Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Is Miss Nagatoro's Negging TOO Mean?
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
 Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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Don't you mean "nagging?" And it seems more appropriate since her name is NAGatoro. I thought negging was more like avoiding or denial of something.
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lemurs
Posts: 106 |
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I submit that even from episode one, Nagatoro was never all that mean to begin with. She's just really outgoing and extroverted, which comes across as off-putting only because Senpai was acting like some cornered animal. But watching it further and it's clear that her teasing attitude is as much a way to hide her feelings as his pensiveness. Like she calls him "pervy", not because he's done anything particularly pervy, but because she wants him to be pervy.
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Dark Mac
Posts: 321 |
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Weird that you watched 10 episodes but spend most of the article talking about episode 1 (Jean-Karlo in particular). Wouldn't it be more useful to talk about the rest of the show, especially since a bunch of staff members talked about episode 1 in the season preview?
For my tastes, episode 1 was by far the best. Nagatoro's domination gets way too weak after that. The proto-Nagatoro version is quite a bit better. |
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meruru
Posts: 475 |
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No, they definitely mean negging. Negging is a concept originated by pickup artists, which is this misogynistic internet subculture of men centered around picking up women. Though it doesn't make much sense at all to sane people, "negging" is this idea they came up with to somehow pick up women by emotional manipulation by straight up insulting them, though sometimes it comes off as a backhanded compliment like, "Oh it's such a shame, you'd look so pretty if you just bothered to make yourself up." |
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Stampeed Valkyrie
 Posts: 858 Location: PA |
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Overall this is a poor adaptation of the source material. Nagatoro's inner dialogues between chapters are completely left out. This along with the anime's even more over exaggerated facial features particularly of her really come off as making her look like a ****.
As the series progressed it seems like it chilled out a little bit, but yeah the anime does make her look bad.. especially in the first few episodes. |
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DirtyCircle
Posts: 128 |
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The first episode was incredibly harsh and if it maintained that tone throughout, it would be insufferable. Thankfully, it’s not. I read the first six manga volumes over the weekend and really enjoyed it as I do the series.
There is always a place for a series that features a “maniac pixie dream girl”. Nagatoro isn’t the best MPDG but it’s so cathartic so see the cute and spunky girl seeing something in a nerdy person and want to spend time with them. While trying show them their potential! |
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meiam
Posts: 3450 |
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So now that the furry fetish well has been thoroughly tapped it seems like anime is moving toward "getting picked on" fetish with something like 4-5 anime about that in the last few seasons. Wonder where that one originate from, a mix of fantasy that girl will just hit on guy because its getting really hard for guy to hit on girl without seeming like a creepy dude with some of the idea that people who bully you are actually enamored with you?
also:
Never really felt like that was the point of Community if anything most of the joke were at the expanse of how awful some of the character behavior were, that and the idea that you can trick the principal into putting an anus on the school flag, classic! |
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Hal14
 Posts: 717 Location: Heart of africa |
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I think this specific subgenre might be a play on Shoujos and other female-led shows with older, aggressive male love interests and 'shrinking violet' FMCs who gradually become more outspoken. However, 'nerd/geek/outcast' meets popular girl is a tale as old as time. |
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dm
 Subscriber Posts: 1468 |
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Or, in Nagatoro's case, perhaps "Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl". |
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battle-arc-fan
Posts: 24 |
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What a lot of the angry Uzaki crowd didn't really get was that nobody really cared about Uzaki's proportions
Please quit it with this revisionism nonsense because it ignores that critics were bashing Uzaki over "male gaze", "objectification" and even - though she is a college student - her being "underage" months - over a year actually - before the first episode even aired. The first Uzaki controversy was actually over her being her being used as a mascot for a blood donor campaign. That is what put the whole thing on the radar and it was taken up on blogs and social media by a bunch of people who don't even watch anime in the first place. That is why claiming NOW that the complaints were REALLY over bad production values and a mediocre show all along is so laughable. Because if that were the case why not Hand Shakers, Ex-ARM and My Sister My Writer? The hilarious thing about Uzaki is how mild the show turned out to be. Uzaki dresses conservatively (her normal top, while self-referentially cheeky, isn't tight and shows no cleavage). Of the "anime fanservice cliches" it only had one - the beach episode - and most of it was their trying to get to the beach! There was more in a couple of episodes of "Chivalry of a Failed Knight", "Infinite Stratos" or - and it isn't even considered an ecchi series - "Classroom of the Elite" than in Uzaki Chan's entire series! |
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a_Bear_in_Bearcave
Posts: 550 Location: Poland |
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Yeah, I saw lot of people saying Uzaki looks underage, behaves like kid (because 1st year college students all behave always like serious adults), or has improbable figure and is therefore sexualized loli - which ignores that there are small big-boobed women in real life, and calling them unrealistic is rather shitty. While I admit adaptation wasn't that good, it got a lot of hate on Internet for completely dumb/shitty reasons. Calling Nagatoro worst show of the season would be amusing if not sad considering I'd calling it the best romcom of the season considering other (admittedly poor) choices in that genre (IIRC Osamake and two age-gaps, one with stalker), and there are plenty of poor choices in other genres as well. There is clearly growth in characters, from Senpai learning he can actually stand up to people sometimes and even get wins against Nagatoro, to Nagatoro clearly using her teasing to protect herself from showing vulnerable side. The first scenes with her friend group where she is trying to thread the middle of joining the Senpai bullying with protecting him from her friends, as they start to make her target of their teasing, explains a bit of her attitude. The scene with her protecting the "manly honor" of her not-boyfriend by insisting on his pervyness, and the part where Senpai purposefully risks getting teased just to protect her honor as well, which shows how their relationship is positively developing. But this TWIA was really short compared to other ones, judging by the scrollbar on several other I have opened to compare, so no wonder there was barely anything mentioned about their growth. Most discussion was about first episode and if it was disqualifying or not, and nothing about recent ones like the ones where Nagatoro overcomes her own embarrassment and offers to model in catgirl cosplay. It was half-baked article compared to the standard for this column, and one of the reviewers used most of that space to repeat same complaint. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 644 |
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Speaking as someone who does have a hard time with socializing, the idea of someone forcefully breaking past your shell and forcing you to be social with them in ultimately-enjoyable ways is a common thing for folks who don't have many friends. And as someone whose best friend in college was basically that, yeah, it's nice when it happens and someone sees that you do want to engage but you have a lot of mental blocks that make it that much harder for you. And what's better than a friend with rockin' boobs and possibly might want you to jump their bones (but they'll never admit it)? It's basically Manic Pixie Dream Girl stuff with different flavorings to it. I don't wanna yuck someone's yum, but like I said Nagatoro is a very specific fetish flavor. Like, you don't put in that armpit scene unless you know what you're doing.
