Changes in our Society...good or bad? Thoughts for discussion.

[marianne202]

Ok, so I had a very unique experience today and I thought it might be a good topic for some fun discussion. I took my 14 yr old daughter and her friend to Animazement today. This is an Anime convention with just under 8,000 attendees. I know they have Comi-Con and several other Anime conventions like this one. Prior to today I was a "Con virgin" as they put it! I'm 48 and while I like some Anime and have been watching it with my kids for years, I was surprised by all the various age groups represented as well as the varied costumes. It was an eye opening experience.

I don't remember anything similar when I was a kid. In my day, aside from a David Cassidy concert when I was 8 or 9 or Rocky Horror Picture show, I have nothing similar for comparison of the passion of fans. I did see some behavior that I was not thrilled with, a lot of cross-dressing which is fine, but there was some lesbian kissing and activities for pictures etc, that I thought was inappropriate for some of the young fans to see. I have lesbian friends and I'm far from a prude, but I just wonder if this was appropriate in such a forum with a lot of young kids. I saw kids there as young as 4 or so. It is ok to have girls cross-dressing as male characters then passionately kissing each other, grabbing each other etc? I also saw young girls binding their breast to cross dress as male characters.

Is this ok for our young minds? My daughter admitted up front that some of the behavior was inappropriate, but she is very mature and we have talked about these types of situations and personal choices, again, I have friends that fall into the gay, lesbian and transgender category. But I do worry about those young people who haven't had such discussions with their parents. Some of the costumes were outlandish to say the least. Some were beautiful and creative! A panel discussion talked about an Anime character being brutally raped. This is a far cry from the Yogi Bear, Bugs Bunny, Scooby Doo animation I grew up on! So my question is, as a society are we becoming more accepting or are we just forcing more onto the public whether they accept it or not? What about potential harm...is there any? Let the discussion begin!

[ryoder]

Not good.
Its really odd how the new cartoons are violence free. They don't show bunnies being shot in the face by a shotgun like happened with Bugs Bunney but this type of thing is considered normal.

[Bibby]

Personally, I've never had any interest in anime, which is a problem for someone who moderates a forum related to video games, since people who play video games a lot tend to be fascinated by Japanese animation!

Yes, kids get exposed to risque content at younger and younger ages these days, and as my understanding goes, Japanese cartoons are a lot less censored than their American counterparts. While the era of our grandparents was a more innocent time, it's also true that older cartoons and Westerns were still quite violent, even if they were clearly comic in nature.

[LaterBloomer]

While I have no children, I do not think exposure to anything but the most tame signs of affection is appropriate for children. Don't care if it's hetrosexual, bisexual, homosexual, or asexual! Take it to a hotel. While I haven't watched cartoons in AGES, am I correct in thinking that there were lots of double entendres going on in the cartoons of the 60s? Lots of violence, but I think that there were some things of a sexual nature that were over the heads of the kids, but for their caretakers. I suppose it was to stop them from going totally mind-dead watching the stupid things.

[BrandeX]

This is a common American misconception that "cartoons" = children.

Anime (animation) is a medium, not a genre. It has adult dramas, musicals, romance, horror, crime, comedy, porn, etc. genres... and children's shows too.

[mrs.b]

When I was small, some of my favorite shows earned disapproving looks from parents and other adults due to the violent content. ThunderCats were constantly battling Mumm-Ra. In Transformers, Autobots and Decepticons were in an eternal pitched battle. Voltron's entire purpose was to fight. Even some of the girlie shows my mom insisted I watch involved violence and forms of assault, like Jem. Truly kid-friendly shows such as Fraggle Rock or Smurfs had violence when the Gorgs caught the Fraggles, or Gargamel caught one of those blue little weirdos. Have you seen Tom & Jerry or Bugs Bunny since growing older? Those are full of obvious violence from start to finish.

The format may be different - anime art instead of more Americanized animation - and they may be less concerned with putting a childish face on the concept, but the animes that are actually geared towards children are no different, in my opinion, than what we grew up watching. As BrandeX said, anime is a broad category - like saying "television shows" - and just because it has a cartoon-like appearance does not mean it was intended for children. My husband loves anime and there are one or two I enjoy, but we have held off on exposing our son to most of them due to the content because he is special needs and does not understand the difference (he sees "cartoon" and thinks it's okay for him). Different cultures have different levels of comfort when it comes to various life themes, and as the world shrinks and cultures cross-pollinate, our jobs as parents include the additional step of checking how these different things fit with our comfort zone and child's upbringing.

As far as the behavior at conventions... My husband has dragged me to a couple cons, and it is one of those things you must enter into with the expectation of what you're going to see. Due to the broad themes seen in anime - from small children's shows up through hard-core pornography - there will be an equally broad range of behaviors witnessed. It is not a place for children, in my opinion. Again, anime is like saying "television shows"; it includes almost every genre. It is more a medium than a category all its own.

