Rising of the Shield Hero Discussion Thread

[Aurora Moon]

Actually if I remember right Naofumi had to treaten people in order to buy and sell at market price, otherwise he was getting horribly ripped off.

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That was how he justified it, yeah. But if you looked closely the stuff he tried to sell was in horrible condition. His stuff was all ripped up, whereas the other guy had a mostly intact dead balloon creature skin.

A large intact rubbery skin has alot of uses. Tiny ripped pieces doesn't.

So..... that merchant might've been in the right to give him that low market price.

 

[FortePlus]

Rising of the shield hero is created to cater to a wider audience than just hateful incels, and in this manner, acts as a recruiting ground for young men on the margins,

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Gotta say, "Shield Hero is lab engineered to create misogynists" is an amazing take. Especially since it requires you to be unfathomably ignorant wrt the nature of LN publishing and marketing.

This is quite literally the same thing as saying that Captain Marvel being a woman was Disney's secret plot to create a nation of feminists and bring ruin to society. Instead of like, Disney riding the wave of women's empowerment that had been going through fictional mediums for years before Captain Marvel was released. Like, I hate Shield Hero as much as the next person, and these takes are still insane to me. It's little wonder you have people arguing in the opposite direction if you're going to lead with stuff like this.

This isn't me telling anyone to stop criticising Shield Hero, by all means dunk away. This is me telling you to do some basic research on LNs and anime.

 

[Valmond]

The idea that media we consume affects us is in no way somekind of "take".
Sure, Shield Hero is not engineered to recruit incels, it merely reflects the incel world view to amazing degree, and makes people who watch it without thinking more likely to sympathize with it.

 

[Aurora Moon]

Sure, Shield Hero is not engineered to recruit incels, it merely reflects the incel world view to amazing degree, and makes people who watch it without thinking more likely to sympathize with it.

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Eh, there was a lot of problematic content that I watched without thinking about it growing up as a kid.... and guess what? It didn't make me want to sympathize with anybody who would want to bring those problematic content out into the real world.

I'd imagine that it was exactly that same way for 95% of the population too. I mean, Have you seriously looked at 80's movies? even the light-hearted ones? Sixteen candles had this whole line said between boys where he basically says: "She's out cold upstairs. I could totally fuck her ten ways right now if I wanted to." in reference to her being drunk. and the other guy doesn't even bat an eye at this, and he just nods. And it wasn't just sixteen candles... the 80's got this whole rape culture going on. It's amazing how many kids' movies and TV shows had rape played off as comedy back then.

My brother and I just watched though that scene without thinking about what it all meant back then... but now my brother gets disturbed by that scene now that he's an adult and could realize the implications of that. "Dude, ugh. that's rape you're talking about!" He said the first time he watched it as an adult. And you know what, I was disturbed by it too.

I dunno, I just think it's weird how you think that the majority of people are so easily malleable that they'd even swing into supporting things like serial killing, rape, etc if the protagonist doing those things were sufficiently sympathetic enough AND had a convincing narrator backing him up.

Sheild Hero is total shit on it's own merits... but let's not pretend that it could easily brainwash the large majority of the population here. That's like saying a good movie about symapthetic witches could turn the entire nation into satanists if they enjoyed it without really thinking about it, as so many christains were so fond of believing back in the old days.

 

[Valmond]

My brother and I just watched though that scene without thinking about what it all meant back then... but now my brother gets disturbed by that scene now that he's an adult and could realize the implications of that. "Dude, ugh. that's rape you're talking about!" He said the first time he watched it as an adult. And you know what, I was disturbed by it too.

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Yes, because he is thinking about it now, probably because something else affected his mind in other ways.
We do not live in a vacuum, what media we consume affects us, as do the people we meet, conversations we have, everything.

And, sure you say you watched lot of problematic stuff when younger without thinking about it and it did not affect you.
Thing is, i don't believe you.
The effect would not have been major, but that there was none, no, i don't believe it.
Older you are, more varied your media consuming habits are, more set in your ways you are, the lesser the effect becomes, but it is there.

 

[Aurora Moon]

so you're just completely discounting the morals and the like that parents would instill in their kids growing up, etc? How the community at large would think and act that affects the kid growing up?

Or even the fact that hundreds of TV shows and the like will most likely depict things like rape and slavery as a very bad thing in comparison to the very few shows who try to depict rapists and slavers in a sympathetic light? That the anti-rape, anti-slavery TV shows and movies would vastly outnumber the few pro-rape pro-slavery crap out there?

