Male Sexual Assault Victims are not just played for Laughs

The YouTube Channel Pop Culture Detective has a video titled Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs Part 2 Female Perpetrators.  It’s a pretty exhaustive and seemingly thoughtful analysis of all the ways Male Sexual Assault is played for Laughs in media. 

However it is unhelpful in actually making progress on how Male Sexual Assault Victims are thought about and treated in society by only focusing on when it’s played for laughs.  Because he denies that it’s actually a “Double Standard” in any way while also emphasizing how allegedly rare it is.

Like by saying “Rape of Women isn’t taken seriously either” followed by a Quagmire clip. That Family Guy scene is an example of Dark Comedy, like most comedy involving women being raped by men, I don’t like these kinds of jokes but I’m not gonna pretend they are something aren't and deny that what’s happening is something everyone considers horrible and traumatizing is vital to the joke working as intended.  All these men being raped by women scenes the video documents are not Dark, they are instead treating the the entire idea of this happening as an absurdity.

But early in the video came the real warning sign of the video's problem.  Yes all these scenes are acknowledging that what the woman is doing is morally and ethically wrong.  Therefore he concludes the problem has nothing to do with people refusing to condemn a woman’s actions.

The problem is there is plenty of Male Sexual Assault in media that isn’t played for Laughs, sometimes a scene happens that almost everyone would call Rape if the genders were reversed, but instead is not only not considered Rape but if any moral judgment is passed on what happened at all it will entirely be that the Man did something wrong to the Woman.

The big example of this in my mind is episode 9 of School Days, which I've talked about before.  Early on it shows how a Girl inviting a Boy to the “rest area” is supposed to go.  Otome doesn’t do that but drags Makoto there, confesses and then assaults him before he can fully respond and then his eyes go weird, the Hentai visual language of Mind Break.

This is very obviously a Rape scene to me.  But because the popular narrative around this show as a whole is that Makoto is a selfish indecisive womanizer who deserves what happened to him at the end no one is willing to even consider the possibility that he was ever the Victim in the first 11 episodes.

That’s just the most blatant example, he had previously been kissed while sleeping and I frankly consider his consent to everything he does with Kotonoha in the last episode questionable at best.

Then I often think about the movie Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, where in one sequence Violet seduces Joy’s boyfriend by taking advantage of his Drug Addiction.  And one online review I read a long ago found laughable the notion that we’re supposed to feel sorry for him when he calls her out on that later.

DC Comics is filled with examples of Villainesses raping Superheroes but the writers being very inconsistent on if they want to acknowledge his lack of consent.  Most notoriously being how Grant Morrison retconned Talia.

Update July 2024: Going back to School Days, in the VN it's Kotonoha who rapes Makoto.

In the scenario that comes from episode 5 being The Video Tape Kotonoha repeatedly assaults Makoto on the train against his protests, and once starts jerking him off while he's still asleep, and more.  Twice in these scenes a prompt will come up for the player but our options are only say no or nothing, no option to actually consent.

In a scene leading up to Bavarois/Lust after he tells her he loves Sekai and wants to break up she undresses in-front of him and tells him to touch her and when he doesn't she walks over and forces his face in her breast.

The issue today with how society treats Female on Male Rape is less a denial that it's theoretically possible and more having a different barrier to considering that's definitely what happened.  When it's a male assaulting a female at least most self described Feminists understand that any Consent given after an encounter begins as non consensual is dubious at best.  But in the scene I just talked about will go "look how easily he starts sucking on them" but I'm like "he barely even looks aware of his surroundings".

Then there is the matter of SA victims themselves often not being willing or able to recognize that's what happened to them.  And for male victims an added reason for that is this very double standard.  But because people enter this franchise with such a baseline cynical view of Makoto it's easy to go "even he admits he did something wrong...." when that's not how human psychology works, people feel guilty about things that aren't their fault all the time.

Update November 2024: Makoto is also a victim of Statutory Rape in Summer Days/Shiny Days.  And at first I thought the Game wasn't taking that as seriously as the examples from School Days I talked about.  But then I realized the parallelism in Futaba seeing Makoto with Youko in the MILF route timeline and Makoto seeing Futaba with Shun in most timelines if you make it to episode 4.  That tells me the writers do see them as the same.

The MILF routes are locked behind some very specific choices that it's unlikely anyone would make by accident. I truly believe all scenes in them were written with the expectation that you've probably already experienced a version of Episode 4 including Makoto seeing Futaba with Shun. So Futaba seeing Makoto with Youko I believe is what's written to echo the other scene even if it technically takes place sooner on the timeline.

