Forum - View topicWhat's So Gay About Yuri!!! on Ice?
|
Goto page Previous Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Lord Oink
Posts: 876 |
|
|||||
The idea of different demographics is a lost cause on some people. They think everything should appeal to everyone and no one should be left out from anything. The idea that a show is specifically aimed at straight people who like gay stuff is something they can't comprehend. It's even more messed up when people expect different culture to conform to the way an American thinks, as if their culture is the only one that matters. If a gay person is turned off from a show because they dislike baiting and want a "realistic" portrayal of gay relationships then the simple answer is the show is not for you and you shouldn't watch it. It makes about as much sense as someone who hates gay stuff watching a BL show and complaining. Anime is a medium that lives on marketing to different demographics. If the market is too small to be profitable then don't be surprised if there's not more shows with that kind of stuff.
Not trying to be rude but have you ever been in a relationship? I've never had to ask permission or get a girl to sign some kind of permission slip before I touch her or something. Most girls I know would get pretty annoyed if a guy kept asking before he did anything. Either way, fiction doesn't have to adhere to reality. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
FloozyGod
|
|
|||||
Sigh, I'm just trying to have fun here. |
||||||
|
Crisha
Moderator
 Posts: 4290 |
|
|||||
I agree on the matter that two people can say they love each other without meaning it in a romantic sense. I tell my closest friends that I love them often. I don't, however, feel that wanting people with a strong emotional attraction to also have a romantic and/or sexual attraction damages or perverts their relationship. It's a question I've asked myself before - why do I like shipping people who are close friends in my entertainment? There are occasional times where I am fine with two friends just being friends, but I often ship those with a close bond together. And, honestly, I'm just a romantic at heart and I enjoy seeing two characters with a close connection get together in such a relationship. I'm not necessarily motivated by who the writers pair up together and have be attracted to each other - I'm interested in the emotional connection or compatibility of two characters I saw on screen. Most times, yes, that does align with "canon" if there is a canon relationship. Other times, no, it doesn't. |
||||||
|
||||||
Seishin Jinrou
 Posts: 29 |
|
|||||
|
As a fellow gay anime fan, I agree with most of this article. I ultimately couldn't stand watching Junjou Romantica and the like, considering that the characters were all so insistent on really being straight and staying 100% in the closet and (on the part of the ''bottom'') not actually liking the sex...it's infuriating, stupid, and insulting. I wish that more high quality, well-written anime had progressive LGBT presentations, like just by including gay couples/characters without all the yaoi baggage attached and without changing the entire genre of the show.
I really do hope that Yuri on Ice comes through and makes this an overtly gay story. But I'm still skeptical of that right now. Last years Gaycation - Japan episode featured a gay Japanese man coming out to his mother, a serious topic I'd love to see in an anime some day, and one that has nothing to do with straight women fetishizing gay sex. |
||||||
|
||||||
relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
|
|||||
Did they ever state anyone in this was gay? There was a ton of symbolism, A TON, and whatshisface clearly lacked any interest in a relationship with a woman, but I don't remember either of them being stated as gay. Talked to a friend who watched it recently and when I mentioned it being gay, she looked at me confused and said she didn't realize they were. Either way, not a big deal. I think it works for the list, I just didn't think it was that explicit.
Yamada actually stated in interviews that it wasn't intended to be yuri, for what it's worth. In reference to Sound!Euphonium. Yamada: Okay. So I’ll say it clearly: I don’t think that’s depicted as yuri. I wanted to depict adolescence. Oguro: For which case? Yamada: Probably for all of them. For Tamako, for Reina, for all of it. I wanted to depict adolescence! Oguro: Did you want to depict the feelings during that time. Yamada: Yes, I wanted to depict those feelings. I have an interest in those points of view. Totally read it however you want, nothing wrong with that, but just saying, interviews actually make it pretty clear that's not what she was going for, at least. Also, for what it's worth, I love Kumiko and Reina's relationship, and don't really see it as baiting, so much as a beautiful adolescent relationship. Whether that leads to something sexual doesn't really matter to me as much. Yuri has always been more about the emotional relationships of its characters to me, than something explicitly sexual. Though both are equally valid. And more of the latter would be nice. From the New World might be my favorite example of homosexual relationships in anime, just by how casually it is treated. It's just a totally normal part of the story that doesn't really get fetishized, or focused on as something weird or different. It just exists. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Chrysostomus
Posts: 335 |
|
|||||
Also, this is a show aimed at women and fans of figure skating. If queer people love it then that's great, but "accurately representing X" is not its goal and it rarely is in any anime. Was Maria the Virgin Witch aimed at devout Catholics? Because oh boy, there was quite a bit of misrepresentation and pop theology in that one. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Keichitsu0305
|
|
|||||
|
WELL! SLAP MY BOTTOM AND CALL ME A DONKEY!!
