You don’t get a pass because your 13 year olds of choice are japanese and drawn characters. It’s creepy as fuck and I am judging you for it.
I have to ask how this is an unpopular take? Like even in online spaces, I see people with anime PFPs getting a lot of shit and anti-lolicon sentiment is on the rise, thankfully.
In what space would this take be unpopular in any way?
Join here if you want to fight your personal war:
I’m not clicking that.
Stand with us now to end child sexual exploitation everywhere.
It’s safe.
Appreciated. I should have just looked the ecpat up tbh but the amount of creeps in this commrnts section really had me assume the worst.
Apologies for my initial assumption. Ecpat is a very worthy cause.
I don’t think it unpopular, it’s the most normie take ever. Anime and Hentai are just another medium for every fetish that exists and there’s some really weird stuff out there. Personally I don’t get those specific ones, but also don’t see it as harming anyone, and also that it doesn’t “activate” the same part of the brain.
No, I’m calling this out.
We have a disagreement in another community to which you name call me and mock me having depression in response to that disagreement, and then you come here and essentially vaguepost calling me pedo adjacent because of my profile picture?
I like Osaka because she’s relatable and gives me comfort as a character that speaks to who I am, not because I think she’s attractive. I genuinely have no words to how low this is.
Your profile pic is a red flag regardless of how you try to frame it
Me liking a character from a series because she represents my experience growing up with undiagnosed inattentive ADHD: “wow, she’s literally me, it feels nice feeling seen”
Random internet strangers: “Well you see, that’s a red flag because clearly you must have an attraction to children and there can be no other reason why you like this character. I didn’t make this weird at all!”
Want an actually hot take? There’s nothing wrong about being a pedophile.
No one can choose to be or not to be a pedophile, it works same as other attractions in this regard. Most pedophiles do not abuse children in any capacity, being fully aware it’s bad and harmful. So the OP’s argument is not really essential to debate - merely being a pedophile doesn’t mean anything anyway.
There are some issues with posting sexually explicit drawings of underage characters in uncontrolled online environments (children should not face such forms of sexualization), but merely having an anime child avatar isn’t it.
If you want to learn more about what pedophilia is & isn’t, refer to Wikipedia and academic literature instead of panicking media landscape.
Fucking stupid. Swap pedophile with any other heinous crime, you wouldn’t feel the same.
“There’s nothing wrong about being a murderer/rapist”.
At least manslaughter can have extenuating circumstances, the rest are abhorant and should be treated as such.
I’m quite certain you didn’t read my comment first, and knee-jerked on the word “pedophile”, which commonly only holds one association.
Pedophile is not the same as child molester, and people wrongfully equate these two words based on false media narrative that has nothing to do either with scientific consensus or basic reality.
Child abuse is a crime, and should be persecuted. Pedophilia is an inherent trait that may or may not result in child abuse. Pedophiles are people, and they are able to comprehend the horrors their actions may cause (look into anti-contact pedophiles) or, if not that, then the legal consequences of their actions. If a given pedophile crosses the line, they should land in jail. But we cannot preemptively persecute people who did nothing wrong and happened to be born with something they can control.
Psychopathy is an inherent trait that may or may not result in a serial killer.
Nah dawg, I think you’re 100% wrong on this one.
Psychopathy is characterized by impaired empathy and resistance to external influence, pedophilia is not. It is a common perception that pedophilia just turns a person into an animal preying on children, but it has nothing to do with scientific consensus on the matter.
Biologically, pedophilia is no different than any other sexuality. You wouldn’t fuck a drunk woman in the club, no matter how hot she is, because you know in this condition she’s incapable of giving valid conscious consent. Similarly, most pedophiles would not fuck kids because they know children in any condition cannot give it, either.
