sex and leaving one piece
This weekend was Steam's big autumn sale, and as usual i bought a bunch of games that were on my wishlist that were at such a good sale price i couldn't pass them over, but it's also quite likely i won't play them for months. I see it as part of my entertainment tax - i spend a lot of money on music, games and books that i don't often enjoy to their fullest extent, but i see that excess as my way of contributing to the larger entertainment industry that i also enjoy via piracy of television shows. There is some kind of post on morality and religion - not to mention the hacker ethic - that is brewing somewhere within, but this post will be about sex.
One of the games i bought because it was 90% off was Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. The AC series is one of the best-known in all of gaming, but in case you are unfamiliar, the gimmick is that you are an individual living at a pivotal point in human history, and you explore a vast map influencing events in a way that will lead to a better outcome in the future. You do so by single-handedly murdering thousands of people. What makes the games appealing to people who don't dig mass murder is that the historical locations are meticulously researched and lovingly depicted. If you ever sat on a mountain looking at some delapidated columns wondering what the place might have looked like a couple thousand years before, Odyssey lets you experience that, and - having now visited Delphi in the game, as well as in real life - i can say it very much delivers on that front.
It also delivers at being a tiny bit gratuitous. Our hero, Kassandra, is an orphan who grows up to be a fierce mercenary in the land of tunics. She cheerfully dives into the Aegean to hunt for buried treasure, and that's where you will get to see plenty of upskirt views of her white panties. Or, well, white loincloth, because that's probably what horse-riding, cliff-diving active warriors would have worn at the time, but it can still be hard to disentangle that from our modern sensibilities. One of my friends who played the game a few years back mentioned rolling her eyes at the way our hero's tunic flapped about underwater like a sexy tennis skirt. It's no Dead or Alive, but still one of those things that make you go hmmm.
C+C Music Factory - Things That Make You Go Hmmmm....
Anyway, the upskirt views of Kassandra - an otherwise tough, badass, masculine-looking woman - got me thinking back to why i gave up on One Piece.
One Piece is shōnen manga/anime, which is to say it's a comic/cartoon aimed at younger teen boys. Almost all the most popular anime in the world is this genre - everything from classics like Astro Boy through Akira and into modern stuff like Dragon Ball, Naruto, Bleach, bla bla bla, a bunch of stuff i have never watched and have no interest in. My primary exposure to anime - prior to One Piece - was limited to stories featuring spaceships and robots, because i am a sci-fi nerd first, so i will watch anything sci-fi even if it's a Japanese cartoon for teenage boys. But One Piece is a 21st century cultural institution, especially here in Asia, so when Netflix released a live action series i decided to give it a try.
It was awesome.
The One Piece Netflix series is so great. It's a fantasy story about a teenage boy called Luffy who is absolutely bursting with optimism and filled with the spirit of adventure. He wants to be a pirate, so that's what he sets out to do, damnit! He sails around meeting people and recruiting them to his crew simply by being a good person. He's not trying to be good to win favors with the gods, or to increase his reputation, or because he was taught that way... He just does the right thing because instinctively he knows that it's the right thing to do. Luffy is depicted as thoroughly naïve - ignorant of politics and religion and other institutions, he is just a pure force for positivity, and it's a delight to watch him go.
Of course, his single-minded pursuit of his own goals and complete ambivalence to local cultural mores often have him committing social faux pas, but because he's such a decent guy eventually the misunderstandings are cleared up and all is forgiven. This usually happens after a ridiculously decompressed battle scene, including with all his future friends, because in shōnen anime the way you make friends with people is to spend several episodes beating them up first. I'm not sure what message kids are expected to draw from that trope, but it is what it is.
Anyway, although Luffy is generally an honorable person, and the stories are for the most part totally innocent and adorable, the anime does feature a lot of racial and cultural stereotypes that could rub people the wrong way. According to fans you're supposed to overlook it because it's a fantasy world with no relation to reality, but of course that's nonsense. That said, if you can handle Astérix, you can handle One Piece. It's mostly harmless.
