The Souls of Roach Folk
On Terra Formars, fascism, and the state of
Western anime fandom
Hello and welcome back to Mo's Home for Treatises and Hot Takes
Ah, anime.
On the one hand: beautiful animation, wonderful characters, heartfelt
stories that really speak to the human condition, that make us laugh, that
make us cry,
that make us bond together as human beings.
On the other end: fascism!
Like, far more fascism than you would expect
from a medium whose fans desperately
hope and claim is apolitical.
And that's what we're gonna talk about today
with Terra Formars!
So make sure to like and subscribe. Follow
me on YouTube and Medium
(links in the description) Without further
ado, let's get into it!
Ni môgo mi kabôh toubabouhou ya djanva Kalaman
Obafôh ko iman civilizé
Ni môgo mi kabôh toubabouhou ya djanva Kalaman
Obafôh ko iman développé
Travaux forcés
Travaux forcés
Travaux forcés
Travaux forcés n'magninan
Travaux forcés n'magninan
Travaux forcés kôh
(CW: Extremely racist imagery and rhetoric,
gore, Ben Shapiro, bad writing)
Section 1
Part 0: Introduction
In the beginning, there was peace. There was
nothing. Weebs and weeblets suckled from the
nectared bosom of the anime goddess for however
long they pleased, binging show after show
after show. They cherished their ships, and
their waifus, and their headcanons in reckless
abandon. Civilization was at its peak. The
people held conventions adorned opulent cosplays
for the world to regard with envy. Fanart
bloomed across the land in abundance. Politics,
that dreaded word, that heinous word, was
no where to be found.
The world was as it should be.
That is, until one cursed day. A devil arose
from the darkness, in the form of an electric
mouse. He spoke,
"Behold! For a show released five years ago
is racist as fuck!" 
And the world fell.
Okay, but seriously though, Terra Formars
is just about the worst thing that exists,
and I'm about to make us think about it again.
Nope, you don't get a choice in this. Sorry.
It's happening now. We're doing it. We're
making it happen.
Look, it's either this or I add another Joker
take to the radioactive pile of garbage stinking
up the Internet, so shut up, we're doing this.
A rather unappreciated advantage of the Internet
is the ability to step through past discourse.
It may take a historian to figure out what
the average Pennsylvanian thought of the end
of Reconstruction. But armed with Google,
the Wayback machine, and a hazmat suit, anyone
can wade through Twitter and relive the rousing
discourse surrounding the release of… I
don't know, like FLCL Progressive?
Or maybe… good ole Terra Formars. How'd
that one turn out?
Terra Formars, is no stranger to the criticism
of anime fans. The show has no idea how to
tell a story. The first season is horribly
rushed, skipping development and character
interaction to get right to what it considers
to be the highlights: blood and gore and boobs.
Despite its lightning pace, however, these
13 episodes in total take 24 hours of in-show
time. A lot of images flash across the screen
but nothing much actually happens.
The second season, by contrast, takes things
slower. So slowly that everything d r a g s. Apparently,
when the writing staff heard the show could
take the time to explain its characters more,
it took that as "cut to a flashback every
five seconds and tell the audience what we
really should be showing them instead". Every
scene has such weight and gravitas attached
to it, but you don't care enough about the
cast for it to affect you in any way.
It's these issues, plus the show's overall
lack of a plot that makes sense, that nets
the first season the relatively low MAL score
of 7.1, and the second season the abysmal
rating of 6.83.
Just to put that in perspective, Wataten!
An Angel Flew Down to Me is literally just
the story of a pedophile in college who grooms
her 5th grade sister's best friend. She bribes
the kids with candy and cake so she doesn't
get the fucking police called on her.
7.52 on MAL.
Terra Formars is five years old, out of the
limelight, and, aside from the handful of
dedicated fans scattered across the net, no
one really talks about it anymore?
So why the Treatise?
