"Serious Dragon Ball" erasure

[Cursed Lemon]

Yeah, I get that. And essentially the scene of Vito's murder plays out more-or-less as straightforwardly horrible within the show.

I just find it interesting how the show is willing to throw in oddball sight-gags like that for what is easily its single most disgusting example of homophobia among the characters, but is generally NOT willing to be that visually or tonally "cutesy" with things like Melfi getting raped or Ralphie's pregnant mistress (and her unborn baby) being kicked and stomped to death against a cement curb.

There's definitely a little of David Chase's Italian-American double-standards subtly seeping through this series at times is all I'm saying (I say that as an Italian-American myself who was raised in a VERY heavily Italian-American family: I know these subtle - and not-so-subtle - little "tells" about these things quite well).

Generally speaking, I think the characters who are mostly innocent in the show - the very few that there are - get the strictly serious scenes. The shtick of the show is that almost every character is a bad person to some degree, so when they go you get scenes like Phil's death which is honest-to-god fucking hysterical.

[Kunzait_83]

Generally speaking, I think the characters who are mostly innocent in the show - the very few that there are - get the strictly serious scenes. The shtick of the show is that almost every character is a bad person to some degree,

This is a generally good point: though that reading doesn't QUITE hold 100% of the time when it comes to certain other moments, like that poor waiter that Chris and Paulie accidentally kill with a brick. That guy was just some random innocent bystander who's only big "crime" was losing his temper at a couple of guys he didn't know were dangerous mobsters, and his death (which if this happened in real life needless to say, would obviously be fucking horrific and sick) was played basically for pure Three Stooges-esque slapstick.

so when they go you get scenes like Phil's death which is honest-to-god fucking hysterical.

Phil's death is easily one of the single laugh-out-loud funniest out of all the more "grisly/gruesome" deaths without a doubt. It's basically a Looney Toons gag with gore.

While not as immediately hilarious, I also loved the running gag that goes on throughout most of the entire series where Chris and Paulie have to periodically move around Emil Kolar's corpse (who was killed in literally the very first episode of the whole series), with each time there being less and less of Emil's decomposing body left until by Season 5 Chris and Paulie are literally reduced to just smashing up his bones into powder with hammers.

Anyways, getting back on something halfway resembling the original topic here:

And more to the point, the stuff I'm referring to by "the material" has always been the drama- The serious stuff that the premise of this thread says is being erased by the types of fans this community represents. The main reason I became a sub fan and rejected the dub all those years ago was because the dramatic moments felt far more effective in the Japanese original than they did in either the Funi/Saban dub or Funi's own in-house efforts.

(That being said, I've also always thought the Funi dub was bad at doing humor too, worse at that than drama in fact, so in the end I don't think it represents either side of Dragon Ball as well as the Japanese original)

I'd also like to note (and this is a point I've noted plenty before in the past): the FUNimation dub is also incredibly, cringingly, embarrassingly terrible at doing the very thing its attempting to do... which is present Dragon Ball as some kind of "edgy, masculine, hardcore, badass" thing.

I'm speaking here as someone who actually LOVES a great, great deal of things/works that can best be described in a lot of ways as "edgy, hardcore, badass" and even "hyper-masculine". I'm not necessarily inherently put off by those things in and of themselves (nor have I ever been really), as those things are NOT inherently bad things in and of themselves.

I'm put off by toxic masculinity, sure (or at least depictions of toxic masculinity that are unself-critical and just wallow mindlessly in it *cough*WWE/Pro Wrestling*cough*), but not masculinity in and of itself: Fist of the North Star remains to this day my Gold Standard for martial arts fantasy manga well far above even DB.

Not everything that is "hyper-masculine" is also inherently "toxically masculine". And I think that that's ultimately a key, important distinction that most of this site/community back in the day had completely missed. The late 90s/early 2000s Golden Age of Bro Douchery was terrible not for being too masculine, but for being too stupidly toxically masculine.

And I think there were a LOT of people in this community back in the day who never really made that separation and were very quick and eager to lump anything/everything that is hyper-masculine as being innately and inherently "toxically douchebag masculine". Hence, all of the "Shonen Spirit of Friendship and Adventure" bullshit that defined this community so thoroughly for so many years.

Which I mean to be fair once again, given how much toxic masculine dipshittery the mainstream popculture of a lot of the late 90s/early aughts were positively STEEPED in, its hard to 100% fault people for making that mistake.

