Forum - View topicINTEREST: Chiba Police Removes VTuber Traffic PSA Video Following 'Feminist' Backlash
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PonSquared
 Posts: 246 Location: Lost in the Catskills |
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I definitely don't see that as sexual. I don't even really think it's sexy. For that matter I hardly think it's even cute. Not sure what everyone is up in arms about unless people are starting to get tired of the over cuteafacation of Japanese pop culture?
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Mamono Hunter Yo Bro
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Why is feminist in single quotation marks? The group identifies as such and shouldn't be used as scare quotes, unless it's being used as a quotation. It's a bit confusing.
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Changeman
Posts: 220 |
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The petition currently has more than 49,000 signatures. Interestingly after the statement on twitter of the representative of the feminist league, the number of subscriptions started to increase: https://www.change.org/p/全国フェミニスト議員連盟宛抗議と公開質問状?recruiter=783411550&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&recruited_by_id=e2f9dba0-9af5-11e7-8075-d35cd2f48223
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The Anime Binge-Watcher
 Posts: 96 |
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I'll admit, I'm conflicted here. On the one hand, I agree that expression of gender and sexuality shouldn't be stifled, and it doesn't set a good precedent to wipe everything even remotely erotic out of the public sphere. On the other hand, that outfit IS pretty cheesecake-y, and the sexualization of minors in Japan IS a big problem that's exacerbated by stuff like this, so I don't blame the police for getting cold feet. Besides, they're a public service, so it's not like they OWE publicity or ad space to anyone, VTuber or otherwise.
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Erufailon4
Posts: 197 Location: Finland |
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Oh boy. YouTube's gonna have a field day with this. I can already imagine the titles and thumbnails.
The way I see the situation, AFER is clearly lacking in-depth knowledge of VTuber culture, but it's very much within their rights to lack it - the problem arises when they have enough influence to have a completely innocent and harmless video (I'd even argue it's an useful one, being a traffic PSA) removed like that. It benefits no-one, and it certainly doesn't benefit their cause. |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5505 |
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Megiddo
 Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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It's really, really, really hard not to see this as a total publicity stunt.
This is a Vtuber that was at ~1000 subscribers for months and months and months. In the past 2 weeks they've rapidly gained subscribers and are now at around 11k subs. Just look at their activity charts. https://playboard.co/en/channel/UCeUxaSLRzywNh8v78SDKP8A |
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Brook09
 Posts: 81 |
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Do you think that the feminist organization and the vtuber agency are under the same umbrella, and that this all was stunt to push the viewer numbers onto an all time high? |
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Fenrin
 Posts: 703 Location: SoCal |
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To be fair that Vtuber model does look like it's styled pretty youthfully. It's like putting big jiggly breasts on an Aikatsu character, it was bound to raise a few eyebrows.
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strawberry_milk
 Posts: 91 |
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The only thing I know about this for certain is it's not an issue that's gonna be solved on YouTube or social media.
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Megiddo
Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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I definitely think the feminist organization could be swayed by VASE to do something like this, yes. It's no secret that the quickest way to get eyes on something is via controversy. Now the 3 minute video has over 100k views where before it did nothing. At least that's a lot of people being educated about bike safety. |
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ParallaxSolution
Posts: 3 |
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The only super weird thing to me is that this character is being used by the police, but i suppose mascots are quite popular over there.
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AmpersandsUnited
Posts: 633 |
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Controversy is certainly an easy marketing tool we see happen almost every time a new movie or show drops. It's free word-of-mouth advertising. I wouldn't be surprised, but at the same time it could very much just be a real thing. Complaints about little things like posters or stuff happen all the time. Either way, it ended up being a lot of free publicity for them.
That's pretty common with Vtubers. Their main demographic are otaku, and are often very sexualized. Pretty much every stream Hololive girls do have a thumbnail of the girl in a sexual position or swimsuit, and they often engage in sexual jokes and talk a lot, including shipping each other together and playing it up like OkaKoro. They know sex sells and it's part of the draw. I remember when Marine basically went on a tangent about erogaki and other R-18 subjects. |
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Fenrin
Posts: 703 Location: SoCal |
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That's true, young looking Vtubers are plentiful. But this one specifically strikes me as more, how do you say, cartoonish? The style is very reminiscent of anime aimed at kids, like Aikatsu. Which make the big boobs seem incongruous, at least in my opinion. |
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juaifan
Posts: 145 |
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Saying this was all a PR stunt is giving them too much credit IMO. It's just another case of the Streisand effect. People try to censor or suppress something, it ends up getting far more attention than it originally did because of it, and more people end up becoming aware of it and being exposed to it as a result. I've never heard of VASE until this controversy, so it worked in putting their name on the map for me. Meanwhile Hololive has been doing dozens of promotions and collabs in Japan with zero pushback or controversy all this time. Last month they did a collab with the Japanese Baseball league and have tons of merch and art of the Hololive girls in revealing baseball uniforms. I'm sure it's something feminists would also find objectifying or sexualized, but the difference is Hololive is pretty flipping huge while VASE is a very very small company. I imagine they saw VASE as an easy target to intimidate since they only had a thousand subs at the time of this and not a lot of fans would be defending them. Going after Cover/Hololive would be futile unless you're as big as the Chinese market like with the Coco stuff.
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