I was reading this article, and it peeled up an old scab of mine.
As always, SJWs fail to grasp what people actually mean when they say that they like a story because it’s “apolitical”. What we actually mean by that is we prefer stories where the moral isn’t loaded into a bunker buster and dropped directly on our heads.
Anvilicious - TV Tropes
SJWs have no appreciation for subtlety at all. They love childish, straightforward didacticism, and they like it when stories tell them what to believe.
Good stories are value-agnostic. They present a setting and its characters neutrally and they invite us to come to our own conclusions as to who is right or wrong. SJW fiction doesn’t do that. SJW fiction crafts a big, heavy-handed aesop and tries to teach the audience a moral lesson with it. Even in third-person omniscient, the narrator is on the side of the writer’s army of diversity tokens and all but demands that we heed the central message and obey. To read this dreck is to experience moral belittlement. You’re basically told, in no uncertain terms, that if you don’t meet the narrative’s standards, you’re a lesser person for it.
When you pick up the average manga, you don’t experience that same sense of inner turmoil, generally because the subject matter is presented in a neutral way and the moral doesn’t punch you in the face and the balls over and over and over again. For the record, that’s what people actually mean by “too political”.
SJWs subscribe to a thing called Critical Theory.
Critical theory - Wikipedia
They have this notion that norms and values are encoded into literally everything we read and watch, and they ought to be picked apart on that basis. Say you, as an author, choose to depict a 1950s housewife going about chores. A normal person would see this as a relatively apolitical thing, but to an SJW, it’s extremely political. She’s part of an oppressive hierarchy that extracts her labor. Kid kicking a ball down a street? His school’s sports program is underfunded. Homeless gay guy? He couldn’t find work due to discrimination. The SJW autistically filters everything through a moral and political lens. Normal people just view these characters and their affairs as set dressing and don’t give a shit what the “deeper implications” are.
SJW stories are not really stories at all, but propaganda pieces. The main purpose is not to tell a story, but to pedantically change the viewer’s values to align with those of the author.
Didacticism - Wikipedia
That’s why SJWs unironically write comics like this.
All the immersion is immediately broken. Writing like this snaps the reader out of the story. A lot of people read fiction to escape reading the fucking headlines. Being constantly reminded of the world we already inhabit is an experience that is most unwelcome.
The trouble with centering fiction solely on the didactic is that it ignores all the other qualities that fiction can possess, such as aesthetic value. This is actually a very, very old debate that has been raging in artistic and literary circles for well over a hundred years.
Art for art's sake - Wikipedia
None of this is new. In fact, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a whole essay about it:
The Heresy of the Didactic | Academy of American Poets
The other problem with SJW politicization of fiction is that it leaves no room for truly transgressive art. Manga is chock-full of transgression. If you've ever read Berserk, Elfen Lied, Ubel Blatt, or Narutaru, you've probably noticed that some manga isn't for kids, nor is it written to pander to adult children who can't handle a little gore, profanity, or political incorrectness.
SJW fiction is hilariously whitewashed. From top to bottom, the SJW attitude influences everything from the setting, to characterization, to the mannerisms and dialogue employed by the cast. You will not see an SJW author write de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, or Armando Iannuci's The Thick of It, because their little hearts can't handle it. Their characters are too nice. SJW authors don't know how to write true cruelty or aggression.
SJW fiction never comes across as genuine, simply because their stories are not populated by people, but by saccharine-sweet, moralizing caricatures spewing aesops. The SJW's goal is to show you examples of good behavior in the hopes that it makes you a better person. What part of that has anything to do with telling a story? If you want to be a real author, if you want to tell a real story, you have to be willing to write a character who's a sweaty nutsack. You have to be willing to write deeply flawed, cruel, vain, self-centered, profane characters who make the audience uncomfortable at first blush, but then achieve a certain familiarity through their sheer vulgarity. SJWs cannot do that. The best they can do is print out a cardboard stand-up of a character with political slogans etched in the margins. That's why their shit is so fucking boring.
The way SJWs perceive fiction, the author has full control over the contents of a fictional work. Therefore, to depict something is to endorse it. After all, if you didn't condone it, you wouldn't depict it.
If we assume that this line of thinking is true, then authors who depict torture are torturers, and those who depict rape are rapists. After all, you had full control over the story. Why wouldn't you show the audience something nice like fluffy, happy bunnies, instead?
Imagine that Frodo and the gang reach Mordor, and they find the Uruks playing with Lincoln Logs. They're mighty cheerful, and they bid that the adventurers come play with them. Where would the conflict come from, then? How would the author illustrate that the baddies are actually bad unless they were willing to show them engaged in violent, cruel acts?
