[IndigoArms]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kurona

I...

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Build was a series that was very directly focused on war, with one of the main villainous factions being a weapons company headed by a war profiteer; and had the country split into three regions each controlled by megalomaniac prime ministers who would send the country into war for their own ends at the drop of a hat. The currently airing series, Zero-One; is a series composed almost entirely of the questions "how will AI develop in the future and how will it be integrated into society," and "should robots have rights", all while its two main villains are terrorists and a CEO written to be so hateable he's rivaling friggin' Kusaka Kaixa. Even Zi-O, a show which was very much doing its own thing; had episodes that very directly tackled the common debate in Japanese society about whether Nobunaga should be revered or hated. This is a franchise that literally started with Takeshi Hongou rider kicking thinly-veiled nazi allegories and making grand speeches about the importance of human life and how it matters above all else! Zero-One currently features an explicitly non-binary Rider with that identity never being questioned, representation in a massive pop culture staple that an equivalent series in America/Britain could barely dream of rivaling!


Like, I don't even have to go into actual real-life examples here (such as Japan having its own very large feminist movement; the country relatively recently having a big push for having more women in the business sector; many schools allowing kids to choose whichever uniform they want regardless of gender; Japan handling Covid-19 far far better than most other countries; there just a couple months ago being a big protest against police for how they discriminate against foreigners), I literally just have to list some of the most major obvious themes of the last few seasons in the franchise we're talking about to show how utterly confused I am at the statement "yeah, they don't care about social justice". Just because it doesn't look the same as it does in the west doesn't mean that Japan doesn't have a lot of people disappointed in society and wanting things to be better, and subsequently have those disappointed people putting those ideals into their writing.

I'm sorry to get so into this, I just really resent this idea of Japan being this amorphous apolitical blob comprised of people with the same opinion that all "don't care about social justice". It's a country filled with actual, real people with a vast array of political and social opinions just like anywhere else.

If that's the case, then how come the author of Love Hina is intensely concerned about how the west is censoring itself for the most mundane things, like how Netflix got rid of a Community episode for "blackface" when really one of the characters is dressed as a dark elf, and is worried that it would happen if manga gets localized in the west. The thing is, Japanese creators are scared that their creative expression will be stifled to fit the idiotic western values.