That being said though, one of the FUNimation dub's biggest problems isn't just that it tried to lean more into the "violent action" side of DB while downplaying its silly/whimsical side: its that even in its trying to highlight those aspects of it, it presented them in the most embarrassingly cringe-ass way possible.

Meaning that even if you wanted to use FUNi Ball Z as an emblem for Dragon Ball's more "hyper masculine/violent action" side, it fails utterly even at being that. It literally fails on its own fucking terms. It is *completely* worthless, even gauged on what its setting out to try and accomplish.

I can wax poetic about the awesomeness of a TON of great "edgy, violent, hardcore, hyper-masculine" works out there: the original The Crow comic is still one of the single greatest works of the 80s indie comic boom easily. Riki-Oh is both one of the coolest Seinen martial arts action manga of all time AND one of the most wondrously deranged live action film adaptations of a manga/anime ever made. Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus is still one of my favorite ever Japanese zombie/action movies. And Schwarzenegger's Commando is the undisputed King of Gloriously Dumb Violent Testosterone-Fuelled 80s Action Movies (with Road House right behind it).

Hell, back in the late 90s/early 2000s, my friends and I went through a weird phase of us bookending watching subbed episodes of Japanese Dragon Ball Z sometimes with viewings of Commando for no real particular reason.

I mean I could easily fill a fucking entire book - probably several books - with all of the dumb, violent, edgy/hardcore/badass/testosterone-overdosed shlock that I adore (and have ALWAYS adored my whole life) to pieces unironically and without the slightest ounce of shame whatsoever.

FUNimation's Dragon Ball dubs are bad to me not even so much for trying to take away the whimsical gag manga stuff and replacing it with a more overt "hardcore xtreme badass macho" approach: its bad for even doing THAT terribly and being embarrassingly cornball at it. I hate to invoke this fucking site at all, but unfortunately it actually has a use here: TVTropes has an article called Badbutt that kind of perfectly summarizes what FUNimation Dragon Ball ultimately ends up being.

Japanese Dragon Ball is simultaneously whimsical and also genuinely badass (much like most Wuxia tends to be). FUNi Ball Z is just badbutt and nothing else. Picking between watching Japanese DB or FUNi DB is literally identical with picking between watching Schwarzenegger's Commando or the 80s G.I. Joe cartoon. Do you want the real thing, or the shitty, watered-down approximation for sheltered kids? Its no fucking contest.

And all of that's even before getting into the whole aspect about how the dub totally erases a ton of Dragon Ball's Chinese Wuxia aspects (which I've argued are THE most pivotal aspects of it): which also makes it that much further awful as a representation of the series of course.

At that point, between the original Japanese and the dub for Dragon Ball, you're not even picking between Schwarzenegger's Commando or the G.I. Joe cartoon: you're picking between a batshit late 80s/early 90s Wong Jing-produced Wuxia flick... or the 80s G.I. Joe cartoon. Which is even quintuple amounts further of "no fucking contest here".

[90sDBZ]

Even though it's often hilarious, I wouldn't say Sopranos is primarily a comedy. It's a pretty serious drama with a decent amount of dark comic relief.

On the subject of DB and what it's really about, it's always interesting to see people give drastically different answers. I'd lean towards it being about the fighting, although I certainly wouldn't go as far as to say that's all it's about.

We all have a need to label stuff as being strictly about one thing or another, but the truth is that things aren't that simple. It's why there's so many differing opinions on whay DB's main focus is. I believe Toriyama himself said it isn't about anything, which actually makes sense on some level. Not everything has a single obvious theme that eclipses all the others.

[GhostEmperorX]

Sure, calling out attack names is cool and all, but it's the manner in which the structure of a battle is fleshed out to fit the individual thoughts and processes of the characters that has always stood out and defined 'battle shounen' separately and uniquely from, say, an American action cartoon or what-the-fuck-ever.

Just reading this, but thanks, you touched upon something I've been thinking about recently.
For all the times that US alterations to JP series in most any era are decried (most of the time justifiably), it sometimes gets lost that there is indeed a cultural difference at play in the way that the two make media in their default settings.
The attack name calling thing is a big part of it, as far as I'm aware Western action series on average don't really spend much time naming their moves (or abilities), and if they happen to have names, even less time calling them out when putting them into action.

