People have lizard brains and eyes. Better that their attention is directed at fabricated cartoon characters or AI stuff than real young people.
Of course being weird about it is weird.
fate/ kaleid liner prisma illya is to be expected considering the amount of fanservice
Ugh truth. A shitllad of ani communities here are like this
I said basically this on the other post about this, but when I look at the characters presented here, not a single one looks “like a child” to me. And I don’t mean “it looks like pedophilia is morally right”, what I mean is that these characters don’t have the traits children have. At least in my eyes.
They don’t look any more like a human child than Kermit the frog does, or Miss Piggy. They’re empty abstractions of people, and we breathe a spirit into them when we project things onto them, and I don’t project “fourteen-year-oldness” onto any of these shapes. Because I’m not into that, maybe?
So, like, even if the plot for these characters states that they’re 14, it certainly doesn’t seem that way. I don’t bring that in with me.
I only recognize like one or two of these characters, so I don’t know what age range is meant to be represented here, I just heard someone else say one of them was 14.
The characters in the post are not the children in question but the profile pictures of people showing up to argue
They don’t look any more like a human child than Kermit the frog does, or Miss Piggy.
You lost me there. Im not sure what you’re smoking if you put an anime character beside Kermit and said “both of these equally do not look human”
It’s usually evident from behavior; from looks I’m only identifying 2 of these as definitely children, yeah
Your honor, Can we really say I’m the person that robbed that gas station? In a Baudrillardian sense, both myself and the gas station were mere hyper-real symbols, and thus morally indistinguishable from the pure form of action, that is being-in-ourselves and not for-ourselves, undifferentiated from any particular point in space or time. I cannot be said to have Truly embodied the sign of “taking what belongs to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it”, which is said to be Stealing; because what it is, is, is unclear. Am I myself, and not them? How can we say in any objective sense that one is differentiated from the other? How can we demonstrate such a thing when the prosecution itself is ontologically incapable of acquiring true knowledge, being bound to the narrow perspective of their conditions?
*smashes gavel* Death.
I should clarify, I don’t say this to defend the individual anime. Maybe some of them are terrible! I’m more just curious at the way y’all seem to see the work. I wish I could glimpse the characters through your eyes and see what you’re picking up, because I don’t seem to have any problem seeing the characters’ form as completely separate from the role they occupy in the plot or fictional world, in a similar way that an actor is not the characters they’ve played.
a bunch of them on the frontpage are anime subs, young girls: like zenless zero, wuthering, genshin,etc. all the fans are men and wierd HORSE fetish.
Speaking as someone who was sexually assaulted as a minor, I would rather people rub themselves off to fictional characters than have it happen to anyone else.
You cannot stop people from being attracted to minors. Making something illegal doesn’t magically remove feelings, nor does it magically prevent people from doing it. The threat of prison has never stopped prisoners.
If people are attracted to fictional minors, let them be honest about it so that parents can keep children away from them. The more the attraction to fictional minors is stigmatized, the less people will openly declare it and the less likely they will seek help.
the threat of prison has never stopped prisoners.
Hardcore History has a great episode about public capital punishment throughout history, and how it has not deterred criminals at all.
Predators are opportunists, they don’t abuse children with an expectation to be caught. I don’t expect an opportunist to announce themselves as capable of deceit before committing a crime, so I don’t think permitting them to be honest with others is something they’d want to do.
Even with the most charitable perspective, people would still view virtuous pedophiles as live grenades.
Consider if someone said “I have a rape kink, I’d never act on it, so I’d still like to be invited to [insert event where people might stray from the group, or drink so much they pass out.]”
The only real answer is to remove the stigma around existing, so they can get professional help. Which is hard when “kill pedophiles” is seen as a socially acceptable reaction to news articles about child abuse (my point is that pedophiles aren’t inherently criminals).
Well said. It doesn’t help that discussion about this topic gives people the ick and makes whoever brings it up “the creepy one”-- making a point about how not all pedophiles are rapists is a good way to get yourself labelled as both.
Nobody wants to touch this topic with a ten foot pole, which makes it an inherently interesting topic for me.
These issues need to be discussed rationally and pragmatically by politicians to change laws in order to maximise child safety.
Unfortunately, a great deal of what seems to contribute to child safety is unintuitive and provokes a reactive disgust response.
There was a news article recently about an Australian importing a child-sized sex doll. This is illegal, but it really shouldn’t be.
The evidence seems to suggest adult-sized sex dolls reduce sexual violence, so why would a child-sized sex dolls be any different?
The sad fact is it is political suicide to suggest legalising child-sized sex dolls, even if it was statistically likely to reduce crimes against children.
