feotakahari (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feotakahari) wrote2019-01-14 08:05 pm
feotakahari) wrote2019-01-14 08:05 pm
A comment I got on a site called Anime Feminist
“The problem is that men come along, see a genre that is fundamentally not about them, and then co-opt it and make it about women suffering instead. It's like they can't accept, for one moment, that a story in the universe exists and isn't about how great men are. Men also write grimdark stories where everyone suffers, of course, but it by no means makes up the majority, or even remotely close to a majority, of all stories written by men. Yet 100% of Magical Girl stories written by men are about specifically women suffering. Do you not see the discrepency? That being said, even if 100% of all stories written by men were about suffering, not just the Magical Girl ones, it'd still be dubious for them to write Magical Girl stories - because it's about them taking a genre meant for women and instead making it about what men want to see. 90% of anime is already heavily male-oriented, and yet men seem intent on making the remaining 10% cater to them too."
This post physically nauseates me. That is not a figure of speech.
I'm trying to figure out how to express how I feel about the idea of genres as walled gardens, into which some kinds of people can enter while others must be kept out. The closest I can come is to try and imagine how I would feel if someone told me that it was wrong or bad for someone like me to write stories that were "meant for" someone else. As it turns out, how I feel is like I'm going to throw up.
This post physically nauseates me. That is not a figure of speech.
I'm trying to figure out how to express how I feel about the idea of genres as walled gardens, into which some kinds of people can enter while others must be kept out. The closest I can come is to try and imagine how I would feel if someone told me that it was wrong or bad for someone like me to write stories that were "meant for" someone else. As it turns out, how I feel is like I'm going to throw up.
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But saying, "having less magical girl content is better," is so actively counterproductive to their intended goal. Like, I don't feel personally upset by these kinds of posts, because I get caught instead on the sheer stupidity.
To use that person's own rhetoric, 90% of major media focuses on subjects that are "supposed to be" appealing to boys or men, or across gendered lines, and only 10% focuses on subjects that are "supposed" to be appealing to women and girls specifically. And they're calling for the reduction of that 10% down to 5% or 3%, because it doesn't meet their weird little standards for Pure, Valid, Good content.
Also, Madoka Magica (these complaints always come back to Madoka, in the end) is a fucking delight and its success literally revitalized the magical girl genre from a severe slump in production quality AND quantity, so who CARES if it was a man's project, since it opened the gate for literally dozens of high quality women's projects since then! We would not have shows like Flip-flappers, and the much praised re-makes of Sailor Moon and Card Captors would have had a much more difficult time getting funded, without the revitalization of the genre that "tragedy porn written by men" created.
Madoka it proved that magical girl anime could be a solid investment: that it could make back the money on a big budget, and could appeal to multiple markets including the desirable otaku markets where most of the money is made, instead of just a young girl's market which ultimately has limited monetization options because it's tied to parents' pockets.
If anything, the proliferation of tragic magical girls (in ADDITION TO traditional magical girls), should be blamed on capitalism and finance, not ~*~bad evil manliness of men~*~.
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