That's just one example but there's certainly others.

[WittyUsername]

FUNimation certainly made an active effort to paint DBZ as a “cool” action show about roided out dudes punching each other for the fate of the universe, but I don’t know if “serious” is the right word to use when describing the tone of the dub. The tone of the FUNimation dub of Z is more akin to something out of the WWE. It’s not “edgy” or “grimdark” or whatever buzzword the Internet likes to use. It’s actually pretty corny and is clearly marketed towards kids, at least up until the Ultimate Uncut Era.

Speaking of which, I think there is an argument to be made that the UUE redub was an attempt by FUNimation to try and rebrand the series under a more “mature” direction. Nathan Johnson’s score certainly has more of an ominous vibe to it compared to the Faulconer score, and who could ever forget this gem of an opening:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TuFd5a_XLhc

[Majin Buu]

FUNimation certainly made an active effort to paint DBZ as a “cool” action show about roided out dudes punching each other for the fate of the universe, but I don’t know if “serious” is the right word to use when describing the tone of the dub. The tone of the FUNimation dub of Z is more akin to something out of the WWE. It’s not “edgy” or “grimdark” or whatever buzzword the Internet likes to use. It’s actually pretty corny and is clearly marketed towards kids, at least up until the Ultimate Uncut Era.

Yes, "grimdark" doesn't describe WWE at all.

That being said, I don't see how "edgy" doesn't describe what WWE is selling, or at least was selling when I was watching it. I haven't watched WWE since 2004 so maybe it's different now, but I was watching WWE during the Attitude era, and from my vantage point, WWE clearly wanted people to view it as the edgier wrestling brand compared to say, WCW (The "Attitude" brand was WWE's attempt to compete with WCW by explicitly going in a more adult, edgy direction).

People compare Funi Ball Z to WWE because they were both trying to sell the same kind of "edginess" at that time.

[jjgp1112]

FUNimation certainly made an active effort to paint DBZ as a “cool” action show about roided out dudes punching each other for the fate of the universe, but I don’t know if “serious” is the right word to use when describing the tone of the dub. The tone of the FUNimation dub of Z is more akin to something out of the WWE. It’s not “edgy” or “grimdark” or whatever buzzword the Internet likes to use. It’s actually pretty corny and is clearly marketed towards kids, at least up until the Ultimate Uncut Era.

Yes, "grimdark" doesn't describe WWE at all.

That being said, I don't see how "edgy" doesn't describe what WWE is selling, or at least was selling when I was watching it. I haven't watched WWE since 2004 so maybe it's different now, but I was watching WWE during the Attitude era, and from my vantage point, WWE clearly wanted people to view it as the edgier wrestling brand compared to say, WCW (The "Attitude" brand was WWE's attempt to compete with WCW by explicitly going in a more adult, edgy direction).

People compare Funi Ball Z to WWE because they were both trying to sell the same kind of "edginess" at that time.

Now WWE tries to be more family friendly, though they toe the line. In the early 2010s they were much more stringent on having a "clean," G-rated DIsney-fied product but now it's more along the lines of Marvel or any standard PG-13 action movie.

[TechExpert2021]

People compare Funi Ball Z to WWE because they were both trying to sell the same kind of "edginess" at that time.

There's also fans who compare FUNimation's version of DBZ to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (Saban's adaptation of Toei's Super Sentai series), G.I. Joe, or some other Saturday morning action cartoon with similar traits.

[Kunzait_83]

FUNimation certainly made an active effort to paint DBZ as a “cool” action show about roided out dudes punching each other for the fate of the universe, but I don’t know if “serious” is the right word to use when describing the tone of the dub. The tone of the FUNimation dub of Z is more akin to something out of the WWE. It’s not “edgy” or “grimdark” or whatever buzzword the Internet likes to use. It’s actually pretty corny and is clearly marketed towards kids, at least up until the Ultimate Uncut Era.

I'm pretty sure I made this exact point in why I said that the dub was a failure: the attempt was to paint it as "edgy" (not "grimdark" as Buu said before me, that isn't quite accurate in this case), but the execution wound up with a "corny" and "kiddie" kind of "edgy" instead.

And as noted, the WWE at this same exact point in time was also going in a very "edgy" direction, and the general zeitgeist of the late 90s and early 2000s was a particular kind of bro-douchey "edginess". We saw it in the WWE, we saw it in the popularity of general "Trash TV" at the time (that WWE itself was a big part of), we saw it in the mainstream music of the time, etc.