Topics that people refuse to discuss are often ones where there’s the least logic in how society acts.
Like, the more open society is to talking about religion, the less religious the society tends to be. In ones where people are punished for blasphemy, people naturally either believe or claim to believe the religion completely.
why would a child-sized sex dolls be any different
The theory is probably that if someone is used to having sex with a child-like object, then it’s a smaller step to having sex with a child. Maybe that’s true. It seems plausible at least. But, it also seems plausible that someone might be able to satisfy their urges or work through something that way and be less dangerous. It’s the sort of thing that would need scientific study – but good luck getting funding to study it.
good luck getting funding to study it.
Thanks for making half my point :p
The theory is probably that if someone is used to having sex with a child-like object, then it’s a smaller step to having sex with a child. Maybe that’s true. It seems plausible at least.
You make a great point, and one which has so much nuance than most people want to consider.
It’s similar to the discussion around lolicon/shotacon (hentai featuring girls/boys). Some people say that it acts as a pressure valve, and others say that it desensitises those which use it.
The nuanced point: to some it acts as a pressure valve, and to a smaller minority, it may desensitise and become a hazard for risk prone individuals.
This is basically true of any population; the subset of risk prone individuals is smaller than the one which rehabilitation efforts will facilitate.
Very sorry for what happened to you. A great line I heard once was “it’s not the child, it’s the abuse”, and that really helped me understand the problem better. I think the goal of a lot of people when hearing about CSA is to try and take children out of society as a whole (eg: don’t have them represented in media), and that’s the “solution”, but really children deserve to be in society, they deserve a say, they deserve to be taken seriously. In fact, trying to erase children as a whole is what gives abusers their power, and really it’s about the power difference which enables abuse.
I am not 100% sure if this approach would have the intended effect, but the stigma around paedophilia doesn’t help at all with actually protecting children.
It should be in everyone’s interests to find reliable solutions to these problems. Sexual attraction isn’t something one can freely choose, or turn off at will. I imagine it must be difficult to deal with sexuality that is potentially hurtful towards unconsenting parties without any guidance.
You cannot stop people from being attracted to minors. Making something illegal doesn’t magically remove feelings, nor does it magically prevent people from doing it. The threat of prison has never stopped prisoners.
Some of these are even more defiant on social media, openly being “me gusta” (as in the meme).
With their full names. And family pictures.
I also believe that pedophilia is same as homosexuality. You can not stop people from being that way.
That statement is probably going to piss a lot of people off because they’ll see it as saying they’re both deviant desires. But, I think I know what you mean, that people are wired a certain way. The difference is that one group can act on their desires with another consenting adult and nobody gets hurt, and the other group can’t. But, as long as they don’t act on those desires, they shouldn’t be attacked based on how they’re wired.
I also think that anybody who thinks that pedophilia isn’t common is deluding themselves. Look how common it is historically. There’s the famous ancient Greek practice involving men and young boys. Admittedly, sometimes there’s another reason. The information we have on marriage ages is mostly from the aristocracy because they had land to pass on, titles to add, etc. We don’t know as much about what peasants were doing. Maybe marriages between commoners was uncommon until both were 18, but that seems unlikely.
Aristocrats were often marrying into another aristocratic family where the marriage wasn’t about love or sex but about politics or economics. OTOH, it doesn’t seem to be common for the new husband to say “Ugh, there’s no fucking way I’m consummating my marriage with that child, she’s only 15!” But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there was an unspoken understanding that the new husband could wait until his bride turned 16/18/20 and became attractive to him.
I wonder if that gonna become removed because some idiot assumed it’s homophobic
(and not just for comments this time)
So here’s the thing, someone who’s a thousand years old mentally would be quite intimidating, sexually, regardless of what they’re like physically. The thing about a lot of fictional “thousand year old” characters is that they still act like children, more or less.
There was a bit in Aeon Flux (or was it Ghost in the Shell?) where some kid (>16) was hitting on her, and she was like “oh you want to have sex? Sure let’s see what you’ve got” and the kid just like shits his pants. I think they end up having sex but in the aftermath it’s clear the kid was not in control.
So IMO you had a realistic “physically 9 but mentally 1000 year old” I think most pedos would not be into that.
I read a fantasy book lately where a bunch of gods were captured and enslaved by people. There was a warrior god, the god of night, many other gods, and, a child god. The child god was not only thousands of years old, but was a god. He had the intellect and wisdom of a god, but he was able to act like a child.
There was nothing sexual involving this god in the book, but he often wanted to be cuddled by the main character, have his hair stroked, etc. When she asked him about this, his explanation was basically “sure, I’m a god, I have boundless intelligence and wisdom, but I am able to put myself in the mindset of a child, and it gives me joy to behave as one and be treated as one.”