Because, as was the case with The Rising of
the Shield Hero, and as I expect to be the
case for many of the shows I end up writing
about, anime fans are easy to accept these
kinds of mechanical, apolitical criticisms
of the anime. If you try, or even hint at,
the disgusting and obvious bigotry and propaganda
on display from the first scene of the first
season to the last, if you bring its disturbing
source material out in the open, anime fans
band together and defend the show from any
kind of criticism.
The result: for the past five years, Terra
Formars has just been, like, stinking up the
place. It hasn't received a thorough critique
or breakdown since it was converted to an
anime. The show exists as part of modern anime
canon without so much as an asterisk.
When Kotaku (remember, Kotaku is supposed
to be that hyperliberal SJW site that thinks
everything is problematic!) reviewed the show
in 2014, it had nothing but praise for Terra
Formars, writing:
"Straight up, Terra Formars is high-octane
entertainment - lots of cool action and
captivating plot twists out of nowhere. Right
from the start … the manga picks up and
doesn't stop, and it's a Hell of an entertaining
ride."
This was added as an additional note, after
the piece was originally published:
"A friend of mine pointed out to me that they
thought the depiction of the humanoid cockroaches
in Terra Formars was racist against black
people. While this does not lessen my overall
impressions of the manga as I don't feel it's
intentional, it may be worth mentioning for
those who feel sensitive."
And in fact, the later quote encapsulates
real discussion around this show. Terra Formars,
as a manga, and as an ill-fated anime adaptation
(and worse live-action movie), has been flagged
by many people, especially people of color,
as problematic.
And every time it's the same, condescending,
response. "It's fine." "It's not on purpose."
"Don't be so sensitive."
"Don't be so sensitive", coming from white
people who don't have to deal with this shit,
who don't have to deal with the fact that
you can count all the lead characters who
look like you on one hand, and don't have
to share a fandom where the majority of people
neither understand what makes life different
for you or care enough about you to have their
narrow perceptions of the world challenged.
When I put on my hazmat suit and used the
wonderful power of the Internet to journey
through time and space back to the release
of this show, all I saw were persistent attempts
to get dissenters to stay quiet about the
parts of this show that really matter. It
was "don't be so sensitive" again and again
until today, the largest written source of
criticism on this medium is a wordpress blog
and someone's old tweet.
I refuse to let my experiences as a black
person, or the experiences of any other minority
just trying to watch fucking anime without
the medium and its fans secreting toxicity
all over our essences, to be reduced to some
afterthought.
I am about to shit all over the legacy of
this worthless piece of garbage of a story.
I am digging up its corpse and defiling its
grave. As you'll soon see, it does not deserve
to be forgotten as "some Attack on Titan knock-off
with pacing issues". Terra Formars deserves
nothing.
At the end of the day though, it's more than
just calling a thing I don't like bad. There's
a clear lack of understanding within the anime
fandom as to what kinds of ideas its media
can propagate, and how those ideas are used
and continue to be used to hurt people and
prop up injustice around the world.
Part 1: The Obvious AKA These Aren't Black
People I Swear
The premise of Terra Formars is as follows:
Back in the 21st Century, humanity began the
process of terraforming Mars as a solution
to overpopulation, adding first greenhouse
gasses and water, then moss and the first
animal species: cockroaches. 500 years later,
this process is complete. A rover is sent
to inspect the planet and learn if it's ready
to host human life, but the machine is destroyed.
During the 500 years since humanity left Mars
to develop, the cockroaches sent there have
evolved into humanoid-like creatures, hostile
to humanity. Tensions rise between humanity
and this new race of creatures called Terra
Formars. A manned mission to Mars brings back
a deadly and contagious virus that's keen
on eliminating all human life on Earth.
The year is 2600. The UN's space body, known
as UNASA (created largely out of NASA), sends
a scientific vessel called the Annex 1 to
Mars to procure 100 live samples of the virus
to help American scientists develop a cure.
