On the Emasculation of Men’s Entertainment

Adam Lane Smith, an energetic and prolific author as well as a psychologist and self-help guru (two careers I consider deeply suspicious, admittedly) has an interesting essay on the degeneration of some beloved franchises in an essay entitled “The Scheduled Murder of Men’s Entertainment.”

In particular, he discusses the Star Wars sequels and what they did to Luke Skywalker, but he goes into greater detail about the God of War video-game franchise, which I admit I’m not familiar with.

Kratos slinks away from Greece in shame, finds a wife, has a son, and then neglects and abandons them both. When he is around them, he spends all his time agonizing over how ashamed he is of himself and everything he’s ever done. He’s hiding from the entire world and from himself. The makers originally intended to show him fat and out of shape. His (now dead) wife lays out a plan to reunite the verbally abusive deadbeat dad with his resentful son but she has to trick them both into doing it.

Following the tendencies of two of his professions, Smith delivers an analysis of this that is compelling:

The problem is that the creators are espousing a very specific post-modern nihilistic outlook brought about by weak fathers or absent fathers. Modern creators supported by Hollywood and big corporations have crushing attachment problems and broken relationships with their own fathers for a variety of reasons. They’re used to their saintly single mothers conditioning them to despise their own fathers. Men grow up worshipping their mothers, and women grow up seeing all men as worthless children incapable of real love.

As I read this essay, I keep hearing in my head the line from Fight Club: “We’re a generation raised by women. Maybe another woman is not what we need.” Of course, Fight Club meant this as a nasty joke (every generation ever is raised by women, as the audience is supposed to realize when hearing Tyler Durden pontificate), but Lane is serious, as have been many other commentators on the same subject.

The concern that the current trajectory of civilization is emasculating has been around for a while, going back at least to the publication of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest but probably predating that. The Fight Club novel, also, immediately predated several nonfiction works on the same theme, and the film adaptation became a movie of choice for a lot of Gen-Xers probably because that theme was already in the forefront of the national mindset: The director intended the movie to be ironic, but many of us viewers treated it as dead serious.

Back at the end of the 1990s, these fears of emasculation were easy to dismiss—but that is no longer the case; now that the American Psychological Association has come right out and declared manliness a pathology, claims of attack on manhood cannot be called mere paranoia.

Sharp observers have noted for years that popular entertainments consistently treat fathers as worthless deadbeats or at least fools. This probably traces to Freud, but it has become most pronounced in the last three decades. Smith makes keen observations of the otherwise inexplicable destructions of characters such Luke Skywalker and Kratos: The storytellers responsible for these works simply cannot imagine a man growing old without also becoming crotchety, worthless, and a deadbeat. It is an ugly mixture of self-hatred and, more importantly, hatred for daddy.

Smith’s suggested solution to this problem is more stories that showcase manliness and masculine virtues, some of which he’s written himself. He’s correct that we now have a dearth of these: Simply browse the latest children’s books available at your public library, and you will see a quite a selection of grrrl power (and a peppering of smut, which blue-haired librarians love to give to children), with very few works designed to interest boys.

Admittedly, I prefer to write stories about girls myself, but I begin to think it’s time to ressurect the classic pulp genre of manly male adventurers who have young boys for sidekicks, in the vein of Terry and the Pirates or even Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I don’t think any of the “pulp revival” authors have shown much interest in writing child characters, so maybe I should consider filling that gap.

Featured Art by limandao

Featured image: “Mai-HiME” by limandao.

I just started watching My-HiME, which came out in , a signature year for magical-girl anime, seeing as how it also saw the release of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and Pretty Cure. My-HiME did all right for itself, producing some spin-offs, though I don’t think it had quite the same impact as Nanoha or especially Pretty Cure, which became a commercial juggernaut.

All three of these shows upped the amount of violent action typical of the genre and did it for three different demographics: Pretty Cure was shoujo, Nanoha was seinen, and My-HiME was shounen.

The opening episode of My-HiME is certainly promising, with a creative action set-piece and some excellent animation.

In any case, I’ll talk about it when I finish it. It’s considerably longer than the last show I reviewed, and my current schedule does not give me a lot of extra time for TV, but I’ll do what I can.

Art by @oregaihanboshi

Featured art: “Magical Girl Natsuki Is Here to Deliver Cupcakes” by @oregaihanboshi.

Anime Review: ‘Prétear’

Prétear, written by Kenichi Kanemaki and directed by Junichi Sato. Hal Film Maker (). 13 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 312 minutes). Rated TV-14.