Another user earlier in this threat also - quite rightly - brought up the influence of the UFC and MMA on this whole cultural movement of the time: and that stuff particularly had an impact on the WWE content of the Attitude Era in its whole "edgy" direction.

FUNimation's DBZ was trying to be the kiddie-equivalent of this kind of "edginess", and it isn't a coincidence whatsoever that the fanbases for things like the WWE and music like Linkin Park and Korn and Slipknot and other such Nu Metal of the time all overlapped almost one to one exactly.

For some personal context: I was in high school from 1998 to 2002. I had also for the first time in my life moved to a white suburb from a largely non-white inner city in 1998, just in time for high school. This period of time is permanently burned into my brain just from the sheer culture shock that I went through alone during that time.

Prior to that point, my experience with white suburban youth culture was fairly limited to a couple of summer youth centers I went to here and there intermittently in the early 90s. My high school years in 1998 to 2002 however was my first real up-close experience with it on a more consistent basis.

White suburban youth culture in the late 90s and early 2000s was positively suffused with the influence of Nu Metal and Trash TV of the time. You couldn't go anywhere or talk to anyone back then within those circles that wasn't touched by those things in one form or fashion.

This was ALL over the North American Dragon Ball fan community of the time as well: it wasn't a coincidence that literally every other rando participating in Dragon Ball discussions back then actually and for-real used The Rock's verbiage/catchphrases as part of their sentence-by-sentence vernacular, or made so many gazillion Linkin Park, Korn, Papa Roach, Drowning Pool, Disturbed, or Slipknot backed DBZ AMV's that it spawned the catch-all term "Linkin Ball Z" due to how over-the-top pervasive it was. Just for starters.

Even to this day, people STILL overlap and use WWE lingo in relation to Dragon Ball. jjgp literally just made a post in this very thread a page or two ago comparing the two once again for the umpteenth time.

Anyone who was actively participating in Dragon Ball fandom back in those years knows exactly what I'm talking about here. This was THE culture of the time as it pertained to DB's fanbase/target audience of that time and place.

The Venn diagram between "North American Dragon Ball Z fan", "WWE Attitude Era fanatic", "avid Nu Metal listener", "has a suspiciously sticky poster of the WWE Diva Sable up on their wall", "thinks that the band Evanescence counts as 'classical music' because they use a piano", "treats the movie Fight Club as their personal religion without in any way remotely understanding that its supposed to be a scathing satire of toxic masculinity", and "frosts the tips of their hair and/or wears baggy Tripp pants" was basically an exact perfect circle from the years 1999 to 2004 or so.

This WAS the core North American Dragon Ball Z dub audience at that time. This is exactly who FUNimation was targeting their "reversioning" at and moreover this culture of the time was partly why their reversioning exists at all as a thing in the first place.

If you made the opening theme song of the show Malcolm in the Middle into an actual person, this is who you'd end up with: this was every other white male suburban kid between the ages of 8 and 22 from 1999 to 2004, and this is what the whitest half of Dragon Ball's U.S. fanbase was during those same years.

(And part of the core of my whole point on earlier pages of this thread about why Kanzenshuu - back then, Daisenshuu EX - made "The Shonen Spirit of Friendship and Adventure" into its whole fucking core brand identity was in no small part in direct backlash response against ALL of this, as the North American Dragon Ball community at that point in time was basically drowning in out of control pre-teen testosterone from all this crap.)

The point being: a certain kind of "edginess" is exactly what both the Dragon Ball Z dub and WWE were both simultaneously going for. And speaking personally myself as someone who actually likes a lot of "edgy" works, my issue with both the DBZ dub and the whole entire Juggalo-esque culture of this whole time period was that it was the cringiest, corniest, most embarrassingly, stupidly fucking toxically dudebro-ish rendition of "edgy" possible.

The word "Edgy" itself is a very broad term that can describe a whole lot of different things: "Edgy" can come in the form of the kind of corny, cringe-ass fucking idiotic kind like the late 90s/early 2000s Nu Metal-ish zeitgeist being described here, or it can be the kinds of more cerebral, artsy Cronebergian body horror kind that dominated the 80s and much of the early 90s, or it can be the broad "hardcore punk" scene of that same time, or it can be the industrial goth scene of the late 80s to mid 90s (that Nu Metal itself kind of took a lot of its influence from), or it can describe much of the broader U.S. and Canadian independent film scene of the 80s and 90s, or it can be the fucking malignantly racist, 4chan alt-right Nazi garbage of today for the past decade at least.

