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I think a less judgmental approach to the reviews would be appropriate. Simply spend 1 or 2 paragraphs stating what level of fan service / loli / etc content is present. The key here is to do so in a non-judgmental way, it is a sensitive issue, and every anime fan has there own tolerance levels for this sort of thing. '

Then move on to review other elements of the show, such as plot, characters, etc. Not a plot summary, but some sort of commentary on the quality of the plot. Does the show have no overarching plot? Is the plot slow paced, or poorly written? Are the characters interesting? Do they develop or stay static?

So you could say essentially, 'I hate the show because of how it portrays women, but here's some info about the quality of the plot, characters, and technical aspects.'

There is plenty to discuss in a review that has nothing to do with the way the female characters are treated. And even if you can't stand the show for that reason, a more balanced approach to writing the review let's the reader make a more useful appraisal of the show based on your review.

Actually you have a perfectly valid model for such reviews... the one that all other reviewers do, the ones that look professional.

And if the column isn't supposed to be that kind of review, then perhaps a better solution is to open up other columns, by other reviewers doing the same sort of 'partial review'. I really enjoyed the spring anime preview that was done, where several reviewers each reviewed the first episode of the new seasons. It gave great perspective on each show.

_Emi_ wrote:

people should be able to just look at the phrase and know the actual meaning

pun noun a form of joke consisting of the use of a word or phrase that can be understood in two different ways, especially one where an association is created between words of similar sound but different meaning. Also called play on words.

(Chambers Dictionary)

Blood- wrote:

@ _Emi_, no, the only people who would find LemonCookies post an "hilariously" inappropriate juxtaposition are those of us who are familiar with the real meaning of the phrase AND the unfortunate racial slur connected with the word "spade." If any of us for a moment thought that LemonCookies used the phrase in a knowingly racist way, it would cease to be "hilariously inappropriate" and just be straight up offensive.

Precisely. Thank you.

Moomintroll wrote:

LemonCookies wrote:

It's like a person who starts a sentence with,"Now I'm not a racist, but..." and then proceeds to say something racist. Let's just call a spade a spade here, shall we?

Am I the only one who thought that was a hilariously inappropriate juxtaposition?

Well done, sir! Perhaps I'm better at unintentional irony than I previously imagined.

erinfinnegan wrote:

More substantive how? Doesn't this just boil down to the fact that I don't like a popular show? I don't think any reason I could give for not liking it will be considered substantive enough for the show's fans.

Call the animation bullocks. The story incoherent. The characters flat. The setting uninspired. Give reasons for such views. "Eww, gross," is a juvenile reaction clearly not befitting a grown woman writing a professional review. Now I imagine you or Zac might cop-out and whine that your reviews aren't meant to be professional, but then what purpose do they serve? Relaying the soap-boxy opinions of a random anime fan? This column is little more than a glorified forum post, both in substance and style. "Why read it then, if you're just going to get bent out of shape?" Because I'm on this site for news all the time and can't help but notice. And apparently a lot of people read this column for some reason, and I feel an impetus to try and offer a different viewpoint.

By Erin's logic Avatar: The Last Airbender is targeted at pedos (And surely the creators MUST be pedophiles) because it has young teens kissing, bathing, and running around is swimsuits several times throughout the show.

Of note would be the beach episode where they show of gratuitous amounts of Ty Lee's cleavage.

Yep, Avatar sure is designed to appeal to pedophiles.

Wow, a lot of blustering and red-faced posting in this thread just because Erin doesn't like your favorite show? Why do you feel compelled to force her to like your show? Why should you feel compelled to force anyone to like your show? All I can really think is that some people feel like they need some kind of affirmation to be able to watch this show. Makes me feel like maybe she is speaking more truth in her review than some people want to admit. But yet they keep coming back with replies, trying to force her to buy into GSG or force others to accept it, often times with rude or obnoxious overstatements of what she actually said. Look, Erin was clearly trying to give this show a fair review but it was hard for her to like it, like it would probably be hard for anyone who wasn't in to the fact that this show perhaps flaunts something that a lot of other shows only minimally imply. Yet she still gave it a net positive. We have all watched anime that has creepy stuff going on. That doesn't mean its a horrible piece of junk, that does however mean that the authors/producers have an agenda that is perhaps skewed towards the prurient and maybe they simply don't give a damn about the fact that they are pushing the envelope so hard and occassionally blowing the mind of the audience. Sometimes art does that. But that doesn't mean that we should lie and pretend that it's not what it is just so that we can feel better. Something that I really like about coming to ANN is that most of the reviewers simply tell it like it is. Bamboo did the same thing in her articles, and Erin is doing a great job following in that tradition. Like I said, most if not all of the reviews i've seen here try to take that same approach of brutal honesty. The reviewers aren't here to be cheerleaders and fanboys/fangirls of any particular show. They are here to try their best to tell it like it is, and hopefully let the industry know when they aren't putting out the best product that we know they can. If you like GSG as it is right now, fine, you can tell Erin that. But don't bash her for telling the industry that she knows they can do better.