Except for the way women are treated. On one hand, in One Piece you have plenty of female characters who who are reasonably competent in the abstract. On the other hand, most of the situations where a character is put in peril and Luffy needs to save them, it's the female crewmembers who got beaten down or the local princesses who got kidnapped. Yeah, alright, save the princess trope goes back to antiquity, fine. All the chicks are scantily-clad and drawn with implausible bubelage, but who can fault a bit of eye candy, right? We also have that one super-honorable main character who refuses to ever strike a woman. I mean, doesn't make sense in a world where everyone has magical powers and amazing combat abilities, but let's call it a quirk. Then there's that main character whose primary identity is that he is so besotted by every woman he meets that he turns into a quivering mess, unable to focus on anything but her beauty. It's uncomfortable, but just silly enough that it can be accepted.
Until.
In a "spooky" story arc that also features an invisible man spying on our female crewmembers bathing, sexually abusing them on-screen and then (inevitably) kidnapping them, we are introduced to a new character. He is an old man - not a teenager like the rest of the crew - and immediately on arrival he requests to see the female crewmembers' panties. Ha ha ha! It's a joke! He's a dirty old man, you see? Except then it turns out that this dirty old man joins the fucking crew! And that "joke" he made when they first met? It's actually his catchphrase, and he repeats it to all the female characters that appear throughout the rest of the series, including his crewmates, repeatedly. Ha ha ha! It's so funny! Only uptight western people wouldn't understand the humor, they are so hung up on political correctness!
No, fuck, i'm sorry, when you have a main character in a show aimed at young teenage boys - although also popular with boys and girls of all ages - treating sexual harassment as a joke, that's not fucking cool. Not in Europe, not in America, and definitely not in Japan where there is a well-known problem of gropers on public transport, people taking upskirt photos without consent etc etc. The fact fans apologize for this shit is beyond eyeroll-worthy. Yes, it's possible for a show in the main to be really fun, wholesome, positive, enjoyable... and also for it to feature incredibly creepy, sleazy, sexist shit. It can be two things at once.
The thing is, for me the creepiness turned me off the whole series. It didn't help that after that arc we go through something like 100 episodes of pointless family melodrama and tedious battles that have nothing to do with the awesome voyage of adventure and discovery of the previous ~400 episodes. Then there is a time-skip to allow the characters to mature off-screen, which for the women means they come back with even bigger boobs and even skimpier bikini tops. Meanwhile the character who is besotted by women spends that period on the island of transvestites, which results in him developing a medical condition that leaves him near death whenever he is exposed to even just a picture of a beautiful (cis) woman. Luffy, on the other hand, spends the break on the island of the Amazons where no men are allowed, except their queen has fallen hopelessly in love with him and now worships the ground he walks on. And the dirty old man? Well he becomes a pop star whose groupies gladly show him their panties, because ha ha ha, it's a joke, you see? When you're a star, they let you do it. Grab them by the pussy!
Yo, fuck this patriarchal bullshit.
But the thing is, it's not just the patriarchy that's the problem here. It's also this fixation society has with sex. Everything gets wrapped up in people's weird obsession. Like, the whole stupid narrative around trans people, it's not even about trans people, it's about cis people who cannot stop thinking about sex. Trans women are actually just men trying to gain access to women's spaces so they can sexually abuse them! Young girls are being given drugs that could permanently inhibit their ability to orgasm! Children are being forcibly "transed" because queer theorists are too homophobic to accept the idea of conventional gay sex! Like, what the fuck are these idiots even talking about? It's just another example of how people arbitrarily inject sex into all kinds of unrelated topics. Peak sensationalism.
I am so fucking over sex. I remember back when i was a tween, and the hormones were running wild, and i had a few science fiction books featuring lurid sex scenes, and they embarrassingly always fell open to those pages i had furtively read so often. That was right around the time that Ugly Kid Joe released their iconic tune listing everything that they hated, which turned out to be everything in the world, including sex, which was "overrated too"!