Association of pedophilia and preying on children is not only wrong, but also harmful. It contributes to stigmatization of pedophilia, and thereby makes it harder for people with pedophilic disorder (i.e. those particular pedophiles who are at risk of abusing a child, or experiencing mental health issues and distress due to pedophilia) to seek professional help, because they are afraid to be outed to their community. Left untreated, pedophilic disorder in particular can lead to child sexual abuse, suicide, substance abuse, and a plethora of other negative consequences. On a personal note, this is the primary reason I advocate for all of this - academic literature suggests that increased understanding of pedophilia in society may help reduce the incidence of child sexual abuse, not increase it. This is crucial to understand if we want to actually protect children instead of catering to political interests framed as such.
(Pedophilic disorder is a clinical term you’ll find in ICD-11 globally, and in various national systems like DSM-V. It is a current consensus that pedophilia itself is not a disorder, but a variation of human sexuality, so current editions of medical classifications do not include pedophilia itself)
And yes, most psychopaths are, in fact, not serial killers, either. But the effect of stigmatization there is significantly lower, because psychopaths are typically less sensitive to it and less inclined to seek help by themselves in the first place. Still, if we want to develop as a society, we need to resort to evidence-based policies and perceptions around this matter as well.
Defending your projection? Someone needs to search this person’s hard drive.
On it, you’ll find an assortment of scientific papers, academic books and various educational materials on my major, biology, as well as adjacent fields like medicine and psychology.
These things could make you smarter, if you could read. Too bad. Still, you can play World of Warcraft, I guess, if you don’t read the quests.
But… But you don’t understand! That mostly naked 12 year old looking girl who behaves like a young, spoiled immature brat is really the oldest, most powerful… Uh… Demon or something from the… Uh… Whatever hell circles.
Or was it a 12,000 year old dragon who looks like a little girl and gets stalked by a middle aged man? No wait, that was Fire Emblem.
Oh by the way; this is also why I’m uncomfortable with Midna. Yes I know what her proper appearance is supposed to be. But until then she looks like a weird little girl in oddly revealing skin tight clothes.
I wish there was a block anime feature to Lemmy
It’s super easy…
I filter what I can, but it ain’t 100%
I almost never see anime with my filters. Most anime posts are from anime comms or anime servers instead of random
it really isn’t, or if it is it isn’t intuitive and I would love to learn. (can I please stop seeing the idiots that think AI will just go away in a few years)
can I please stop seeing the idiots that think AI will just go away
aw, someone yucking your AI slop yummy?
Aren’t you the guy that defends pedophilia?
no, mostly just tired of the wishful thinking that it will vanish / be regulated out if existence, I won’t deny I think LLMs can be helpful but are also extremely harmful to the internet.
well, good news: AI is going to go away. It’s bubble is going to pop, it’s going to take out a huge chunk of the economy, it’s foolish, single purpose infrastructure will go down as one of the stupidest investments of human civilization, and it’ll be a punchline for generations like tulip futures and the segway changing humanity.
edit: go back to reddit ffs, they love ai garbage
I don’t give a shit about the companies, the models aren’t going away.
the models aren’t going away.
sure bud.
that’s like saying: z80 microprocessors might go away but the software will stick around.
no, there will be better, newer things created. your models are LLMs. hardly worthy of your adoration
You are responsible for your feed. That means you need to actively block what you don’t want to see. You can block on 3 levels. Block the Author, Community, or Instance. It’s very effective. Start wide, then go narrow. After a few weeks of scrolling and blocking, now I don’t see any politics and I engage with posts I care about. Sure, there’ll be random comments still I encounter trying to bring that stuff into the discussion, but more and more time now passes between having to block individual people.
One thing I agree it is harder to do for are general communities like this one since there are no word filters. But again that’s a risk you take allowing general communities in your feed.
Maybe it depends on what client you use, but on Mlem it’s very easy.
There is a lot of anime that creeps me out.
There’s some good stuff out there, but Jesus Christ is there a large pile of problematic anime.