Futaba never admits to seeing herself as a victim in her relationship with Shun, in fact in the present she's the one actively seeking to continue it while he's seemingly trying to cut it off, which makes it easy for a cynical viewer to see her as some pervert's fantasy of a totally willing underage girl.  But we don't see how her relationship with Shun started, it's the content locked behind the MILF routes that hints at the true subtext.  Specifically the version of the "Captivated by the Twins" ending predicated on Futaba answering Karen's phone and Makoto at first assuming it's Kazuha.

Futaba's interpretation of what she saw is that Youko is seducing and taking advantage of Makoto.  So no matter how much she pretends she's consenting in the relationship with Shun when she sees the same thing happen to someone else she can only recognize it as predation.

But what's really telling and kind of sad is why she chooses to frame this plan as just helping Kazuha get with Makoto, why she seems to feel only Kazuha can Love Makoto enough to Save him.  The obvious subtext to me is that like many rape victims she sees herself as tainted and unworthy of love.  She returns to Shun in episode 4 (which doesn't happen if the Twins Seduce Makoto in episode 3) because she thinks that's her only option.

But it is worth criticizing that this one element of Subtext is it.  A casual play through not looking for this kind of thing will easily see the Milf routes as just unironic fun while there is no way to miss the negative framing of Shun and Futaba or what in some routes happens to Kokoro.  

Update June 2026: I want to confess that the systemic forces that lead to this effects even myself. I have found female character likable for things I could not still consider a male likeable if they did them. It's a pervasive issue I'm not pretending to be above or immune to. 

Smartphone Season 2 retry

I decided to rewatch season 2 of In Another World With My Smartphone and see if I could get over what made me feel so disappointed the first time.

And I did enjoy it more this time, the different Dub Voice Actors for some characters aren’t so jarring anymore.  And in general this show may be better binged.

One interesting thing to praise is how very harsh it is on Slavery, actively avoiding one of Isekai’s most commonly complained about pitfalls.

That said I do think I like it less then season 1 still.

I mentioned before not liking the confirmation that Leen will become one of the official wives. In general though I always had kind of mixed feelings about the Polycule expanding.  I kind of consider 5 the ideal number for a core Anime cast in general because of a lot of notable examples.  And for a Polygynous Harem I kind of consider 4 wives the ideal because of how much my Biblical defense of Polygamy is based on Jacob’s family.

Add to that how the additions to the group made post Toya becoming officially a geopolitical entity are going to have a disadvantage at feeling properly integrated.  Much of season 1 was like a lot of Fantasy Anime based on the vibe of a group of friends playing out an RPG campaign.  It’s hard for me to buy that they can recreate that now.

Rumbling Hearts was an Anime missed by exactly who'd like it most.

Rumbling Hearts is an Anime that is underappreciated partly because it was missed by a lot of the very people it would most appeal to.

First of all it's mostly an Adult Life Drama but the first two episodes are in High School for the backstory.  So the people who want more adulthood in Anime should really check it out.

It also functionally has a very Shoujo or even Josei appeal but still gets officially classified as Seinen being a Visual Novel adaptation.

The show is an emotionally dense Melodrama where all the characters make bad decisions for bad reasons but you always understand them.  Something that takes really skilled writing to pull off.

The Toxic Masculinity of Hating on Male Anime Protagonists

I mean a certain kind of Male Anime protagonist here but I didn’t want to make the title too long.  Thing is, the protagonists meant to be morally hateable are often the ones people like as characters, Light Yagami being the big one.  

I kind of felt like specifying “Bland” in the title, but some of these are hard for me to consider that word as even an accurate description of how their haters view them.

Sometimes people who self identify as Feminists and people who more uncritically accept traditional Gender Roles as they currently function sound shockingly the same as each other, not when talking about Politics directly but when critiquing fiction.  That includes male characters being critiqued for being too Passive, for not “making a move”, for being Romantically indecisive and so on.  

And in the context of Anime, partly thanks to Mother’s Basement, two posterchilds of the kind of Male Anime Protagonists unfairly hated in this way in my head are Yuki Amano from Mirai Nikki aka Future Diary and Kazuya Kinoshita from Rent-a-Girlfriend. Both those shows and a lot of the other shows whose protagonists I’m defending here are flawed shows that don’t always do what I like about them perfectly and sometimes drop the ball in close proximity to the very scenes I praise.  But at their core I think they are good entertaining shows including their protagonists so how their protagonists are hated on bugs me.

