Classic stuff. Let's not forget "Donglegate" either. That time was literal assault too.
The distinction between "hopping" and "blurring" that line is a bit hard to reckon because male and female are still very concrete categories over there (remnants of Taoism, yin/yang and all that). I'll leave that tangent aside and try to directly answer your question:
From antiquity there's been several Shinto deities that are variously depicted as male, female or androgynous.
Traditionally, women were barred from acting in Kabuki theater, so all the female roles have been men in makeup for a few hundred years. (I'd have to check if there's been any slackening of this rule in the last decade or so) Side note: women are historically very involved in all sectors of entertainment by playing instruments, singing, dancing, reciting poetry, etc...
There was plenty of homoerotic business being conducted in the Yoshiwara red-light district of pre-modern Tokyo (Edo), much of it involving cross-dressing.
As for anime, I'm sure there's many more, but here are some examples I know of:
As far as I can trace back, the original trap is Hibari-kun (1983)
That same year saw the introduction of Ryūnosuke from Urusei Yatsura.
I won't spoil anything about Gall Force: Eternal Story (85) except to say that it's germane to the discussion. Really great film, been watching it for 25 years. The song for the credits reel includes the line "You probably think I'm a crazy feminist." I've got the soundtrack CD.
Dirty Pair: Project Eden (86) makes a passing reference to sex-change surgery in a distant future where the technology for something better than an axe wound is hypothetically feasible. Also a really great example of peak '80s anime.
Zoisite from Sailor Moon (92) is a very interesting case. You can easily search up clips of his original Japanese voice, then a female English dub from the '90s (which had me completely fooled back in the Toonami days), then once again male for an updated English dub in 2014. Don't miss the irony that the West was censoring homoerotic romance from globally popular anime at one point in time.
By far the most famous instance of that was in S3(94) when the first English dub portrayed these two as "cousins" rather than...y'know.
Then in S5(96) the Japanese showrunners actually made a slight adjustment from the source material. In the manga these three are girls pretending to be boys, but in the anime they're depicted with bare masculine chests at the beach, implying that they transform into girls when assuming their "sailor warrior" forms. The manga author has gone on record as being a bit annoyed about this because her intention was for it to be a "girls only" thing.
Eps. 12&13 of Cowboy Bebop (98) feature the kind of dramatic character you were discussing with u/altmehere (seasoned with a bit of comedy from other background Ts). But do go in for the whole show or none of it at all - it's essential Weeb 101 material. I'll even endorse the dub. Oh and also, the Netflix remake sucks and everyone who truly appreciates the original hates it.
I think I've made my point, even if I stop a decade earlier than you requested. I do recommend this rap battle for some tongue-in-cheek modern "trap" culture (as opposed to WT culture)
You weren't exactly wrong about the T propaganda thing. As you well know the net is infested with them. A huge portion of them have anime avatars, and just like everything else they think anime should be all about them, source culture be damned. But hopefully I've demonstrated that you can tell an honest weeb from an ego-tripping troon by looking for subtlety, nuance, humor, open-mindedness, simple fun, etc...
I had grandiose ideas of a whole essay last night, but now I think we should take things one step at a time. You did convince me to stay in this thread and go on record. I'd like to be a helpful weeb on here moving forward.
I share your disgust with the untested hormone treatments, the mutilating surgeries and the perpetual maintenance of what the body naturally treats as a gaping wound. Not to mention the narcissism, melodrama and constant attention-seeking regularly displayed by...I'll call them WTs (Western Ts).
Let's start with just one data point illustrating that not all gender-bending has to be like that. What do you think about this clip? (from Komi can't communicate, finished airing in January)
I'll play along with pronouns since she isn't being a dick about it (heh). Her name (Osana Najimi) is a play-on-words referring to osanajimi=幼なじみ. Part of the joke is that maybe she's able to make so many friends because she's not exactly a he or she. It's critical not to invoke the term "non-binary" here, which drags in loads of politicized garbage from the US. This is an example of Japan doing it's own gender thing like I said, and it's only projection when redditors hop on it with their vocabulary.
The term the narrator uses to describe Najimi's schtick is seibetsu-fumei= 性別不明, which one could render as "gender-ambiguous/unkown" or something like that.
Anyways how about that good mood? Strikes me as a rather more pleasant and functional individual than your average WT, amirite? She did the work to make friends. She didn't demand love and acceptance on the basis of some abstract theory of her human rights.
We've really opened up a can of worms with your first paragraph. I do have the time, and it's a subject I really like to talk about. But it'll take a lot longer than tonight, and it's getting late over in these parts, so I hope that we can continue this conversation later.
If you'd be willing to slide into my DMs then maybe I can give the topic of gender spoken in Japanese due diligence given enough time. (I can send my Discord; that would be ideal)
For now I can at least try to address paragraph 2 in a minimal fashion: The key difference between Mizuki and a troon is that Mizuki honestly struggles to create who she wants to be and puts in effort to become that person, whereas the troon simply announces to the world what kind of person they would like to be treated as, and if you don't comply they accuse you of "erasing their existence." Totally different.
Personally I'd go with the end of Voyager in 2001.
