By David Futrelle
In these troubled times, it’s good to know that the guys at One Angry Gamer have their priorities straight. Forget police violence, forget the tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths caused by Trump’s utter mishandling of the coronavirus. The crucial issue of our time is exactly how short the shorts of Faye from Cowboy Bebop should be.
As you may know, Cowboy Bebop is a famously sexy Japanese anime show from the nineties that Netflix is resurrecting as a live-action series.
But one element of the original might not make it into the reboot: the exceedingly skimpy clothing of the character Faye. In an interview with io9, you see, show writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach mentioned that Faye’s outfits will be toned down a scootch because “we need to have a real human being wearing that.”
Naturally this has made Billy D of One Angry Gamer even angrier. Accusing Netflix of having
a certain kind of formula … which almost always undermines the original work to push some kind of subversive, Left-wing oriented message,
he laments that their version of the
Cowboy Bebop show will not be faithful to the original, especially when it comes to how sexy Faye is supposed to be dressed.
Who likes short shorts? Apparently not Netflix.
Billy is especially outraged by the idea that cartoon Faye wears clothes not fit for a real human.
So basically, wearing short-shorts, thigh-high stockings, thong suspenders, and a cropped V-neck sleeveless halter-top isn’t something “a real human being” would wear?
Well, no, it’s not. I’ve seen plenty of skimpy outfits in my day but I’ve never seen anyone dressed like Faye walking down the street.
You mean to tell me that real women have never worn what Faye has worn?
Generally speaking, no.
So the women who attend sporting events in the summer wearing cropped tops and short-shorts aren’t real human beings?
He then shows women wearing much less revealing shorts than Faye. And without the thigh-high stockings.
You mean to tell me that celebrities like Lady Gaga wearing cropped tops and short-shorts with heels are women who aren’t real human beings?
Well, no, but to be fair Lady Gaga once wore a dress made entirely of meat that has its own entry on Wikipedia. One time she wore this. And another time she wore this. In other words, she’s not really a good bellwether for “what real people wear” in the real world.
In the comments, One Angry Gamer’s completely normal readers responded in completely normal ways.
“I’m just done,” wrote one.
let this shitty society burn and let the kikes take over and let everyone go extinct
Another responded:
Nah.
lets burn the kikes instead and take BACK the society we once held dear
only this time, no more sympathy for subhumans
Huh. If I were running One Angry Gamer I’d be a little more perturbed by my own readers’ inhumanity than by the exact shortness of Faye’s short shorts.
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Calls to defund the police should probably mostly come at a city and state level. Police funding in the US comes mostly at a city level, and then most of the rest comes in on a state level, with only a tiny amount of funding coming from the federal government. That doesn’t mean that the federal programs that exist aren’t hella problematic- why blowhard about calling in the national guard when the Pentagon already supplies the local police with surplus military supplies? But I think this is something that primarily should be handled on a local level.
Talking about the president of the United States literally defunding the local police, Trump is ironically the president that has done more than the Democrats- his 2020 budget slashed funding for grants in the COPS program that has provided funds to hire additional police for 2 decades, obstinately in order to free up money for cracking down on all of his pet peeves such as immigrants and drugs.
What Trump proposed in his 2020 budget
@DaliLama
Things change when people get out and vote. If and when people don’t vote for whatever reason, then why would any politician of any party listen to them?
Unless I’ve misunderstood, I’ve heard you say discouraging things quite a lot here, so I’m wondering what exactly you want other people to do? What’s your detailed game plan, if the system sucks and can’t be fixed, and everything sucks, and we don’t have a perfect candidate?
Sorry for the triple post, but I missed the edit window. I reread what I said and what Dali said and I way overreacted. I’m sorry.
@Moogue
Bullshit. Also, this position completely ignores the massive amount of voter suppression in this country, which Republicans and Democrats alike have perpetuated since the beginnings of those parties, and by their precursors before them.
Well, the first step is getting progressive whites to actually acknowledge what the problem is, a task sufficiently Sisyphean that the next steps won’t occur in the foreseeable future unless something changes drastically. We’ve still got to deal with people like Lilliel pretending Biden’s actually proposing something besides the status quo, or that Pelosi is a canny politician rather than a blatant Quisling.
Edit isn’t working
No worries, but also that kind of knee jerk reaction is a big part of the problem.
Ideally, yes. In practice, not so much. The people with power keep their thumbs on the scales, and they make sure that nothing significant changes. At least, nothing that would be a threat to them.
People absolutely should vote, don’t get me wrong. Especially on the state and local level, this can make an impact. But that cannot be the end of our activism, or even a large part of it, because the systemic change that we need (we’re counting down to, what, 9 years now before climate change will be irreversibly catastrophic?) will not be facilitated by replacing shitty old white assholes with marginally less shitty old white assholes.
Edit borked.
No worries, but also that kind of knee jerk reaction is a big part of the problem.
