MyVisionity wrote: ↑Wed Sep 16, 2020 5:18 pm
goku the krump dancer wrote: ↑Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:46 pm
The counter point is that, its not the only moment in the series where some one is brutally beat down for an extended period, I feel like their's a level of innocence being played up because Videl is female but how is she any more innocent than Gohan getting beaten up by Recoome or Nappa?
It's not about any kind of innocence. It's primarily about Videl being a woman. Having a woman brutally and excessively beaten the way she was is going to be problematic, no matter the context. Especially in a children's cartoon. It doesn't matter whether or not she's in a domestic relationship with the person or not.
I can only really speak for myself but it's drilled into our heads, across most cultures, that beating up women is wrong and repulsive. Fusion summarised it in his video that violence is glorified in culture, but mainly in the form of men beating up other men or women beating up men without real resistance. Whether or not that's considered right or properly feminist, it's just the way we've all been wired from early ages. Videl may have been slightly masculinized for the tournament what with the boyish haircut but even ignoring her gender, we know that she's cute and wide-eyed and extremely in over her head against Spopovitch. So I don't feel remotely weird saying that I'm not a big fan of seeing cute girls get their teeth shattered and skulls slowly crushed in a (relatively) lighthearted children's manga. Leave that sort of stuff to Ito.
The comparison with Gohan's beatdown scenes are weird to me because they're not exactly easy to sit through either and as has been said before, context matters. Gohan is simply stronger, more durable and ultimately more central to the plot than Videl, so we know that he can take a beating and is usually one rage-boost away from returning the favour to the perpetrator -- although he gets his ass seriously beat by Recoome, it doesn't feel as severe as Videl's because we know he can always bounce back somehow. Only a few chapters later, he starts kicking around the 2nd and 3rd Forms of Freeza. He may have got his neck snapped, but... 'tis but a flesh wound, by Saiyan standards anyway. Videl isn't a Saiyan. She's nowhere near the general weight class of the series' heavy-hitters, whereas Gohan always has been.
I argued in the MistareFusion thread that part of why the Videl scene is uncomfortable is because it takes place in what we consider a safe location. Unlike with Gohan, who's always thrust into the big life-or-death battles for the universe, Videl is just an amateur martial artist nowhere near his power level. Although the Tenkaichi Budokai has been home to its fair share of brutal, dramatic scenes, it's always been the fun, low-stakes battle location throughout the whole series. So seeing Videl suddenly get bloodily brutalised by a giant brute in broad daylight, in front of hundreds of spectators as well as all of the main cast who stand there doing
nothing to prevent it, is incredibly jarring.