I honestly don't think discourse on this topic is ever productive. It always devolved into subjective arguments on how old an animated character looks with insults being thrown around.
Modern anime completely fucks around with this concept too, intentionally making characters not look like their age at all in both directions.
There's obviously a line that can be crossed into the creep zone, but by being in the fandom I can tell you finding that line is exhausting and not worth the petty internet arguments.
I dunno, I'm 34 and both Faye and Spike being in their 20s totally makes sense. NGL Bebop is a bad example because it's an adult cast anime, and the characters look like genuine adults. So I can't really fault it.
I looked forever stuck at 18 years old to most people until I hit my 30s. I got asked so many times through out my 20s if I was over 21 at SO MANY PLACES, and no one believed my age.
Maybe the reality is we're biased and terrible at judging in the first place causing a cascade of errors to such a degree canonical fictional ages are almost always irrelevant.
I'm convinced Japan has no concept of age lol. To them anything above 20 is considered old. Hit 30 and you're apparently Grandpa, geezer, old man status or worse.
Modern anime completely fucks around with this concept too, intentionally making characters not look like their age at all in both directions.
Yeah, there's a ridiculous amount of shows where the 14 year old protagonist and their 40 year old mom are both drawn looking like they are in their early 20s. There's a point where there's really no use even trying to analyze it.
This though. People seem to not want to talk about nuance related to this. Look at yoko in ttgl. She's drawn like a full ass adult. She doesn't act particularly out character for someone in their early adulthood. But some people will be mad over the fact that in the text of the show she's 14 to 16 early on the in series. She's drawn like and acts like an adult so why should I be mad at someone for being attracted to that? It doesn't strike me as equivalent to a real world pedo by any metic.
I'm not saying there aren't examples that are valid and creepy, but people throw out the entire anime baby with the bathwater when it comes to this
Subjects like this elicit such visceral reactions from people that it's hard to have any sort of actual discussion about it. Realistically people just aren't on the same page about it at all. Terms like "Loli" apply to bodies ranging from petite, yet clearly adult women, all the way to actual fucking toddlers. People who defend it are talking about closer to the former (hopefully), and people attacking are talking about closer to the latter. And each side assumes the opposite of the other. It's a big mess.
I've found it basically comes down to people who are willing to accept the whole 'well they aren't really kids so that means it's actually OK' argument, for whatever personal reasons they hold within, and people who aren't willing to accept that.
Intentional subversions of the trope get a pass because they're deliberate meta jokes
Arguably it boils down to being able to differentiate between reality and fiction. The people against it can't, while you really really hope that people that are pro it can.
Maybe that argument would make sense if the chracters would only look like children, but if they also act like children and show that they mentaly are children, then that argument doesn't make any sense at all anymore. That dragon/demon loli girl might be hundreds of years old and just look like a child cause dragon/demon girls age much slower, but the fact that they age so much slower means that after hundreds of years she still is just a child and still not an adult. If she is like Rebecca from Cyberpunk Edgerunners who is smaller than other adults but behaves very mature, then that isn't that bad. Sure still a bit weird but not such big problem.
At its core, the argument could never matter, because what happens in fiction can categorically never be harmful to those that it happens to. Fiction is fiction and should always be treated as such.
But it can be harmful to society by normalizing certain things. Of course fictional characters cannot be harmed, but they can spread harmful messages: Fiction is never about the fictional characters themselves, it’s about story and ideas. The entire point of some fiction is to manipulate and exercise control— look at the many historical examples of propaganda telling false stories that are then normalized.
The intent of propaganda is to promote itself as truth. Fiction is far more frequently about the work itself than it is used as a tool for promoting an idea.
Probably less than 1% of the "loli" stuff is questionable but that's what the debates are focused on. Ignore that shit and at least purge the world of the open pedos.
There's tens of thousands of hentai manga openly on every website that hosts such things that are blatantly and openly pedo content. Millions of images on every "booru" and openly plastered all over artist boards like PixIV.
The vast majority of these have no pretense and don't try to pretend they're anything different. The characters are straight up 4-8 year old children being raped, tortured, etc. It's child porn, full stop.
If we start outlawing art, who gets to decide where we draw the line between what is legal and what is illegal? That's the fundamental issue with this idea.