Available on Funimation.

Funny story: Although it looks like a much earlier series, the information on Prétear from the Funimation site claims that the show comes from 2010. Since that’s the year before Puella Magi Madoka Magica made its appearance, I was all set to interpret this show as the end of an era, the last of the primarily Sailor Moon-influenced magical-girl anime before Madoka took over the genre. But Funimation’s metadata is wrong (which is good because that means I wasn’t crazy when I thought there was no way this was from 2010); Prétear is actually from 2001.

That, however, suggests perhaps equally interesting connections: It bears some apparent influence from Revolutionary Girl Utena, and it also predates Princess Tutu by just a few years. It comes from the same studio as Tutu and resembles it in some respects; so while this isn’t a bridge between Sailor Moon and Madoka, it might be a link between Utena and Tutu.

Continue reading “Anime Review: ‘Prétear’”

‘Jake and the Dynamo’ 2 Preview

Jake and the Dynamo (remember that book?) is still unavailable as of this writing since the unfortunate out-of-businessing of my publisher. I have no known date for a re-release, but I am seriously considering self-publishing within the next few months and also releasing volume 2 the same way. Volume 3 is also underway, though I’ve set it aside for the moment for another writing project. In any case, here is a preview.

It had been a Sunday afternoon in early spring. The weather was at last warming up, so Marionette’s drafty attic was comfortable again after a terrible winter. Although her joints didn’t stiffen up in cold as readily as a human’s did, and though she couldn’t suffer frostbite or pneumonia, she could still feel miserable. She had spent much of the winter warming her fingers over a small cast-iron stove and painting a few strokes at a time before needing to warm her fingers again.

Now down to shirtsleeves and green boyshorts, she spent a lazy Sunday lying in her cot. The paint-flecked bedclothes were in a tangled mess, partly over her and partly under.

Kasumi Sugihara, down to a sports bra and boxers, lay beside her and smoked a cigarette. In her magical form, she was Card Collector Kasumi, but for the moment, she was merely an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl. She and Marionette had wiled away the late morning and much of the afternoon reading magazines, talking about TV dramas, discussing battle tactics, and gossiping about which boys they hated.

Marionette held, balanced on her stomach, a crystal Pontarlier glass of milky absinthe louche. She gazed at it for half a minute, raised her head, and took a sip. A faintly bitter scent of blended herbs met her olfactory sensors, and then the drink slipped smoothly down her synthetic throat.

Continue reading “‘Jake and the Dynamo’ 2 Preview”

Some Updates

I’m working on a story for an anthology project I caught wind of. I don’t know yet if the anthology will actually appear or not, but if it doesn’t, I’ll submit somewhere else.

I’m also much distracted from both the blog and my other project because my wife is having a baby. Soon, we’ll have two magical girls instead of just one running around this place.

Speaking of magical girls, it seems like it’s been a long time since I sat down and reviewed one of those, but that should change in the near future if I can get through what I’m currently watching.

Memes

Netflix Pisses Off Pretty Much Everybody with ‘Cuties’

As you can see from the meme collage at the head of this post, the streaming service Netflix absolutely loves it some dirty, sexy kids. In the last couple of days, this fact has become apparent not just to the few edgelords talking about it on /pol/, but to everybody, as Netflix has advertised its acquisition of a French movie called Cuties, which made it big at Sundance.

What’s remarkable is that, although Cuties has a handful of defenders, this is one case where almost everyone seems to be pissed off. The left-right divide, over this one film, has evaporated: Everyone is angry. For a brief moment, our fractured nation is united in mutual offendedness and outrage. Maybe now we can begin to heal.

What sparked the controversy is the poster Netflix chose to advertise the film—a poster notably different from the original French version, which Netflix apparently created on the unwise assumption that it would appeal more to American audiences. The poster has so outraged some that I have even seen an individual I admire and respect begging people not to share it, even to criticize. Because I don’t think we can talk about this without depicting, in some fashion, what we are talking about, I’ve decided to share the poster, but only after the break. Consider yourself warned.

This movie, Cuties in English and Mignonnes in French, is about a group of eleven-year-old girls who dance. That brief description sounds inoccuous, even charming, but wait until I tell you that the film achieved an NC-17 rating and will be rated TV-MA when it appears on Netflix next month. As you likely know, NC-17 is the rating that replaced X; this is an X-rated film about eleven-year-olds.