The Annex I is the latest in a new wave of
Terran missions to Mars, following the failed
Bugs I and Bugs II missions.
Each crew, made up mainly of orphaned teens
and 20somethings in debt, has had their genes
spliced with an insect or some other organism,
giving them each a unique ability in combat.
Armed with superpowers, they must fight their
way through the hostile natives to survive
and bring back enough virus samples to save
the human race.
Not a bad premise for a gritty sci-fi romp.
I mean, okay, some of you can tell that this
story is problematic from its very premise.
But not anymore problematic than is the case
for most sci-fi and fantasy.
But, uh…
The first problem? These "humanoid cockroaches"
look like fucking this:
When people complain about the racism of Terra
Formars, this is usually what they're talking
about. If you were a fan during that time,
you probably remember the discourse around
this well, as it's basically the only thing
that ever got touched.
The designs of the roaches are not really
what make the show racist. You could swap
the design entirely for something less based
on a racist caricature of black people and
the show would still be disgusting.
Still, I think this is the best place to start.
First, because even this obvious truth about
Terra Formars has been lied about and gaslit
out of existence, so it would make me personally
feel good to set the record straight. Second,
because the show's relationship with the Martian
roach people is vitally important to how it
builds its ethnonationalist propaganda, so
this needs to be explored.
So yeah, the anime's Martian roach people
are racist African caricatures.
Christ, that's even a stupid sentence to type
out.
Find a black person who has never seen this
show and show them the image I linked above.
Ask them if they look like black people. 99
times out of 100, they'll say yes.
The first most common defense of the show's
(and the manga's) awful design decisions is
that real cockroaches are also dark in color
so there's nothing wrong here.
"You're the real racist because you're comparing
what are obviously cockroaches to black people
unprompted! Checkmate, SJW!" ~Reactionary
Paul
… is how the gaslighting portion of this
argument usually goes.
So here's what I'm going to do. I'm writing
on the Internet, so I have the wonderful ability
to just attach images for y'all to look at.
Here's what an actual cockroach looks like
Here's a black human being
And here's a roach person from Terra Formars.
That was fun. Pretty colors. Shiny. Means
I'll have to put in a modicum of effort editing
the audio version though. Oh well.
Let's try that one more time, anyway.
Cockroach
Now a black person
And Terra Formars again
Okay ladies, gentlemen, and everyone else.
Tell me.
Please.
Do the Terra Formars Martians look more like
black people? Or more like cockroaches?
I'll give you a hint: one of these answers
is wrong, and it's the second one.
In the second picture from the anime, where
you can't really see their antennae, there's
nothing really there that's supposed to make
us read these characters as cockroaches. If
you notice the antennae, they could be any
insect at best. We only know they're cockroaches
because the show says so again and again.
Yet, no matter what angle you look at them
from, they always seem to share some of the
more… let's say "culturally distinct" features
of blackness: their mouth shape and lips,
their nose shapes, the muscular bodies.
If all black men had bodies like that, I'd
have mad chicks to disappoint. Sadly for my
love life, it's a stereotype that has no basis
in reality, and only serves to make it seem
as though black people, black men in particular,
are made of more animalistic muscle than human
intelligence. In America, it's a holdover
when we needed a reason to justify black people
doing all the manual labor in the country.
Today we don't need that justification because
we put all the black men in prison to do that
labor anyway.
Progress!
Okay, okay, okay. So clearly, some of you
are not on board. I've still got fucking ammo
left, so let's keep going.
Here's a humanoid bug from another medium,
Pokemon Black and White, that retains far
more insect-like qualities than Terra Formars'
cockroaches do, without being racist.
And here's a creature from Homestuck that
is black and chitinous, like Terra Formars'
roaches are supposed to be, but also manages
not to be ridiculously, obtusely, ludicrously,
white-friend's-uncle-on-thanksgiving-ly fucking
racist.
