this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
181 points (100.0% liked)
anime
10890 readers
36 users here now
Welcome to c/anime on Hexbear!
A leftist general anime community for discussion and memes.
Simple rules
-
Be nice.
-
Use spoiler tags.
-
Don't sexualise underage characters, including 1000 year old loli ones.
-
Don't post hentai here. This is an anime community.
High quality threads you should definitely visit
Gigathread: Good Anime Talks, Presentations, Conventions, Panels, etc
Piracy is good and you should do more of it. Use https://9anime.to/ and https://4anime.to/ for streaming, and https://nyaa.si/ for torrents. Piracy is the only means of digital protest that audiences have to fight poor worker treatment.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
seeing this made me just break down crying. if you'd asked me yesterday what i thought of akira toriyama i would have probably said i respected him immensely, but his work didn't hold a special place in my heart. but realizing that he's gone is just devastating. such an iconic, important artist. the world is worse without him
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Japan in general still has a sexism and homophobia problem. Even huge current pieces (pun intended) like One Piece constantly follow the general trope of women being weak and lgbtqi+ being weird. So Toriyama is kinda just a product of his environment.
certainly true to an extent, i don't think he was ever malicious with his stuff and i think there are many people who are much worse on those fronts. you mentioned one piece, which includes one of the most transphobic plotlines this side of silence of the lamb, and there are plenty of other way more problematic works out there. for contemporaries, zeta gundam was 86 and is real bad about gender, and of course there's a lot of bad stuff about queer people as well
but it's important to remember that anime was seen as much more progressive than western stuff for a lot of people at the time. they had kids shows full of sympathetic queer characters and women who fought in ways the west could only dream of. sailor moon is massive and isn't much later than dragon ball, classic anime like dirty pair included kickass women and trans positivity. that's not to say there wasn't plenty of bad stuff, it's just to say he wasn't simply a product of his time. there were others at the same time doing much better on those fronts, and finding success while they were at it