The majority of shows I actually enjoy either ignore that shit entirely or have the author’s self-insert moment of having a character go, “Now that’s fucked up” to any such things. The most recent one I saw was Spy x Family, the one character is madly in love with his sister. The child in the wildly dysfunctional family takes one look at the situation and in her hilariously understated and dry way just proclaims, “Yuck.” Mind, this is after the object of his affection beats him to a bloody pulp because stop that shit.
Why have the trait? Because there are funny situations that can come from it, especially if you’re willing to make the character almost entirely unlikeable. Which this show does.
I’m sorry, but imo it’s still not funny. To me, this would be like your show having a rape attempt and another character going “omg eww lol”. Like. Doing it isn’t funny, pointing it out isn’t funny, subverting it isn’t funny, conspicuously mentioning how you’re not doing it isn’t funny. It’s just disgusting.
I take your point, but the example I provided and the example you provided is a comparison between apples and battleships. As well, in my personal opinion the example I provided is merely (incredibly, wildly) distasteful while the example you provided is an actual violent crime. There’s an order of magnitude of difference between the two, and I also wouldn’t watch a show that attempts to minimize rape. Let’s not conflate extremely questionable kinks with actual violence and crimes. Adults of consenting age working out their differences in a way that makes an observer either laugh or roll their eyes is a very different scenario from criminal sexual assault.
Its like the large pile of racist old cartoons you never see because they don’t run them anymore.
Sure, except we haven’t reached the stage of culturally condemming and not running the creepy anime shows yet and they’re still really popular.
You are free to think weebs are wierd but it is cunterproductive to water down the term pedophile to include people who like anime with school aged characters.
I think media that is creepy, wierd or gross need to be allowed to exist. It is important to be able to explore topics that make people uncomfortabe and I think that freedom necessitates the tolerance of works whose artistic merit is unclear as long as they don’t cause direct harm.
Anime doesn’t depict the sexualisation of minors as a bad thing. It normalises, relishes, and straight up comodifies it.
The normalization of sexualized children is harmful.
It would probably be for the best if pedophiles and child sexual abusers weren’t considered the exact same by the general public considering one harms people and the other appears to be a mental disorder (or maybe just a sexuality), but that won’t happen for a long time if ever.
Bruh some of us like the characterization, and have arrived to liking that character because were fans of the anime.
I like Mikoto Misaka from A certain scientific railgun because she is a bad ass. If she was real I’d give her a fist bump and go about my day.
You might have missed the title of this post somehow?
The people with anime school girl avatars and/or the people who gush over how hot/sexy/fuckable the overly sexualised children are in whatever anime/manga, are who I’m calling out.
I worry about your social circle that you think this is unpopular.
Based opinion
Idgaf if the character you’re drooling over is canonically X, Y or Z; if they have been drawn like a child then the artist drawing them has done so intentionally (two points if you can guess why they draw characters like that)
If your argument was true, then GTA or other violent games should cause mass shootings and lots of killings. They don’t, because they in principle work the same as cultural works. But they don’t. Now you’re gonna go into an ad hoc argument filled up with fallacies, because what you’re saying is just simply false.
He’s not making a causal argument that the media causes something to happen. Just that someone who creates media has a specific intent when they do it. They’re not the same thing.
Your argument is fundamentally flawed because you’re discussing the media causing something, and the comment above is discussing media made for something. I don’t think anyone is making the claim sexualizing (things that appear to be) children in anime is causing people to have sexual relations with children. People are saying that sexualizing children in anime is done specifically to appeal to a subset of people that we should not be making media for.
No, because the problem is again that only if something causes real and verifiable harm, it can be considered bad, but as I exposed, that content doesn’t cause any harm at all and it can even avoid harm to be done because of the fact that they’ll release these impulses into/towards something safer and harmless.
If your only argument is moral repulsion or mere distaste, then your position is invalid by nature.
Normalizing it does cause harm. It makes them think their behavior is more acceptable than it is.