Ugly Kid Joe - Everything About You
That line often made adults in the room chuckle despite themselves, and now that i am adult i get why. Sex is fucking overrated. It's about as gross of a bodily function as blowing your nose or taking a shit, except with other people, so it's awkward and sweaty too. Some people have a hormonal urge to do it, others don't, and for almost all of us it's the process by which we were conceived, so, hooray for perpetuation of the species, i suppose? But eh. In the modern world there are lots of other ways for people to spend their time that are just as entertaining. In fact, that's what art is, right? The entertainment we made for ourselves that was better than sex.
So, like, stop shoehorning sex into our entertainment, you know?
I guess some people, like maybe a 12-year-old who hasn't yet gotten into the teenage "lol everything sucks" phase, appreciate a bunch of sexy stories to spice up their life. And, hell, most of the people left on LJ these days are or were into smutty fanfic, so obviously there is a market for sex in entertainment. Heck, i have no problems with gratuitous outfits and cartoonish curves, but what i do object to is when sex is used to construct boring plot points that perpetuate these cultural narratives like rape as the root of all female trauma, women as perpetual victims of sexual violence and so on. Yes, we know there are sexist men in the world. No shit. WE LITERALLY LIVE THAT EVERY SINGLE DAY. Does it mean they need to be depicted in every piece of entertainment too? Like, can't we just have one thing where the women get to be heroes without also being sexually harassed?
Anyway, that's why i quit watching One Piece. But i will keep watching the Netflix live action, because i trust Netflix to give these characters a much-needed "woke" reimagining.
I really want to write more about Le Bureau des Légendes - the spy show that i have been loving so much i have been forcing myself to only watch one episode at a time because it's so good i don't want it to end. There is a way it could have weaved into this topic too, but this post is too long so i will do it later. Here's a teaser for where the post could have gone...
The women spied on by undercover police - We Did Not Consent
I did notice that just this week they released an American remake of Le Bureau called The Agency. I'm not sure if American TV can do the characters justice, but i'll give it a chance when i finish season 2 of the French version.
Anyway, back to running around ancient Greece bopping Spartans on the head. Yes i went to Pride last week, it was fine. I didn't get very many good photos, but i can say that this year there were a lot more naughty sailors and airmen on the streets. Sign of the times?
One of the games i bought because it was 90% off was Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. The AC series is one of the best-known in all of gaming, but in case you are unfamiliar, the gimmick is that you are an individual living at a pivotal point in human history, and you explore a vast map influencing events in a way that will lead to a better outcome in the future. You do so by single-handedly murdering thousands of people. What makes the games appealing to people who don't dig mass murder is that the historical locations are meticulously researched and lovingly depicted. If you ever sat on a mountain looking at some delapidated columns wondering what the place might have looked like a couple thousand years before, Odyssey lets you experience that, and - having now visited Delphi in the game, as well as in real life - i can say it very much delivers on that front.
It also delivers at being a tiny bit gratuitous. Our hero, Kassandra, is an orphan who grows up to be a fierce mercenary in the land of tunics. She cheerfully dives into the Aegean to hunt for buried treasure, and that's where you will get to see plenty of upskirt views of her white panties. Or, well, white loincloth, because that's probably what horse-riding, cliff-diving active warriors would have worn at the time, but it can still be hard to disentangle that from our modern sensibilities. One of my friends who played the game a few years back mentioned rolling her eyes at the way our hero's tunic flapped about underwater like a sexy tennis skirt. It's no Dead or Alive, but still one of those things that make you go hmmm.
Click to viewC+C Music Factory - Things That Make You Go Hmmmm....
Anyway, the upskirt views of Kassandra - an otherwise tough, badass, masculine-looking woman - got me thinking back to why i gave up on One Piece.
