animegate Update – 03/05/18

Author: Gabriel Persechino-Forest     Published: May 3rd, 2018

Korean Gaming Feminist Controversy

Nardack, a Korean artist who works on the Chinese smartphone game Azur Lane, was commissioned to make an illustration for the game by X.D. Global. She then came under fire online for supporting anti-social organizations because of Tweets she liked and as a result, she fell under the impression that she was being called anti-social due to her supporting feminist comments online. I personally believe she is in error as it has been pointed the comments she liked came from Megalia; who are a well known feminist extremist group in the country who post appalling content and support a misandrist world view. I do not believe, as many do, that there is ill will here, especially considering the type of illustration Nardack makes. I believe she is possibly unaware of the nature of the group who made the comments and mistakenly assumed it was the feminist nature of these comments that were the issue.

Then the company sent her a message asking if she belonged to any anti-social group to which she responded no. But to make this controversy even more unnecessarily over-bloated, they asked her to say the following:

I have no relation to Megalia whatsoever, and I do not support Feminism.

Clearly, Megalia is the issue, but because both the artist and the company share a different view of what feminism is, it created a bigger problem which resulted in her illustration being taken down. To make things clear, I do not believe the company is sexist, or they wouldn’t have hired a woman in the first place; it is obvious they have a problem with the more extremist brands of feminism that have unfortunately come to represent the movement. At the same time, the artist has no wish to renounce an ideology she believes in, because to her it represents women’s rights; thus creating this ugly mess.

Then the artist sought to outdo the company’s class act by posting herself:

Is the stance taken by a part of the Korean internet, “feminism is anti-social,” a legal and social agreement made by members of our own community?

Again, unnecessarily making this about feminism when it’s really about a few radicals starting trouble as they love to do.

Doing a class act of their own, Anime News Network posted their article that painted the entire incident as an anti-woman campaign, pretended the people involved were angry about feminism itself, did not mention Megalia’s involvement and felt the need to make a connection with GamerGate. They even changed the meaning of the statement that was issued by the company from:

Originally posted by Nardack:

I have no relation to Megalia whatsoever, and I do not support Feminism.

to:

Originally posted by Anime News Network:

I have no relation to antisocial groups, and I do not support feminism

Obviously as a deliberate attempt to exclude the hate group from the discussion and paint the incident in a manner that supports their scenario.

Great journalism right there. To double down on their original piece’s quality, they actually went to the comment section and said this:

No more Gamergate discussion or mentions. This thread already started off bad enough without treading back into those waters.

They started the GamerGate debate in their article and now are forbidding users to talk about their opinion’s merit; this in an article talking about an artist deploring a lack of respect for freedom of speech by corporations.

Source: Evernote (English and Japanese), Nardack’s Twitter

More Mainstream Normalization

It seems the mainstream establishment is deploying a new salvo of articles aimed at helping anime’s mainstream acceptance:

Hyper Beast makes a massive sales pitch for My Hero Academia to the average Joe while Sy-Fy is trying to tell us “Anime is for jocks too!”. I mean really! As if it’s some sort of astonishing revelation that people who play sports and aren’t computer programmers actually have hobbies outside of the sport they play. Of course the article isn’t designed to reveal any sort of truth, its only goal is to play on established stereotypes that geeks are all basement dwellers and “cool kids” don’t touch the stuff or face social exile. As if reality was determined by their artificially crafted worldview; fortunately, individuality is still valued and hopefully, people have the ability to see seemingly inoffensive articles such as these for what they really are when put in the larger picture.

Sports appears to be the big gateway now. Athletes are making their interest known for the medium now and its making the news. Interesting how celebrities are coming out as fans one industry at a time and all at the same time within that industry when they do with appropriate media coverage to follow. Anyway, it seems that recently Joel Embiid was “caught” watching Dragon Ball GT during one of his breaks. Funny how these anime stories never came out before but now happen on a weekly basis. Of course Sports Illustrated ran with it as well and couldn’t help themselves from uttering the all too familiar and symbolic catch phrase of this campaign:

ANIME ISN’T JUST FOR NERDS

There’s definitely a theme to this media push. And you know they’re serious since it’s in all-caps.

Part of this recent “Athletes push” includes Steven Adams skipping watching the Warriors’ first game with Kevin Durant to watch anime instead and Johnny O’Bryant starting his own manga company.

Further reading:

Anime’s Normalization

Attack on the Fanbase

AnimeGate Archive