After the break comes the poster, and then I will discuss how Netflix chose to describe the movie, what people are mad about, and so forth.

Continue reading “Netflix Pisses Off Pretty Much Everybody with ‘Cuties’”

‘KissAnime’ Shuts Its Doors

The big news in weebdom is the complete shutdown of KissAnime and KissManga, two hugely popular pirate sites that fans of manga and anime have relied on to get content for free. This follows on the heels of Japan tightening its copyright laws.

Given the enormous popularity of these sites, this will have repercussions that remain to be seen.

American voice actors have been doing a lot to make themselves obnoxious lately, so they took this as another chance to show their lack of basic P.R. skills: Several took to Twitter (the internet’s home of celebrities behaving moronically) to rub salt in the wound and gloat over the fans who could no longer get their content from these sites. Of those I’ve seen, the most notable of these gloats is this one:

That’s from Alex Moore, who has done English dubs for Fire Force and Fairy Tail. To her credit, she later apologized for some of her language. Still, I think her comment is worth noting because she brings up one of the most compelling reasons to turn away from official translations and toward pirate sites and fansubs. I’ll quote it in case the tweet goes away and the image accompanying it disappears:

“But [PC culture/feminism/politics] of dubs ruins the show!”

No it doesn’t, you’re just an asshole. How many times have you heard someone yell “YOLO!” or “YEET!” Or mention a meme in a localization? It’s done to make it accessible and relevant, not be transliteral. (BTW, next liberal feminist Witch coven meeting is at BN’s.)

Notice what she’s doing here: People complain about messages that are not in the original material being wedged into that material, and her response is, first, that you’re an asshole, apparently because you disagree with her ideologically. This is a standard tactic of the Woke cult—either acquiesce to them on every last little jot and tittle or you lose your humanity card.

Second, she argues that trendy words should be wedged ham-fistedly into translations to be “relevant” and then, laughably, gives outdated examples: No one says “YOLO” anymore (thank goodness), and “yeet” is on its way out. Memes, generally, go stale within a few weeks after they appear. That’s why you shouldn’t screw around with translations this way: Because you’re dating your material, and chances are, you don’t know what the kids think is hep and happening anyway, even if you think you do.

Since she likes internet lingo so much, I’ll sum it up this way: What she writes here is Boomer-tier cringe.

She inadvertently makes the best case for piracy I’ve ever seen: “Yes, we are going to be unfaithful in our translations, and you’re going to like it, you asshole!”

To give an idea, of what she thinks is making a show “accessible” and “relevant,” this is the most infamous of altered translations, from a show called Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid:

Comparison of dub and sub of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid

You can see that the dub has nothing to recommend it over the sub; it is not more comprehensible, not more “relevant” in its lingo. It is merely an example of someone thrusting a political agenda into a show that has nothing to do with it, simply because she can.

I’ve previously encountered this before: I have a review expressing my suspicions that VIZ inserted identity politics into Sailor Moon R: The Movie. I have since had confirmed that my suspicions were correct—but of course I knew I was correct to begin with because, unlike VIZ (and most of Sailor Moon’s Western feminist fanbase), I can grasp the worldview in which Sailor Moon was written and recognize lines that don’t belong to it. Those lines don’t make the show more “relevant” as Miss Moore asserts; they stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.

I can’t in good conscience approve of piracy: There’s a lot of anime I want but don’t have because I can’t get it legally. Despite this being a site about magical girls, you’ll notice I don’t talk about the latest Pretty Cure series; that’s because I can’t get them. I’d love to watch Sugar Sugar Rune or the Studio Pierrot shows from the 1980s, but I can’t acquire them legally, so I go without. Asking that people purchase things legally rather than steal, and go without if they cannot purchase legally, is not normally unreasonable, especially when those things are mere entertainments—normally.

I’m not actually prepared to approve piracy. But smug voice actresses make it tempting.

Anime Maru: ‘Magical Girl Recruitment Down’

I stumbled upon this recently, a satirical article from Anime Maru reporting that talking animal mascots have had a hard time recruiting new magical girls because of the increasingly dark tone of new magical girl anime.

I repost it mostly because I myself am a little tired of the dark turn in the genre since Puella Magi Madoka Magica and am ready for earnestly made but lighter fare.

With such challenges, many magical girl recruiting mascots have been forced to turn to drastic measures. It has been reported some are even going to alternative realities for recruiting, framing the opportunities they offer as isekei.

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