Just for only a FEW possible examples of countless many.

My point is simply that a certain kind of Shadow the Hedgehog-esque "Kiddie Edgy" is basically what the FUNimation DBZ dub (and all of its associated marketing) was specifically aiming for: and it had a mainstream audience at the time that was ripe for eating up every last drop of it and asking for seconds, thirds, and fourths.

[GhostEmperorX]

My point is simply that a certain kind of Shadow the Hedgehog-esque "Kiddie Edgy" is basically what the FUNimation DBZ dub (and all of its associated marketing) was specifically aiming for: and it had a mainstream audience at the time that was ripe for eating up every last drop of it and asking for seconds, thirds, and fourths.

And there's no better evidence of this than the fact that they continuously went out of their way to sanitize characters for most every other line compared to what was in the original JP version (if it's different). Either that, or going for a sort of "cool in the moment" thing that completely misses the point overall.
A lot of its proponents tend to miss this fact overall, and some make one excuse or the other for it.

[WittyUsername]

Maybe I just don’t know what really constitutes something being “edgy”, since that Internet has had a tendency to abuse the hell out of that word at least since the early 2010s.

All I know is that if we’re talking about “serious” Dragon Ball, the FUNimation dub is arguably less serious than the sub, given the sheer volume of goofy one-liners and late 90’s lingo. All you need to do is look at what a jokester they made Freeza.

[Kunzait_83]

Maybe I just don’t know what really constitutes something being “edgy”, since that Internet has had a tendency to abuse the hell out of that word at least since the early 2010s.

I'll 100% agree on the internet at large abusing the hell out of this word and applying it to so many other things that it clearly doesn't apply to, that its lost much of its meaning.

All I know is that if we’re talking about “serious” Dragon Ball, the FUNimation dub is arguably less serious than the sub, given the sheer volume of goofy one-liners and late 90’s lingo. All you need to do is look at what a jokester they made Freeza.

I think the disconnect here is that what you're describing here is the actual end result of the FUNimation dub, rather than the intent that went into. They were clearly (to one extent or another) going for something "edgier" (whatever that word means to you, though in this case it was clearly a more "kid-friendly" version thereof), and what they instead ended up with was something cringe and corny.

Which I argue is what always ends up happening whenever something tries to be a kind of "kid-friendly edgy", as being "kid friendly" and "edgy" are completely incompatible and oxymoronic. You can't really be both of these things at once (kid-friendly and edgy), you have to generally pick one.

Hence why I said that their version fails even on its own terms of what it had set out to achieve.

Clearly though, for whatever reason, their "reversioning" had the desired effect they were looking for, as there are even to this day still a number of dub fans who maintain that the dub isn't corny or cringe at all, but is legitimately "edgier" than the original in their eyes.

[JulieYBM]

Perhaps it's because I am a girly of the 1990s and 2000s, but every time I think back to how Japanese cartoons were marketed in the US—especially those done through extensive re-writing to 'punch it up' for, say, American teenagers or whatever—I can't help but think back to the early 2000s tendency to try and make stuff 'not gay'. Which is to say, I feel like the entire purpose was to try and make people who like anime not feel like faggots for liking cartoons—most of which were aimed at children in the first place.

Which, y'know, is ironic, since anime and manga is the faggiest shit on the planet. And, in case it's not apparent, I'm using that term as a compliment. Boys are pretty in anime, girls get to kick ass in anime and be tough and commanding, there's tons of crossdressing and gender-bending, and homoerotic under—and over—tones to fill up a grand concert hall.

The rewriting and the scoring to 'fit what American kids like' doesn't just sound xenophobic and racist to me, it also sounds distinctly queerphobic in a lot of ways. "No more emotive orchestral music! Ironic sarcasm every other line! Really, really bad acting—because you need to sound hard and manly and like you're trying to push your larynx all the way down until you grow a first or second set of balls! Also, sound like you do nothing but smoke cigarettes, we want boys to think that they need to sound like they smoke ten packs a day because that's real manliness!!!"

