Tag: controversy

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’”

Nostalgia Critic on ‘Sailor Moon’

Why?

Although I follow his close associate Jame Rolfe, whom I’ve often found insightful if vulgar, I haven’t paid much attention to the so-called Nostalgia Critic. For whatever reason, whenever I’ve started one of his videos, I’ve found it annoying.

Because I wasn’t minding him, I discovered only three years late that he produced a review of Sailor Moon. As soon as I realized this, I decided that, of course, I had to watch his review and post it.

Then, about halfway through his video, I exclaimed, “I can’t post this!”

However, after further consideration, I have decided that, though his methods are crass, I think he discusses things that are worth discussing. So I have decided to post his video here even though some of his humor violates my vaguely defined rules for acceptable content. Viewer discretion is therefore advised:

He mostly discusses the DiC English dub of Sailor Moon, and he appears to be familiar only with part of the first season, though his discussion does, curiously, range for a moment into the third season, which he compares against the Japanese version even though he otherwise leaves the Japanese version unaddressed.

A few comments of my own: First, though his methods are tongue-in-cheek and crude, I think he is right to address the sexualized obsession with young girls that characterizes much of Japanese pop culture, even if I think he over-interprets this particular franchise and uses it as an excuse to make ribald jokes.

Second, I think he needs to watch the Japanese original in order to appreciate the franchise. He spends much time complaining about Sailor Moon’s unlikable personality, which is not unreasonable, but I think he should see the character as played by Kotono Mitsuishi, whose fantastic voice performance makes the whiny, lazy, and cowardly heroine remarkably endearing.

Third, his complaints about the show’s sexual elements, if not exactly misplaced, are at least too facetious and improperly contextualized. I don’t entirely disagree with him, but it is worth pointing out that Sailor Moon and her compatriots wear miniskirts and go-go boots for the same reason that female Star Trek officers in the original series wore them: Because these were at one time emblems of women’s liberation. That may be hard to appreciate in an age where the burka is a symbol of feminism, but it is a fact nonetheless, though such a symbol was arguably anachronistic already by the time Sailor Moon made its appearance.

Also worth noting, the animated version of the franchise, which is the only one the Nostalgia Critic discusses, varies considerably from the manga version. Both certainly have sexual content, but of a markedly different character. The upskirt shots, the emphases on the characters’ legs, and the panty peekaboo are exclusive to the anime, apparently because most of the people working on the anime were men and because they wanted to appeal to a male audience.

Is Crunchyroll Crashing and Burning?

I’ve been hesitant to talk about it because most of what is coming my way is rumor-mongering.

I’ve sometimes defended Crunchyroll on this blog because I like what they do, mostly, but I’m becoming increasingly displeased and am beginning to share the same distaste for Crunchy that colors much of my Twitter feed.

First, there’s Crunchy’s longstanding failure to update its player, which is still running on the security nightmare that is Flash while the rest of the internet has moved to HTML5.

Then there is High Guardian Spice. It’s not so much that Crunchyroll wanted to follow other streaming services in creating dubious original content, but that it rolled it out in the most obnoxious way possible, failing to advertise the show itself but instead virtue-signalling about the sex of the staff working on it. On top of that, further checking reveals that the cartoon is based on somebody’s Tumblr comic, and that the characters are the standard smorgasbord of “diversity,” meaning everyone in the story thinks, talks, and even looks the same. Naturally, Crunchy caught flack for this, and naturally, their response was to accuse fans of various phobias and isms, which only increases my displeasure.

More recently in the same vein, Crunchyroll is now getting accused of manipulating translations to match American political fixations. This is an issue Funimation had in spades, most infamously with Prison School and Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, but has taken steps to correct (by firing its freelancers). I don’t know for sure if Crunchy is actually doing this, but given what we saw of their staff in the High Guardian Spice ad, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t true. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the religion of social justice (for it is a religion) suffers nothing beside itself, so we are almost certainly going to see more and more politically incorrect gender-benders out of Japan being forced through a Gender Studies mold when translated into English. (Ten years ago, if you had told I would be defending Japanese animated traps against the charge of being transgendered, I would have responded 1) that you’re crazy and 2) that I don’t know what those words mean, yet here we are.)

And the huge deal that was Crunchyroll’s partnership with Funimation? Yeah, it’s over. The casualties, according to random people on my social media feeds, amount to 250 series being taken off Crunchy, including several I was looking forward to watching. Rumors have flown all over the place about what led to this, but the official explanation is that it has to do with Funimation’s acquisition by Sony. Some claim that this is Funimation’s rebuke to Crunchy’s rollout of High Guardian Spice, but I suspect that’s wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, Sony, which now owns Funimation, has made a bad reputation for itself with weebs because it is in the habit of heavily censoring eroge games. Personally, I don’t mind if hentai addicts are unable to get their drug, but I am nonetheless against censorship on principle: If they can censor hentai, they can easily move from there to censoring other things—such as anything that doesn’t accord with the social justice cult. If Sony doesn’t want T&A in its video games, then it shouldn’t port the games, not port censored versions. Telling an artist you don’t want his work is fine, but taking his work and changing it to suit yourself is extremely disrespectful. (Ten years ago, if you had said that I would be criticizing the censorship of pornographic video games, I again would have told you you’re crazy, but hey.)

Crunchy was for a while more-or-less the only game in town, but that’s starting to change. Amazon Strike didn’t get off the ground, and Netflix is too busy navel-gazing, but HIDIVE, which is now on VRV, is starting to look like a good alternative for anime streaming—though VRV is closely related to Crunchyroll and was created by some of the same people, so we’ll see what this means in the long run.

I will not be surprised if Crunchyroll goes the way of Tokyopop in a few years. We’ll see. If it does, it might take VRV with it.

I can’t justify more than one streaming service at a time given the pace at which I watch shows and my income. I’m currently on Amazon Prime (mostly because of interest in Made in Abyss), but once I’ve had my way with everything that looks interesting on Amazon, I may make the switch. I notice, for example, that HIDIVE has A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, though only in the dub, and that’s one I’ve wanted to see. In fact, it also has Made in Abyss.

UPDATE: As a reader informs me, Crunchyroll actually has updated its player. I guess I haven’t been on their site in a while. However, a few tests indicate that the new player doesn’t work with ad-blockers.