Like I said, I'd have been way happier if the series was more on the level of the later episodes instead of the first one. I would have been a little uncomfortable, but the charm is there. And there's cute stuff like Senpai rescuing Nagatoro and her friends from having to deal with the annoying guys at the park, or Nagatoro FINALLY standing up for Senpai right at episode 10. But the extent to which Nagatoro ribs on Senpai in that first episode is just way too much. It set off my brain goblins in a bad way. It basically puts the rest of the show in the same space for me as WataMote: what it does is irrelevant, the core of it all just puts me into a bad mental place I don't like being in.
Weird that you read the whole column but spent your whole post talking about a few paragraphs. Wouldn't it be more useful to talk about the entirety of the column, especially since we did talk about the rest of the show? |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24165 |
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I somehow made it past the first episode which I found painful to watch and lasted until I think episode 4. What finally did me in was the constant one noteness of Nagatoro trying to sexually embarrass senpai. I would have felt the same if instead of sexually embarrassment, she had concentrated on mocking his hair, for example. Change the pitch up, man. Big fan of Uzaki-chan, though. Give me more of that, please.
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battle-arc-fan
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To answer the question: "Is Miss Nagatoro's Negging TOO Mean?" to quote Tex Richman in The Muppet Movie: "the answer is no." This article only hints at it, but lest we forget the series opens with Senpai carrying on a very misogynistic monologue in his head about the Nagatoro and friends sitting at the table (and girls in general). Have we forgotten that? Nagatoro and company were able to just look at this misogynistic creep and guess what he was thinking. And then they take his drawings and ... it confirmed their suspicions: he was making himself the hero of his own sexist fantasies. (The female characters - all of them - were calling him a closet pervert hypocrite long before they had hard evidence).
So at the very worst - or best depending upon your perspective - Nagatoro and Senpai are both huge jerks who deserve each other. Why have more sympathy for one jerk than the other? All right look ... I get that Nagatoro is the aggressor and Senpai just wants to be left alone. But ... left alone so he can become even more misogynistic, perverted, isolated and hooked on porn and video games? I am not so good with that even in the context of our western individualist culture. Which means that in eastern cultures with communal values that emphasize members of the group being responsible for each other, it isn't acceptable. This also explained the "why can't she just leave him alone!" angle in Uzaki-Chan ... as his "kouhei" it was her social responsibility to get involved. And Uzaki was very willing to publicly exploit Shinichi's social expectations to manipulate him. And that angle explains things: the male lead's identity is only "senpai" because it describes his relationship with Nagatoro. (It is also why neither "senpai" has the option of just telling his tormenter to get lost.) Also note that Nagatoro's friends don't even call him senpai. They call him "paisen" to mock him because his character defects make him unworthy of respect as a senpai. Note that at no point does he protest or say that they are wrong. I am no feminist (as you can probably already tell) but with all the garbage that teenage girls have to put up with from misogynistic creeps - and the show does present several more - I have a hard time feeling sorry for him getting the abuse from females that he would certainly give to females if he possessed a bit more self-confident. Repeat this: were Senpai more confident he'd probably be worse than the sleazy harassers that Nagatoro and company had to put in their place. The bigger problem with this show is it's rewarding this creepy misogynist with a (gorgeous) girlfriend. And he doesn't even need to exhibit - say - the 3 years of painful character growth that Hachiman had to endure in Oregairu, and Hachiman wasn't as much of a misogynist that Senpai is (example: Hachiman treated his sister well and wasn't a pervert). Instead only the first 2 episodes really dealt with his misogyny and from there attention shifted to his other many negative traits. I do understand what Nagatoro sees in him - peel away the many layers of awfulness and he is a decent kid and a talented artist (my theory is that she was able to detect his good qualities by reading his comics) - but I can't help thinking that Nagatoro, warts and all, deserved someone who was a nice guy already. Or had the show consisted of Nagatoro forcing him to confront what a louse he was through abuse and humiliation for the first arc, then had Senpai spend the next two arcs working through his character flaws on his own and THEN for them to spend the final arc becoming a couple - I guess similar to the last season of Oregairu maybe where Hachiman and Yukino spent most of it apart planning the rival proms for the last bit of character growth and to then spoiler[reconcile and become a couple at the end]? - I would be a lot more comfortable with it. Am I letting Nagatoro off for her own meanness and hypocrisy? Yes. But to quote Chief Bogo from Zootopia: "I don't care." The only people that Nagatoro abuses are the ones that provoke her first, and she gets provoked for no reason other than her committing the unforgivable offense at the male world of existing while female. (Which - lest we forget - Senpai did by looking and her and her friends as if they were trash.) And I guess I am ... fine with letting Nagatoro off the hook because of that? |
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09jcg
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