Like, I look back at all this shit and the decisions that got made and it's so hard not to laugh at how fake the 'masculinity' of it all feels—especially as a queer girl growing up in that era and seeing how stuff was generally marketed and framed towards people.

[Kunzait_83]

but every time I think back to how Japanese cartoons were marketed in the US—especially those done through extensive re-writing to 'punch it up' for, say, American teenagers or whatever—I can't help but think back to the early 2000s tendency to try and make stuff 'not gay'. Which is to say, I feel like the entire purpose was to try and make people who like anime not feel like faggots for liking cartoons

I don't have any links on me at the moment sadly, but I'm fairly positive that this has been overtly noted and remarked on by various people (via interviews and such) who have worked in the U.S. anime licensing industry over the years, since back in the 80s and 90s. Given the general - ahem - "attitudes" that have always been pervasive in much of the U.S. marketing and advertising industry since time immemorial (at least until very, VERY recent years), this really shouldn't be seen as all that surprising.

most of which were aimed at children in the first place.

Most of the anime that was aired on outlets like Cartoon Network (and basic syndication) and that communities like this one overly-focus on were aimed at children in the first place.

As I note continuously, there is literally an entire universe of anime and manga that exists (much of it even brought to the U.S. since ages ago) that was not, and never was, aimed at children (not even in Japan).

Even in some of those cases though, some of the older dubs/localizations for even some anime that was always aimed at an adult audience were not immune from attempts at, uh, "artificially enhancing" their "masculinity": I'm thinking particularly of Manga UK, who were exceedingly notorious for this sort of thing (with results that were every bit as cringe and laughable as you'd expect).

Which, y'know, is ironic, since anime and manga is the faggiest shit on the planet. And, in case it's not apparent, I'm using that term as a compliment. Boys are pretty in anime, girls get to kick ass in anime and be tough and commanding, there's tons of crossdressing and gender-bending, and homoerotic under—and over—tones to fill up a grand concert hall.

Given the homophobic/transphobic views of modern "alt-right" of the past decade or so combined with their own enthusiastic embracing of anime and manga as part of their whole identity/iconography, there's a helluva psychology paper waiting to be written there (that I'm sure has already been written in at least a few incarnations by now).

The rewriting and the scoring to 'fit what American kids like' doesn't just sound xenophobic and racist to me, it also sounds distinctly queerphobic in a lot of ways. "No more emotive orchestral music! Ironic sarcasm every other line! Really, really bad acting—because you need to sound hard and manly and like you're trying to push your larynx all the way down until you grow a first or second set of balls! Also, sound like you do nothing but smoke cigarettes, we want boys to think that they need to sound like they smoke ten packs a day because that's real manliness!!!"

Like, I look back at all this shit and the decisions that got made and it's so hard not to laugh at how fake the 'masculinity' of it all feels—especially as a queer girl growing up in that era and seeing how stuff was generally marketed and framed towards people.

To be sure, this was all blindingly obvious to a lot of people even back then at the time. When I talk about the general "toxic bro douchieness" of the late 90s and early 2000s, rampant and wanton homophobia was a tremendously gigantic part of it.

As most people know, the 1980s was one of the single most homophobic decades in all of U.S. history; less talked about though is how there actually WAS by the mid-90s a sort of gentle easing off the homophobia gas peddle at least a little bit overall with more sympathetic, pro-gay voices making their way through a lot of the U.S. counterculture throughout much of the early half of the 90s. In a lot of ways, the big return to 1980s over-the-top homophobia in the early 2000s was itself a backlash against that.

I have distinct memories of an overall regression in general views of gay people in the early 2000s relative to where things were only just STARTING to sort of head by the mid-90s. Not to say the 90s themselves weren't still plenty homophobic obviously: but there was a notable pushback against homophobia in the 90s as a backlash against the out of control homophobia of the 80s... which then saw the early to mid 2000s swing back the OTHER way once more into virulent homophobia as a backlash against the backlash.

2000s homophobia peaked by the middle of that decade, and by the tail-end of it we saw the beginnings of one of the most significant leaps forward for pro-gay voices. Nowadays, transphobia is basically the current accepted form of broad homophobia, with reactionary attitudes towards trans people specifically basically being used as a glorified "mask" or "cover" of sorts for still trying to continue fighting against gay people within the confines of a more broadly gay-accepting mainstream public.