I've gotta do another Homestuck essay. No,
Mo, no! One thing at a time! I've got anime
to problematize! It's amazing how easy it
is to never run into the exact problem Terra
Formars has. Who'd've thunk'd?
People have argued that the Martian roaches
are just similar to Homo erectus or some other
pre-human stage of evolution, just recolored
and textured to look like cockroaches. Any
other resemblances to any race is a mixture
of coincidence and projection.
First, this argument is literally nothing.
Black people have been compared to the theoretical
look of Homo erectus since forever. Eugenicists
and race realists have asserted that black
people are less evolved than their white counterparts,
closer to apes and Homo erectus than Homo
sapiens, for centuries. Saying "they're not
black, they're less evolved sub-humans" is
not the defense some might think it is.
As we've learned more about the various types
of early humans, we've become prone to the
graft our racialized interpretations of people
onto early humans. From the "controversy"
surrounding the idea that the first humans
to land on the British Isles may have been
dark skinned , to the science news media running
with the idea that Homo erectus was so lazy
it drove itself extinct despite the fact that
that conclusion a) wasn't found in the scientific
paper the headlines were based on and b) represents
the guesses of one of the researchers, and
other researchers stated their disagreements
with the idea.
Evolution, science, and Homo erectus have
been racialized since the dawn of time. You
can't hide behind them in an attempt to deflect
what Terra Formars is clearly doing here.
Second, again, they don't look like cockroaches
at all. You can call back to Homo erectus
without the African stereotyped look. It's
art. This wasn't the only way to do that.
Guys. For real.
THE BUGS HAVE AFROS
LIKE SERIOUSLY THEY DO JUST LOOK WITH THE
EYES GOD GAVE YOU
ARE YOU SHITTING ME????
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Bring me a cockroach that has my hair and
I swear to God I will delete every Treatise
and Hot Take I've ever written. I'll retire
forever. You'll never hear that some mediocre
show is actually racist or capitalist propaganda
ever again.
Just show me one fucking bug that just so
happens to have my skin, my face, and my hair
and I will shut this blog down right the fuck
now.
No. It's just not true. There's no argument
here, yet this is the narrative that won after
5 years of "discourse".
Fuck me.
There is no reason at all why these designs
would "just so happen" to turn out the way
they have. In fact, adding more distinct features
of cockroaches to the Martian roach people
would improve the design and better communicate
the show's core ideas.
Imagine for a minute, if these creatures had
lighter front sides/underbellies (like they
do in real life), dark bug eyes, pointed chins,
reversed legs, alien feet, limbs with hair
on them, maybe an abdomen.
Would that not look scarier? Would that not
scream cockroach? Instead of 50 scenes of
the main characters calling them "damn roaches"
and flashing images of cockroaches in front
of my face whenever they move, you could just,
like, show through the design that they're
cockroaches. Would it not be more 𝕋𝕙𝕖𝕞𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕝𝕝𝕪
ℝ𝕖𝕤𝕠𝕟𝕒𝕟𝕥?
The show chooses not to do this though.
This is a common theme here on Mo's Home for
Treatises and Hot Takes. People consuming
media often get trapped in (or choose to adopt)
the thinking that everything that's on the
page is just how it had to be. In reality,
the only reason why anything in a story exists
is because the author chooses for it to happen.
Somehow, this vid is never not relevant whenever
I do one of theseIt's not just people of color
who view Terra Formars' Martians as stand-ins
for Africans. There's another important group
of people who see it the same way: actual
racists.
When the manga started to gain popularity,
and especially after the anime was first released,
corners of the Internet far-right memed this
show to all hell. It was just as fun as you'd imagine.
"Terraformars design has been controversial
for being seen as a parody of African American
people, although is based on Homo Erectus
[lol]. As a joke, the Terraformars are sometimes
refered (sic) as African American people,
often using stereotypes." ~ Terra Formars on Know Your Meme
Ah yes, the famous law of nature that states
that things cannot be both jokes and racist
at the same time.