That's the kind of thing that would be more likely to swing kids into the anti-rape and slavery mindset more than anything else. children and adults aren't going to ignore the impact all of the above up there had on them growing up, in favor of one single japanese cartoon show that somehow conviced them that slavery was totally a good thing. That's just ridiculous.

 

[Valmond]

I think parents count as "people we meet".
Again, as i said, effect is minor, and probably countered by a ton of other messages, but to pretend that media we consume does not have an effect on us and what we think is disingenuous at best.

 

[Aurora Moon]

I think parents count as "people we meet".
Again, as i said, effect is minor, and probably countered by a ton of other messages, but to pretend that media we consume does not have an effect on us and what we think is disingenuous at best.

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Ah, but earlier on you said that the effect would be so great that kids and the like would be open to being recruited by incel groups, etc. Thus shield hero is a danger to the moral fabric of society.

Now you say the effect is so minor as to be countered by a ton of other messages telling us that slavery is bad, etc. You can't have it both ways, you know?

Choose one: 1) Shield Hero has such a massive cultural impact that it'll instantly covert everyone into misogynists just after watching one episode.
2) or it'll barely have any impact to the point that the effect it has on everyone is so negligible and hardly newsworthy at all.

personally, I pick number 2.

 

[Arawn_Emrys]

Ah, but earlier on you said that the effect would be so great that kids and the like would be open to being recruited by incel groups, etc. Thus shield hero is a danger to the moral fabric of society.

Now you say the effect is so minor as to be countered by a ton of other messages telling us that slavery is bad, etc. You can't have it both ways, you know?

Choose one: 1) Shield Hero has such a massive cultural impact that it'll instantly covert everyone into misogynists just after watching one episode.
2) or it'll barely have any impact to the point that the effect it has on everyone is so negligible and hardly newsworthy at all.

personally, I pick number 2.

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Everything has an effect. How great the effect is depends on a lot of other factors. Making one anime the devil is wrong, but utterly discounting any affect is just as wrong.

 

[Aurora Moon]

Everything has an effect. How great the effect is depends on a lot of other factors. Making one anime the devil is wrong, but utterly discounting any affect is just as wrong.

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I never said there wasn't any effect at all, though? Just that it was negligible enough thanks to upbringings, etc. If it can be easily countered by a massive number of factors in a person's life then I cannot see how a single anime could turn you into a misogynist overnight.

I mean... a person's life would have to been already so super-shitty and lacking any positive social contact in both family and school life, AND ON TOP OF THAT never having watched the last 20 years of TV shows, Movies, etc that they'd easily get swayed by Shield Hero. What's the odds of that?

 

[Valmond]

As i said, watching shield hero without thinking about it and just accepting the narrative will make you more sympathetic to incel narratives.
It does not turn you into incel (except maybe in extreme edge cases).
but if you watch shield hero, read/watch other media with similar issues, then find yourself talking with incels or other people with similar ideas, you can slowly move towards becomming an incel.

It's like the youtube alt right pipeline to fascism.
Except for anime nerds to misogynists instead of edgelords to fascists.

 

[Reveen]

so you're just completely discounting the morals and the like that parents would instill in their kids growing up, etc? How the community at large would think and act that affects the kid growing up?

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Those "morals" that were instilled in them could very easily include 'Watch out for women, son. A lot of them are lying hoo-ers.' and 'The Civil War was about states rights and a lot of the blacks were perfectly happy as servants!'

The problem isn't these shows making fucked up ideas just spring into peoples heads, but them reinforcing already existing societal attitudes that get reawakened in people because they see it being expressed by a cool sick nasty anime instead of by their racist grandpa.

Or even the fact that hundreds of TV shows and the like will most likely depict things like rape and slavery as a very bad thing in comparison to the very few shows who try to depict rapists and slavers in a sympathetic light? That the anti-rape, anti-slavery TV shows and movies would vastly outnumber the few pro-rape pro-slavery crap out there?

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Most works that portray rape will depict only the most clear, obvious and unlikely rape scenarios possible. Usually perpetrated by people the audience is predisposed to not be sympathetic to anyway. While glossing over all a lot of the scenarios in the real world that drive rape apologia because people aren't convinced it's real rape.

How many fucking works of media for example depict older men, sometimes powerful men, with sexy young mistresses without ever really considering that such a relationship could very likely be based on exploitation rather than Magic Pixie Dream Girl shit?