Because Yuri just told the whole world in episode 5 that his love for Victor (and his family and friends) is too abstract to be considered romantic!!! Well, that settles everything!! 
PROOF! Fujoshis and fundanshi's we have finally reached the mountain top!!! |
||||||
Kimiko_0
 Posts: 1796 Location: Leiden, NL, EU |
|
|||||
I read the article when it had already been changed to "asexual beings" and still got that "asexuals == not quite human" vibe from it. Why not simply call them "asexual boys" or "asexual people"? As for realistic trans characters in anime, yah, that's even more super rare than realistic gay or lesbian characters. Wandering Son is really the only example that comes to mind. The anime is only a short excerpt from the longer manga, but still very recognizable to anyone who's trans (I wish Matt Thorn would get back to translating the manga; it's been 1½ year since vol.8  ).
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
Neko-sensei
Posts: 285 |
|
|||||
|
This is a well-reasoned article, and I'm 100% behind the celebration of gayness in anime... and yet, I think essays like this foster an unproductive, and perhaps unintentionally racist, mindset through which to view anime.
We all want to see ourselves in our entertainment, but this desire can lead to some very unfortunate mental traps. The human brain is prone to a number of biases, the most relevant of which here are attentional bias (our tendency to pay closer attention to cues that seem related to the things we think about the most) and confirmation bias (a rather overused term on the Internet, describing our tendency to assign value to evidence that supports our beliefs and disregard evidence that puts them into question), that structure our thoughts about the topics closest to our hearts. When viewing entertainment, these biases work with our innate desire to see our internal mental landscape reflected in external reality and cause us to attribute our own perspectives to the characters in (and makers of) the art we find most meaningful. A non-LGBT example should serve to illuminate how this danger works. I'm a Christian (before you break out the pitchforks—Episcopalian and member of a Believe Out Loud congregation) and I always get that happy-little-thrills-down-the-spine feeling when I watch anime with themes of sacrificial love, the quest for salvation, forgiveness as a form of social justice, the inalienable meaningfulness of individual lives, and the nagging, inescapable feeling that there's something more to reality than what we see on the surface. For me, those concepts are inextricably bound up with my personal religious conviction that human beings were created to love God and each other through eternity, and that it took the sacrifice of our very Creator for us to understand that. When I watch Haibane Renmei—on which I've written many a theological treatise!—I see every one of the ideas that are most meaningful to me, articulated beautifully and made achingly real: I see Rakka find salvation through forgiveness, and then use her newfound understanding to offer salvation to another human being. I see Christ in the dead bird at the bottom of the well, the Old Testament Law in the physical walls and the social taboos surrounding the Haibane, the Church in the Haibane Renmei (who mediate between the sacred and the mundane), and God the Father in the half-remembered (and charmingly terrifying) myths of Glie's creation. Haibane Renmei seems to me a truly Christian anime, one articulating my worldview on every level! Of course, to describe the show this way is wrong. Haibane Renmei is, objectively, no more Christian than the Laozi or the Bhagavad Gita. ABe Yoshitoshi is not a Christian, even though he consciously tried to express the same themes that are for me so religious in his story of salvation. None of the staff of the anime are Christians. The series narrative is, self-consciously, about human relationships and not divine salvation. The Japanese attitude towards religion is so fundamentally different from the Western framing of the notion that very few Japanese people even have the mental categories to process what "being a Christian" means for an American. I have lived in Japan for four years; I have had many conversations on the topic with a good Japanese friend who's a Lutheran pastor; I understand these things rationally. But still, because my attentional bias picks out all the elements of the show I find important and my confirmation bias tells me that "this is how God works in the world, even through those who have no explicit knowledge of Christ," it is almost impossible for me to consider Haibane Renmei outside a Christian framework. There are two major negative consequences of this inability to break out of my own head-space, one "active," and one "passive" (but much more insidious). The "active" consequence is the reason I brought up the "r-" word in the first paragraph of this comment (if anyone remembers that long ago, or is still reading at this point): my sense that Haibane Renmei is "about" Christian concepts makes me map those concepts and the world view to which they are attached to the non-Christians who created it. It is racist in the sense that it rejects the notion that different cultures can have different conceptions, not just of which religion is correct, but of the very nature of religion's role in our lives and our personal growth. It assumes "everyone thinks like me," the first step on the road to bigotry and hatred (which occur when you start believing that people can only reach different beliefs than your own through stupidity, mean-spiritedness, or outright "evil"), rejects diversity, and makes my own conception of the universe the standard by which every other society's is judged. This active consequence is the external spark for many flame wars (and real wars), since such a bias is generally identifiable to others but is very difficult to argue against. The passive consequence is even more horrible: since I conceive of Haibane Renmei as an extension of my own beliefs, an attack on the show or on my reading of the show becomes an attack on myself. I become defensive. Defensiveness is the death of discourse, the death of compassion, the death of reason, the death of progress. It is an almost insurmountable evil, because it immediately turns all attempts at correction or discussion into morally-coded assaults; it casts those outside your defenses as "villains" who simply don't understand the way things "really are." This consequence is passive because it colors all our interactions, and because it's not always obvious to an external party when a statement is simply a statement of opinion and when it's the first line of defensiveness protecting some deeply-held belief. Thus if I am to have a productive discussion about Haibane Renmei with anyone but myself (or with the two or three people who happen to share my exact views on the topic), I must avoid the active and passive negative consequences of my cognitive biases by recognizing that the elements of the show that appear to speak directly to me do not speak the same way to everyone else, may not be intended to speak that way to me, and do not suggest that the series shares my beliefs or is the product of a culture that shares my beliefs. Doing this is hard as hell, but it's the only way to keep myself out of the pits of racism and defensiveness. Hopefully it should be obvious by now how I'm planning to apply these lessons to most fandom reactions to series with LGBT elements. The Japanese conception of homosexuality and gender issues is totally, wildly, ridiculously different from the Western one, lacking the shared metanarrative of oppression, struggle, and recognition that defines our conception of the topic. Japan largely lacks the "moral disgust" reaction ingrained into many other societies, but also places such a premium on gender-coded social interactions that its people are often straight-out befuddled by questions of how to incorporate non-binary self-identifications into society, assuming that such "personal preferences" are one of the many things you don't publicize in your standard social interactions—just as in many situations you wouldn't tell a host you didn't like coffee if offered; you would simply drink it to be polite. The situation is simultaneously "better" and "worse" than it is in the West, because, and I can't say this enough, everything about it is fundamentally different. I truly think it's actively wrong (and, again, possibly racist) to apply one's own conception of the LGBT struggle and of the importance of depictions of LGBT characters to Japanese media, just as it is wrong for me to apply a Christian conception of religion to Japanese society. We must remember that we are not our media, and our media does not, intrinsically, reflect us. I think Ei Aoki's flattered-but-baffled reactions to Jacob's questions concerning Wandering Son are quite revealing in this regard: to Jacob, and heck, at first blush, even to me, it seems obvious that the splendid little show has transgender issues on its mind. But to its creators, such concerns were irrelevant, or rather, simply an incidental aspect of tackling the main theme of the anime (in this case, "growing up within society"). This is because the creators are Japanese people, working in an industry in which (as Jacob points out in this article) what we see as LGBT themes are typically intended simply as another form of fanservice. They do not create things that fulfill our desires. To ascribe to Yuri!!! on Ice the sort of intent that Jacob's thesis