One of the worst things the far-right on the
Internet has done is convince minorities that
we can't tell when we're being made fun of.
Like the bully harasses you every day in gym
class and then harasses you for getting upset
at being harassed because those last times
were just jokes he swears.
At the very least, racists think Terra Formars
are racist. That's, like, not a good thing
last I checked.
Part 2: Stereotype Emporium AKA Yes, It Does
Get Worse!
Alright so maybe the bugs do look a little
like black people. And maybe some 4chan trolls
got a hold of it. So, what's the harm? After
all, Terra Formars has black humans as well,
right?
They look normal. Some of them even have speaking
lines sometimes. So maybe we chalk this up
to a bad choice in character design that ultimately
never hurt anyone?
NoI've got more ammo. Way more!
Because of course I do. This is a Treatise
after all. That's why I'm here. To trigger
the cons with FAX and LODGING.
Because see, what really makes these creatures
racist stereotypes isn't really the design.
Like I said, the designs just got the most
attention when the anime was first made. As
usual, not really the worst part.
Mars is the shithole-iest country
The Terra Formars are scientifically undeveloped.
I want to make it clear that this makes sense
in-universe: the cockroaches have only been
on the surface of Mars for the past 500 years
or so, cut off from the technological developments
on the planet Earth. That's not really enough
time to develop a good understanding of physics,
engineering, mathematics, medicine, and the
like. Those things on Earth took thousands
of years and thousands of cultures working
together to understand.
Again, though. I'm not concerned with whether
or not Terra Formars justifies its bigotry
with internal logic. I'm interested in how
its world is framed.
A mysterious disease from a far-away place
is threatening to end civilized life as we
know it. The people who live in these places
are hardly people at all. They're club wielding,
rock throwing masses that brainlessly attack
everything not like them. They rarely wear
clothes or shoes. The narrative will constantly
mention that individual members of this people
are not capable of problem solving, and must
take direct orders from a leader that happens
to be more intelligent than is expected.
The only artificial structures that these
Martian roach people seem to be able to build
are pyramids, which just so happen to the
most iconic structures on the African continent.
Can I just mention that this is the shittiest
argument for the idea that Africans can't
build things? White civilization today is
still unsure how the pyramids were built given
the tools available to the Egyptians at the
time. The pyramids that find themselves in
Africa and Latin America are literally unlike
anything white civilization has ever accomplished.
The discrepancy seems so hard to square that
white people will literally believe in aliens
before believing that the ancient Egyptions,
Nubians, and Mexicans were maybe more advanced
than they're given credit for.
Anyway, one character says of the Terra Formars,
"Because of you and the rest of your kind,
Earth is becoming a shitshow."
He continues,
"You feel nothing. No pain. No fear. That's
why you'll never progress like us you pieces
of shit."
These are all just various stereotypes people
have of Africa.
It's the shithole where all the diseases come
from (think about conservative reactions to
the HIV epidemic, or the more recent Ebola
epidemic). Its people are uncivilized, still
uncomfortable wearing shoes. With the exception
of ancient Egypt, Africans don't build things,
they just live in the jungle or the desert,
in mud huts or in the wilderness. Africans
are either too stupid to "progress" like the
rest of the world, or too uncultured, or both.
It doesn't matter what the Terra Formars look
like in this case (though it does make matters
worse). You don't bring all of these tropes
together by accident: it's a deliberate and
obvious attempt to make a statement on world
affairs.
Maybe this is more obvious to me than it is
to mainstream anime fandom, because I've been
exposed to this rhetoric and I've had it used
against me. But this really isn't complicated
stuff. You just put two and two together.
There's a bad place filled with savages who
are bringing diseases that will kill us all
unless we do "something" about them. This
something involves indiscriminate, ruthless,
unrelenting violence until the threat is neutralized.
Here be dogwhistles, y'all.