[marianne202]

I agree that the cartoons I grew up on in the 60's were violent ie: Elmer Fudd shooting at a Bugs or Daffy and the Roadrunner smashing Wiley at every turn, but we knew it wasn't real because they bounced right back. I worry about the obvious obsession with a character that starts to invade ever facet of a person's life. I saw and heard about people who have gone to drastic extremes to "become" their favorite character. It just seems too extreme for me. My daughter wanted to go to this convention last year and I wouldn't agree. This year I gave in after a long talk about expectations and limits. My daughter did fine, but her friend truly believed these people were their characters and she was calling them by name and trying to hug each one, then taking their picture like they were a celebrity or someone important. Is this healthy? I guess I did learn a few things while taking all my psych exams for my focus in psych! I wonder how will these people function in the real world when faced with real life challenges? I know people have obsessions, but how far is too far? I've never been a dependent personality type, but I worry if some of these fans get too entrenched into this lifestyle they will lose their own personality and become disfunctional within real society. Trust me I saw some people that were middle-age that looked like they just crawled out of their parents basement for the first time in years! I was expecting fun, fantasy and some wildness, but it was also a little sad. I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone else, but I guess I just worry about future generations. I know my grandparents thought my parents generation would be ruined because of rock and roll and the hippie lifestyle, so in context this might not seem so bad, but as a parent I just wonder how this could affect future generations when it comes to how people relate to each other function as a part of society.

[mrs.b]

While it is more common these days - internet makes it easier to find the venues - there have always been these pockets of obsession and fans. Star Trek conventions? I remember those being talked about when I was younger.When I was a kid, I recall news stories of people panicking that other games would lead to mass murders by people dressed as elves wielding longbows, imagining the world full of dragons. Like you said, I think these obsessions have always been around. Some people handle it as an entertaining pastime, with a portion of the offbeat population getting too entrenched. If it was not over that, it would be over something else, though; obsessive, unsocialized people will find their outlet one way or another. They can just find them more readily now, so the outlets and the obsessive behavior get more visibility. For some of the attendees that appear to take it too far, I imagine they may go to wild extremes on the weekends, have fun dressing up, then go back to normal lives once they take off the make-up. Likewise, there is a not insubstantial number that fit the profile of parents' basement dwellers because they do not know how, and never figured out how to function outside their fantasy worlds. That has and will always be the case, though. It has just become more "cool" to be a nerd, so people do not hide that nerd-factor as much as when we were younger. It came with the whole no-tolerance policy deal at schools with regard to bullying; "don't pick on that kid because he's different, because being different is okay." To a great degree, I think it's a good thing.

Edited to Add: Any cartoon message can be evaluated and read into; Elmer Fudd shooting Bugs Bunny, who promptly gets up, could be argued to say, "it is okay to hurt people, because the damage is not permanent." Showing children, in children's contexts, that hurting people does hurt and can do lasting damage could be argued to be positive, in showing real-world consequences in contexts they can understand. Even in Thomas the Tank engine, Diesel 10 chased Lady and Thomas all over the island with the implied threat that if he caught them, he would hurt them with a pinchy claw. (My son is sick, and though he is 9 years old, one of his autistic obsessions is trains and he gravitates to the show when he does not feel well...we've been watching it all day long.) It is an innocent show that teaches a lot of good messages - say "please" and "thank you," do not be greedy, treat your friends how you want to be treated - and it has violent threats included.

[Lyanne]

I took my kids to Comic-Con last year, mostly because we had just moved to the area the year before and saw all the celebrities on the news, and thought we'd like to see some celebs too. There is a very broad spectrum of Comic-Con fandom. From people we steered clear of because they were a little too scary/made us uncomfortable....to people like us, who obviously had no clue what was going on, and probably in many fervent Comic-Con attendeees' minds, had no right to be there. It was a delicate balance between laughing at what we saw and trying not to judge, lol. There was one uncomfortable moment when I had to explain to my 16 year old daughter who/what "furries" were. I wasn't expecting to see any there, but my daughter is a big CSI fan and they had done a show on furries a while back (which is how I learned about them) so she may even have been exposed before and forgot.
One thing we did experience, without exception, was that every single person we interacted with was nice to us. It's a community within itself and just being in the building, or walking out in the city with your "swag bag" made you a part of that community. One couple we met, and waited in line with for 4 hours to get into panel rooms, actually gave us their sold out tickets to a private, 200 person panel with Zachary Levi. A $40 value and they had been sold out since the morning they went on sale. They did this simply because we were new and had arrived way too late to get into the public panel, and because they had seen Zachary Levi "sitting in" on another private panel they had purchased tickets to. These strangers wouldn't take any money, and wouldn't even tell us their last names or give us any information that would allow us to repay them in any way. We were completely blown away by the kindness and acceptance into the Comic-Con world. We are going back again this year, but rather than purchasing tickets to the convention, we are just going to hang out in the restaurants surrounding the convention center and go to the "supplemental" events.
As far as the topic...I think these kinds of alternative lifestyles have always been around, but the world is just a little more open to allowing people to be more public about it. It may simply be economical. Perhaps in the past, convention space would be denied to a group because the venue owners disapproved. It may be social. Perhaps today's venue owners aren't afraid that no one else will book their venue because of what kind of groups had previously been there. I might even venture to say....without trying to offend, that maybe the perception of having things forced on us is a reflection of our own feelings about whatever is becoming socially acceptable. Using myself and my family as an example: My parents were not thrilled that my husband isn't exactly like me. I hesitate to say race because there is no such thing as race. When I was born, it was illegal in this country for my husband and I to marry. When my parents met, their families and their churches objected to the union because they were of different faiths. My dad feels that "homosexuality" is being forced on him because he is forced to see gay characters on some of his favorite TV shows. IMO, he's just not ready for it. He was ready for interfaith marriage when he met my mom, he had to accept inter-racial (ugh, there's that word again) marriage when I met my husband, and if either of my brothers was gay, he would have had to accept that too.

As for the attendees themselves, I think many of them need psychological help. I personally don't think it's healthy to detach so completely from "real life", whether it be into anime, video games, or anything else. Even sports. I see grown men crying/abusing their loved ones/becoming violent because the Giants or the Red Sox lost and I feel they need some help too.