I didn't like Nemesis that much, but at least it wasn't the utter travesty the franchise has become.
There's a whole lot here, and I'm not very familiar with any of these games. I'm more on the anime/manga side of things, but I'm glad you're keeping an eye on the situation over there.
My main question would be how much of the SJW ideology gets added on the English end in cases like this.
I ask because I think you should reconsider applying the word "troon" in this context. I had no idea about Mizuki, but looking around a bit I found exactly what I expected: in the source material she looks, acts, and sounds (enough) like a girl, and it's only the US fandom that's foaming at the mouth about her "gender identity" on the English wiki, etc...In the former case it's a fun narrative trope, in the latter it's a political sermon.
Basically, don't mistake just any case of gender-ambiguity in Japanese media for the Libstian cultural hegemony I mentioned. (Ranma, anyone?) They've been playing a much subtler game with the boy/girl conundrum over there for a very long time.
That game is nothing like a big fat 45-year-old with a beard and eye makeup yelling at a lesbian to have sex with "her" or else they're a bigot and deserve to be raped. That's a troon. There's other words for Mizuki.
Big Sad.
I commented on Tuesday that "Libstian cultural hegemony" hadn't yet reached Japan.
Looks like I was wrong.
It is such a farce that these sanctimonious scolds still think that they're defending "multiculturalism" by dictating what's allowed in other cultures.
Emanuel Maiberg.
Sorry the parentheses on my keyboard are all worn out.
As one of our resident terminal weebs, I'd like to say that I see two things going on here:
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From the premise you can indeed catch the Netflix stench of Libstian cultural hegemony creeping up from miles away. But at least it still hasn't quite arrived in Japan, yet...
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The show is going to fall flat with the Enwokened on this side of the pond if the joking tone of this trailer makes it into the final product. (if the ha-ha music wasn't clue enough, the text isn't exactly an SJW sermon about "birthing bodies") It's similar to how words like "trap" and "futa" piss them off. Over here you have to bow down and lament such bigotry with tears and wailing. No humor allowed. In Japan it's still understood that these are hypothetical, satirical, comical or rhetorical devices, not life-or-death political struggles.
They made a movie where Ahnold got preggers in 1994. It's a long shot, but if Japan still has 25 years before they get where we are ("birthing bodies"), maybe there's hope yet.
Edit: Also, they're up to the usual bullshit, injecting their ideology by fucking with vocabulary when they put "cis-male" in the subtitles. Listen for danseininshin=男性妊娠 right at the beginning: 男性=male 妊娠=pregnancy
No "cis-" about it because their heads are still screwed on straight.
And yet you knew enough about the culture to come up with that username...I'm going to go with "good job on that irony, sir."
That's the one - S5E9.
Lol I just re-watched that episode of TNG not 12 hours ago; what are the odds?
(I know I know, Trek is pure Liblet fantasy...but it was simpler times, and better than the reboots amirite? At least Picard had his dignity back then.)
That's a good way of putting it. Here's my bare-bones version:
"Why are you surprised? We're good. You're bad. It's good when we do it. It's bad when you do it. How can we make it any simpler?"
Convincing performance, but it could have used a H O N K at the climax.
His dimensions are pretty different from mine, that's for sure.
Climb up the ladder then kick it over. Super classy Peter.
And God season 8 was such shit.
Hear hear!
Summary executions and no due process? That would make us no better than them. We'd turn on each other at the drop of a hat just like they do.
The short answer to your question is that the concept of a supreme divinity that fixed universal laws of how the world would always operate after he or she set it in motion paved the way for both the scientific method and rationality.
(The former being empiricism and the latter being...mostly pure math I guess, which often turns out surprisingly useful)
If you're a pagan, and it's all up to where you happen to be and the mercurial whims of local spirits to decide whether or not your kid's gonna die of hypothermia in a bad winter, there's little incentive to "figure out the way the whole world works" while you're trying to scrape calories out of the frozen dirt.
(I'm agnostic, for the record.)
Not to mention that dumb Bishop George Berkeley who pointed out some weak spots in Newton's initial formulation of calculus.
What a couple of absolute rubes just yelling past each other, amirite?!
Glad to see Herr Schwab on the list. Fucker.
Weeb here. It pisses me the fuck off when woketarded tranny jannies from the US think they should be able to dictate what Japanese artists are allowed to make.
Plenty of it is degenerate, yes, but it produces very few trannies over there by comparison because the Japanese have a much better grip on the distinction between reality and fantasy. Plenty of it is rather based.
Not to mention that the concepts of shame and taboo aren't dead for them. Just behave in public and keep your weird shit to yourself is the rule. There's no such thing as a "hentai pride parade." (not over there at least...I shudder to think what kind of tranny weeb cosplays we'll be treated to on Nickelodeon come June)
~oo00oo~ I see what you did there. Such subtle irony.
No false equivalency here. Teaching my kid about where babies come from vs Poop-dick or Genital Disfiguration? All the same.
I'm with you OP. I believe "really damn good" was the way I put it elsewhere.
Is there any anime you've particularly enjoyed in the past?
Santa? Why are you yelling?
OH MY GOD I'M.....I'M MOOOOOODDING