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Post by phanax on Oct 26, 2005 15:44:24 GMT
OK, the title is very harsh and I don't really mean it, but does anyone else find the scene where Mokoto (is it mokoto, I'm not good with names, any-way, the younger girl) randomly solicits to a bloke in a back alley, and he barely raises an eyebrow, a bit... overly wrong, I mean, even by anime standards (barr hentai) perhaps I think too much about this perhaps I'm also eager to be the first to put a thread for this series
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Post by Indefinite Description on Oct 26, 2005 19:17:46 GMT
There are many forms of strangeness, especially since it's a relative concept. Some people might think it strange to talk sp much of suicide on an anime forum, but I'm doing my bit to make it entirely normal.
It's 'Mikoto', by the way, so you were close.
I'm not sure precisely what worries you. Is it the thought that this might be (perceived as) normal? That the chap exhibited no signs of a struggle with whatever lingering sense of morality he might have? That the show cast him as more of a silly unfortunate than actually evil?
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Post by phanax on Oct 27, 2005 11:21:34 GMT
OK I'll admit normality is a strange concept, and I wouldn't consider anyone I know to be normal, but yeah, I think the casualness of the sittuation disturbed me a little
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Post by Indefinite Description on Oct 27, 2005 16:42:41 GMT
I was thinking about this earlier, and I reckon that according to Kantian ethics it's actually Mikoto who was acting unethcially. She lied, which in Kant's thought is always wrong -- he (in)famously decalared that if you're sheltering a friend from a mad axeman and the axeman asks you where your friend is, you may not lie -- and thus threatened the entire practice of consensual sexual relations. (The basic point is that the maxim you act on has to be such that everyone could follow it; hence you can't lie, because if everyone lied the practice of truth-telling would fall apart. Or so says Kant.) The chap would probably be okay, since the maxim he might have been acting on -- I suppose something like 'It is permissible to have sex with 14-year-old schoolgirls when they solicit you' -- doesn't produce that sort of self-defeating contradiction. (She also used him as a means to an end rather than an end in himself, which is also wrong in Kant's ethics. Arguably he'd have used her as a means to an end, viz. sexual pleasure, too, but then, since she was the initiator, very arguably that would, had she been genuine, have been mutual. Sex is in general awkward for Kant in this respect.) According to this -- why did Googling for this information lead me to end up on a French site? -- Mikoto is fourteen, so from what little I know about the age of consent law whether she's old enough to consent to sex in law would depend on the prefecture. (ageofconsent.com appears to have died, but you can find the archive.org version for 11/10/2004 here.) Also, what Mikoto did was arguably wrong in classic Utilitarianism (promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number), on the grounds that introducing the threat of assault into consensual sex decreases overall happiness (whereas consensual sex would tend to increase it, at least in theory). She's probably safe in terms of virtue ethics, not least because just about every virtue ethicist has a different list of what the virtues actually are; I think they'd tend to regard accepting solicitations as indicative of vice, although not necessarily for clear or consistent reasons. (Okay, I'm not keen on virtue ethics...) Casualness doesn't figure much in moral philosophy, to be honest... Anyway, if you don't like it, there's always tentacle rape.
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Post by phanax on Oct 28, 2005 15:03:03 GMT
...If I don't like it there's tentacle rape, as if tentacle rape is more acceptable?
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Post by Indefinite Description on Oct 28, 2005 17:18:49 GMT
Okay, false dichotomy. I was merely wondering whether something nicely non-casual -- I here assume nobody's going to admit to sufficient expertise in this area to inform us of any casual tentacle rapes, but we shall see -- would suit your preferences better, given that you'd flagged up the casual nature of the scene as its disturbing aspect, rather than, say, arguable degradation of sexual relations, encouragement of reckless behaviour offering opportunities for predatory sexuality, etc.
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Post by phanax on Oct 29, 2005 13:42:31 GMT
tentacle rape is fine in a stable loving relationship... ... with a demon beast
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Post by Indefinite Description on Oct 29, 2005 14:26:56 GMT
It's questionable whether it would then constitute rape; if you can't manage to make your sex consensual, maybe the relationship isn't actually all that loving...
Of course, here we tread on the topic of what constitutes consent. There's a paper in the current issue of the journal Ethics -- I think the title was something like 'Seduction, Rape and Coercion' -- which argues that a fair amount of psychological pressure is permissible, though threats are still ruled out. So maybe it would be possible to sort out something if it were properly understood by both parties that lust-demons just have certain occasional needs; here I'm thinking of something like the agreed overriding of immediate disinclinations by long-term inclinations in certain types of BDSM relationship... Why the hang am I writing this stuff, as though I didn't get enough comments about scariness, etc. already? I'm supposed to be working on 'Is Ethics Natural?'
Of course, a more important question is this: will rape replace suicide as the sick forum in-joke? Perhaps someone should start a poll thread...
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Post by phanax on Oct 29, 2005 15:54:10 GMT
consider it done
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Post by Indefinite Description on Nov 4, 2005 1:12:53 GMT
The Japanese are strange people, he says... Hopefully you'll concede that this is hardly usual: Linkage.After discussing rape this is almost a return to classic mode, but I still prefer suicide pacts. What struck me was that I wouldn't think of it as particularly weird if it were an anime plot.
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Post by phanax on Nov 4, 2005 12:20:50 GMT
"no, we're not terrible people... horses are terrible people!"
who can source me that quote? (yes the current topic is a clue)
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Post by Indefinite Description on Nov 4, 2005 15:46:09 GMT
I don't think it's the source, but Googling produced this: horsehater.blogspot.com/I thought we could use it to distract attention from ourselves in case we were ever accused of being inane, sick-minded people with too much time on their hands.
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Post by phanax on Nov 5, 2005 13:51:15 GMT
"..., the way black people hate white people, ..."
OK, that scared me!
btw the quote was from family guy the movie, available at all large music shops
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Post by Indefinite Description on Nov 6, 2005 22:37:26 GMT
It's surely a measure of... something... that when I saw this, I thought of these boards. It doesn't involve the Japanese, but I feel it somehow suits this thread anyway. While some hate horses, others love monkeys. CG game monkeys. In pink.
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Post by phanax on Nov 7, 2005 12:15:49 GMT
IT's wrong! wrong wrong wrong!
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