SJWs don't know how to write clear villains. Or, more accurately, they seem to lack a fully developed concept of evil. They're bleeding hearts par excellence. Villains aren't evil, they're just misunderstood. In the postmodern, post-Marxist concept of the world, a villain is just someone who has been tarred by the victor's brush. There are no psychotic injuns who scalp unsuspecting settlers, they're just poor natives fighting against colonial oppressors. Everything is just shades of gray. Most people are wonderful if you just get to know them. Even the most brutal CJNG sicario has a mother, and maybe a sister, and maybe they were a good kid, once. No one is beyond reform. No one is beyond saving, right?
Wrong. Evil exists. If we refuse to show the audience what evil looks like, it's not going to miraculously stop existing. If your argument against depicting evil acts in stories is that someone might be jerking off to it, or that someone might emulate it, you don't have an argument. You're not a critic, you're a fucking censor.
Superhero fiction is actually a product of censorship, which is why SJWs love it so much. When the Comics Code Authority originally came up with their definitions for what constituted prohibited content, they were specifically targeting illustrated horror mags that were common around the early 20th century.
This is the actual text of the CCA dating from 1954:
Boy, sure sounds like an SJW wrote it. Except this wasn't written by SJWs. It was written by fanatical bible-thumpers, their spiritual and intellectual forebears.
Manga was never subject to the CCA. As a result, Manga authors often tackled darker subject matter than their Western counterparts. That's how you can have stories like Akumetsu, which is literally a manga about a vigilante terrorist who goes around murdering corrupt public officials with hand axes and gets away with it because he has tons of clones of himself. The entire point of the manga is the schadenfreude of enjoying watching corrupt motherfuckers and human traffickers squealing and squirming, unable to avert their own demise. Heavy-handed? Absolutely. But far more amoral and graphic than what we're used to.
Encoded in every SJW argument about fiction is this notion that lowbrow pulp is somehow bad, and we ought to feel ashamed for liking Henry Chinaski or Ignatius Reilly, and it would be much better if we read stories about cultured and educated urbanites trying to rescue the world from the jaws of ignorance and bigotry, like them.
The true appeal of Manga is that, like pulp, it depicts ordinary, warty, vulgar people.
Imagine the kinds of stories that could have been told in comics if the Code never existed. We'd have more Alan Moores, more Garth Ennises, more Frank Millers, more Sam Kieths.
Instead, whiny moral busybodies ruined everything, and they keep trying to ruin things even today.
As always, SJWs fail to grasp what people actually mean when they say that they like a story because it’s “apolitical”. What we actually mean by that is we prefer stories where the moral isn’t loaded into a bunker buster and dropped directly on our heads.
Anvilicious - TV Tropes
SJWs have no appreciation for subtlety at all. They love childish, straightforward didacticism, and they like it when stories tell them what to believe.
Good stories are value-agnostic. They present a setting and its characters neutrally and they invite us to come to our own conclusions as to who is right or wrong. SJW fiction doesn’t do that. SJW fiction crafts a big, heavy-handed aesop and tries to teach the audience a moral lesson with it. Even in third-person omniscient, the narrator is on the side of the writer’s army of diversity tokens and all but demands that we heed the central message and obey. To read this dreck is to experience moral belittlement. You’re basically told, in no uncertain terms, that if you don’t meet the narrative’s standards, you’re a lesser person for it.
When you pick up the average manga, you don’t experience that same sense of inner turmoil, generally because the subject matter is presented in a neutral way and the moral doesn’t punch you in the face and the balls over and over and over again. For the record, that’s what people actually mean by “too political”.
SJWs subscribe to a thing called Critical Theory.
Critical theory - Wikipedia
They have this notion that norms and values are encoded into literally everything we read and watch, and they ought to be picked apart on that basis. Say you, as an author, choose to depict a 1950s housewife going about chores. A normal person would see this as a relatively apolitical thing, but to an SJW, it’s extremely political. She’s part of an oppressive hierarchy that extracts her labor. Kid kicking a ball down a street? His school’s sports program is underfunded. Homeless gay guy? He couldn’t find work due to discrimination. The SJW autistically filters everything through a moral and political lens. Normal people just view these characters and their affairs as set dressing and don’t give a shit what the “deeper implications” are.
SJW stories are not really stories at all, but propaganda pieces. The main purpose is not to tell a story, but to pedantically change the viewer’s values to align with those of the author.
Didacticism - Wikipedia
That’s why SJWs unironically write comics like this.
All the immersion is immediately broken. Writing like this snaps the reader out of the story. A lot of people read fiction to escape reading the fucking headlines. Being constantly reminded of the world we already inhabit is an experience that is most unwelcome.
The trouble with centering fiction solely on the didactic is that it ignores all the other qualities that fiction can possess, such as aesthetic value. This is actually a very, very old debate that has been raging in artistic and literary circles for well over a hundred years.