Yuki is as passive as he is to contrast with Yuno Gasai, and I already talked about the innate Gender subversion of the Yandere.  One part of the show I often think about is the part where the antagonists they are facing are this weird couple, and the guy keeps insulting Yuki’s masculinity for being protected by his Girl, telling him he’s supposed to be the protector, but not even in quite the most cartoonishly obvious Sexist way you’d expect either, they’re framed kind of like the villains who’s advise the Hero will actually take later on.  So I loved when at exactly the point when it seems like now is when that will happen, instead Yuki doubles down, he embraces the fact that in this relationship the Girl is the fighter, the Protector, and so he should actually just leave the frontline entirely so she can focus, completely placing his trust in her.

I know a lot of people are going to think there’s something inherently Patriarchal about my love of Polygynous Anime like Isekai Smartphone and Girlfriend, Girlfriend.  But the thing is the Internet Neoreactionaries who defend specifically Patriarchal Polygyny as what should be the norm have specific ideas about what kind of Man is supposed to attract multiple women that those Anime and even the Harem Anime unwilling to go for Non-Monogamous resolutions don’t play along with, to them it’s not supposed to be Soft Gentle Kind Hearted Beta Males who have Harems.

And yet even critics who supposedly have more Left of Center perspectives on Gender watch these shows and express bafflement about how these “spineless” men are so attractive to women.  They don’t want to say that Traditional Masculinity is the thing these characters lack that makes them find it so unbelievable they’d be so popular, maybe they don’t want to admit it to themselves.  But that is what it is.

A lot of the time people hate these characters not for anything they do but for what they assume about the intended audience.  They are characters who aren’t Perverts but are put in Perverted situations so the Perverted audience can project onto them guilt free.  And yeah a lot of the time I do think that’s what the writers are thinking.  I however don’t like watching these characters I like put into situations that make them uncomfortable.  I would prefer the Nudity in Anime be characters unashamed of being Naked disrobing in front of characters who are equally totally comfortable with it.

Then there’s the “Nice Guy” and “Friend Zone” discourse, I really don’t want to have to explain what that is, if you’re somehow reading this and don’t already know what it is just google it.  I do not disagree with the Tumblr Feminism critique of these ideas. But I am annoyed at how it’s resulted in a hatred of every fictional character a self described “Nice Guy” might identify with rather than explaining to these people why they aren’t like these Actually Nice fictional characters.

Of course the focus of this post is on Protagonists of Harem or Harem adjacent Anime, where these men aren’t being “Friend Zoned” if anything it’s them “Friendzoning” the girls. But that’s the thing, once a character is deemed to have the vibes of a “Nice Guy” the critique becomes that their getting the girl is a wish fulfillment fantasy.  At that point I think critiquing a show for such Meta reasons is the embodiment of Bad Media Literacy. I never get the sense any of these shows are trying to tell the audience who’s entitled to love, they just want to write romances that start out being built on kindness.

I could go off on a tangent about how the characters in Anime that actually resemble a self described “Nice Guy” are a certain type of character in Yuri Anime who some of the audience will root for over the protagonists intended endgame, like Yaya from Strawberry Panic.  I’m not even the first to say this, I’m basically borrowing a talking point from the old WhiningAboutYuri Tumblr Blog.

I currently identify as Gender Fluid with Any/All pronouns on Social Media.  But I was assigned male at birth and saw myself as Cis until less than a decade ago.  And I still mostly live as a Cis-Het Male offline.  And that makes me very hesitant to write something so predicated on disagreeing with other Feminist and Queer Media Critics. So I’ve been thinking about all this holding off on actually writing it for a while.  But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are the only non Crossdressing Cis-Male characters I’ve at all related to while sitting on the fence about my gender identity.

However the Feminine Side of my personality also disagrees with the notion that it's unrealistic these guys would be so popular.  To whatever extent there is a Straight Girl inside of me, this is the kind of Boyfriend she would want.

So I want to finish by briefly bringing up School Days again. But I don’t want to retread stuff I already covered in my huge School Days post titled Sekai Did Nothing Wrong.  At first glance Makoto doesn’t seem relevant because he can’t really be called innocent of any wrongdoing.  But he’s relevant mainly because those who think of School Days as a “Deconstruction” see Makoto as this type of Harem protagonist actually suffering the consequences of their “indecisiveness”.  Of course for most of these characters the indecisiveness results in getting truly intimate with no one not everyone, and in the VN Makoto doesn't get with everyone on a single timeline.  But even Makoto in the Anime isn’t as bad as people make him out to be, mostly because they downplay the times when he is a victim of Sexual Assault.  He is a flawed character who makes dumb decisions as a horny Teenager, but a lot of it comes from his not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings.  And I’m sick of seeing every few years a new School Days Video on Anitube that just repeats the same shallow reading of his character and Sekai’s, they’re always so boooring.

