fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5852 ]

[ SECRET POST #5852 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5852 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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03.

[Nu: Carnival]

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07.

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08. [SPOILERS for Attack on Titan/Berserk]

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09. [SPOILERS for Scum Villain's Self-Saving System]

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10. [SPOILERS for Deltarune]

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11. [WARNING for discussion of non-con themes]

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12. [WARNING for discussion of pedophilia/non-con]

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13. [WARNING for discussion of suicide, sexual assault, sexual assault involving a minor]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #837.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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12. [WARNING for discussion of pedophilia/non-con]
https://i.imgur.com/4WL6nu0.png

Is this the same OP as the Maidragon secret? Either way, god I'm tired.

not tired enough to not complain on the internet lmao

If typing two sentences to say you're tired makes you more tired, you're the one who needs to get off the internet and go see a doctor.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-01-14 05:20 (UTC) - Expand

This secret really feels like it's just trying to stir shit.

The way I understood it, Miura wasn't a lolicon enthusiast himself, he was protesting a censorship law that would have made being a mangaka (of any genre) very difficult and created a precedent that would have affected all creators in the manga industry.

That being said, there's no reason for you to read Berserk if depictions of (non-con) sex make you feel iffy. Because there's a lot of it. I'd even compare it to Game of Thrones.
It's definitely not for everyone and it grinds my gears how Berserk fans keep pushing everyone to read it.

DA

Not in the Berserk fandom, but agree with all of this.

>involved in pedophilic artwork
Wtf does this mean? Involved? Did he do a thought crime, is that what we're getting at?

He drew loli apparently, so essentially yes, a thought crime. He thought up some imaginary little girls and made lewd drawings of them.

That's what I'm assuming they mean. And these vague, "they drew lewd pictures of imaginary kids" allegations about content creators tend to make me think more of the mangakas.

Shame on the west for trying to impose its morals on the entire world because Japan ate into their profit margin by not having the same "you can't write / you can't draw / you can't publish ..." taboos as the US did.

Nothing he drew is illegal in the US.

Why the hell do you need a justification to drop a media you don't enjoy/is not for you?

Berserk is a goddamn hardcore manga with a lot of non-con and other fucked up shit. It's not for everyone and that's ok.

I say this as someone who love berserk and enjoy it a lot. I enjoy the mindfuckery and non-con of it all. I found it cathartic, especially 20 years ago when I discovered it and stuff like that was rare.
But THAT'S ME. You don't have to read it to be a "real manga fan" or whatever the hell people who pushed you to read it say.

Also Miura was not into loli/shota/pedoshit as far as I'm aware (he was against censorship in the manga industry) and even if he was it wouldn't change a damn thing in this specific case.
Drop whatever you don't enjoy with no shame or guilt. You don't need a justification.

Fandom really does talk up Berserk and how incredible and life-changing it is to go through, and as a fellow abuse survivor, I was gung-ho to try and go through a challenging work. I love to analyze complicated works especially by creators who are messy. That said, I was just so disappointed to see what I was hoping was an excellent, deep, story that has so much to say (according to others. I have yet to read it still.), and immediately see stuff handled as fap bait.

Sigh. But also lol.

I'm sure the story gits gud, but I will at least let myself have a laugh at the annoying segment of the Berserk fandom for praising the fap bait parts as hardcore and kvlt. It was nice to see the fandom elitism shaken for a moment, and have some concerns I had validated.

On a very literal level, I do have to disagree: if Miura was indeed into pedoshit (to the best of my knowledge he didn't do anything IRL), it would matter. It would provide some context for why certain story elements are they way they are, if anyone wanted to analyze his stories.

I also think having a justification is just as valid as not having one. I did enjoy having my spidey sense validated, and getting more context for what I was attempting to read.

AYART
To my reply where I say:
>>You don't have to read it to be a "real manga fan" or whatever the hell people who pushed you to read it say.
>>Drop whatever you don't enjoy with no shame or guilt. You don't need a justification.

You reply this:
>>Fandom really does talk up Berserk and how incredible and life-changing it is to go through
>>I'm sure the story gits gud, but I will at least let myself have a laugh at the annoying segment of the Berserk fandom for praising the fap bait parts as hardcore and kvlt. It was nice to see the fandom elitism shaken for a moment, and have some concerns I had validated.

Your reply to me makes little to no sense to what I'm saying. You're just trying to justify why you feel like your secret and feelings are valid. I simply don't care. I accept that Berserk is a very difficult manga to approach for any personal reason.
Any feeling is valid, but how you're writing them down is not IMHO. You're trying to feel better than any other Berserk fan around you because for you Miura was not a perfect author and that's just childish.
You care TOO MUCH about what the western fandom thinks about this manga and/or mangaka. Let it go.
You don't need any proof that the mangaka had any pedophilic inclination to dislike their art. If it's gross and offputting and odd vibing to you, IT JUST IS.

Like, I dropped Oyasumi Punpun because even if it was certainly a good piece of art it was just fucking with my head and it was too off putting for me. No shame. I don't need to justify my feelings, my like/dislike of any opera and thus searching for any validation of my feelings and taste searching through the history of the author, hoping to see something OFF like a shota/loli drawing.

Also, you know what context you really need to understand Bersek? JAPANESE MANGA AND MEDIA HISTORY. Berserk is a product of its time. Miura Kentaro is the author, yes, but there's a reason why Berserk is what it is and it's because it's a manga started in 1989.

Please be a troll. Please. This is awful if it’s legit.

Re: OP

(Anonymous) - 2023-01-14 20:18 (UTC) - Expand

Maybe I'm weird, but I can't bring myself to give a single fuck about what someone draws/writes if no real children are involved.