This is all relevant to Julie's point here also, because LOTS of times historically, homophobia is laundered into the public sphere under the pretext/cover of "I'm just thinking of what's good and healthy for children". As if to say "Look, its not that I'M homophobic: I just don't want people's kids to get hurt or be put at risk" (as if gay or trans people are any sort of inherent risk to kids to begin with, and as if framing or implying that they are isn't itself the dictionary definition of homophobic).

This kind of sentiment came through in older marketing to kids from decades like the 80s and 90s (where a LOT of this faux-masculinity was basically coming from a general sentiment of "We don't want to raise our boys to be sissy-faggots: boys should be raised to be Manly Men."), and today it comes through with much of the narrative you see being spun around trans people specifically, as most of today's current "trans panic" discourse is rooted deep within the pretext of "We're just looking out of the children, we don't care what adults do" (even though eventually, this crap almost always comes back around inevitably to affecting and dehumanizing adult gay and trans people).

Children are often used as a shield/pretext for adult homophobia is what I'm getting at here. Whether it be in the current day "trans panic" discourse, or in how U.S. marketing dipshits back in the day justified how they tried marketing things that might otherwise be seen as "sissy/girly" (like Japanese children's cartoons) in a way that preserves "manliness" within young boys: its all variant flavors of the same basic homophobic stew.

[JulieYBM]

Yeah, I completely forgot to mention that a lot of that 2000s-era queerphobia was ramping up in large part due to the 2004 POtUS election, which same-gender marriage was a big topic of debate. That, mixed in with the rise in Islamaphobia post-9/11 really just stoked all of the bigotry, I think. How that played a part in the way that media and marketing was approached to make media 'Patriotic', 'American', and 'manly' all had to have tied in together a lot more.

Another thing to note—which kind of gets lost in the discussion often—is that same-gender marriage wasn't legalized until 2015. In the US, the ability to marry someone of the same gender in any state is still not even ten years old yet. I feel like that gets lost in the discussion about 'acceptable' shit and influences how we make our media. Even now, there's a very specifically acceptable type of queerness allowed in media and while some of the toxic masculinity elements are no long as highlighted, I think the potential for regression is still there as we see the real world rights of trans people eroded.

If the attacks on cis queer people twenty years ago have now reformatted into attacks on trans people in the 2020s, I highly suspect that we can say that the generalized homophobic takes on masculinity in the 2020s have reformatted, too.

[WittyUsername]

At the risk of going off-topic, in regards to the point about the perpetually shifting cultural attitudes towards queerness, if these past few years are any indication, homophobia seems to be making one hell of a comeback in the United States. It really seemed for a brief period after 2015 like the Western part of the world was finally moving past all this, but now it’s back with a vengeance. Gen Z men in particular seem to be getting swooped up by it, thanks to the prominence of the likes of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. Hell, Disney apparently told the team working on Inside Out 2 to make Riley seem “less gay”, because they were spooked by Ron DeSantis.

[JulieYBM]

At the risk of going off-topic, in regards to the point about the perpetually shifting cultural attitudes towards queerness, if these past few years are any indication, homophobia seems to be making one hell of a comeback in the United States. It really seemed for a brief period after 2015 like the Western part of the world was finally moving past all this, but now it’s back with a vengeance. Gen Z men in particular seem to be getting swooped up by it, thanks to the prominence of the likes of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. Hell, Disney apparently told the team working on Inside Out 2 to make Riley seem “less gay”, because they were spooked by Ron DeSantis.

That's the thing about fascism, you've got to take bold stances against it or else it will come right back in any way that it can. Conservatives have been slowly building up after switching over to attacking trans people after the Supreme Court decision in 2015, and now that they've made big waves on attacking trans rights they're starting up attacks on same-gender marriage again. Soon enough, they'll go after interracial marriage again, too.

The political divide among men and women is probably going to grow even wider within the next decade, too.

I definitely recall there still being a lot of broader, grassroots queerphobia post-2015, though. Even before I publicly came out as trans and was presenting to the public as a a visibly queer 'man', I was getting called slurs at my job by customers.

It's really easy to get caught up in the moment and think that everything is fine, but that's why it's so important to remember our history and to keep it alive through media and representation. Stonewall was less than seventy years ago. Reagan's intentional lack of action during rhe AIDS pandemic was only four years ago. Conservatives calling gay people pedophiles during the 2004 election was only twenty years ago. The Supreme Court ruling that same-sex marriage was legal was only nine years ago. Shit, it wasn’t until I was already into my twenties that I could marry a man.