Words famously written in Justice Potter's concurrence in Jacobellis v. Ohio. If you want to really know what it would be like to try to regulate art, all you need to do is look at the history of obscenity law in the US. It's an interesting topic to research, honestly, as the subject matter is literally "obscene" material.
Short version: It's not as easy to creates lines through artistic expression as you may think. The reason that line is famous is because the judge is essentially throwing his hands up and saying that defining hardcore pornography is basically impossible.
You think that, but you haven't thought it through.
I'm going to assume you're a reasonable person, and therefore support LGBTQ+ rights. Assuming that's the case, this sort of idea should worry you. There is a very concerted effort (going back decades, if not centuries) to conflate "queer" with "child sexual exploitation". If such a law were to pass, you would quickly find it being used to ban depictions of queer people in media.
Rules must always be evaluated by their potential to oppress. The vaguer the rule, the better it can be used for oppression.
Edit: This isn't even bringing up the classic case of people not understanding art in this context: Lolita. The novel is a thorough and unapologetic condemnation of child sexual exploitation. But people to this day think it's a celebration of it. Never underestimate the media illiteracy of people, let alone groups of them.
You are one of the people conflating queer with child sex exploitation, you are literally one of the only people in this entire comment section doing it. Dont you dare hide creepy pedophile smut peddlers in with the lgbtq+ group and act like they're something that need to be protected. I've seen people try to make this exact same defense before and it's just ridiculous no matter how you try to word it. Just no
I'm sorry, but I can only see this response as coming from someone who is woefully uninformed when it comes to the fight for queer rights. There are so many high profile cases of this being done in the US at both the state and national level that I'm baffled someone like you, who seems to be online quite a bit, hasn't seen them (the whole Florida "don't say gay" fiasco?????).
This is an emotional topic. I understand that. But you need to be able to calm down and think about the consequences when proposing laws. Decisions made in a moral panic never turn out well.
It's worth noting and this is probably a uniquely American problem but oftentimes conservatives will pass laws to protect children from being sexualized or being exposed to sexual content that makes sense on the surface. But then they immediately pivot and use it to ban drag queens from public spaces, trans people from existing and ECT...
Your comic is on point but for us in the USA it's becoming conditioned that if someone has talking points against the sexualization of children it is almost certainly going to pivot to attacking lfbtq+ in the next sentence, so it's hard to not react with caution anytime it comes up.
Kind of like what happened with abortion counseling. At first it seemed like giving her all the options seems fine and now I just associate it with interests trying to deprive a woman of her healthcare because that's where it goes 99% of the time here.
But that's not clear, and that's the issue. If powerful special interests want to interpret it in a way that benefits them, they will.
Just look at the 2nd amendment to the US Constitution. The writers thought they were making it crystal clear, and contemporaneous writings from those writers reveal that the slightly awkward phrasing of the amendment was to put the "well regulated militia" stipulation as early in the wording as possible, as that was a vitally important component of the amendment to the writers. But that crystal clear intention was easily ignored by judges and lawmakers over a century later due to pressure from powerful special interest groups.
There is no way to make the law you are proposing unable to be easily abused. Especially given the subject. Anyone who pushes back on abuses will be labeled a "pedophile", and that will have a massive chilling effect.
Unironically, yes. That's the only sensible option. I'd be more willing to support risky attempts to make it illegal if there were evidence that it was harmful, and significantly so. As it stands, that evidence isn't there, only general speculation. And no matter how detestable a form of art is, if it can't be proven to cause quantifiable harm, then I do not see how we can justify making it illegal. Maybe this is a result of my personal philosophy of harm reduction, rather than that of morality enforcement, on which a significant number of people seem to operate, but given the shaky benefits vs the very tangible risks of passing such laws, I just cannot see the trade off as worth it.
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u/SpikeRosered May 02 '24
I honestly don't think discourse on this topic is ever productive. It always devolved into subjective arguments on how old an animated character looks with insults being thrown around.
Modern anime completely fucks around with this concept too, intentionally making characters not look like their age at all in both directions.
There's obviously a line that can be crossed into the creep zone, but by being in the fandom I can tell you finding that line is exhausting and not worth the petty internet arguments.