One Piece is shōnen manga/anime, which is to say it's a comic/cartoon aimed at younger teen boys. Almost all the most popular anime in the world is this genre - everything from classics like Astro Boy through Akira and into modern stuff like Dragon Ball, Naruto, Bleach, bla bla bla, a bunch of stuff i have never watched and have no interest in. My primary exposure to anime - prior to One Piece - was limited to stories featuring spaceships and robots, because i am a sci-fi nerd first, so i will watch anything sci-fi even if it's a Japanese cartoon for teenage boys. But One Piece is a 21st century cultural institution, especially here in Asia, so when Netflix released a live action series i decided to give it a try.
It was awesome.
The One Piece Netflix series is so great. It's a fantasy story about a teenage boy called Luffy who is absolutely bursting with optimism and filled with the spirit of adventure. He wants to be a pirate, so that's what he sets out to do, damnit! He sails around meeting people and recruiting them to his crew simply by being a good person. He's not trying to be good to win favors with the gods, or to increase his reputation, or because he was taught that way... He just does the right thing because instinctively he knows that it's the right thing to do. Luffy is depicted as thoroughly naïve - ignorant of politics and religion and other institutions, he is just a pure force for positivity, and it's a delight to watch him go.
Of course, his single-minded pursuit of his own goals and complete ambivalence to local cultural mores often have him committing social faux pas, but because he's such a decent guy eventually the misunderstandings are cleared up and all is forgiven. This usually happens after a ridiculously decompressed battle scene, including with all his future friends, because in shōnen anime the way you make friends with people is to spend several episodes beating them up first. I'm not sure what message kids are expected to draw from that trope, but it is what it is.
Anyway, although Luffy is generally an honorable person, and the stories are for the most part totally innocent and adorable, the anime does feature a lot of racial and cultural stereotypes that could rub people the wrong way. According to fans you're supposed to overlook it because it's a fantasy world with no relation to reality, but of course that's nonsense. That said, if you can handle Astérix, you can handle One Piece. It's mostly harmless.
Except for the way women are treated. On one hand, in One Piece you have plenty of female characters who who are reasonably competent in the abstract. On the other hand, most of the situations where a character is put in peril and Luffy needs to save them, it's the female crewmembers who got beaten down or the local princesses who got kidnapped. Yeah, alright, save the princess trope goes back to antiquity, fine. All the chicks are scantily-clad and drawn with implausible bubelage, but who can fault a bit of eye candy, right? We also have that one super-honorable main character who refuses to ever strike a woman. I mean, doesn't make sense in a world where everyone has magical powers and amazing combat abilities, but let's call it a quirk. Then there's that main character whose primary identity is that he is so besotted by every woman he meets that he turns into a quivering mess, unable to focus on anything but her beauty. It's uncomfortable, but just silly enough that it can be accepted.
Until.
In a "spooky" story arc that also features an invisible man spying on our female crewmembers bathing, sexually abusing them on-screen and then (inevitably) kidnapping them, we are introduced to a new character. He is an old man - not a teenager like the rest of the crew - and immediately on arrival he requests to see the female crewmembers' panties. Ha ha ha! It's a joke! He's a dirty old man, you see? Except then it turns out that this dirty old man joins the fucking crew! And that "joke" he made when they first met? It's actually his catchphrase, and he repeats it to all the female characters that appear throughout the rest of the series, including his crewmates, repeatedly. Ha ha ha! It's so funny! Only uptight western people wouldn't understand the humor, they are so hung up on political correctness!
No, fuck, i'm sorry, when you have a main character in a show aimed at young teenage boys - although also popular with boys and girls of all ages - treating sexual harassment as a joke, that's not fucking cool. Not in Europe, not in America, and definitely not in Japan where there is a well-known problem of gropers on public transport, people taking upskirt photos without consent etc etc. The fact fans apologize for this shit is beyond eyeroll-worthy. Yes, it's possible for a show in the main to be really fun, wholesome, positive, enjoyable... and also for it to feature incredibly creepy, sleazy, sexist shit. It can be two things at once.