I'm getting so off-topic here, but after Conservatives get their way and forcibly detransition us and revert our gender markers they'll go after same-sex marriage to nullify our marriages, assuming we married people of the same gender assigned at birth. They want to establish their White Supremacist state and they can't do that if they aren't forcing white people to have sex for the sake of birth with each other.

Wrapping back around to Dragon Ball: it's going to be really interesting to see how misogyny and toxic masculinity influences the US reception and marketing of Dragon Ball, should the Conservative streak in Gen Z and Alpha isn't course-corrected within the next fifteen years. If that shit gets its claws back into media marketing it will just become a self-perpetuating hate machine.

Well, I'll be more concerned with making sure I can marry whatever consenting adult I want and keep taking my hormomes, but you get the idea.

[MasenkoHA]

Soon enough, they'll go after interracial marriage again, too.

They kind of already are. "Things should be left to the state" isn't exactly subtle.

Wrapping back around to Dragon Ball: it's going to be really interesting to see how misogyny and toxic masculinity influences the US reception and marketing of Dragon Ball, should the Conservative streak in Gen Z and Alpha isn't course-corrected within the next fifteen years. If that shit gets its claws back into media marketing it will just become a self-perpetuating hate machine.

I have noticed there seems to be a growing trend of romanticizing Goku and Vegeta's "traditional nuclear family" lifestyle with their respective wives. Nevermind that Goku's marriage to Chi Chi is a complete sham and man has zero concept of romantic love or sexual attraction. Also seen videos that Krillin "won" because he got a hot supportive wife. And less common, I've seen discourse that Yamucha should have gotten married too, because he's somehow "owed" a wife and family

I wouldn't be too surprised if Crunchymation plays into that. Or finds an excuse to have Linda Young play Frieza again and return to their early 2000s effeminophobia approach to the character.

[JulieYBM]

Soon enough, they'll go after interracial marriage again, too.

They kind of already are. "Things should be left to the state" isn't exactly subtle.

Wrapping back around to Dragon Ball: it's going to be really interesting to see how misogyny and toxic masculinity influences the US reception and marketing of Dragon Ball, should the Conservative streak in Gen Z and Alpha isn't course-corrected within the next fifteen years. If that shit gets its claws back into media marketing it will just become a self-perpetuating hate machine.

I have noticed there seems to be a growing trend of romanticizing Goku and Vegeta's "traditional nuclear family" lifestyle with their respective wives. Nevermind that Goku's marriage to Chi Chi is a complete sham and man has zero concept of romantic love or sexual attraction. Also seen videos that Krillin "won" because he got a hot supportive wife. And less common, I've seen discourse that Yamucha should have gotten married too, because he's somehow "owed" a wife and family

I wouldn't be too surprised if Crunchymation plays into that. Or finds an excuse to have Linda Young play Frieza again and return to their early 2000s effeminophobia approach to the character.

Jesus, that is some disgusting incel talk. I know that I'm preaching to the choir when I say this, but good lord, that kind of attitude toward women is disgusting. We're not trophies to be handed out to men.

[WittyUsername]

Soon enough, they'll go after interracial marriage again, too.

They kind of already are. "Things should be left to the state" isn't exactly subtle.

Wrapping back around to Dragon Ball: it's going to be really interesting to see how misogyny and toxic masculinity influences the US reception and marketing of Dragon Ball, should the Conservative streak in Gen Z and Alpha isn't course-corrected within the next fifteen years. If that shit gets its claws back into media marketing it will just become a self-perpetuating hate machine.

I have noticed there seems to be a growing trend of romanticizing Goku and Vegeta's "traditional nuclear family" lifestyle with their respective wives. Nevermind that Goku's marriage to Chi Chi is a complete sham and man has zero concept of romantic love or sexual attraction. Also seen videos that Krillin "won" because he got a hot supportive wife. And less common, I've seen discourse that Yamucha should have gotten married too, because he's somehow "owed" a wife and family

I wouldn't be too surprised if Crunchymation plays into that. Or finds an excuse to have Linda Young play Frieza again and return to their early 2000s effeminophobia approach to the character.

I doubt they’re gonna bring back Linda Young as Freeza.