Forum - View topicINTEREST: Reddit's New Pornography Rules Includes Ban of 'Fantasy' Minor Content
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kotomikun
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In real life, or live-action, that's obviously a rule that needs to be followed. And it should also be followed in anime... but when the characters are drawings, figuring out how to follow that rule becomes a whole lot more complicated. Some cases are obviously inappropriate, but most of those never get animated or sold in normal manga stores, for that very reason. Most of the time we have the impossible task of figuring out the "age" of an abstract representation of a human (with a made-up age that can't correlate with their appearance because there's no standard art style, and that's not even getting into ridiculous cop-outs like "this child is totally 1000 years old, for real guys") and deciding what counts as sexually explicit. There is absolutely no objective way to judge the vast majority of anime in this regard, so each person draws their own line somewhere between "it's all A-OK" and "it's all pedobait" and we get one of those perpetual arguments the internet loves so much. I've always felt that the fundamental problem with the public image of anime is that it's all seen as one unit. If one anime has giant robots, it's all got giant robots. If one anime has disturbing underage fanservice... well. Maybe it's because it's foreign? People don't criticize all literature because of [insert offensive romance novel here], or boycott the Oscars because Andy Warhol made a movie consisting entirely of some guy's butt. A certain politically-motivated group with a tenuous connection to anime certainly hasn't helped matters. As for Reddit, I don't expect the rule change to actually affect anything, but it sure has dragged the aforementioned argument out of the woodwork. Probably because they specifically mentioned anime. I guess it's about time I quit using that site anyway. "Come for the bickering, stay for the categorized groupthink." |
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Chrono1000
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Xe4
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I'm well aware that different parts of the world have different ages of consent, and that a 16 year old could look like an 18 year old while a 20 year old could look 16. That's not what I'm talking about. I clearly drew the line at prepubescence, because that's all a line we should be able to agree on, yet tons of anime and manga crosses that line constantly. There have been a few anime in the past few seasons that were leaps and bounds beyond that, and that's not even getting into h-stuff.
I appreciate that there can be a somewhat fuzzy line regarding age in an animated work, and that's something that goes back to the original Disney works. But even with that, there's so much blatant pedo trash infecting Japanese animation and comics. Shoot, there's even multiple words use to describe it, and fans of it, it's that bad. You said yourself there are tons of pretty gross cop outs like the 1000 year old dragon. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. If you draw a girl (or guy) to look prepubescent, act prepubescent, and then put them in sexually explicit situations, I don't care how many times you tell me they're over 18, it's disgusting and I have no problems with it getting removed from places like Reddit. I also agree that anime gets painted with an overly large brush at times. There's no one thing that anime is, and the vast majority of anime does stay away from gross loli shit. But I really can't blame anyone for judging anime because of the way kids are sometimes depicted in it. It's something that should never happen, yet does far, far to often in the medium (to the point there's a topic on an anime news site regarding it). |
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Tuor_of_Gondolin
 Posts: 3524 Location: Bellevue, WA |
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Hey, Xe4, if you don't like that kind of stuff, don't watch it. Problem solved. You don't have any right to determine what *I* choose to watch (and it's not loli-porn, BTW) or what anyone else watches for that matter.
There are a lot of things in the world that I find reprehensible, disgusting, immortal, or crude. But so long as others aren't being harmed (if people want to harm themselves, that's their own business), then I simply avoid it and rarely even get into discussions about it. Different people like different things. That's how the world is. I don't have to approve of their quirks, and they don't have to approve of mine. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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I mean, I agree with that, and Reddit can remove whatever they want from their own website. My overly-complicated point is mainly that it's not really as common as people tend to assume--though it's hard to judge that because people disagree on how old a character looks, and what counts as (too) explicit--and that it's not really fair to judge all of anime based on the worst possible examples, since we don't generally do that with other mediums. The fandom does acknowledge the existence of... fans of that sort of thing, which is definitely weird compared to the rest of society, and contributes to the idea that there's a disproportionate number of them among us. But I'm not so sure about that last part. After all, most anime fans got into it when they were kids, and there's no evidence that pedophilia is a disease you can catch from exposure to obscene material (though people do seem to believe that's the case). It seems more likely, though also more disturbing, that underage-fetishism or whatever you want to call it is more common than we want to believe. That sort of crime is extremely under-reported, but it's still a well-known phenomenon to the point that we have stereotypes about creepy priests and grandads and people drive-by-catcalling 12-year-olds. But, as horrible as all those things are, they're old, and we're used to them. The anime variant is new, and people love blaming new things for old problems. I certainly don't approve of this crap in anime, but it's a small part of a vast issue, and feels like more of a side effect than anything else. |
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chaccide
Posts: 295 |
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Sorry about the blank post before. There been no prosecutions in the US for anyone for posession of images unless they are on probation and strictly forbidden from viewing those images, or unless real photos etc are part of the collection. During the Handley case the laws against possessing drawn images of "cp" war declared unconstitutional and the requirement has become that they be prosecuted as obscenity cases. Now Canada and Australia are other stories. It's happened there. |
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Polycell
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Mad_Scientist
 SubscriberModerator  Posts: 3011 |
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I highly doubt that we're gonna see some sky is falling mass banning of anime content scenario as a result of this. Heck, reddit is kind of notoriously bad about enforcing even the most basic of rules against blatantly obvious violations, so there's a chance there might be basically no noticeable difference as a result of this rule change.
That said, the rules are a bit vague with a lot of potential leeway in enforcement, which allows for some abuse, as well as extremely uneven enforcement. It reminds me a bit of when tvtropes decides to delete pages for works with content like this, but somehow never got rid of the page for freaking Song of Saya of all things. (Though if I remember correctly, tvtropes had a "if it has an official legal English release it's okay" loophople to their rules, so Song of Saya would be fine now that it's officially released, even though it really should have been deleted years ago when they first made the rule change if they were being consistent.) In the case of tvtropes, it was clearly as a result of advertising pressure, and it led to some really odd situations, where the handful of people responsible for evaluating this stuff would end up having to look online for screenshots of the sexually explicit parts of anime visual novels to see whether the actually 10,000 year old alien/doll/whatever's breasts were big enough to pass as maybe 18 or older, or couldn't and would thus put the work into the "paedoshit" category. (No seriously, tvtropes had if I remember correctly a grand total of 5 people responsible for determining whether a work violated their new policy, and this is literally what they would do in many cases. And yet again, somehow Song of Saya slipped by despite being one of the initial works flagged for loli/pedo content. Don't ask me how.) Anyways, back to reddit. I will be interested to see what reddit does. Given how complicated reporting content for stuff like this is, I suspect this isn't really any good faith effort on reddit's part. So we might not see much happen. Also, unlike tvtropes, as far as I know reddit is only banning the actual depictions of something, not discussion of it, so I think that people will be free to discuss Made in Abyss all they want without fear, as long as they don't actually post any images/links of Riko being strung up naked, for example.
You contradict yourself in your own post with the Handley case. There have been no convictions for child porn for drawn images. But Handley himself was, as you point out, prosecuted for child porn despite having only drawn images and not being on probation. So there have been prosecutions, even though that particular aspect of the charges against Handley was later dropped. And yes, as it was ruled that Handley could only be prosecuted for obscenity, since then I do not believe anyone else has been arrested/prosecuted in the US for child porn for only having drawn images. But they can still be arrested for having drawn images, they just have to be charged with obscenity instead. And the incredibly vague nature of our obscenity laws makes it easy to do so. |
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