Isn't that the entire point of fiction? That you can write about things that wouldn't be possible/would be forbidden in real life?

This. I'm currently feeling bummed because I've been reading about the new Velma show and while it does sound like a terrible show, there are so many comments on it's "sexualizing minors," everywhere. Really? Even animated kids who have their own business and drivers licenses and are indistinguishable from young legal adults in... everything?... must be protected from the pedos? This is so new and weird.

Protect no drawn kids, not even the ones that look and act like real kids (though to be frank, most loli and shota characters are not that either). At their core they're all just people-shaped lines from the heads of grown-ass human beings.

DA

I'm with you, anon. The only thing I'd add is that some grown-ass artists have been drawing sex and kids and both together since they were kids themselves. Because this business of "kids AREN'T sexual, and if they are, some adult did it to them" is bullshit.

Something inside me healed, when I found out that scientists have observed unborn babies masturbating. Because the Christian right, and its grotesque idealization of the "innocence" of the unborn, is so much of the basis for claiming that women's lives should always be worth less than babies lives.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-01-14 13:11 (UTC) - Expand

Thank you, secret maker for turning my comment into a secret!

As for Berserk itself, yeah, I initially dropped Berserk pretty early because I wasn't feeling very confident about the rape. I knew before starting a story that a character named Casca(?) was going to get raped and it was going to be horrible and what not, but I was still willing to give it a shot. I was NOT very enthused to see that rape was already starting to be a thing in the first couple of pages of the story, and dropped soon afterwards out of reflex.

That said, I feel much better after reading people commenting on Miura's works after people started to be a bit more vocal that he enjoyed putting... specific indulgences into his works (cough cough Giganto Maxia child pee chugging cough cough). People addressing the elephant in the room and handling it in terms of what that means for the art is pretty much all I needed, because I've gained more interest in eventually reading the story than I did afterwards where people merely talking about how good the story is zomg!!1! I'm likewise able to enjoy Lovecraft's stories because people already analyzed and acknowledge his racism, but I'm thoroughly irritated by Conan the Barbarian youtube fandom for swallowing the negative undertones ("life was so much better before prissy civilization and woke morals got in the way" is a common trope) wholesale.

tl;dr the bonus secret was that I'm more interested in reading the story now that I have a better idea of what to expect.

This comment combined with the secret is giving odd vibes.

Re: OP

(Anonymous) - 2023-01-14 05:15 (UTC) - Expand

There's nothing wrong with bouncing off a piece of work that you don't vibe with, and also (I think) nothing wrong with being a bit bitter at a work being overhyped when all you see is its flaws and shortcomings. But I think you should be careful about the way you phrase your reaction and distaste for works like this. I think you're conflating two things which you should be very careful to keep apart: (1) "I am uncomfortable reading works that purport to have a serious storyline (which grapples with morality and ethical issues) but then which ALSO use rape scenes as titillation and an exciting element of the story." A kind of "have your cake and eat it too" situation where rape is simultaneously something bad in the story that makes the world grimdark AND clearly the author's fetish, therefore something the author went out of their way to include and put a lot of effort into. If rape were clearly bad and upsetting or if the story was clearly a porn fantasy meant to titillate, that would be fine, but you hate the crossing of the streams. Perfectly fine! And (2) "That discomfort I felt while reading [works of the above type] was a sign that I was getting 'off' vibes about the author and indeed I was right that the author was a creep and so I now feel vindicated in having bounced off the story in the first place." There are many things wrong with that second opinion, namely that there are a lot of people who write creepy stories who are not IRL creeps and a lot of IRL creeps who never write a single creepy thing you can peg them with. And yes, sometimes these two things align (you get creeps who write creepy things and you get lovely people who have only written lovely things) but there is either no correlation at all or the correlation is so weak that you should honestly be very careful about making serious judgments like that BEFORE evidence about IRL behavior has come out, and also very careful about how much you claim that someone's fictional tastes/output predicted/indicated things about their character.

Especially because fandom is filled with people who write stories of the type I described in (1) and so absolutely ARE affected by the statements you make in terms of how fictional tastes reflect IRL morality. I think when a lot of people see rapey stories set in grimdark fantasy worlds like Berserk and they dismiss the genre as "creepy old dudes passing their creepy rape kink off as Serious Fantasy"... I mean, you may think that as largely a critique that targets a generation of old dudes who you're fine with sinking into obscurity or being lightly mocked/called out for the creepiness of putting their kink into their stories, but what you may not realize is that it describes a HUGE swathe of fanfic fandom which is largely women and of all ages -- think A/B/O and BDSM AUs and sex pollen tropes and non-con PWPs and romance novels that start out non-consensual and so much else. Heck, I am actually working right NOW on a fic that is set in a canonical grimdark fantasy world, where I'm using the fact that the world is grimdark to write an iddy rape scene in every single chapter (because that's my kink!). I'm a 34-year-old woman, and I've been doing this since I was 19. Like, you may think you are criticizing the behavior of Miura and GRRM and other published SFF authors who fall into this category, but you're also lumping in a lot of fellow travelers in fandom when you say that, so you shouldn't be surprised if you get strong pushback as a result.

So yeah, in response to what you said in this comment, it's perfectly fine that knowing an author has a rape kink helps you contextualize and enjoy a story you otherwise would not be able to appreciate (it's also fine to bounce off it and just not read it). But I would be very careful about conflating "having a rape kink" with being pedophile-adjacent, an IRL creep, a generally bad/sketchy person, or just with any IRL behavior that has real victims and causes actual harm.

yawn

You're just finding out about this now, OP? Better tell your 13 year old tiktok mutuals about this!

Fuck off

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