I don't think it is once you include anime that isn't sexually explicit in nature, but thows in a ton of unnecessary fanservice.
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The Ringer: Why do Twitter Trolls use Anime Avatars?
- Thread starter bigkrev
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Megami Magazine will take ANYTHING and turn it into a lewd poster though
(but you're right)That doesn't allow one to be lazy and put all of them under an umbrella. It's the easy way out.
Yup. There are PLENTY of people on twitter/facebook who use their real name/faces who also spout hateful shit just as much as someone with an anime avatar, if not more so.
hosannainexcelsis
Member
I think it's fair to say that many of the most avid participants in anime fan culture in both Japan and Western countries emphasize the sexually provocative in their discourse, their purchasing habits, and their derivative fan works. Still, while I understand that it can be hard, I think you have to separate what they focus on from what the anime field at large has to offer. The people who watch and enjoy anime such as Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu and Battery are perhaps not going to be as vocal online about their enjoyment, but that doesn't eradicate the continued existence of such quality anime that does not focus on selling sex.
Well, Japanese BD sales are decreasing significantly recently. That's happened across the board, and it's really been hitting anime hard lately. The continued funding of anime is relying on factors other than disc sales.
Soma isn't especially popular, at least in anime form. The Soma manga is what's really popular, and yes, the orgasmic food reactions are certainly what helped it garner people's attention. (I strongly dislike the series myself.)
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I don't entirely disagree, but I do think anime communities are sometimes, wilfully or genuinely, a bit blind to the general framing around female (and sometimes male) characters in ways that other forms of media just aren't. You'd probably not call Shirobako a "moe" show, for example, but I would say that it's female designs encourage message board fans to argue over who "best girl" is
Boston sports fans are bad people. No exceptions.
Boring white male avatars can't be stereotyped; it's morally wrong
Let's just keep it to anime avatars so we don't have to worry about pieces of shit looking like us
LyleLanley
Banned
You're not wrong.
Sparkedglory
Member
This is how I see it. Plus I've always wondered about it in the threads I see here as well, but I usually just ignore it. Like you said I'll just use whatever avatar I like.
Absolutely savage.
Holding a fish sounds like some insecure notion to spout off the worst of the worst.
It's something I've noticed more and more on twitter. Gamer gate was one thing, but nowadays it looks like nearly everyone attacking women and minorities on twitter have some little anime girl as their avi.
I start to wonder if these fucks are bots made to spit out rancid shit.
I start to wonder if these fucks are bots made to spit out rancid shit.
hosannainexcelsis
Member
Anime fans will talk about best girl/boy in just about any show!
I think the main character designs in Shirobako are mediocre, probably because the original designs came from an LN illustrator, ponkan8. I do think it's worth noting here that the animation character designer who turned those designs into animation-appropriate ones, Kanami Sekiguchi, is female.
The anti-Gamergate-heart recolored to Gamergate colors.
LordGorchnik
Member
There are plenty of assholes on the Internet who use real life pictures, pictures of sports teams, and pictures of anime, along with their favorite video game or comic book characters. Assholes are everywhere.
........That's why I have a talking corgi wearing sun-glasses and a hawaiin shirt from an anime-inspired game. Best of all worlds.
........That's why I have a talking corgi wearing sun-glasses and a hawaiin shirt from an anime-inspired game. Best of all worlds.
It's a shounen nostalgia show, so it probably gets a pass. The type of anime that is mostly implied in these discussions is your seasonal seinen anime.
I take it the author isn't really an anime fan although his reasoning is sound.
I'll expand it on it a little with my perspective, ignoring those who're using anime avatars for irony's sake (e.g. make anime great again trump rally attendees).
So NeoGAF is a pretty left-leaning board, in tune with mainstream culture. As an aggregate, we like Marvel films. We like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. We watch and follow various sports leagues. We're pro-atheism. GAF is racially and sexually inclusive, although sometimes parts of it struggle with those two topics (and this is not really unusual). GAF also doesn't like anime (outside of the AnimeGAF/cartoon subcommunities), and anime avatars are usually used as punching bags. Right-wing NeoGAF, those who aren't permed, never really rear their head. Alt-right opinions are openly mocked and ridiculed. All this is more or less cultivated/regulated by the moderation policies and the prevailing poster culture: that of a 20s-30s Western liberal urbanite (which describes much of the English-speaking internet).
So why can't the opposite be true? Anime subculture tends toward insularity (sometimes of their own volition, sometimes due to ostracism), and insularity is the fertile ground from which radical ideologies grow. It'd be difficult for, say, like-minded fascists to find each other in a place as leftist as NeoGAF, and harder still to escape persecution from moderation/the hivemind. But in an anime-centric community with a laissez faire attitude towards anything off-topic, as it were, not only can they find others who share the same opinion, but they can congregate and enjoy themselves all while fueling their radicalism in the off hours.