 

[Valmond]

Those "morals" that were instilled in them could very easily include 'Watch out for women, son. A lot of them are lying hoo-ers.' and 'The Civil War was about states rights and a lot of the blacks were perfectly happy as servants!'

The problem isn't these shows making fucked up ideas just spring into peoples heads, but them reinforcing already existing societal attitudes that get reawakened in people because they see it being expressed by a cool sick nasty anime instead of by their racist grandpa.

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Yeah, i did not want to bring that up.
But as i have said before, incels are not special.
They are normal people, with fairly normal ideas, taken up to eleven and turned invard until they become what they are.

"Parents will instil people with good morals", i'm afraid that this is a terrible argument, because where do people think all the misogynistic, homophobic, etc, shit comes from? Our parents.
Well, not everyones parents, but, as great as my dad was, he could be pretty casually homophobic and racist.
sure he might not have hated gays or people from foreigners, but in the unthinking, part of society way where you just repeat jokes and use phrasings that, once you actually think about them, are kinda racist and/or homophobic.
Not so most would notice, because that's just what the society is.
But if i relied only on what my parents (great people with not a hateful bone in their body), i think i would be a worse person that i am.
Not by much, like i said, they are great people (well, were, in my dads case), and not in a way that had much effect, but i would be.

 

[Aurora Moon]

How many fucking works of media for example depict older men, sometimes powerful men, with sexy young mistresses without ever really considering that such a relationship could very likely be based on exploitation rather than Magic Pixie Dream Girl shit?

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I often see those same older men with young mistresses being shown as gross old perverts, who are the corrupt CEO who exploits his poor workers just so that he can get a second yacht. Not somebody admirable who we all want to be in the long run.

Granted, the media does tend to gloss over how problematic the old man/young mistresses thing is, but at the same time I've never seen it shown in a positive light at all. Usually they're the antagonists who the underdogs have to overthrow.

 

[Valmond]

I often see those same older men with young mistresses being shown as gross old perverts, who are the corrupt CEO who exploits his poor workers just so that he can get a second yacht. Not somebody admirable who we all want to be in the long run.

Granted, the media does tend to gloss over how problematic the old man/young mistresses thing is, but at the same time I've never seen it shown in a positive light at all. Usually they're the antagonists who the underdogs have to overthrow.

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And how often it is seen as the young mistress being a villainous gold digger?
I would not say the old man with a younger mistress is usually the villain, sometimes they are, but as often they are victims, or someone who you should envy.

 

[FortePlus]

So I guess watching Naruto is a pipeline to murder since a bunch of kids ended up killing another kid (burying him in a sandbox) due to something they saw in the anime. That could happen to anyone and watching similar shows therefore makes you more sympathetic to murder.

In similar fashion watching enough One Piece causes you to have an immense desire to attack government officials and commit various acts of terrorism.

 

[Aurora Moon]

And how often it is seen as the young mistress being a villainous gold digger?
I would not say the old man with a younger mistress is usually the villain, sometimes they are, but as often they are victims, or someone who you should envy.

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In most of the movies and stuff that I've watched, the gold diggers are barely there at all. They're just there to make the old guy look powerful, manly, and threatening. They're nothing but arm eyecandy who bats their eyes at the old guy to get a few thousand bucks out of him. Which is misogynistic as hell, more than it would be had they been an active party on the villain's side.

 

[FortePlus]

Like this wider discussion is cool but I'm interested in seeing the claims that Shield Hero is "targeted at 'marginal' young men" and is "an incel pipeline" actually backed up in this thread. Those are different from it being a bad show that follows a bankrupt, dumb ideology and chases shock value to propel its plot.

All the evidence shows that Shield Hero became popular and was thus heavily promoted for its edgy "cranky Japanese loner vs. world" content, using salty incel logic and talking points to justify the hero's nonsense, and then cashing in when people stayed for the waifu bait and catharsis that came from seeing an over the top temptress get her so called comeuppance.

You can't just declare things to be true. If I jumped into a Metal Gear Rising discussion and asserted that the people who enjoyed and played it are murderers or just a matter of degrees from being murderers because you have precision mechanics for cutting people, someone would either call me a troll or ask me to back that assertion up. Because videogames don't work like that.

 

[Valmond]

So I guess watching Naruto is a pipeline to murder since a bunch of kids ended up killing another kid (burying him in a sandbox) due to something they saw in the anime. That could happen to anyone and watching similar shows therefore makes you more sympathetic to murder.

