On Taboos
Why is it that, for visual cultural materials, erotic derivatives are almost universally accepted?
I’m convinced the reason lies outside of either Japanese culture or the specifically sexual proclivities of the consumer, the two reasons most commonly cited.
The question to watch isn’t “is what I’m doing though of as ‘weird’ and ‘creepy’”, but “is what I’m doing thought of as notably creepier than its blandest relative?”. Having already accepted the awkwardness of, to take what usually form the opposite ends of these arguments, a thoroughly adolescent, in the narrative sense, SF action animation synonymous with nerdery (Gundam); or a self-published niche PC game with a cast of strange girls (Touhou); one is already so far alienated from acceptible mainstream entertainment that a step to eroticism doesn’t appreciably change the abnormality of one’s habits.
In some cases, this is healthy, or at least by no means as unhealthy as is sometimes argued; the angry man who argues it as a symptom of the Japanese culture his grandfather warred against is but uncognizant of that same grandfather’s lonely nights on Pacific islands with only the company of that old standby of 2D pornography, the pinup. The loss of the idealized figure in paint, whatever it may look like, owes far more to modern makeup and film postprocessing making the construction of a “perfect woman” easier in 3D, at a cost of damaging the image of the average girl.
At other times, it’s more neutral; certainly, only the widest readings of “visual culture” include Western horror and teen comedy film from the ’80s on, but these are as enthusiastic in the sexualization of taboo subjects like grotesque imagery and high school students as mainstream 2D pornography.
Honestly, I could think a lot more about this, but I just caught ep 23 of Gundam 00, and it’s completely blown anything I can write about retarded fanboy crap out of my brain.