[ SECRET POST #2646 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2646 ⌋

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

01.


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02.
[Free! Iwatobi Swim Club]


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03.
[Love so Life]


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04.
[the last leg]


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05.
[Karen Gillian/Doctor Who]


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06.
[True Detective]


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07.
[Yume Nikki]


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08.
[Black Dagger Brotherhood Series]


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09.
[Mass Effect]


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10.


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11.










Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 040 secrets from Secret Submission Post #378.
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.

Comments

[feotakahari]

I don't think Madoka Magica was intended to have a feminist message or an anti-feminist one. It's valid to discuss whether or not it handles its female characters well--that applies to almost any story that has female characters at all. But it would be beside the point to praise or condemn it for not promoting feminism, as it would be beside the point to praise or condemn it for not having a subplot about bullying, or for not using Homura's arsenal as a segue to discuss gun politics.

[(Anonymous)]

Pretty much this. I don't remember PMMM ever being marketed as some big feminist series (Tumblr powerpoints don't count), and it seems a little silly to be horrified when it turns out to not be a perfect, shining, totally feminist work.

Madoka, Panty & Stocking, and Kill La Kill are the three series I can't even mention around my friends for fear of them rattling off the points they read on a post somewhere. I have to hunt around online for those sweet sane pockets of fandom if I want to, you know, discuss them. Good, bad, and ugly.

[sarillia]

I don't think a message has to be intentional in order for people to talk about it. If you have a bully in the story, whether you mean it to be an anti-bullying message or just a depiction of something that happens in real life, people can and will analyze the portrayal and the framing of it. People will do the same thing with gender politics.

This analogy is kind of bugging me though, for reasons that I'm still trying to untangle in my head. So now I'm asking myself why someone being disappointed at the series for not having an anti-bullying message and someone being disappointed in a series for not depicting women well are different things.

I guess it's because there are more options for the bullying subplot. You can frame it as a negative and take a stance, you can take a "kids will be kids" stance that says that's just what happens and you need to learn to toughen up, you can avoid talking about it at all by not including one of those characters.

That last one is trickier in the case of attitudes toward women. It's hard to have a piece of media with no women and doing that will be seen as political in itself in a way that having a piece of media with no bullies won't be. There's also not really a neutral path to take where you just treat women as human beings because that in itself is seen as a feminist thing.

Sorry if I'm not explaining well. I'm still trying to organize my thoughts.

[feotakahari]

I tried to draw a distinction in my earlier post between talking about a work in terms of how it portrays its female characters and talking about it as a feminist piece. I think the latter implies a specific message, which can then be analyzed and evaluated, and that doesn't really apply for a work that has no intentional message about women. The former is still a valuable and important thing, but I think it's more important as an aggregate (here are all these works that portray female characters badly!) than in relation to any one work.

I guess I'm still organizing my thoughts, too. I'll come back to this if I think of something else.

[sarillia]

I think "feminist" has come to have two separate meanings. You're talking about the meaning related to the feminist movement(s), where someone has to specifically align themselves with the movement in order to say that their work is feminist. But I think the term has come to have a more generic meaning where it's just a word for "anti-sexism". If you look at it this way then a work either perpetuates the status quo or it defies it and is therefore feminist in the minds of people who define the term that way.

[feotakahari]

Maybe another way to frame this would be in terms of war movies. On one level, you can look at a war movie and discuss how accurately it represents the things that happen during a war. On another level, you can discuss what the movie says about the war, and whether it supports or condemns it. I've heard it said that there are no neutral war movies, and to some extent, that's accurate--if you honestly represent what happens in a war, that's going to come off as anti-war to some degree. But it feels to me like it would be a stretch to describe a movie as anti-war just because it dispassionately portrays what happens in a war, when its purpose may be entirely different from praising or condemning war.

What you're saying is that if a work accurately portrays the fact that women are human beings with their own wants and desires, that's feminist. My argument with this is essentially semantic, but I think it's important as semantics go, because framing a work in a feminist light can obscure what it's really about (in Madoka's case, debt, obligation, and selflessness, which aren't framed in gendered terms here.)

[sarillia]

framing a work in a feminist light can obscure what it's really about (in Madoka's case, debt, obligation, and selflessness

Why can't you look at it both ways? Why does one obscure the other?

It's probably not relevant but I don't really see the series as feminist, but I'm not really understanding this argument against looking at it in those terms.

[feotakahari]

It would be great to talk about both, but that doesn't seem to be what most people do. I mentioned war stories before--when people talk about Ender's Game as an anti-war piece, they tend not to understand or care about what it says about moral relativism. I get frustrated to see more complicated ideas that takes more thought and effort to discuss constantly set aside in favor of messages that fit in a tweet or on a bumper sticker, so I tend to try to promote discussion of the more complicated ideas. I don't intend that to come at the expense of the simpler ideas, and I'm sorry if I came off that way.