Note: I wrote this article in a hurry, so there’s a lot of typos and sentences I need to rewrite properly when I have the time.
The Pretty Series history article explaining everything from Pretty Rhythm to Prichan is finished now. You can read it here. It explains the series relationships with Oshamajo, Love Live, Aikatsu, and the KING OF PRISM spin-offs. It’s quite a long read, but I strongly recommend reading it first to get a much better understanding of this controversy.
On August 3rd 2018, the official Prichan twitter RTed how there’s swimsuit dakimakura among the Pretty All Friends(PAF) official goods to be sold by Icrea at C94 (August 10-12 2018). It created a controversy among the Pretty Series fans. This is natural as the fan community is pretty massive now after PriPara and Kinpri’s successes, and includes people from different countries (mostly Japan and South Korea) so obviously everyone has different opinions and sensibilities. There’s people saying the dakimakuras are bad because they’re sexualizing underage characters from children oriented anime, and making hashtags protesting about it.
On August 3-4, the Japanese tags for PriPara and Pretty Series were trending. The Korean tags for “dakimakura” , “children anime” and “pripara” were trending too. There’s also a currently trending tag with thousands of tweets used by people to protest against the goods: #プリティーシリーズ_女の子キャラクター_性商品化_もいい加減にしろ, meaning “Stop making official goods sexualizing the Pretty Series girls characters”
And a korean equivalent: #프리티_시리즈_여아캐릭터_성상품화_작작해라
I’m not making this post to repost some of the tweets in those tags, and write/translate things like
“look how low the Pretty Series franchise has fallen”
“wow Japan is so cool and redpilled, they NEVER PUT POLITICS IN ANIME, those Koreans complaining about the swimsuit dakis are just dumb SJW!!”
and get views like the crap Yaraon already did. (I’ll explain later why I mention Korea. Not linking the yaraon post on purpose to not give them views. And I hope ANN won’t write a post on this issue with yaraon as only source, because unlike what they said it’s not only Korean fans that are displeased about it)
I’m not interested either in trying to figure out if there’s a consensus, or counting the heads on each multiple sides of the argument. Rather, I wanna try to talk about the incident as a whole and explain what led to this. And in case it a becomes an even bigger controversy, it would be good to have a post for future reference to know what happened.
Also, I’m not going to voice my own opinion much. Which is that basically I don’t think the dakis are a good thing, but I don’t agree with 100% the arguments against it I’ve seen. Explaining my opinion would require me to write about things personal and I don’t feel like it nowadays. Usually, I always voice my opinion because I don’t believe 100% objectivity is a good thing. (Like how most people saying they’re apolitical or don’t care about politics and don’t want to see politics in cultural works pretty much means they voluntarily support the wrong politics by not caring, and has never been forced to care because they’re rich or white or never experienced stuff like racism)
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