Update January 2025: Sometimes the male characters who get this treatment aren't even the main character.  For example I recently learned that some people inexplicably hate Kazuki from Wixoss, how can anyone dislike Kazuki?  He's adorable?

It seems whenever a Male Character is liked by more then one Female Character a lot of people just go "I don't see what his appeal is" and leave it at that.  When Anime Girls I respect like a Boy I make an effort to see him through their perspective, and it's usually not that hard to find the appeal when you actually try.

Update May 2025: I recently stumbled upon a Hentai Doujin geared towards a female Audience where the Male lead very much resembles the Generic Isekai protagonist look.  So yes clearly that look does appeal to Girls at least in Japan. 

Shizuku is the first Visual Novel

Amelie Doree is a great YouTuber who's videos I highly recommend to everyone seeking to learn more about obscure Japanese Video Games from the 90s and 2000s.  I want to make that clear up front given how this post is about my disagreement with on specific thing she says in her video on Shizuku.  

Now the part about it not being the first Dempa seems to be true, Dempa I don't know much about but it seems like she's correct there.  However I am very invested in properly understanding the history of Visual Novels and other similar kinds of Games.

Her reasons why it's not the first Visual Novel are all very technical, I'd dare say even semantical.  One of my prior posts on Visual Novels takes the position that the mechanical distinction between them and other Games I feel are wrongly called Visual Novels is the dialogue choices being the only interactive element, and I learned from this YT video at least one prior game fits that definition.  But there's a lot about my older posts on Visual Novels I have come to regret since the fall 2023 Anime season.

Let's compare this to the debate about if the Slasher genre began with Halloween.  By every technical standard there are plenty of pre-Halloween films that fit the bill.  However what makes Halloween so vital is the fact that once people were making movies with the premediated concept of a Slasher being the genre they are making, Halloween and it's first sequel were the primary model they were using.

With Visual Novels it's similar, once we're in the time period when Visual Novels undisputedly exist, Leaf's spiritual trilogy not any prior games that technically fit the definition were the inspiration, the first two which are more Horroeqsque are very directly the inspiration for games like Tsukihime when you compare what Tsukihime originally looked like to what they look like.  And then To Heart is clearly the inspiration for One and Key's Seasons Trilogy and Rumbling Hearts and Shuffle.  Then over time those games became more directly influential then what influenced them.

However the difference between the Slasher situation and the Visual Novel situation, at least in the way I chose to describe the Slasher situation, is that no one was making Tsukihime or Kanon thinking of "Visual Novel" as the name of the Genre they are working in.  Because in Japan "Visual Novel" has never been a genre name, it's only the Leaf series that are called that and it was part of their Branding not a subjective flexible Genre label.  So in that context it's even more indisputable, to the nation that makes all these Games we're talking about there are only 4 Visual Novels and Shizuku is unambiguously the first.

Bowel of Lentils videos on the history of Visual Novels and how that became a term more commonly used in the west then in Japan I highly recommend, and another prior post I made on VNs I kind of regret is the one disagreeing with them.  I have mostly abandoned my past refusal to classify Visual Novels as video games.  Though I still think something more specific then Adventure Game is needed to be the umbrella term for both the undisputed Visual Novels and Dating Sims and other games with this Style.

And that's why I'm indebted to the 2023 Anime 16bit Sensation: Another Layer.  That show has helped make me and others in the Western Fandom aware of how the Japanese term for these kinds of Games is Bishojo Game.

Visual Novel though is still a more distinct subcategory within that.

Magical Girls are my favorite Genre of Anime yet my Favorite Anime isn’t one

Conceptually how I’d define what I like about Anime in general and how I’d define what I like about the Magical Girl Genre specifically are almost exactly the same.  No single Genre embodies what I love about Anime as a whole more than the Magical Girl Warrior.

Yet the Magical Girl Genre has had some bad luck that holds back every specific example of it from similarly perfectly embodying all of that.  The status of being my Favorite Anime has changed a few times since I first had one at all, but it’s never once been held by a Magical Girl show or movie.  In fact I often feel like I’m forcing myself even by usually having one in my top 10.

Now I love this Genre unconditionally so much that even its Mediocre or fatally flawed entries give me a lot of Joy.  And there are plenty of near perfect examples that I love more than most Anitubers seem to love their favorite Anime.

The first problem is the classic standard form of the Genre is a show that airs for a full year which is inevitably held back by a bunch of mid or sometimes even bad one off Monster of the Week episodes. Now do not misunderstand me, my favorite episodes of these shows are also usually one off monster of the week episodes with little if any bearing on the overarching plot.  But the more opportunities you give a show to drop the ball the more they eventually will.  