I feel like the normalization is a net negative, but not something grotesque. Obviously younger characters are necessary for specific narratives. It also allows for specific people (several standard deviations outside of normal) to feel comfortable with ever-more misanthropic fantasies.
But hey, so does AI, so…
Douses the internet in gasoline and lights a cigar
Yeah, AI is when everything goes into shit, because it’s trained with pictures and videos of real children. That’s fucked up.
Also it enable abusers to harass people online with deepfakes.
Adult curves are difficult. Same reason high fashion models all are shaped like boards.
I literally run a Mastodon server specifically for non-toxic English-first anime/etc fans and I understand where you’re coming from. I created the community for a lot of the same reasons
That said, you are projecting an extreme puritanical Western philosophy onto a culture that is dramatically different for deeply ingrained cultural reasons.
Teenage stories are prevalent because of the concept “seishun” (springtime of youth). Japanese culture is extremely rigid and conformist, and as a consequence highschool is viewed as the time in life where you have the most freedom to try new things, express yourself, and discover your passions. Watching teens experience their first love, for example, is a cathartic release for people who don’t have the freedom to make drastic changes to their identity anymore. It is a depiction of someone discovering a new identity, and embracing change.
“Kawaii” (cute) culture has deep roots in Shinto spiritualism. For a large part of Japanese history, due to mortality rates among children below the age of 7, children were literally considered not fully human until they reached a certain age. They were “close to the spirits” because they might be reclaimed by the spirit world at any time. This, along with some other tidbits, led to the trope where a spiritual being regresses to look childlike when they lose their spiritual power. It is “closer to the spirit realm”. And because there are many stories about being careful not to malign spirits, this became a reverence for childlike things.
Yes, especially among westerners, the are a lot of people with transgressive tendencies who gravitate towards the medium because it’s an easy mask for their predilections. But you would do well to more about the history of the culture and medium you’re attacking.
Because the way you present your position right now just makes you look like an ignorant westerner who didn’t bother to ask “why” before painting an entire culture with a single brush.
EDIT: Wanted to make sure I call out that there is plenty of anime with seriously problematic content that I refuse to watch, no matter how good the story is, because I won’t give tacit approval to the bad parts. Mushukou Tensei, No Game No Life, and many others fall in this category. But the stuff in Re:Zero, for example, needs to be viewed through the Japanese cultural lens where youthfulness is an ideal, and a mature character with the ability to manipulate their appearance at will naturally picks a young, petite body. The disparity between that characters childlike physical appearance and overtly adult attire and vile behavior is literally the point of the character.
I hear this and sympathize.
…But. Honestly? It’s not just western fans that are the problem. A few anime shows I researched seem to use underage sex appeal (or other problematic depictions, like toxic relationships) to draw attention, to make money.
At some point that’s not a cultural difference or misunderstanding; it’s pandering. The showrunners know what they’re doing. I’d argue that is exploitation of Japanese culture.
And even if they’re rejected by fans like you, these problematic shows seem to be immensely popular.
And american tv shows don’t sexualize teenagers constantly?
every type of media panders to it’s fans… that’s the entire point.
and you are welcome to not watch if if that isn’t what you enjoy.
I have no doubt media you consume can be criticized as problematic from various POV that aren’t your own. And yet, you still consume it.
This is classic ‘it’s cringe when you do it/enjoy it, but based when I do it’
A couple of things:
-
Trashy western sex appeal (or tacticool fetish, drug glorification, or whatever) is a fair point. That’s a problem. Some of those trashy western shows are popular, too.
-
But I don’t buy whataboutism. It doesn’t make either thing okay.
-
Some popular anime really takes things to an… extreme.
-
And even outside the notorious anime, I kept finding problematic tropes when I tried to get into anime, like these women written in a way that got me to squirm in my seat and turn off my TV. When I sample critically acclaimed western TV/animation, this is not such an issue; I don’t mean to make a comparison, but just to convey that anime sampling made me uncharacteristically uncomfortable.
