Tag: Twitter

Why ‘Sailor Moon’ Is Not Feminist

The hot take to end all hot takes.

I have sometimes argued that Sailor Moon fans give Tuxedo Mask a bad rap, treating the character as if he is utterly useless when he in fact makes an important contribution to the Sailor Moon saga, albeit in a role that becomes more peripheral as the story advances. Because of my unorthodox view of this subject, I recently made a tongue-in-cheek comment on Twitter. Then, to my surprise, all hell broke loose—and I’m not sure that’s a metaphor because some of my interlocutors act as if they’re demon-possessed. This is not the tweet I would have selected to go viral, but beggars can’t be choosers:


To give some context, @t_unmasked is an account dedicated to Sailor Moon trivia. It revealed that an old Sailor Moon video game had two modes, hard and easy, which it facetiously listed as “boy” and “girl.” It’s not clear what joke the game’s designers were trying to make; possibly, and indeed most likely, they were referring to the fact that, in the Sailor Moon universe, girls have the most powerful magical weapons. But another possibility, assumed by @t_unmasked and most of her readers, is that the designers were implying that girls are bad at video games.

My cheeky comment was supposed to point out that, contrary to the beliefs of many of the franchise’s American fans, such a joke would fit right in with Sailor Moon’s sense of humor, as I’ll explain below. But nobody understood what I meant, and @t_unmasked’s followers quickly dogpiled me, ranting and raving like a pack of banshees.

I was flabbergasted by this response because I thought what I said was obvious, being right there in the show. But @t_unmasked, to my surprise, went so far as to claim my comment was “factually incorrect,” as if empirical science had refuted my opinion about a Japanese funnybook.

And that was the nice, civil response. Most of the responses I got were more along the lines of, “I HATE YOU YOU BASTARD YOUR MARRIAGE ISN’T REAL YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ALONE JUST SAY YOU HATE GIRLS I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YUUUOOOOO!!!1”

I started this blog because I noticed that discussions of magical girls were, let us say, philosophically monolithic, so I thought a fresh perspective was warranted. Since I write in a niche genre and am bad at SEO, I get few interactions. Doing my own little thing in my own little corner, I sometimes forget that a lot of you are crazy.

Continue reading “Why ‘Sailor Moon’ Is Not Feminist”

‘KissAnime’ Shuts Its Doors

The big news in weebdom is the complete shutdown of KissAnime and KissManga, two hugely popular pirate sites that fans of manga and anime have relied on to get content for free. This follows on the heels of Japan tightening its copyright laws.

Given the enormous popularity of these sites, this will have repercussions that remain to be seen.

American voice actors have been doing a lot to make themselves obnoxious lately, so they took this as another chance to show their lack of basic P.R. skills: Several took to Twitter (the internet’s home of celebrities behaving moronically) to rub salt in the wound and gloat over the fans who could no longer get their content from these sites. Of those I’ve seen, the most notable of these gloats is this one:

That’s from Alex Moore, who has done English dubs for Fire Force and Fairy Tail. To her credit, she later apologized for some of her language. Still, I think her comment is worth noting because she brings up one of the most compelling reasons to turn away from official translations and toward pirate sites and fansubs. I’ll quote it in case the tweet goes away and the image accompanying it disappears:

“But [PC culture/feminism/politics] of dubs ruins the show!”

No it doesn’t, you’re just an asshole. How many times have you heard someone yell “YOLO!” or “YEET!” Or mention a meme in a localization? It’s done to make it accessible and relevant, not be transliteral. (BTW, next liberal feminist Witch coven meeting is at BN’s.)

Notice what she’s doing here: People complain about messages that are not in the original material being wedged into that material, and her response is, first, that you’re an asshole, apparently because you disagree with her ideologically. This is a standard tactic of the Woke cult—either acquiesce to them on every last little jot and tittle or you lose your humanity card.

Second, she argues that trendy words should be wedged ham-fistedly into translations to be “relevant” and then, laughably, gives outdated examples: No one says “YOLO” anymore (thank goodness), and “yeet” is on its way out. Memes, generally, go stale within a few weeks after they appear. That’s why you shouldn’t screw around with translations this way: Because you’re dating your material, and chances are, you don’t know what the kids think is hep and happening anyway, even if you think you do.

Since she likes internet lingo so much, I’ll sum it up this way: What she writes here is Boomer-tier cringe.

She inadvertently makes the best case for piracy I’ve ever seen: “Yes, we are going to be unfaithful in our translations, and you’re going to like it, you asshole!”

To give an idea, of what she thinks is making a show “accessible” and “relevant,” this is the most infamous of altered translations, from a show called Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid:

Comparison of dub and sub of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid

You can see that the dub has nothing to recommend it over the sub; it is not more comprehensible, not more “relevant” in its lingo. It is merely an example of someone thrusting a political agenda into a show that has nothing to do with it, simply because she can.

I’ve previously encountered this before: I have a review expressing my suspicions that VIZ inserted identity politics into Sailor Moon R: The Movie. I have since had confirmed that my suspicions were correct—but of course I knew I was correct to begin with because, unlike VIZ (and most of Sailor Moon’s Western feminist fanbase), I can grasp the worldview in which Sailor Moon was written and recognize lines that don’t belong to it. Those lines don’t make the show more “relevant” as Miss Moore asserts; they stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.

I can’t in good conscience approve of piracy: There’s a lot of anime I want but don’t have because I can’t get it legally. Despite this being a site about magical girls, you’ll notice I don’t talk about the latest Pretty Cure series; that’s because I can’t get them. I’d love to watch Sugar Sugar Rune or the Studio Pierrot shows from the 1980s, but I can’t acquire them legally, so I go without. Asking that people purchase things legally rather than steal, and go without if they cannot purchase legally, is not normally unreasonable, especially when those things are mere entertainments—normally.

I’m not actually prepared to approve piracy. But smug voice actresses make it tempting.

A Tale of Two Genres

And why the argument is stupid.

Recently, my Twitter timeline blew up with a rancorous debate between pulp-rev and indie authors over the question of whether science fiction and fantasy are the same genre or separate ones.

We have some writers claiming that the two are distinct, and appealing to the obvious differences between books such as The Martian and Sword of Shannara for evidence. Then we have others claiming they are the same, or that science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy, and taking Star Wars for evidence.

This is another iteration of a recurring debate throughout the history of science fiction. It is, like the Plato-Aristotle debate in philosophy, a conflict that appears repeatedly in different forms. As the argument takes shape, it reveals itself to be more or less another version of the Campbellian vs. New Wave argument, between those who want their science fiction pure and rigorously scientific, and those who … well, don’t.

Continue reading “A Tale of Two Genres”

Arby’s Goes Magical Girl

(In case you don’t get it, that’s a reference to Kill la Kill.)