On the other end of the spectrum the shows that have only one Cour lack fun one off episodes which are conceptually part of the Genre’s appeal.  And the few two Cour shows that do exist have something off about them.  None perfectly follow what I have deemed the ideal 26 Episode Anime Structure.

Some great Magical Girl anime are held back not because they did anything majorly wrong but because I feel they could have been better. From Pretty Sammy’s TV Anime to Pretear to Yuki Yuna Is A Hero.

There are a handful I have given a 10 out of 10 rating to. But I’ve given a lot of 10/10s and so it’s a steep competition to stand out among them.  To people who think I shouldn't give them out so easily I say 10/10 means a Masterpiece, I happen to feel a lot of those exist but they are still a minority of the total of what I’ve seen.  Point here is the few Magical Girl Anime I’ve given a 10/10 still have steep competition to be something I’d rank as a personal absolute favorite.

Sailor Moon R: The Promise of The Rose is probably the best movie installment of the Genre (certainly the purest form of Sailor Moon).  But the non Magical Girl Anime Films it’s most directly competing with are other annual tie in movies to ongoing TV Shows, a sub type of Anime films many don’t treat with respect, but Pokémon 3 Spell of The Unown is a movie I consider a near perfect masterpiece by any standard, and Detective Conan has four movies I consider not just great among Conan films but Masterpieces of the Detective Genre in general.

The thing is, many of my absolute Favorite Anime are not part of the Magical Girl genre but they feel connected to it in some way.  Noir has been the most consistent holder of the top spot and I already did a post on its climatic Sailor Moon reference. A lot of my favorite Male Protagonists are characters who personality wise practically are male Magical Girl Protagonists.  There are several reasons I’m confident the Fate/ Franchise wouldn’t exist without the Infinity Arc of Sailor Moon.

Interestingly since I started writing this the title has started to become less definitively accurate as I’ve also been doing a bunch of Fate/ rewatching in May of 2024.  And so have come to view Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya as possibly my favorite Fate/ Anime and my Favorite Magical Girl Anime and maybe even a contender to dethrone Noir.  However that may not stick if my mood changes later and a different franchise becomes my current main hyper fixation.  

But also I’m hesitant to unconditionally endorse Prisma Illya as a Magical Girl show while the 3wei arc is still incomplete even in the Manga.  If it fully delivers on the promise made by episode 9 of the 3wei TV Anime and what I’ve heard about certain character deaths don't stick then it can easily become my ideal Magical Girl Saga, but right now that’s still an IF.

Fate/ Watch Order again

My past absolute advocacy of watching Fate/Zero first has been diminished, but not for the reasons most people say you shouldn't watch it first.  It doesn't "Spoil" nearly as much as people make it sound like, and what it does Spoil is what everyone already knows anyway, the cat is out of the bag.

No as I already talked about once I've come to be concerned by what happens when an AniTube Video Essayist decides to "analyze" Fate/Zero on it's own with no regard for the fact that it's a Prequel.

But I'm not even making this post mainly for the Fate/Zero question.  

If you have been convinced or are trying to convince people to watch the Studio Deen TV Anime before any UFOTable stuff because it's the closest thing we have to a Fate/Route Anime, my advice is to at least watch Episode 0 and 1 of UFOtable's Unlimited Blade Works first.  

Episode 0 takes place entirely before the point of divergence between the routes, and in episode 1 the divergence happens right at the end.  

At least get the more properly structured and fleshed out adaptation of how the VN begins.  Then you can start Deen/Stay Night with episode 3 which rewinds slightly to show you how the end of UBW episode 1 plays out differently in the Fate Route.  

Even following these days from Rin's POV first is faithful to the VN, something I didn't expect to be the case originally, much of that being missing is a big part of what's wrong with the first two episodes of Deen/Stay Night.

Unlike a lot of people the reason I consider UFOtable's Anime the better adaptation of Fate/ is entirely how the Story and Plot is presented.  It's visual presentation and animation and music are all great, but maybe kind of over done.  From what I've seen of what early Type Moon Visual novels look like I kind of feel like the Deen Anime are actually more faithful to their vibes (same with the Tsukihime Anime that allegedly doesn't exist).

I even went ahead and recently watched Deen's movie version of Unlimited Blade Works, and if it were still the only Animated version of that story we had I'd definitely critique how it needed to be fleshed out more.  But since I do have the full story I can appreciate it's different visual style for being what it is.

However the Witch of The Holy Night VN and the Tsukihime remake seem to imply Nasu himself wants his worlds to look like the UFO Table Animes now, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.