Black people are violent
(CW: Female genital circumcision)
While the anime starts with the story of the
Annex I landing on Mars to collect enough
roach samples to find a cure to the virus
threatening humanity, the manga starts a few
years earlier with the Bugs II mission. This
is treated in a prequel anime that got made
but I never watched because I'm working on
respecting myself for at least a little bit.
On the Bugs II mission, there was a South
African woman named Victoria Wood. Her powers
were based off the Emerald Cockroach Wasp,
which is equipped with a stinger that disables
the fight-or-flight response in cockroaches,
turning them into what are essentially "slaves".
Victoria Wood does the same thing to the Martian
cockroaches on a larger scale, injecting them
with what is essentially a mind-control poison.
It's taking a real thing and exaggerating
it to fit a horror/sci-fi setting. Not too
bad, I guess.
In a brief pause in the action of the story,
Victoria takes a moment to describe what life
was like 
in her home country.
She continues. Remarking,
I'm dying slowly. Just so y'all know. I guess
we're all dying slowly. Wait, would that mean
I'm
actually dying faster than average?
Probably. I'm dying faster than is normal,
but slower than I'd fucking like to.
First of all, on grave robbing, that's not
an African thing. It happens all over the
world. Yes, even in Japan. Victoria explains
this to this Japanese man as if it's some
exotic and primitive thing that only savage
Africans can imagine, but it's not. When people
are poor and desperate, and when they know
rich people get buried with expensive stuff
when they die, it doesn't take much to put
two and two together. Race has nothing to
do with it.
The issue isn't that no South African has
ever robbed a grave, or that certain South
Africans haven't thought to protect their
dead from grave robbers before. It's framing
grave robbing as this thing that happens in
these shithole countries for black people.
Nowhere on the African continent is grave
robbing so bad that the poor encase their
dead in concrete. People don't steal whole
corpses either, I mean holy fucking shit how
do you make money off a putrid, disintegrating
body? Who's buying zombie flesh on the black
market? What the actual fuck?
Oh, no no no no no, I see. It doesn't matter.
You know those Africans. They're not even
civilized enough to have valid socioeconomic
reasons for doing things. This is just how
they work.
And then there's this female genital circumcision
stuff.
Look, if you wanted to stereotype Africans
as those barbarians that mutilate little girls
for fun, at least look up a fucking map of
Africa and pick a country where this stuff
actually happens to any sort of degree . The
percentage of women in South Africa who undergo
female genital circumcision is around the
same percentage as women in the West who undergo
it. Which is to say the number is statistically
insignificant.
But I bet the person who wrote this only knows
two African countries: Egypt and South Africa,
and they picked the blacker one to make their
point. That's probably how it worked.
This author cited a fucking academic source
when the narrator of the story went on a rant
about how netting has evolved with human intelligence,
yet doesn't bother to do basic research when
it comes to African cultural practices.
See, now that's just the thing. Yes it's true
that the most severe forms of female genital
circumcision are painful, irreversible, and
often forced upon women. And yes, many people
have built good reasons to oppose all circumcision
on the basis of bodily autonomy and consent.
But what this is not is an honest concern
about ending sexist cultural practices in
the third world. It's about using a real problem
to insist that Africans are brutal, unthinking,
violent savages.
The author is just making up stuff about Africa
that's sorta vaguely true if you stretch the
truth enough because the point is not to actually
care about women in the third world or victims
of grave robbing.
There are informed, empathetic, well-researched
ways you could write a story about the challenges
of growing up as a woman in a patriarchal
third-world country that actually move the
conversation forward. We could talk about
the various forms of the practice from least
to most damaging and their effects. We could
talk about the women who have chosen to undergo
the procedure and what it means for their
culture and heritage. We can talk about occidental
religions and culture, and what male genital
circumcision means to the people who practice
it. Maybe compare the two.