Moomintroll wrote:

_Emi_ wrote:

people should be able to just look at the phrase and know the actual meaning

pun noun a form of joke consisting of the use of a word or phrase that can be understood in two different ways, especially one where an association is created between words of similar sound but different meaning. Also called play on words.

The second half of my sentence (without bringing up the racist connotations of the word spade.) includes your pun and those who would attach actual racist meaning to it. I probably would have found it funny at one point but I've had too many bad experiences (one ex-co-worker is still fresh in my mind) for me to find any hilariously inappropriate humor in it and would just wish people wouldn't attach racism to the phrase, hilariously inappropriate or no. The humor has been killed for me. R.I.P.

Megiddo wrote:

That's why I found it so hard to believe that Erin could get such a simple concept of the series so wrong.

Maybe she got it wrong because the writing was poor or overly ambiguous. It might be a simple concept but poor enough writing and/or over-ambiguousness can render a simple concept incomprehensible. At least that's how I see it rather then it being Erin's drinking and Gunslinger Girl gets shoved further down the list.

Unholy_Nny wrote:

By Erin's logic Avatar: The Last Airbender is targeted at pedos (And surely the creators MUST be pedophiles) because it has young teens kissing, bathing, and running around is swimsuits several times throughout the show.

Of note would be the beach episode where they show of gratuitous amounts of Ty Lee's cleavage.

Yep, Avatar sure is designed to appeal to pedophiles.

Avatar: The Last Airbender isn't aimed at adults so she wouldn't. I realize I'm speaking for Erin, so if I got you wrong please correct me or tell me to stop if you'd rather I not.

LemonCookies wrote:

"Eww, gross," is a juvenile reaction clearly not befitting a grown woman writing a professional review. Now I imagine you or Zac might cop-out and whine that your reviews aren't meant to be professional, but then what purpose do they serve? Relaying the soap-boxy opinions of a random anime fan? This column is little more than a glorified forum post, both in substance and style. "Why read it then, if you're just going to get bent out of shape?" Because I'm on this site for news all the time and can't help but notice. And apparently a lot of people read this column for some reason, and I feel an impetus to try and offer a different viewpoint.

You're simplifying it down to "Ew, gross". That isn't what Erin said. It's part of it, sure; creep factor definitely is an issue when it comes to reviewing things.

Take Lars von Trier's "Antichrist", for example. Most of that movie is "ew, gross!". Many critics (professional ones, even!) responded to it with dismissive reviews that you could boil down to "ew, gross!", even if they were also trying to make the point that when something is that distractingly shocking and grotesque, whatever the artist might be trying to say is lost beneath all the ichor. Which is a valid observation - you may be trying to make a salient point about the evils of cohabitation or whatever, but if you're doing it with severed fetuses and geysers of blood, few people will stick around to hear what you have to say. Yes, the reaction is "ew, gross!", but the critic establishes what they really mean by that.

Erin's point about Gunslinger Girl is that she personally dislikes the series because she finds the lolicon character designs and the treatment of the little girls in the show to be despicable and off-putting, to the point where the rest of the show's qualities are mostly lost on her, even if she can see the show will find redemption in an audience that simply is not as squicked out by such things as she is. In fact, I think she made that point pretty clear. Not only that, it lets her readers who may feel the same way as she does when it comes to stories about underage characters (which is, believe it or not, a sizable number of people based on all the feedback I've gotten on this issue over the last half-decade or so) that they may have the same reaction she did. Which is valuable.

You don't like the way she said that, okay. You're a fan of the show and took personal insult to her point about the show being lolicon (which is something I personally don't agree with, but Erin made her points about that and has clearly been working out exactly what Gunslinger Girl is in the column for a while now), suggesting that when she says the show is a loli show, that means she's calling you a pedophile.

Which is, how do I put this, ridiculously sensitive and suggests, as I mentioned before, that you have a bit of a persecution complex about it.

As for the rest of your predictable twaddle about "this doesn't belong in a professional review!!", forgive me but I have no interest in consulting you on how best to execute this column. It has a very large audience because people enjoy reading it. In terms of numbers, Erin has not lost a single reader during the transition and is in fact growing the audience. That is what we who work in the editorial world refer to as "a success". I am not in the business of fixing what my numbers tell me is not broken.

Given how every time a column changes authors there are the inevitable playground bullies who show up in the forums to rip the new guy apart in an attempt to force their will on how the column is executed, you'll have to excuse me for dismissing it as such.

