Mod Post: Off-Topic Tuesday

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In the comments to these weekly posts (and only these posts), it's your chance to go as off topic as you like.

Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.

The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.

Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.

It's been suggested that, if discussing spoilers for recent media events, it might be advisable to consider using the rot13 method to prevent other members seeing spoilers in passing.

The world situation is the world situation. If you're following the news, you know it as much as I do, if you're not, then there are better sources than me.

It appears that a deal has been offered to the Writer's Guild which the WGA seems enthusiastic about, and will recommend to their membership. The strike may be over soon, though the actors are still out and WGA sill support them.

The boss of Spotify has said he has no plans to ban all AI music from the site, though he will if it is an unauthorised copy of existing performers voices. Which leaves all sorts of questions open, of course.

Veteran actor David McCallum has died, aged 90. Known to multiple generations as Russian agent Ilya Kuryakin in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", the mysterious agent fighting the chaotic forces of Time as Steel in "Sapphire & Steel", or as Medical Examiner Donald "Ducky" Mallard on NCIS, as well as voicing (the not-exactly sublte nod to a Time Lord role he never played) Professor Paradox on "Ben 10" amongst other voice roles.

And speaking of Time Lords, a new trailer dropped for the 60th Anniversary specials, and Neil Patrick Harris' role has been confirmed as gur Gblznxre (Gurl'ir qebccrq gur "Pryrfgvny" ovg cbffvoyl nf vg unf hasbeghangr enpvfg pbaabgngvbaf.

The Osiris-Rex spacecraft has suuccessfully returned nine ounces of material from the Bennu asteroid to Earth! I'm still not sure naming your spacecraft after the god of the dead is exactly encouraging for those who remember "The Andromeda Strain", but it's an amazing achievment.

Comments

[leahandillyana]

No sure what to say. I feel very tired all the time and work is becoming more and more difficult and slow for me. Especially Thursday and Friday were macabre. Resting doesn’t help at all. I may share some of my opinions and observations unrelated to any current events.
Western readers often refuse to engage with Japanese works due to them having commonly the tropes of ‘bury your gays’, ‘gay villain’ and ‘queerbaiting’ (though I prefer to refer to most instances as queer subtext, but it seems that Western fandoms do not differentiate between the two). I do not have problems with those tropes, but I think it may be due to the differences of how they are employed in Japanese versus American popculture:
-Japanese works tend to be interested in what makes the villain villainous, with the baddies being at least somebody you’d want to understand and maybe wish that they turned out different in different circumstances, and often somebody you’d obsess and lust over, somebody the creators want you to obsess and lust over to sell more merch. In popular culture I’ve seen this approach to baddies only in She-Ra reboot and Nimona, both by the same creator.
-Japanese works often has the themes of tragedy. For ‘bury your gays’ trope, it means that while queer characters die, a lot of non-queer characters die to. Clearest cases are Rose of Versailles, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Black Butler or Madoka Magica. Furthermore, queer deaths tend to be portrayed as tragedies and the characters are mourned if time limits allows the story to mourn them. This from my experiences is rare in American popculture. There’s definitely some subtext of homophobia with the common presence of the trope, but it’s a different flavour of implied homophobia than in Western cases.
-Finally, the queerbaiting/subtext. I think the Japanese cases are VERY different from what is considedred queerbaiting in the West. I see most cases as the creators WANTING the characters to be perceived as gay and attracted to each other, but saying it outright would have hurt the series due to homophobia on society’s part rather than the author’s. What’s more, Japanese culture is a very indirect one, with a lot of meaning being conveyed between the words in general, so in this context queer subtext coexists alongside a lot of other subtextual meanings, making it much less singled out. Once again, it’s a different flavour of implied homophobia than similar trope in the West.
A good example of a series that has all three tropes is Seraph of the End. It’s not a good series, at best it’s a cliche-riddled shounen with good art, but it’s also one of the queerest non-BL/GL manga series I’ve read. If you read it, you can get a good understanding of how different and more respectful to the subject matter those tropes read in Japanese fiction.
I’ve asked my international leftist commrades what they think about book bans like the ones happening right now in the USA, and I was actually provided with legitimate left wing positions that support book bans. On the other hand, I also learned that opposing book bans is a pretty common far right position. That said, the commrades I talked with do not live in the USA, and most are living in Europe, where the local context is that far right texts are often banned and logically far right groups want to have them unbanned. Your point of view depends on where you sit, it seems.
Said commrades also tend to often be... ugh. I know that it's a rhetorical figure, but a colleague from a queer group saying "I wish all gay artists and writers were hanged publicly" in response to her perception of there being much more m/m art than f/f art is crossing the line by a long way, don't you think? I am often uncomfortable with the group but say nothing because I'm self-conscious of my autism and how often makes me misinterpret social cues, as well as various priviledges in comparison to my commrades, but holy shit, how can you say it and think you are the good guy here. Holy shit.
In happier news, Magia Record is currently having a crossover with Lycoris Recoil, a recent girls with guns (and a caffe) anime with very strong yuri subtext. It's a good series when you like those things, and only when. I'm grinding to earn enough currency to get both main characters. I already have Takina, and she is among the best characters in the game and my best dark character. Everything about this crossover is perfect.

[onsokumaru]

The same far right people are ok for banning other kind of books, like anything with homosexuality.
I see 3 categories of books bans, two of them being mostly enforced by the left, and one by the right.

A) Content that is directly advocating violence and persecution, like Mein Kampf or radical religious stuff. For understandable reasons, they don't fall under the protection of free speech in several countries.
B) Content with racist or homophobic stereotypes, often product of their time, like Tintin au Congo or Jungle Taitei. It's often the left too that is pro-ban here.
C) Content that could "corrupt" our precious children. Books with LGBT content, positive descriptions of wizardy, blasphemy or nudity. It's mostly the right that is pro-ban although in some cases the left may enforce it too.

Personnaly, I kinda agree with the "A" category. Being french and "old school" universalist left, I guess I'm a product of my time and my environment. But I have some doubts. Banning this kind of crap worked before the internet, but now it's probably very easy to find online, and it can benefit from a "the books THEY don't want you to read" propaganda. Still, the fact they are banned still makes it harder to make money out of it, or at least so I hope.

I'm definitely against the "B" kind of ban, as well as against any kind of censorship or modification. If there is problematic content, the books should be published with notes giving context and explaining why it's bad.
Anyway I find hypocritical to ban any of those books before banning the major religious books, which, depending how one interprets them, may fall into the "A" category. (I heard there is an american who, as a protest againts the right banning some books, managed to remove the Bible from school library because of its violent and pornographic content. Unfortunately, the ban was undone, but I hope people will keep trying.)

People who want to enforce the "C" ban can eat my ass. With the expection of reasonable age restrictions for explicit violent or sexual content. Like, don't put Invincible or Oglaf in an elementary school library, obviously.

[leahandillyana]

Thank you for the long reply :)