My point is that you, a westerner, being comfortable with Western media but uncomfortable with Japanese media, is not as much indicative of the character of the content as it is indicative of the things that have been normalized for you vs the things that have been normalized for others.
That’s the thing you’re missing: every culture has problematic content, every culture gets desensitized to their own problematic stuff but not others’, and every culture has complex reasons why those things developed there.
I promise you: people around the world squirm at your favorite media just as much as you squirm at theirs, because your cultural history, standards, Overton Window, and exposure to media are significantly different.
You have been describing your subjective experiences as if they provide objective facts about the content. It is hard to step back, recognize your own cultural biases, and remove them before assessing both other cultures’ media and your own culture’s.
Like, imagine an American saying “I’ve sampled a lot of American food and almost never find it disgusting. But when I sample food from other countries I frequently find things I don’t like.” Wouldn’t you be like “yeah? And? Obviously that’s because you grew up with American food”
Ah yes of course, your romantic depictions of children are ok because they’re nuanced and cultural and any adults who call it weird just aren’t cultured enough to appreciate all that n
uaonce.
-
Adults with anime school girl avatars
Some of them, I’m sure. Some people I think just have a favorite character or look like them or relate to them somehow. I live in Japan and it’s not uncommon for adults to have a character for an existing anime or even something drawn for them in that style based on their own appearance (men and women, old and young) in LINE (messaging app) or whatnot.
As for the rest (i.e. being actually attracted to or overly-obsessed with), yeah, that’s getting in to creep/pedo territory.
Exactly, as someone called out in this post: I really just like Osage-chan. I find her super relatable and fun.
That said its not ok to be weird and have “waifus” that are not age appropriate for you.
If you watch anime as an adult you have to grow up and recognize you are watching media targeted for kids and teenagers. You can’t engage with it like you would if you were still that age.
If I were to watch Lucky Star as a teenager, I might have a crush on some of the characters. But as an adult I can recognize the best girl is their teacher Nanako. 🤟
Sturgeon’s Law states that 90% of everything is shit, and this absolutely applies to anime. The worst of the worst can be disgusting as hell, and I hate how often minors are sexualized.
That said, the good stuff is good! I can name a handful of high school romance anime/manga I’ve really enjoyed (Kaguya-sama: Love is War, Horimiya, You and I are Polar Opposites), and what these series have in common is that they’re about romance, not sex. The characters aren’t presented as sex objects for the audience to lust over, they’re characters in a coming-of-age story, and the stories I just named are all kept wholesome and PG-13. I would honestly recommend watching these just to see if they change your opinion at all.
High school settings are popular because that’s often the most pivotal turning point in a person’s life - ideal for a coming-of-age story. For many people that’s often when they had their most active social lives, and for a writer it’s a pretty easy shortcut to giving the cast a reason to interact with each other.
And honestly, I think a large part of it also has to do with nostalgia for the audience. I’m sure you’ve heard the term ‘loneliness epidemic’ used a lot these days, high school settings can be appealing to those who lack much of a social circle today and maybe feel like their lives have all been downhill since then.
I don’t doubt for a minute that a good number of people with waifu avatars probably want to fuck the anime schoolgirl. But I think that there are a lot more people who just wish they could be the anime schoolgirl.
Anime about the dating lives of school kids is not something that interests me. Romance as a genre is not something I’m interested in, and as an adult, the lives of teenagers also aren’t interesting to me. I’d rather watch sports than teenagers kissing, and I hate watching sports.
If you (general) peaked in high school and like anime school girl shit because it reminds you of your ‘glory days’, lmao, ngl that’s just sad.
Adults wanting to be/be seen online as anime school girls are on par with the adults who have no qualms with sharing online that they want to fuck anime school girls. You’re both creeps imo.
Hopefully none of you work with kids/teenagers.