Making up some bullshit about how South Africans
saw 12-year-old's clits off with rusty tin
can lids because "that's just how they are
lol" is none of that. It's disgusting. It's
racism in it's purist, most unaltered form.
The author doesn't even see Victoria Wood
as a victim. Just a byproduct of a failed,
barbaric, violent Africa. Victoria dies unceremoniously
and off-screen. Unlike her numerous white
and light-skinned Japanese counterparts who
die to inspire the men in the story to action,
we never hear about Victoria again.
The Terra Formars themselves are also shown
to take a kind of glee in slaughtering as
many people as they can.
Again. Not unilaterally a bad thing to have
a kind of monster or villain that takes a
joy in killing. It's a pretty common horror
trope 
The issue, as it always is, putting this trope
into context.
Black and African people have been stereotyped
as primitively violent for hundreds of years.
Post-colonial Africa has reinforced this stereotype,
as nation-states have struggled to define
themselves in the power vacuum left by European
colonial empires.
Compare for example how the Holocaust is talked
about to how something like the Rwandan genocide
is talked about. There are scores of literature
that explain in detail the various socioeconomic
factors that lead to the rise of antisemitism,
hyper-nationalism, and the ultimate genocide
of 6 million Jewish people off the face of
the planet. Most average (read: non-Nazi)
people can either give a rough account of
this history or, at the very least, acknowledge
that the causes of this genocide were varied
and complicated.
The Rwandan genocide though? Tribal conflict.
One side just hated the other side. They couldn't
get along so they killed each other. So sad.
People will explain away the current violence
in Cameroon between the anglophone minority
and the francophone majority as "it's too
bad they're a third world country". Colonialism?
Arbitrary borders? What are those? 
People will explain away civil war South Sudan
and Somalia as "that's just how things are
there". People will explain away gun violence
in Chicago as "their culture loves violence".
If they're even aware of this at all.
In a study published in the Journal of Research
in Crime and Delinquency entitled Mental Illness,
the Media, and the Moral Politics of Mass
Violence: The Role of Race in Mass Shootings
Coverage , researchers at Ohio State University
found that the media is 19 times more likely
to present white mass shooters as mentally
ill compared to black perpetrators. The media
is also 12 times more likely to ascribe mental
illness to Latino shooters than black shooters.
As the authors state,
"Quantitative findings show that Whites and
Latinos are more likely to have their crime
attributed to mental illness than Blacks.
Qualitative findings show that rhetoric within
these discussions frame White men as sympathetic
characters, while Black and Latino men are
treated as perpetually violent threats to
the public."
When white people are violent, there's always
some rational explanation. "No one just snaps"
they say. There's always some sociopolitical
context we're not factoring in. We have years
of investigations into why ordinary people
could end up enforcing the violence of the
Nazi regime. We pour billions of dollars into
researching how propaganda led to the rise
of nationalism in Europe. We clamor for more
mental health institutions whenever a sweet,
innocent white boy decides to pick up a gun
and slaughter his classmates.
Black people are never afforded the same luxury.
The media narrative is that Black people are
violent just because. Our suffering and our
death need no explanation. There is no sociopolitical
context to the Rwandan genocide, or the situation
in Somalia, or the war in South Sudan, or
gun violence in Chicago. Our deaths are the
natural order of the universe. Our deaths
are just how we are.
The only difference between the liberal position
and the conservative position is that white
liberals pity us, while conservatives are
disgusted.
I'll paraphrase a message I got from someone
online maybe a year or so ago:
After Europe left Africa, everyone there kills
each other. Blacks are always loud and violent
when in large groups.
Terra Formars presents violence in exactly
this attitude. We're shown clip after clip
of these creatures that look like black men
tearing people apart limb from limb, interspliced
with images of disgusting bugs, while the
characters go on and on about how horrifying
and disgusting these people are.
It's propaganda pure and simple. Propaganda
that would fit alongside depictions of the
White Man's Burden.