If you've ever boggled, like I have, at conservative image macros sporting Sonic, anime or furry iconography, this is one way of resolving that contradiction.
(Poor Girls und Panzer. It doesn't deserve to be lumped in with these crazies.)
Abstrusity
Member
There was a large subset of people that came from stormfront and the like. What was that quote? Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.
Now replace idiots with racists, even at a casual level. But I won't lie and say the foundation was never there -- I didn't go on 4chan because I was some normal kid who wanted to get his kicks on some foreign porn, I was a maladjusted kid who never stayed in one school long enough to make friends and slowly stopped bothering to be social altogether, and lo and behold, those people were just like me. They fed their angst and fear of the world into escapes like video games or anime, self-deprecating humor being the only thing they could really muster. We hated each other, we hated ourselves, we hated the things we loved, we all hate that place, but we all felt like it was the only place we actually belonged.
And that sort of thing is fertile soil for hate. What was casual racism became much less casual. What was weird became conspiratorial. The fear of being "invaded" by people who like what we like -- long after those very people pushed us out of their social spheres because we liked it -- was palpable.
For someone who was still in the thick of it, it was hard to separate fact from fiction, and harder still to separate the personal feelings for some of these things from the fear of other people enjoying them without having any of the context for why they should. Criticizing without knowing anything about it.
It didn't matter that it was irrational, because we couldn't see that it was.
It's just going to get worse, I think. Contrary to popular belief, 4chan wasn't always as bereft of mods as it is now, and even casual racism didn't generally fly in most places if a mod was around. Unlike a forum, most threads would get deleted in a day or so, giving what mods there WERE little time to catch things without a report.
The shared experiences on 4chan can never really be matched on any forum, or any news aggregation site, or image sharing site, or what-have-you. But if that's the cost of not having to watch that sort of thing happen all over again, that slow, creeping rot pervading and twisting your community, then I'll be okay with it.
It's probably more slice-of-life.
Shirobako is an 11 on the moe scale
LyleLanley
Banned
Anime is immoral. It's no coincidence that all anime fans are either sexist or racist.
I don't think the people who insult anime avatars make that distinction.
I see we're using power sprayers instead of brushes now.
That heavily depends on where you live though. Where I grew up, anime was always accepted, despite parents occasionally making fun of it.
As someone who despises most of today's vocal anime community, I think that's too cruel.
Yep, it's sad when you get all lumped together...especially when it's seinen with that.
So anime fans share a lot in common with dirty Boston fans
LyleLanley
Banned
Hey, I'm not sexist!
Subpar Spatula
Banned
God dammit.
I make the assumption that these people, these anime avatar sporting twitter trolls and neocons are by and large American, or perhaps British. I don't know what the distribution is like outside of the twittersphere. Like, what kind avatars do pro-PRC Baidu users use?
SliceSabre
Banned
Arguing over best girl(or guy) is going to happen regardless of artstyle or even the subject of the anime. Either in jest or done seriously.
It happens in more than just anime. I'm pretty sure everyone has favorite characters in more media than just anime.
Would they even sport such avatars, considering it's from Japan?
It even goes out of the realm of anime and for a long time too.
People argue over who was the better Captain (Kirk/Picard) in Star Trek for fuck's sake.
Excellent point.
MikeHattsu
Member
John Kowalski
Banned
peeps giving anime a bad name what the fuck
D
Deleted member 231381
Unconfirmed Member
I have no real problem with anime - I can enjoy my Jojo and whatnot. It's the really large subsection of the anime community that engages in moe that creeps me out; there's some really problematic objectification going on in there. Trying to avoid anyone who uses waifu unironically has served me pretty well as a rule of thumb.
We're not a monolith!
XiaNaphryz
LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
LyleLanley
Banned
I see your troll attempts are just as terrible outside the NBA threads.
My troll attempts in the NBA thread are not terrible.
Eh, like others have said, just the little girl avatars a bad name.
And, like, if you're going to appropriate and ruin something, slice of life lolis are the best case scenario. Nothing of value gets lost.
It's also dumb because there is obviously a difference between arguing over who is the best captain and who is the best male/female.
Yep. But the problem is, wherever you go, those people are there. One has probably the best chances with a small forum or just friends/people in real life.
One is about a job, the other about gender.
petran79
Banned
I agree. In the anime forums I was a member during that time, there was an equal amount of male and female members and they were more open minded to LBGT and gender equality issues, also thanks to the mods. This was even reflected in the anime and manga titles they proposed for which I had no clue. There were also bad apples but they were the minority, even though a very vocal one.
Some were also delved into western graphic novels and comics and went to their annual Comicdom events.
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