The thing is, for me the creepiness turned me off the whole series. It didn't help that after that arc we go through something like 100 episodes of pointless family melodrama and tedious battles that have nothing to do with the awesome voyage of adventure and discovery of the previous ~400 episodes. Then there is a time-skip to allow the characters to mature off-screen, which for the women means they come back with even bigger boobs and even skimpier bikini tops. Meanwhile the character who is besotted by women spends that period on the island of transvestites, which results in him developing a medical condition that leaves him near death whenever he is exposed to even just a picture of a beautiful (cis) woman. Luffy, on the other hand, spends the break on the island of the Amazons where no men are allowed, except their queen has fallen hopelessly in love with him and now worships the ground he walks on. And the dirty old man? Well he becomes a pop star whose groupies gladly show him their panties, because ha ha ha, it's a joke, you see? When you're a star, they let you do it. Grab them by the pussy!
Yo, fuck this patriarchal bullshit.
But the thing is, it's not just the patriarchy that's the problem here. It's also this fixation society has with sex. Everything gets wrapped up in people's weird obsession. Like, the whole stupid narrative around trans people, it's not even about trans people, it's about cis people who cannot stop thinking about sex. Trans women are actually just men trying to gain access to women's spaces so they can sexually abuse them! Young girls are being given drugs that could permanently inhibit their ability to orgasm! Children are being forcibly "transed" because queer theorists are too homophobic to accept the idea of conventional gay sex! Like, what the fuck are these idiots even talking about? It's just another example of how people arbitrarily inject sex into all kinds of unrelated topics. Peak sensationalism.
I am so fucking over sex. I remember back when i was a tween, and the hormones were running wild, and i had a few science fiction books featuring lurid sex scenes, and they embarrassingly always fell open to those pages i had furtively read so often. That was right around the time that Ugly Kid Joe released their iconic tune listing everything that they hated, which turned out to be everything in the world, including sex, which was "overrated too"!
Ugly Kid Joe - Everything About You
That line often made adults in the room chuckle despite themselves, and now that i am adult i get why. Sex is fucking overrated. It's about as gross of a bodily function as blowing your nose or taking a shit, except with other people, so it's awkward and sweaty too. Some people have a hormonal urge to do it, others don't, and for almost all of us it's the process by which we were conceived, so, hooray for perpetuation of the species, i suppose? But eh. In the modern world there are lots of other ways for people to spend their time that are just as entertaining. In fact, that's what art is, right? The entertainment we made for ourselves that was better than sex.
So, like, stop shoehorning sex into our entertainment, you know?
I guess some people, like maybe a 12-year-old who hasn't yet gotten into the teenage "lol everything sucks" phase, appreciate a bunch of sexy stories to spice up their life. And, hell, most of the people left on LJ these days are or were into smutty fanfic, so obviously there is a market for sex in entertainment. Heck, i have no problems with gratuitous outfits and cartoonish curves, but what i do object to is when sex is used to construct boring plot points that perpetuate these cultural narratives like rape as the root of all female trauma, women as perpetual victims of sexual violence and so on. Yes, we know there are sexist men in the world. No shit. WE LITERALLY LIVE THAT EVERY SINGLE DAY. Does it mean they need to be depicted in every piece of entertainment too? Like, can't we just have one thing where the women get to be heroes without also being sexually harassed?
Anyway, that's why i quit watching One Piece. But i will keep watching the Netflix live action, because i trust Netflix to give these characters a much-needed "woke" reimagining.
I really want to write more about Le Bureau des Légendes - the spy show that i have been loving so much i have been forcing myself to only watch one episode at a time because it's so good i don't want it to end. There is a way it could have weaved into this topic too, but this post is too long so i will do it later. Here's a teaser for where the post could have gone...
The women spied on by undercover police - We Did Not Consent
I did notice that just this week they released an American remake of Le Bureau called The Agency. I'm not sure if American TV can do the characters justice, but i'll give it a chance when i finish season 2 of the French version.
Anyway, back to running around ancient Greece bopping Spartans on the head. Yes i went to Pride last week, it was fine. I didn't get very many good photos, but i can say that this year there were a lot more naughty sailors and airmen on the streets. Sign of the times?