In similar fashion watching enough One Piece causes you to have an immense desire to attack government officials and commit various acts of terrorism.

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Yes, because context does not exist, one is exactly like the other.
Adverticing does not work, propaganda does not exist, and culture does not propagate through shared experience.

 

[FortePlus]

Yes, because context does not exist

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Stop deflecting.

As i said, watching shield hero without thinking about it and just accepting the narrative will make you more sympathetic to incel narratives.
It does not turn you into incel (except maybe in extreme edge cases).
but if you watch shield hero, read/watch other media with similar issues, then find yourself talking with incels or other people with similar ideas, you can slowly move towards becomming an incel.

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You literally said this and I repeated it with your logic to show you how ridiculous it sounds. We have zero documented cases of Shield Hero "creating" involuntary celibates and yet there's at least one of children watching Naruto, emulating what they saw in it, and a child dying as a result.

Naruto is bigger in popularity, longer in run time, and has influence in more mediums than Shield Hero with its source material running for 15 years. This means that it's not impossible for someone to be influenced by the material, which includes violence, but there isn't any sort of documentation to show that with all of that global influence it has created more violence and anger throughout the world, or even in Japan. Likewise One Piece, one of the biggest manga of all time, has no known links to increases in anti-government sentiment or piracy or violence despite those being major parts of the work.

You don't get to make ridiculous claims without proof.

 

[Valmond]

Stop deflecting.

You literally said this and I repeated it with your logic to show you how ridiculous it sounds. We have zero documented cases of Shield Hero "creating" involuntary celibates and yet there's at least one of children watching Naruto, emulating what they saw in it, and a child dying as a result.

Naruto is bigger in popularity, longer in run time, and has influence in more mediums than Shield Hero with its source material running for 15 years. This means that it's not impossible for someone to be influenced by the material, which includes violence, but there isn't any sort of documentation to show that with all of that global influence it has created more violence and anger throughout the world, or even in Japan. Likewise One Piece, one of the biggest manga of all time, has no known links to increases in anti-government sentiment or piracy or violence despite those being major parts of the work.

You don't get to make ridiculous claims without proof.

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And you said "watching naruto", without any of the follow ups.
Piracy and fighting against the government is hard, it takes work.
You can be a misogynistic piece of shit without ever leaving your home, and many are.

 

[stratigo]

Gotta say, "Shield Hero is lab engineered to create misogynists" is an amazing take. Especially since it requires you to be unfathomably ignorant wrt the nature of LN publishing and marketing.

This is quite literally the same thing as saying that Captain Marvel being a woman was Disney's secret plot to create a nation of feminists and bring ruin to society. Instead of like, Disney riding the wave of women's empowerment that had been going through fictional mediums for years before Captain Marvel was released. Like, I hate Shield Hero as much as the next person, and these takes are still insane to me. It's little wonder you have people arguing in the opposite direction if you're going to lead with stuff like this.

This isn't me telling anyone to stop criticising Shield Hero, by all means dunk away. This is me telling you to do some basic research on LNs and anime.

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Umm.. captain marvel intends to support feminism and feminist view points. I actually don't know why you seem to go on a rant about how awful feminism is so obviously no movie could support it, but most of us here on SV and hopefully in the world as a whole, think the goals of feminism are noble and don't have a problem with a movie supporting it. As opposed to a show supporting incels. It's not about supporting politics, as much as I know the modern day crypto's like to frame every criticism in that light, but the politics it supports

 

[FortePlus]

Yeah, fine. You're not interested in backing up what you've said earlier and I'm not interested in this line of conversation. We're going nowhere.

I actually don't know why you seem to go on a rant about how awful

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Since you've chosen to do this, don't @ me. You obviously don't want to have anything resembling a discussion.

 

[Valmond]

Since you've chosen to do this, don't @ me. You obviously don't want to have anything resembling a discussion.

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I knew there had to be something we could agree on.

 

[stratigo]

Yeah, fine. You're not interested in backing up what you've said earlier and I'm not interested in this line of conversation. We're going nowhere.


Since you've chosen to do this, don't @ me. You obviously don't want to have anything resembling a discussion.

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Oh, and here I thought we were engaging in a straw man hyperbole off where we take the opponents position to the most extreme to make them look foolish. If you didn't want that, then perhaps you could have eased off your own clearly exaggerated straw man of my argument. I feel no obligation to treat an argument with more respect than mine get treated.