@Viscaria
Having calmed down a bit myself, good point. I honestly felt like that discussion was saying “Biden” was synonymous with “the Democratic Party” and I was trying to show that even Biden was heading leftward because the party was. I should have been clearer myself.
@Dalillama
Hey here’s a change you can make right now: Start spelling my screenname right, and I’ll respect your positions a bit more. Hell, copy-paste if need be.
As it is, I’m going to ask you exactly what your metric for “Quisling” is, because it seems to grow mysteriously vague whenever someone with a similar position to you is asked exactly what it is they want to show proper loyalty to the dialect, and what exactly would demonstrate “a major change.” While I’m at it, I’m going to ask what exactly is bullshit about the opinion that voting in a voting based system is bullshit instead of talking about the process of preventing votes, which would suggest voting is the exact opposite of bullshit. Otherwise, nobody would care.
I’d ask what the worldwide protest, the imminent dissolution of the Minneapolis PD, the sudden appearance of “defund the police” as a somewhat acceptable idea to have at all, and how the majority of Americans ended up turning on the police by statistics is, in your viewpoint. I won’t because I know you believe it doesn’t strike the right tone, address a particular personal issue of yours, or involve the ability to psychically will instant vanishing of about two hundred years worth of structural inertia away instantaneously, so obviously this is the world’s largest Klan rally as they reinvent themselves for a highly coordinated false flag that only seems to be a multiracial protest of the murder of a black man. Truly, no right-thinking person can contest the power of mind control to get all those minorities to not actually protest an aspect of white supremacy and instead the completely tangential field of… racist policing policies.
@Catapla
Point in that. Voting is a start, not the end destination. But it’s a start.
@Leliel
First off, if you want to have a discussion, quit whining about typos. You’ll notice I addressed what Moogue said, not their misspelling of my ‘nym. You might take an example from that.
There’s the part where she voted to fund the concentration camps, supported the anti-sex worker “Trafficking act”, supports for the War On
DrugsBlack and Brown people, voted for the Patriot Act, helped Bill Clinton end welfare as we knew it… I could go on, but you haven’t given me reason to take you seriously enough to bother at this time.You’ll be wanting to work on your reading comprehension there, old bean. You seem to have missed the “also”; those were two separate statements. As for the statement you take issue with, name for me one occasion when voting has wrought positive change in the US. Note that changes generated by riots, strikes, or other direct action DO NOT COUNT for this discussion, because voting had fuckall to do with the outcome. Since you’re approaching this conversation with 100% intellectual honesty, I’m sure you have dozens of examples at your fingertips.
There’s a stereotype that in Britain all we care about is tea…oh.
I honestly never found Faye’s outfit all that revealing. Don’t get me wrong it is revealing, but compared to the vast amount trashy ecchi anime I think her outfit is really rather tame in comparison (which is sad when you think about it). I think the outfit could maybe work in live action, just depending on what materials are used and how flexible it is to move around in. This is just me spitballing.
@Alan Robertshaw
A similar response transpired with journalist Owen Jones:
To be fair, I do wish corporations could maybe use some of their wealth for advancing positive causes rather than just repeat slogans, but I guess this is a start.
@ naglfar
I don’t know about PG Tips, but the Yorkshire Tea people do support a fair few good causes; albeit mainly in Yorkshire. Although they did pay to send some nurse abroad somewhere. I’m assuming that was altruism and not just someone they wanted to get shut of.
If I were running that shithole, I’d just trash it.
@alan:
If they’re proper penny-pinching Yorkshiremen, surely they could have found a cheaper way to get rid of her. Though I do love the idea (and am now imagining the four wealthy Yorkshiremen discussing ways they’ve got rid of people).
@Dalillama
Here’s my example: You got defensive about making an incredibly easy mistake, started screaming about how I wasn’t taking you seriously, when in fact part of the reason I got mad in the first place is, when you can copy-paste the screenname of a person – like I just did – requires no effort and given how you were talking to someone else, came off as the “teenage bully” level of passive-aggression.
Given how you conveniently decided to spaghetti post and only confront the parts of my post you actually had a response for, instead of the entire second paragraph of “what the hell is the worldwide protest and souring of opinion on the police, if not an apparent sea change?”, and my own complaint that it seemed to be you tone policing the protests, I’m not exactly confident that I was mistaken. To be honest, I have my own suspicions of Pelosi, and I do suspect she was honestly bad if not still is, but then again, a lot changes in a few years, especially political acceptability – and more importantly, you also went “I don’t take you seriously enough to answer!” Which, frankly, is pretty much exactly what I mean by “mysteriously vague” (“I am so intellectual and informed that I am too smart to demonstrate it!”). Thank you for proving my point.