I think much of your post and position are fairly reasonable and common positions, particularly here on the fediverse, but I do kinda think you lost the plot here. Just cause you dont see the appeal of romance doesnt no one else does, and that the only reason someone would watch a romantic coming of age story is because they wanna fuck kids 😅
I like romance. I like seeing the themes of romance across a lot of people. Though generally queer romance, as it makes me happy to see stories of queer love and it feels like I have more cultural connection to the way romance looks in queer stories, regardless of pairing.
Romance frequently gets written as young people, because its a time of discovery and that heightens the tension as the characters are learning to navigate things together.
I didnt peak in highschool, I was going through a mental health crisis, I barely even got to experience highschool honestly. I just like seeing romance in media. The highschool ones usually aren’t quite as good though, especially in anime and manga- they tend to be fairly samey and rely on tropes, and as a result end up with underdeveloped characters. Not always though, sometimes they’re really beautifully written :)
I can understand by being grossed out by depictions of young people experiencing intimate things. But like, there are stories about people in all stages of life 😅 a coming of age story is a familiar structure because its a big experience that really shapes you as a human. And romance is a fairly core human experience for most folks too (though certainly not all). I think you just dont get the point, and thats okay but not everyone who finds joy or sees meaning in that kinda story is a wannabe child fucker
Why is my saying I dislike the romance and teen genres something people are interpreting as me stating blanket rules on what others are supposed to like?
I was sharing my dislike for the genres because I was replying to a comment reccomending shows from them to me to watch.
You can like whatever media you like, people will have opinions about it and judge you for it, just like people do with everything, and that is normal. You can like things other people have negative opinions about, it is allowed.
You like sexy children in anime and I don’t, good for you. I am judging you and think you’re gross, but you are still fully capable of continuing to enjoy your media despite this. See how it works?
You misunderstand- I do not think that your judgement means I can’t like something. I think your judgement is ill-founded and dependent on assumptions that you have as a product of not relating or enjoying the things you’re judging, and I’m passing judgment on it exactly in the way you’re passing judgment on what I’m saying. Only I think my judgement is actually well founded, and I think that’s reflected by the fact that no one but you disagreed with or disliked my comment, where many people have otherwise agreed with you.
You like sexy children in anime and I don’t, good for you
That’s a transparently bad faith straw man, and you look like a moron for saying it as though its anything less than a transparently bad faith straw man
I’m ace. I don’t generally find people sexually attractive lol. Not really a thing that happens for me.
You (GENERAL YOU) like sexy children in anime and I don’t, good for you (GENERAL YOU)
Hopefully this clarifies the situation.
I don’t know that I believe thats an honest reframing but frankly it doesn’t matter. A ‘general you’ still implies it’s true for me among others.
If its not true for me, maybe, just maybe, theres a way of relating to this you just don’t understand, and not everyone who enjoys romantic coming of age stories is a horrible person who wants to fuck children. Just maybe.
The fact that you just told someone who likes coming of age romance stories that they “are allowed to like sexy children” is telling on yourself. It means you cannot look at teenagers who are in love without getting aroused.
Your comments all over these threads make it very obvious that you are a self-hating pedo trying desperately to convince everyone, including yourself, that you aren’t one.
Most people don’t look at teenagers holding hands or confessing that they’re in love and think “wow look at those sexy teenagers”.
You have a genuine problem.
Get help.
(I’m ace, which personally I think makes it way funnier that he feels that’s a biting criticism lol)
Oh wow that really does make this even funnier holy shit 😂
Please see my comment here for information that directly responds to elements of this comment: https://piefed.social/comment/13300209
Sorry for enjoying some entertaining comedies I guess. If you just don’t enjoy romcoms at all then fair enough I guess, taste is subjective, but I think you’re just projecting too much outrage that other people enjoy things. There’s truly nothing wrong with any of the shows I mentioned, and even if they’re not to your taste I think you could at least get a better idea of why someone else might like it.