I thought it was an interesting take, because often when they have say an old vampire in a child’s body, the vampire feels angry and trapped to be in the wrong body. But, in this case it was almost the opposite, the god could have any body he wanted, but he often chose to appear as a child because he was created to be a child god, so that’s the role that made him feel like he was being what he was made to be.
I’ve never actually heard anyone say were attracted to a character like shinobu from monogatari. The only times this discussion has ever come up from what I know is when a character is canonically underage but drawn to look like an adult like rias from dxd.
I have absolutely 100% seen the “she’s a 1000 year old witch coincidentally drawn as a child” unironically in many nsfw forums. Like it’s not hard to find, there is evidence of it on Reddit even let alone sites dedicated to the subject or with worse moderation policies.
It’s out there. Denying it’s existence just reveals your own ignorance on the subject.
Does putting an adult mind in the body of a child immediately imply sexualization? Or can you specifically name the instances of this where the characters are sexualized?
I watch a shit load of anime and off the top of my head I can think of three that fall into the latter category. (And no, I did not continue watching those shows)
Westerners have a tendency to sexualize anything that breathes. That says a lot more about our culture and issues than it does about Japanese culture.
The “powerful spiritual entity regressing to the form of a child” has a long, deeply rooted history in eastern religion and culture. It is not inherently sexual. It is not an excuse to sexualize children. And many Japanese people see westerners as the ones with a problem for projecting sexualization into minors in these scenarios. In their world view, a powerful old spirit in a regressed body is still a powerful old spirit, not a child. Form does not dictate function.
The history behind it is genuinely fascinating (happy to point you at the research I did on this specific subject a while back).
Of course there are absolutely serious problems with some content where there is 100% sexualization of minors (and worse) going on. But that’s far more the exception than the rule.
When I say this I’m referring to discussions that I’ve seen. You can call me ignorant all you like but this is not denying the existence of nsfw art of young looking characters which is obviously the case.
I’m basically saying that the age of a fictional character is far less important than how that character looks and presents. This is not just a thing in anime, I also don’t think that someone who finds the characters in Riverdale attractive are pedos.
How come we almost never see the opposite. A character who looks 58 but is actually 12. Like Benjamin Button.
nekopara is sort of like that, the cats look like catgirls and age like cats and can speak.
Every JoJo’s character
If you include those not in anime, the Ocampa reach sexual maturity between 4 and 5 years old, and die before 10.
Do the Ocampa make any sense? In one episode, Kes goes into heat, she says it’s the only time she ever will, and Ocampa are shown to have a litter size of around 1. So…how has this species survived their own 0.5 at best replacement ratio?
They make as much sense as any of the “I may look 5 but I’m actually a billion” characters out there.
Howl’s Moving Castle?
I didn’t knew that is (loosely) based on a book until recently. I recommend it a lot to everyone who liked the premise of the movie.
Would you crucify me if I said I only watched two Ghibli films?
Yes!
No crucifixion necessary, I’d just tell you that it’s worth watching more of them. They’re all very well made, and well made art is worth experiencing from time to time.
The only exception I have for that is for Earwig and the Witch. It’s by no means a bad film, but I was underwhelmed by it. From an animation standpoint, it was still pretty good, but it kinda shows that “we’re doing our first ever 3D animated movie” kinda vibe. Especially with scenes like the worms punishment scenes with so few worms, making it feel like an underwhelming punishment.
Again, I imagine the people behind it put in so much effort, and I really do appreciate it, but it isn’t a Ghibli film for me.
Was one of them porco rosso? If so, you can live
Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service.
You should 100% Watch Howl’s Moving Castle and Mononoke as well, but good choices nonetheless
Tom Hanks’ character in Big?
Or the entire plot of Shazam!
And all those “Freaky Friday” type movies where an adult and child switch bodies.
Morally wrong AND sexually unappealing*, I can’t imagine why it doesn’t exist
spoiler
- for common preferences don’t @ me
Kes in voyager was like that. We saw her ‘old’ once and she was like 12
deleted by creator
If you’re going to be a perv, the least you can do is keep that shit to yourself.
You wouldn’t be the first person to have a freak fetish in a room full of people who all agree “Freak Fetish is bad!” that just nodded and smiled and kept their fucking mouths shut.
Exactly, I don’t think people can deny or change what they’re attracted to. God knows they’ve tried that with gay men.
But of course the big difference here is that here these people can’t ever be allowed to act on it. They need to reserve the furthest and darkest place in their mind, build walls around it like they’re building a nuclear bunker and seal off all the exits. And don’t fucking tempt that shit with loli anime or other weird shit.
