Ladies and gentlemen, we've come to a disgusting place. Even for otaku. I'm not going to exaggerate and say that we're in the deepest circle of Otaku Hell-- there are only ten copies of the most hellish thing in otaku and they were all already sold in the first fifteen minutes of some underground comics convention you've never heard of and never will-- but we're a circle or two in. This is the Circle of Piss. You have been warned.
I love this story. It's such a clusterfuck! Charger Girl Juden-chan is a particularly pervy magical girl fanservice show. Many people are making the comparison to last season's Queen's Blade, which was pretty shameless itself. Both these shows are in a long tradition of anime shows that feature sexual content just short of being softcore porn, in hopes of selling the DVDs or cable TV version that takes tiny steps into that territory. Like Queen's Blade, this show makes no bones about being jerk fodder, but it does add something new to the mix: a persistent urination fetish. I'll be damned if I sit through this whole thing, but the show gets off on three things more than just simple flashes of tits and ass: girls getting abused, girls pissing themselves as a result of said abuse, and girls secretly getting off on it themselves. This isn't just creepy-- it's creepy with panache!
It is needless to say that neither of these shows I've mentioned should be shown to children, so genius website Crunchyroll-- who I still won't support or link to, being as they made all their money as a for-profit piracy scam-- decided to stream it to their 12 to 14-year-old demographic. To be fair, I doubt any US distributor would actively seek out this show: it was almost certainly at the request of some utterly clueless Japanese sponsor who only cares that people see the anti-piracy notice at the beginning of the show. But a mismatch is a mismatch. Jesus Christ!
To this end, CR came out as saying that they were working with sponsor Avex to make some changes that would allow "all audiences" to enjoy Juden-chan. Seriously, guys? You honestly want to show Juden-chan to all people? Just showing Juden-chan to one person is a serious insult: inflicting it on everybody is mass psychological warfare. Even putting aside that Juden-chan itself is awful shit, it's not exactly mass-audience fare in the first place, being as the whole point is that it's softcore wank material. You can't edit Juden-chan down to the point where it's presentable, because it's not supposed to be. It's filthy. It was made filthy.
But that never stopped anybody from trying. The funny thing is that Juden-chan wasn't transformed into something that barely resembled itself, or a five-minute montage of clean magical girl scenes. It is still a piss-fetish magical girl cartoon. You can still see the scene where the heroine gets hit with a baseball bat by the hero and pisses herself, or the one where she watches another magical girl anime in which the heroine is tied up and being molested by tentacles and also pisses herself. It's just a piss-fetish magical girl cartoon with some fog over the naughty bits. Sometimes.
Anime fans have been anti-censorship zealots for years, so they were naturally outraged, I say, outraged! The fan reactions on this discussion thread are fascinating: none but a few of the readers know the first thing about this show, but utterly ignoring the circumstances, they're up in arms that anybody would violate the sacred cartoons of Glorious Nippon (save a certain thin-skinned Colony Drop "favorite"). You're consistent, anime fans, even if you've got absolutely nothing else going for you.
Here are the circumstances: in Japan, Juden-chan runs on a subscription cable channel to paying customers-- and everybody who's downloading rips of the cable version, which is where the fansubs come from, but never mind all that. The show hasn't actually run on free TV yet, and this edited, fog-in-funny-places version is probably what's going to run on Japanese TV when it gets there. This isn't really a free speech or a censorship issue: it's a cable TV station deciding to charge for the good stuff and give everybody else a toned-down version of their softcore. Crunchyroll probably doesn't intend to start running or selling 18+ material, so of course they're not going to have the prized version where you get to see nipples. I guess the American pervert who wants that version legitimately is out of luck, but, well, it's not like there's no way to get it.
Of course, there's really no solution to all this. Juden-chan, in all its glory, probably shouldn't be on a mainstream, young-skewing site like CR in the first place. But that's why all this hilarious stuff happened, so why get mad? This is a situation which calls for laughter, first and foremost. You'll never be a happy anime fan unless you learn to make fun of absolutely everything that happens in the fandom. Just make sure the piss doesn't hit you.
"Juden-chan, in all its glory, probably shouldn't be on a mainstream, young-skewing site like CR in the first place"
Which is why I was confused and laughing when I saw they CR decided to get it. I'm not surprised they censored it. It's interesting stuff at least one episode in when even when you take out the pissing, so eh.
Posted by: TheBigN | July 12, 2009 at 04:48 PM
reminds me in a minor way when CPM picked up Utena, thinking they had a show 'just like' Sailor Moon that they could sell to CN or somebody....oops.
And trying to figure out what do DO with Utena kept them kinda in vaporlock for some time, until they finally said 'fuggit, just sell the damn thing already'
Then there was ADV and Angelic Layer which just had a creepy as all hell subtext instead of just being a shojo version of Plawres Sanshiro.
I do laugh. I laugh hard. :)
Posted by: Steve Harrison | July 12, 2009 at 07:48 PM