reactive rage and hatred, and too far away from the clear and good thought process that it just was.
We have seen this in the past and still see it in modern times where there is an overbearingly strong foundation that we want to help, but then that good energy is overshadowed by blaming the solutions and medicines that work very well for those who need them. Then they are banned, causing much more suffering while still offering no solution to the main problem at hand. This is not the way.
I am sure we will regain this sense of understanding. It is just a long gradual process of making silly mistakes and then later correcting them. We see it with food and health regulation. We see it with same-sex marriage. We see it with cannabis and education. It is at least trending consistently.
I wonder why loli/shota/cub or any Forms of Fictional/stimulated CP is not actually seen as “bad” in most of Western countries but not in East/ southeast Asians countries
The ire towards fiction in the west has definitely increased in recent years with the pizza gate and QANON bullshit.
Many on the right are attacking LGBT folks as part of their baseless hysteria against some fictitious cabal of pedophiles and groomers, and those on the left are in turn responding by ramping up their own outward hatred and intolerance for anything related to pedophilia. In this fragile socio-political climate with a great many demographics on edge for threats perceived or real, a shared hatred for MAPS (who are and will likely always be powerless and insignificant )has become a means to ease their inter-factional tension. Someone had to be thrown under the bus and I’m not surprised it was us.
@LegalLoliLover1
Deleted your post because it was off-topic, and quite frankly that whole controversy isn’t something that needs to be discussed here, or at least, not in this thread.
Not everyone is familiar with that game series or its characters.
Well, like the censorship, it’s all a part of western pop culture “guardians” wanting to “save” other cultures. Like I said, barring indie translations (AKA more accurate ones, as we see from fan translations of the Utawarerumono eroge vs. the inaccurate translations of the all-ages version by NISA), we need a Sakoku period for Japanese pop culture.
Right, and that’s fine, it’s just not warranted in this particular thread.
What I’d like to know is whether or not these punitive attitudes held by Western audiences themselves have a similar effect that overseas licensing agencies have with regard to content or expression. I’m hopeful that the collective moaning and whining of offended parties on Twitter are not taken as seriously as they ought to be.
Social media sentiment is not always in-line with how people truly think and act as evidenced by how faulty of a statistic it is for analytic and marketing purposes, hence why companies make more money off of background trackers, which are hooked up to various other APIs that profile and track user activity that occurs within its network.
Companies in the US and elsewhere continue to license and distribute lolicon/shotacon materials, Fakku, MangaGamer, and JAST being the big ones. There’s no shortage of people who are avantly anti-loli on Twitter, but the data behind interest in “loli” hentai tends to tell a different story.
So long as it does not affect their business, I don’t care. Speaking of affected businesses:
And this just happens to be right after they updated their “ethics policy”. Common coincidence or causal pattern? I understand that correlation doesn’t always equal causation, but…
LOL, of course you’d link a Kotaku article. Not gonna give them more clicks. Sorry, but all Japanese image hosting sites will still label Bridget otoko no ko.
@87blue
I’d prefer if you and @LegalLoliLover1 kept this dispute in DMs, and out of this thread. I understand that, in both of your perspectives, this debate has some relevance to the topic
(that being whether or not this character was intended to be transgender or a ‘femboy’ archtype, and whether the clarification was made to appease perceived Western pro-trans sentiment and revisionism), but said relevance is extremely limited and only by way of a secondary context.
I’m not trying to come off as a tyrant, but we’re delving into subject matter that is not immediately relevant to the original topic.
I personally have no stake in this argument, I am not trying to pick a side, but if you want to continue this discussion, please do so amongst yourselves, or try and create a thread in Off Topic.