I don’t think people can deny or change what they’re attracted to.
I’m not even going that deep on it. I just think policing what people are attracted to (for whatever reason) is a fool’s errand. At the same time, advertising what you’re attracted to invites public criticism.
They need to reserve the furthest and darkest place in their mind, build walls around it like they’re building nuclear bunker and seal off all the exits.
Not even that. They just don’t need to throw on sandwich boards and parade around anime conventions with bullhorns insisting they have some god-given right to fuck the art.
I guess that was a bit of a hyperbole, but you get what I mean :)
I think nazuna (the greyscale one on the right) is neither visually nor technically a minor. However she is actually the pedophile in this case because she is a vampire going after a literal teenage boy.
That makes them an ephebophile then. Pedo/paedophilia is younger than adolescence (ie. Single digit ages)
Thanks for proving that informing someone about the distinction of pedophilia/ephebophilia makes you sound like a pedofile
Shit, I better tell my middle-aged wife then!
found the pedo
There’s no better way of protecting your family against a certain minority of the population than learning about them. Be victimised, or be aware. Personally, I prefer to do some basic reading.
I can understand thinking shows with questionable content are good. Some really great shows have some straight up weird content.
Though if you’re justifying sexualizing under aged shaped characters… just … no. There’s a reason everyone (rightfully) shat on Netflix’ Cuties, and that was even trying to call it bad.
Cuties was about real human girls for actors, not fictional characters. And that’s not to say that people shouldn’t give weird anime side eye, but like these are literally two different things. One is based on morals and the other should literally send you to jail.
I recently ran into someone who DM’d me asking to please remove all veiled accusations of them being a pedophile or any comments about the age of a 29 year old animie girl.
(I never even accused anyone of anything)
This character looks like a 9 year old, based on her perceived height alone she’d for sure not be in High School yet.
But yea sure, she’s 29, only looks 9??
Short people can get old too. Which character was it?
It’s not just the height, it’s everything about the character.
The character isn’t from a show, does this look like a 29 year old to you?
It sure as hell doesn’t to me
She doesn’t look like any 9 year olds I know either
I don’t really know what 9 years old looks like, but she sure as shit doesn’t look 29 to me.
My cousin is 14, people her age are surprisingly tall, so on proportions alone I’d guess she’s not older than that.
Adults heads usually aren’t about the same size at their torso
Nor are children’s, that’s their point.
I don’t care what you say, Becca’s got my heart (Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners).
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
One of the most shocking things in Japan that I learned was that… age is hard to guess. Talked to some lady and I thought she was in her early 20’s, nope she was older than me.
Becca was older than the main character, but she chose the Loli aesthetic. A lot of people gave the shiwrunners shit for it too.
I see. The irony is that I know someone in person that looks too similar to her appearance, except she’s like almost 50. So I kinda looked it a bit differently, I guess some people accept their height and some people obsess over having a young look.
Isn’t she 21 anyway. I’ve legit seen girls with her same build who are like 27.
edgerunners II, are you ready?
No.
too bad, lets go :3
Oh, I’m gonna watch it. I’m just not ready for the inevitable trauma.
Uh. Isn’t Rei Ayanami (2nd from the top, blue hair) visually 14 but canonically like four years old during the events of the original Evangelion series? Somehow that’s not even the most fucked up part about what happens to basically everybody throughout the story, either.
She’s a 40 something 4 year old in a 14 year old body.
Shit is weird and it’s no wonder Hideaki Anno crashed out about the fans being so fucking creepy about the girls
I assume Anno made the show? Wasn’t the show also sometimes weird about them? It’s no excuse but it does strike me as a little odd to call people out if he participated. Like this is the guy who made the scene where Shinji… uhh… “melts his icecream” next to one of them in a coma. Yes he was probably saying something about it, but he still did it, you know?
Shinji is a maladjusted teen who doesn’t get the chance to emotionally connect to anyone because he’s forced to fight a war. Exploring sexual trauma through your characters is nothing like sexualizing characters. Honestly kinda immature to view that scene as “haha he straight up jorked it”.
I understand that it’s a psychologically interesting scene about Shinji’s trauma, I’m just saying that I’m not sure how big the line is between just straight up being gross and being gross to make a point. There is a difference in the goal but not the methodology, so to speak.
Did that actually happen?
I mean, good if it did, but having watched the show, the creator strikes me as one of those same people who’d be fucking creepy about girls.
I think the death threats over the last episode were a bigger deal to him, but I can’t actually read his mind so who knows.