_Emi_ wrote:

Unholy_Nny wrote:

By Erin's logic Avatar: The Last Airbender is targeted at pedos (And surely the creators MUST be pedophiles) because it has young teens kissing, bathing, and running around is swimsuits several times throughout the show.

Of note would be the beach episode where they show of gratuitous amounts of Ty Lee's cleavage.

Yep, Avatar sure is designed to appeal to pedophiles.

Avatar: The Last Airbender isn't aimed at adults so she wouldn't. I realize I'm speaking for Erin, so if I got you wrong please correct me or tell me to stop if you'd rather I not.

Erin's claims in the forum here is that the demographic for Gunslinger Girl are the weirdos who whack off to doujins with the characters. Which, while I'm not an expert on these things, I feel is an outrageous and unfounded claim. So it wouldn't be a stretch to claim that's the REAL demographic for Avatar.

@Zac: My issue isn't that her views on the show boil down to "Ew, gross" it's that she's said "Ew, gross, this is mostly designed to sell to pedophiles."

While a lot of reviews for Anti-Christ were along the lines of "Ew, gross" (And the content does offend me, I don't plan on seeing it) at least they're not saying "Ew, gross, this is mostly designed to sell to serial killers."

EDIT: Statements I've found particularly offensive -

Quote:

the Japanese audience creeps me out much less than the creator himself, or moreso, the manga editors and TV producers who wanted to push a show to an audience that's going to start making and consuming loads of porno doujinshi about it.

Quote:

hate to think of massively successful lolicon shows creating loads of new fans of child pornography, intentionally or not.

Whether or not you found her statements to be personally offensive to you, I haven't seen how you proved them to be wrong. Just for an example: I remember reading some reviews on ANN about the show Kanokon, mostly negative reviews talking about how the show was totally sexualizing underaged looking characters. I became curious after reading the reviews and watched the show to see it for myself. The reviews were right of course. Now, that show takes it to a whole other level from GSG, but then I started seeing other news tidbits about kanokon where you had the producers marketing oversized pillows with depictions of the girls barely clad in bikinis with their bodies practically bursting out of them. Ok, we all know what is going on there. We've seen other examples even with the more tame shows. We know who they are marketing to with some of the stuff. GSG might not be like kanokon, but I simply wouldn't be surprised if the same people who consume Kanokon also consume GSG and I would bet that the producers realize that. It doesn't mean that that's all they think about, but perhaps they take it into consideration. Again, until you prove her wrong I think all you can do is disagree but you can't dismiss her opinion. We all know that the porno doujinshi exists and that the producers know about it. Maybe they take it into consideration, maybe they don't. One guess is as good as another.

erinfinnegan wrote:

Wasn't Yotsuba 4chan's mascot for a while?

Yotsuba has always been 4chan's unofficial mascot, their 4 green leaves logo is a reference to her hairstyle. But that comes from a different time, when 4chan was populated mainly by SA forum goons. Most users of the site today only know her as "that girl you see when a thread 404s."

In any case, it would only imply anything about moot, since it was his decision, made years ago when 4chan was far from the behemoth it is today.

ChibiKangaroo wrote:

Whether or not you found her statements to be personally offensive to you, I haven't seen how you proved them to be wrong. Just for an example: I remember reading some reviews on ANN about the show Kanokon, mostly negative reviews talking about how the show was totally sexualizing underaged looking characters. I became curious after reading the reviews and watched the show to see it for myself. The reviews were right of course. Now, that show takes it to a whole other level from GSG, but then I started seeing other news tidbits about kanokon where you had the producers marketing oversized pillows with depictions of the girls barely clad in bikinis with their bodies practically bursting out of them. Ok, we all know what is going on there. We've seen other examples even with the more tame shows. We know who they are marketing to with some of the stuff. GSG might not be like kanokon, but I simply wouldn't be surprised if the same people who consume Kanokon also consume GSG and I would bet that the producers realize that. It doesn't mean that that's all they think about, but perhaps they take it into consideration. Again, until you prove her wrong I think all you can do is disagree but you can't dismiss her opinion. We all know that the porno doujinshi exists and that the producers know about it. Maybe they take it into consideration, maybe they don't. One guess is as good as another.

Those types of shows are way, way different. And as far as I know, there is no officially licensed merchandise along those lines for the Gunslinger Girl characters.

And thank you for telling me to PROVE IT'S NOT TRUE [Glen Beck] when Erin hasn't posted any proof that it IS true. (Aside from "Google the show, you'll get dirty pictures" which applies to everything )

EDIT: If someone can link me to officially licensed sleazy merchandise for Gunslinger Girl, I will kindly go away and admit I'm wrong.