Art for art's sake - Wikipedia
None of this is new. In fact, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a whole essay about it:
The Heresy of the Didactic | Academy of American Poets
The other problem with SJW politicization of fiction is that it leaves no room for truly transgressive art. Manga is chock-full of transgression. If you've ever read Berserk, Elfen Lied, Ubel Blatt, or Narutaru, you've probably noticed that some manga isn't for kids, nor is it written to pander to adult children who can't handle a little gore, profanity, or political incorrectness.
SJW fiction is hilariously whitewashed. From top to bottom, the SJW attitude influences everything from the setting, to characterization, to the mannerisms and dialogue employed by the cast. You will not see an SJW author write de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, or Armando Iannuci's The Thick of It, because their little hearts can't handle it. Their characters are too nice. SJW authors don't know how to write true cruelty or aggression.
SJW fiction never comes across as genuine, simply because their stories are not populated by people, but by saccharine-sweet, moralizing caricatures spewing aesops. The SJW's goal is to show you examples of good behavior in the hopes that it makes you a better person. What part of that has anything to do with telling a story? If you want to be a real author, if you want to tell a real story, you have to be willing to write a character who's a sweaty nutsack. You have to be willing to write deeply flawed, cruel, vain, self-centered, profane characters who make the audience uncomfortable at first blush, but then achieve a certain familiarity through their sheer vulgarity. SJWs cannot do that. The best they can do is print out a cardboard stand-up of a character with political slogans etched in the margins. That's why their shit is so fucking boring.
The way SJWs perceive fiction, the author has full control over the contents of a fictional work. Therefore, to depict something is to endorse it. After all, if you didn't condone it, you wouldn't depict it.
If we assume that this line of thinking is true, then authors who depict torture are torturers, and those who depict rape are rapists. After all, you had full control over the story. Why wouldn't you show the audience something nice like fluffy, happy bunnies, instead?
Imagine that Frodo and the gang reach Mordor, and they find the Uruks playing with Lincoln Logs. They're mighty cheerful, and they bid that the adventurers come play with them. Where would the conflict come from, then? How would the author illustrate that the baddies are actually bad unless they were willing to show them engaged in violent, cruel acts?
SJWs don't know how to write clear villains. Or, more accurately, they seem to lack a fully developed concept of evil. They're bleeding hearts par excellence. Villains aren't evil, they're just misunderstood. In the postmodern, post-Marxist concept of the world, a villain is just someone who has been tarred by the victor's brush. There are no psychotic injuns who scalp unsuspecting settlers, they're just poor natives fighting against colonial oppressors. Everything is just shades of gray. Most people are wonderful if you just get to know them. Even the most brutal CJNG sicario has a mother, and maybe a sister, and maybe they were a good kid, once. No one is beyond reform. No one is beyond saving, right?
Wrong. Evil exists. If we refuse to show the audience what evil looks like, it's not going to miraculously stop existing. If your argument against depicting evil acts in stories is that someone might be jerking off to it, or that someone might emulate it, you don't have an argument. You're not a critic, you're a fucking censor.
Superhero fiction is actually a product of censorship, which is why SJWs love it so much. When the Comics Code Authority originally came up with their definitions for what constituted prohibited content, they were specifically targeting illustrated horror mags that were common around the early 20th century.
This is the actual text of the CCA dating from 1954:
Boy, sure sounds like an SJW wrote it. Except this wasn't written by SJWs. It was written by fanatical bible-thumpers, their spiritual and intellectual forebears.
Manga was never subject to the CCA. As a result, Manga authors often tackled darker subject matter than their Western counterparts. That's how you can have stories like Akumetsu, which is literally a manga about a vigilante terrorist who goes around murdering corrupt public officials with hand axes and gets away with it because he has tons of clones of himself. The entire point of the manga is the schadenfreude of enjoying watching corrupt motherfuckers and human traffickers squealing and squirming, unable to avert their own demise. Heavy-handed? Absolutely. But far more amoral and graphic than what we're used to.
Encoded in every SJW argument about fiction is this notion that lowbrow pulp is somehow bad, and we ought to feel ashamed for liking Henry Chinaski or Ignatius Reilly, and it would be much better if we read stories about cultured and educated urbanites trying to rescue the world from the jaws of ignorance and bigotry, like them.
The true appeal of Manga is that, like pulp, it depicts ordinary, warty, vulgar people.
Imagine the kinds of stories that could have been told in comics if the Code never existed. We'd have more Alan Moores, more Garth Ennises, more Frank Millers, more Sam Kieths.
Instead, whiny moral busybodies ruined everything, and they keep trying to ruin things even today.
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