So, for my example: Abraham Lincoln winning reelection instead of that imbecile McClellan, or being elected to begin with. Of course, you’ve also defined anything that was made at all possible with voting out of use and away from an argument you might lose, so I had to resort to a Wikipedia search instead of basic common sense. I’m sure the answer card you have still says “Moops” instead of “Moors”, and I’m sure you’ll reach for some twist of logic that redefines the guy who actually could fight a civil war out of standing given the amount of intellectual rigueur you just showed with that cherry-picking.
Of course, I’m sure I failed to properly couch the dialect, so I’m sure this is somehow entirely moot. After all, I’m not the guy so enlightened and learned that I tone police someone for not liking it when I don’t bother to proofread a response and/or deliberately misspell someone’s moniker to show how low they are in my view, then scream about how whiny someone is when they dare to call me out. Or worldwide protests, for not pushing my exact message.
I’d like to ask a question tangentially related to earlier comments.
I’m AFAB. I grew up being treated as female for the most part. (I say “for the most part” because I knew what a freemartin was before I knew what a dyke was.) I considered myself a woman because that’s the body I’ve got. I considered gender identity to be a cultural construct. I wasn’t female or male; I was me.
Then I met people who had a gender identity they were willing to risk discrimination, abuse and death for. Obviously gender identity exists for some people. What I’d like to know is if my experience is unique, or if there are agendered people out there. So, do any of the commenters here shsre my experience, or am I an outlier?
@Victoria Parasol,
A bit late, but your good news needed something special to celebrate with. Something that hasn’t been seen around here for quite some time, unhappily enough. Something long missed, if folks here think about it some.
Something like…like…
PONIES!!! Ultra-fabulous ones are that! 😀
(Unless you’d rather see some of the Mane Six instead of one-episode ponies; I can go find appropriate gifs of them too.)
@C.A. Collins
I am not agender but I do know that agender people exist and IIRC we have some commenters here who are agender (I think Knitting Cat Lady and mcbender are, maybe a few others). I don’t know much about it, maybe some agender commenters can chime in with more info.
One question I have is, does being agender also automatically make one asexual? For me, sexual attraction is related to my gender identity, so I’m not sure how that would work without a gender identity.
@C.A. Collins
While I do not identify as agender, I also do not identify as female or male either, and I do not care what pronouns someone uses for me because they all feel equally wrong. I present as female and experience misogyny, however. I respect that gender identity and pronouns are important for other people, but they aren’t important for me.
I don’t know how well that comports with your experience.
@Naglfar: Me, I’m attracted to female bodies. I don’t care about what the person identifies as nearly as much as I do about exteriors. (I may be shallow.) I definitely don’t identify as asexual.
@Policy of Madness: That sounds kinda like me. Not so much wrong as irrelevant, though.
I don’t know why it would? I’m ace, so maybe I don’t understand the nuances of sexual attraction, but I would imagine that attraction to other people is unrelated to one’s gender identity (except for the way that it relates to how you name it, for the folks who experience attraction to only select genders). I can’t imagine my asexuality changing even if I later identify as nonbinary or as a man, though maybe that’s because asexuality is “universal”? I could see someone identifying as hetero or homosexual being a little thrown by a change to their own gender identity, because the names of those identities are reliant on one’s gender identity. I can see there being a fair amount internal conflict if one strongly identified with the gay community but later realized they were trans and felt like they could no longer be considered part of that community… I suppose that’s one more reason for why a unified and inclusive queer community is so important.
You previously identified as nonbinary, if I recall correctly? If it’s not too personal, can I ask if your attraction to others was altered somehow, after you identified as a woman?
@Leliel
You mean the guy who ran on a platform of retaining slavery in the slave states and continued to support that position until several years after slaveholders had started an armed rebellion? Which armed rebellion was literally the only reason for the Emancipation Proclamation, created as a weapon of war against the slaveholders? Again, the necessary case is changing things by voting, not direct action. Since you’ve now demonstrated that your position is completely intellectually bankrupt and based on a profound ignorance of history, this discussion is over. Run along now.
ETA: nothing to do with the dialectic, you just don’t know what you’re talking about.
@Catalpa
Sorry if what I said was hurtful to ace folks, I did not intend it that way. I was just curious if there was some sort of link between being agender and being asexual.
I referred to myself as non-binary for a period of a few years while I was trying to figure out what I was. I wouldn’t say my attraction changed since cracking the egg, but I would say that I felt a lot more comfortable with said attraction because I was more comfortable with my identity. Before cracking the egg I was very uncomfortable with any attraction I felt, but I didn’t know why. Now I feel a bit more comfortable with it.
@Dalillama
To be fair, sometimes positive change is capped off with a vote. For example, the 2008 California Proposition 8, which legalized gay marriage in that state.
To say that voting alone accomplished that is laughable and ignores the decades of work and activism that drove forward the cause for LGBT rights and actually forced the politicians to address the topic, of course. But voting was a (small) part of the change.
Voting alone can’t create change, and never will, but it sometimes can facilitate it.