Your statement is correct, but I think people are taking it as an implication that all anime sexualizes kids, which is false. There's lots of really great anime out there.
I mean a lot of it does, there's a reason it's part of the stigma against anime
Even some shows that I otherwise really like have an uncomfortable amount of sexualization of minors. A Certain Scientific Railgun, Steins;Gate, Gate, Gurren Lagann, to name a few
I'm talking specifically about the scene where Okarin grope Luka. It's one scene, he's rightfully called out for being a dickhead by everyone, but it's still uncomfortable to watch
I mean, I wouldn’t call that sexualization, it’s intentionally framed to make you uncomfortable (you’re playing as Okabe in the VN after all).
And still, it’s two scenes with 16-year olds, pretty sure most western teen dramas do far worse. The stigma is because of stuff like SAO or Code Geass where they literally can’t let two episodes pass without a butt in your face.
Well I know about Japanese culture with the "perverted wind" blowing up skirts, people peeking under skirts and the crotch shots when kicking someone in the face and getting a bloody nose and stuff. I know about that kind of pervertedness but that seems fairly harmless to me. I've seen some Pokémon episodes mentioned which weren't released in the west, and even then I wouldn't deem it as problematic.
So I am thinking either I'm really naive, which I will say I certainly am, or I am missing some things. Most people I know don't even know what anime is, and if they do, they think of Pokémon and Sailor Moon. But not much else. So I guess most of this news has passed me by.
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Oh and I've seen none of the anime you mentioned so maybe that is the issue. I'm mainly focussed on older anime. But I have just now watched that scene from Steins;Gate and I totally get what you mean if you are talking about that. That is so incredibly uncomfortable and unnecessary to be in there. Graphically I think the show looks nice and I feel like I want to watch this some more if I could have not seen this scene.
While most anime doesn't sexualize minors, a lot of it does, and unfortunately what comes to a lot of people's minds when we talk about anime is either stuff like Naruto and DBZ where two guys shout at each other until someone wins, or stuff like Kill La Kill where a female character's power level is seemingly determined by how small their clothes are. Anime would have a much better reputation if shows like ACCA and Mushishi were the ones everyone knew about.
I feel like I want to watch this some more if I could have not seen this scene.
To be fair, that is the only questionable scene in the show. I highly recommend watching it, I'd hate for your only experience of Steins;Gate being the worst scene in it
Well in Pokémon a character asks to suck Misty’s tits, it’s an anime trope for old people to be pervs and you come across a few in the series. There’s the beach episode and you get a lot of shots that pan from her ass
In Yu-gi-oh you get the “love slave” comment…along with yugi’s grandfather being a perv. Mai also hits on yugi a ton which either she’s a kid who they draw with huge tits and a really short skirt or she’s an adult trying to hit on a 14 year old
Inuyasha has Kagome bathing naked a few times
No Game No Life has not just loli but hinting at incest a bunch. But the main character (kid) is obsessed with trying to spy on the girls while they bathe. If you get the light novel then the opening pages are straight up loli hentai
Weirdly enough, I just learned in my Developmental Psychology class recently that there's a very surprising amount of sex between old people going on in nursing homes. Some of the students who'd actually worked in nursing homes before even confirmed it. So the trope may not be as unfounded as we might think.
Not saying old people hitting on kids is okay. It's freaking weird and gross. Just stating an interesting fact.
Uhh... no? Despite the fact that a lot of anime they dubbed was shounen, so for teens (but obviously they wouldn't know because cartoons are only kid stuff in their head), if they only censored sexualization of minors, or sexualization at all, people would be much, much less mad.
They censored every small mention of blood and death and most japanese cultural references, changed 90% of the names and soundtrack, straight-up skipped episodes and oversimplified dialogues dumbing down every message the series might've tried to convey. That's criminal. Yu-Gi-Oh is literally a different series outside of Japan. I've seen series/games where the only censorship is on sexualization, and the backlash is nowhere nearly that bad.
Not to mention they also had horrible practices towards voice actors and licensors, so really, there's no reason not to hate those pieces of shit.
Ah yes, more denaturalization of the original product = higher quality. Wonder why they didn’t have Captain Europe when localizing Marvel movies.
And then people wonder why anime dubs have a bad reputation when the biggest companies producing them were literally in a race for who could fuck more shit up.
And, in most cases, they suck. The Inside Out ones I’ve seen are acceptable because they’re minimal and, as they say, "They learned that some of their content wouldn’t make sense in other countries". But 4Kids didn’t do that. They literally turned Japanese anime for teens into American cartoons for kids.
Removing any hint of a deep message in everything and making every series a travesty is nowhere nearly comparable to what Pixar, or other modern companies did. Pixar altered things to get the same message across, 4Kids did it to remove any, and change it with one of their dumb jokes (which, albeit often funny, were slammed in serious situations and killed the mood of everything. Make an original series if you want to do that).