Dont even have to watch these videos, just look at the comments on them ( I recommend using ad block to not give these people any ad revenue profits, even if its a few cents): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rlwnlb72rLo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pman_LN8sVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfCzdZZtP5g
And the thing that pisses me off is that anime is actually such a diverse medium, that there are literally mountainloads of anime that dont sexualize women. There is literally genres like shoujo and manhwa geared towards female audiences, and yet these people go into shounen (a genre meant for teenage boys), and the complain that the women are sexualized.
https://ibb.co/qWMmYMs https://ibb.co/8zRf8sQ https://ibb.co/x2GcyNH
And when you point out that there are genres that gear towards women as well, its still not enough for them.
Related to the post u/Theman2008 made earlier today
A few comments from the videos:
I know this commenter is talking about My Hero specifically, but in anime as a whole? It of course varies from anime to anime, but I'd argue the opposite; men are usually generic cutouts, whereas the female characters, even if trope-y, are distinct. And I've literally seen feminists bitch about that.
Generic female characters = bad, cause sexism. Generic male characters = bad, because it means men can identify with them; Patriarchy! You can't win.
...Watch...different...anime...then...?
Seriously, there's plenty of anime with well developed (heh) female characters, and even female protagonists, who are not there to be "objects of pleasure."
You have to explain that the male gaze is bad because you're in a cult, and you don't think like normal people anymore. As to fanservice, that trend is not because they want to humiliate and degrade female characters but because those characters don't usually display that level of sexuality or nakedness on their own, so to fit it in it has to be that accidental peeping or whatever. Oh, and also, Japan is fucking weird.
Funny thing is, again, they'd be unhappy no matter what. If a female character showed off willingly (in universe, I mean...because these are fictional characters and aren't un/willing since they're not real) all the time for fanservice...feminists are still pissed. As evidenced in some of the other comments there. So their argument that fanservice is sometimes "against the will" of the female characters is nonsense since they're also pissed when it's not against their will.
And, yes, anime must be gatekept the fuck out of.
I don't understand why people these days have this weird obssession of needing to relate to a character in order to like them or consider them well written. Not every character has to be relatable.
It probably comes down to narcissism. "If this character isn't a self insertion of me, then I can't understand them because I'm a completely self-centered cunt".
This has to be fairly new because I only heard people crying about representation in the last ten years or so
Characters need to be relatable on some level, that's just a part of storytelling. The relatability, though, has little to do with superficial characteristics.
Bad writers make it superficial. That's why 90% of male protagonists are Japanese teenagers with unkempt black hair loners who are especially bad at interacting with women. Oh, how relatable! Oh, make them semi-good at video games or studies, too! That's both lazy and weak writing.
But I've been reading though "Reborn as a Vending Machine", you've got an immobile vending machine MC, who literally can't converse. It would be a very boring story if the MC wasn't relatable, if it was just an account of sales and transactions. Relatability with a vending machine? Zero. Relatability with the MC? A lot more.
I've never been a vending machine selling chicken sticks to tazmanian devil lycanthropes, at least not recently, but I have been in customer service, I have been lost in foreign lands, I have hand-fed animals, I have made food for friends. I can know some distorted but represented emotion that the MC is feeling, within myself. Empathy. There's relatability far beyond "I'm not a vending machine, therefore I can't identify with this situation, therefore it is not relatable."
Those who cannot relate without direct physical characteristics, have no empathy.