requires—the idea that the show is on "a path to giving audiences a beautifully animated and well-told story of gay sexual awakening"—is no less culturally misguided (and perhaps offensive) than it is for me to ascribe to Haibane Renmei a Christian proselytistic message. So we're in very dangerous territory here: to say that Yuri!!! on Ice "should," or "has the chance to," or even "works to" portray well-rounded gay characters is to give in both to the attentional and confirmation bias, to practice at the very least cultural appropriation as we map our own views of the world onto another society's, and to create a defensive mindset which can lead only to rage at the show itself—if Yūri never gets over his attraction to Yuuko, or if Victor was right about Yūri's attraction to Minako, or if Victor asked the question because he's interested in Minako, or if Mila forms a romantic relationship with Yurio—or, in the worst-case but most likely scenario, at the rest of the fandom—if none of the relationships are ever "authoritatively" resolved, and we wind up facing page after horrible page of arguments about the characters' "real" feelings. We must celebrate diversity in our entertainment, but we must not in doing so become so fixated on our conceptions of what "diversity" means that we fail to recognize the real diversity of ideals and conceptions about what is important, or to remember that Japan does not share many basic Western moral understandings (even in cases when the two societies appear to be talking about the same thing). I've been struggling for some time with a way to explain this problem without coming off as bigoted myself (having someone take this essay's message as, "LGBT readings of anime are racist!" would be the worst possible outcome for me), but after spending so much time in Japan the wrong-headedness of this type of appropriative reaction to Japanese media has become more and more concerning to me. It denies otherness, reinforces misunderstanding, discourages people from learning about the real (and fascinating) cultural assumptions that inform their entertainment, and, most damningly, transforms all debate into defensive naysaying. (Even in instances like this, where such unproductive discussion is explicitly against the intent of the debators!) It feels to me the way it feels to actual gay people when they see a caricature like Leeron from Gurren Lagann, or the way it feels to Catholics to see Hatchin's (married!) abusive priest foster father in the first episode of Michiko and Hatchin: even when not actively offensive it's just off, somehow, betraying a lack of understanding of the subject being discussed and a lazy comfort in one's own mentality that is very disturbing. Of course I recognize that everyone has their own perspective on the world, but I feel like we're using that perspective the wrong way in this fandom. I really hope we can get past this, "I claim this show for me!" attitude of viewing anime, but I'm not quite sure how to help the fandom do that apart from writing screeds like this—which no one will read—or requiring everyone to take a mandatory intercultural communication and/or media comm course before they talk about anime—a solution which is probably even more horrible than the problem I'm trying to solve... |
||||||
|
||||||
|
ryoukosan245
Posts: 81 |
|
|||||
|
@Neko-sensei - Well said.
Edited to remove large quote. --willag |
||||||
|
||||||
Random 21
 Posts: 198 Location: Nottingham, United Kingdom |
|
|||||
I can think of a few. Wandering Son is the biggie, but there's also Isabella from Paradise Kiss, Hana from Tokyo Godfathers, and I guess you could also include Haruhi's dad from Ouran Highschool Host Club? They're the ones off the top of my head anyway. I'm not super knowledgeable on trans depictions in anime, but if Jake ever wanted to write a piece on that, I would eagerly read it. Anyway, this was a fantastic piece Jacob, I really enjoyed reading it. As a gay guy myself, I've been really eager for a great depiction of gay guys in anime. Outside of Doukyuusei and Love Stage (sort of), most yaoi anime really are a huge turnoff. You know, for show's that make a huge deal of how "LOVE TRANSCENDS ALL BOUNDARIES", you would've thought the guys in them wouldn't act like they'd rather be literally anywhere else. I'm always up for some cheesy Free!-style beefcake (I appreciated last season's Earth Defence Club LOVE for somehow being even more blatant about it than it's first season), A show like Yuri on Ice really hits the spot. I'm not really sure how to interpret today's spoiler["My love is too abstract to be considered romantic"] thing though. I'm honestly unsure of how to take that.. |
||||||
|
||||||
Knoepfchen
 Posts: 698 |
|
|||||
No.6 has a bottom-kicking gay action hero as one of its lead characters.
