Author: Gabriel Persechino-Forest Published: April 23rd, 2018
Fancon Event Indefinitely Postponed
Universal Fancon, which advertised itself as an “All inclusive event” for LGBTQIA, women, the disabled, minorities… and pretty much anyone who isn’t part of the evil privileged white patriarchy (All this sounds stupid I know but this isn’t my narrative, I’m just reporting on it) has been postponed indefinitely. The odd thing is, the project had more than met its goal on Kickstarter, accumulating 56 000$, and was scheduled to occur between April 27th and 29th.
One Angry Gamer attempted to contact the organizers of the event about refunds for those who had booked hotels and flights in advance but was met with the FAQ page on the official website instead of an actual answer. They claim further details and alternate plans will be offered to those who already booked flights and hotel reservations in Baltimore.
Based on what has been said so far, even though they more than met their goal, they failed to reach the financial means necessary to achieve an event on the scale they had planned. This does indicate severe mismanagement but also, that in spite of some impressive level of support, there still aren’t enough people who want such an event to actually make it materialise. And it shouldn’t be surprising, since most women, minorities and so on… don’t actually feel marginalised or oppressed within the geek community; making an event designed specifically to “protect them” pretty pointless overall.
Source: Article Image: One Angry Gamer
#MeToo In Japan
The attempt to socially redesign and engineer people’s behavior is now starting to hit Japan in a serious way. For one we have this article which aims to try and control people’s behavior towards women and more importantly, force men to think of women differently. The amazing thing is that this political correctness movement has only served to vindicate the ultra-conservative crowd: They have claimed since the beginning that women are “Weak little flowers” who “Shouldn’t try to interact normally in society because they need special treatment”. Of course I do not believe this. Women have proven themselves just as competent as men in all fields including being artists (Such as writers, directors and so on…); not to mention women never asked for that special treatment. But I do find it interesting that the regressive Me Too movement keeps making the contention that women must now be treated with kid gloves and that we must think of them differently as well. It is entirely counterproductive to what feminists have actually been trying to do since their movement started and is only further proof that 4th wave feminism is actually anti-women.
Another article speaks of how #MeToo is actually suffering backlash in Japan but attempts to paint people being sceptical of unfounded accusations and unsubstantiated stories as “Part of a patriarchal society”. It then talks about women who are raped rarely seeing justice in Japan. While true, this issue is entirely the fault of the government (Through their laws and law enforcement as well as the justice system) but it tries to put the blame on “society” instead. Isn’t it nice how when corrupt government officials of all level institute discrimination and injustice they get to blame the people they are abusing as the culprits. They also attempt to appropriate themselves groups that have nothing to do with #MeToo such as Mika Kobayashi’s help group for victims of rape. Even though they share their stories anonymously with each other for support, their efforts to help women have now been claimed by #MeToo:
Mika Kobayashi is a rape victim. She runs a self-help group that has shared thousands of #MeToo experiences, but only anonymously among themselves.
The group isn’t using the Me Too hashtag and Kobayashi said herself she isn’t an activist so how can her efforts be part of #MeToo? Me Too is a political movement but one that attempts to centralize and claim all the efforts done to combat legitimate sexual abuse under its banner with the aim of controlling the narrative from now on.
On a finishing note, I have said before that #MeToo would be used to achieve not only behavioral censorship but also artistic censorship. While not affecting Japan just yet, we do have a precedent that proves my point within the UK. It seems it has become de facto impossible to publish books with so called “Macho heroes” and #MeToo is cited as part of the cause. As I said, Me Too is a political movement that is an integral part of political correctness and aims to censor and control content. This is what we can expect in Japan as well when things get started for real. The feminists keep saying they are not coming for our anime, but they did come for our video games, then our comics and now our novels; under what rock must you live in to believe anime will be the world’s sole exception? Two female authors so far have already come out to speak on how this will affect fiction aimed at women, since now “Macho men” can no longer be romantic interest in romance fiction; as I said before as well, entertainment aimed at woman is also targeted in this campaign and so is women’s ability to create freely as they see fit (Freedom is a genderless issue after all).
Source: Rawle Nyanzi
For further reading:
My Article on Political and Social Pressure