Look, I think it's at least safe to guess that where there's smoke there's fire, so to speak. There's a lot of the type of thing she's referring to there going on throughout the industry. Like I said earlier, some might just think its fun and/or interesting art, but you can't censor her or anyone else from bluntly stating that there is a lot of prurient fluff going around and not enough meaningful stuff. You can disagree with her about a particular show, like this one. The editor himself said he doesn't agree but he's not trying to keep her mouth shut like you are. I want to hear all sides of an argument. This forum allows you to respond to her, but from what I saw she was trying to be very fair in her article, she gave that review a net positive said the show was shelf worthy despite her honest issues with it, and you still are obsessed with trying to keep her quiet.

I'm not trying to censor her. In fact, I enjoy her writing style and follow shelf life on a weekly basis. I agree with her reviews more often than I don't.

But this is just outright wrong. She's so paranoid about lolicon content that she's claiming that the main goal of Gunslinger Girl is to appeal to adult males who are into little girls.

Compared to other shows airing in Japan GSG is not even remotely offensive. Yes there are some offensive and creepy shows over there, Seikon no Qwasar comes to mind as does Kiss x Sis. But GSG is not even close to the offense level of those shows. I have a very high tolerance for this sort of thing, but those two shows go too far in my opinion.

It is like getting up on a pulpit and railing against the dangers of BB Guns, when you can buy Assault Rifles.

Zac wrote:

LemonCookies wrote:

"Eww, gross," is a juvenile reaction clearly not befitting a grown woman writing a professional review. Now I imagine you or Zac might cop-out and whine that your reviews aren't meant to be professional, but then what purpose do they serve? Relaying the soap-boxy opinions of a random anime fan? This column is little more than a glorified forum post, both in substance and style. "Why read it then, if you're just going to get bent out of shape?" Because I'm on this site for news all the time and can't help but notice. And apparently a lot of people read this column for some reason, and I feel an impetus to try and offer a different viewpoint.

You're simplifying it down to "Ew, gross". That isn't what Erin said. It's part of it, sure; creep factor definitely is an issue when it comes to reviewing things.

Take Lars von Trier's "Antichrist", for example. Most of that movie is "ew, gross!". Many critics (professional ones, even!) responded to it with dismissive reviews that you could boil down to "ew, gross!", even if they were also trying to make the point that when something is that distractingly shocking and grotesque, whatever the artist might be trying to say is lost beneath all the ichor. Which is a valid observation - you may be trying to make a salient point about the evils of cohabitation or whatever, but if you're doing it with severed fetuses and geysers of blood, few people will stick around to hear what you have to say. Yes, the reaction is "ew, gross!", but the critic establishes what they really mean by that.

Erin's point about Gunslinger Girl is that she personally dislikes the series because she finds the lolicon character designs and the treatment of the little girls in the show to be despicable and off-putting, to the point where the rest of the show's qualities are mostly lost on her, even if she can see the show will find redemption in an audience that simply is not as squicked out by such things as she is. In fact, I think she made that point pretty clear. Not only that, it lets her readers who may feel the same way as she does when it comes to stories about underage characters (which is, believe it or not, a sizable number of people based on all the feedback I've gotten on this issue over the last half-decade or so) that they may have the same reaction she did. Which is valuable.

You don't like the way she said that, okay. You're a fan of the show and took personal insult to her point about the show being lolicon (which is something I personally don't agree with, but Erin made her points about that and has clearly been working out exactly what Gunslinger Girl is in the column for a while now), suggesting that when she says the show is a loli show, that means she's calling you a pedophile.

Which is, how do I put this, ridiculously sensitive and suggests, as I mentioned before, that you have a bit of a persecution complex about it.

As for the rest of your predictable twaddle about "this doesn't belong in a professional review!!", forgive me but I have no interest in consulting you on how best to execute this column. It has a very large audience because people enjoy reading it. In terms of numbers, Erin has not lost a single reader during the transition and is in fact growing the audience. That is what we who work in the editorial world refer to as "a success". I am not in the business of fixing what my numbers tell me is not broken.

Given how every time a column changes authors there are the inevitable playground bullies who show up in the forums to rip the new guy apart in an attempt to force their will on how the column is executed, you'll have to excuse me for dismissing it as such.

Wow, you're still on the "persecution complex" shtick? Once again, let me remind you that I don't believe anyone is persecuting me, and I find it ridiculous that twice now you have resorted to bringing this up. I'm not a sap, and you're not winning any Internet argument points by repeating yourself like a parrot, so get off it already.

Secondly, even if the number of people who like the column are in the majority, so what? This doesn't mean that Erin is a good writer, nor an accurate one. The majority of American voters elected George Bush into office, twice. So I honestly don't give a flying f_ck whether a majority of people like or agree with Erin's asinine opinions. The point is, you can beat around the bush all you like about what she actually said, but you damn well know what she implied by bringing up lolicon and the creepiness factor.

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