I spent some years in Spain and have French friends, so I feel confident to say that what counts as "proper" heterosexual behavior depends entirely on cultural imprinting. No matter if gay or straight, real emotions are always so much more interesting than baiting and pandering. Great read, thank you, Jacob. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Chocoreto
Posts: 105 |
|
|||||
Well they didn't tell us anything we didn't already know, but it was nice to have it clearly stated like that. "Yuri loves Victor but he still does not know in what kind of form". The point of the show is not so much to see if Yuri is going to win some medals, as it is to see him trying to find himself and sorting his feelings for Victor out. What the majority of the commentators here does not realize, is that it does not matter what will happen in the end as long as it is well written and believable in the eyes of the audience. Can't we just relax and enjoy the ride without overanalyzing themes aggressively from the first episodes? A story cannot be judged for the main message it's trying to convey if it's not complete. The only thing we can say for sure right now is that it's useless to deny the existence of yaoi fanservice. Other than that, all remains yet to be seen. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
goatnuke
Posts: 60 |
|
|||||
|
Sigh, I'm really sick of Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu being paraded around as "gay anime" because not only is that inaccurate but it also does a disservice to what made that show so great: its nuance and subtlety. It never felt the need to outright say the main character was "straight" or "gay" or "bisexual" or whatever because that would miss the purpose of him struggling with his own identity. He himself did not know for himself at any point in the series.
It's that nuance that made it a great show. The characters were layered and rarely did it make overt statements, instead successfully showing growth through subtle moments. This is the problem I have with many "gay/lesbian" shows: there's absolutely no subtlety. Characters cry out their sexuality. And that's fine, there's a place for that (I've enjoyed yuri series plenty of times and respect that yaoi/BL has its fans in its target demographics). It doesn't do much for realistic gay narratives though. In fact I would think gay people would take issue with them being depicted as constantly crawling all over each other at every possible moment instead of with the subtlety more often afforded to straight characters. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
lebrel
Posts: 374 |
|
|||||
|
I'm a little confused by this essay. Yuri is a great show, granted, but in terms of characters and relationships, the major thing that makes it different from a thousand other BL-teasey stories (or actual-BL stories, for that matter), is that it is a high-production-value anime rather than a manga. What I see in Yuri, and in other recent works that have been praised for "doing it right" like Classmates and that Raguko show whose name I can never remember, is that we are finally at a point where there are enough women with decision-making power in the anime industry that there can be significant investment in (more financially risky) material targeted to an older female audience rather than only in shoujo-targeted series that are already confirmed blockbusters in manga/novel format. In the last couple of years we've had a canonically josei anime of one kind or another almost every season, which is pretty incredible.
I think this interpretation is missing a big point about "tease" shows (at least BL-tease; I'm less informed about the male yuri fandom, although I would suspect something similar is operating), in that their popularity in large part comes from and depends on their ability to inspire fan activity; they feed the "productive" rather than merely "consumptive" parts of fandom. The reason that the BL-tease genre is far, far more commercially successful than actual full-on BL is not that the fans don't want to see the boys get together, but that keeping things up in the air allows fans to make their own decisions on which boys get together (in ensemble-cast shows) and how that relationship works. Like male otaku, producing and consuming fan-made material is a major part of fujoshi culture and fujoshi community; in fact, for most BL fans, the majority of the BL content that they consume (and for a substantial fraction of them, all of the BL they consume), is doujinshi / fanfiction / fanart rather than commercial BL. If the story locks in a particular pairing or concretizes a relationship dynamic, they lose their appeal to the part of the fandom, which is far more lucrative than the "core" fans who buy actual BL. Stories that make the transition to an explicit relationship tend to do so either when a) there's already demonstrable popularity for a specific paring (e.g., Madoka), or b) the series has fallen in popularity and is about to end anyway, so you might as well let the author do whatever they want. |
||||||
|
||||||
I'll change it to "asexual beings."  |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group