(Public domain)Black people are a threat to
attractive, light-skinned women
(CW: rape)
While both the manga and the anime are clear
and unapologetic in their portrayal of the
Terra Formars as violent, terrifying, unfeeling
beings, it's especially effective in the anime.
The show takes advantage of quick cuts and
selective framing to make it as clear as possible
how dangerous these beings are.
But on top of the general framing of the Terra
Formars as violent killers, the show has a
specific emphasis that this violence is directed
towards attractive, light-skinned women.
The implications here are quite explicit.
In fact, the anime tells you as much with
this piece of dialogue here:
"The Terra Formars target enemies according
to a specific hierarchy. First, they attack
anyone with a tool, or the tools themselves.
Especially if they're good ones. Second, they
attack anyone alone. Third, they attack anyone
injured. And fourth, for some reason, they
love to go after women. We don't know why
they go after women. It's not for sexual gratification,
it's eerie. But something definitely attracts
them."
In addition, at least one character states
that the Martian roach people "are nothing
but worthless swine, creatures who poison
our daughters" (that's a direct quote) and
uses that as a stated reason for wanting them
all dead.
The stand-in for the violent, animalistic
black mob has been so dehumanized that we're
told explicitly that they're incapable of
a basic human feeling: sexual desire. This
is of course not to imply that our asexual
comrades aren't human. Rather, it's the story
that frames a lack of sexual attraction as
a lack of humanness, and paints that characterization
onto its African/black stand-ins.
The show doesn't even do the weird cross-species
attraction trope thing. Africans are just
so base, and so vile, and so unlike civilized
people that we're incapable of even feeling
sexual attraction as we go around raping,
molesting, and killing for no good reason
whatsoever.
The term Black Peril refers to an idea formalized
in the context Colonial Africa, but present
in any part of the world where a white ruling
class governed over black people. Black Peril
was the idea that African men had an uncontrollable
desire to copulate with white women. Black
Peril tends to specifically refer to Colonial/Apartheid
South Africa and Colonial South Rhodesia,
however, this idea played out pretty much
the same in the United States, without the
label, from the Civil War onward.
These governments would take accusations of
rape and sexual assault by black men against
white women as a pretext to restrict the rights
of black men and perpetuate an idea (an idea
that still exists today mind you) that black
men are inherently driven to assault fair
skinned women "for some reason".
The reality of course was far different. White
men in these governments raped and killed
black women with impunity while the police
turned a blind eye. In the African colonies
in particular, most of the white population
were men, as the European governments at the
time thought to send the male "labor" class
to work and manage the colonies while the
precious hwite women stayed safe at home.
These men relieved their sexual frustrations
with black women, in encounters that were
usually violent and certainly not consensual.
Often, white law enforcement officers themselves
partook in these rapes, and they still do
today.
Currently in the United States, the police
routinely abuse sex workers or just people
they're stopping and sometimes if you're lucky
they'll actually charge one with a crime or
something. Do we have data on this? Not really.
Who the fuck are you going to call when the
police rape you? The police?
Having an institution with a monopoly on violence
that's only accountable to itself and capital
is starting to sound like a bad idea. Hm.
Black Peril has historically been used as
a pretext for violence against black men.
Many of the lynchings committed in the Southern
United States by the Ku Klux Klan used alleged
sexual violence by black men as an excuse.
In South Africa, the fear that black men have
uncontrollable sex drives led to a government
campaign to control the black population in
South Africa, through immigration control
and limits on the fertility of black women.
In South Rhodesia, black men were forced into
domestic servitude in white households. This
paranoia that African men were sleeping with
white wives while the husbands were at work
led to support for increased laws that controlled
the freedom of movement of African men, and
laws that allowed the police to kill black
men for whatever the police sought to define
as "attempted rape".
In all three of these countries, Black Peril
was used to enforce bans on interracial sex,
marriage, and children.
Since at least 2011, all of this crap is getting
shoveled unceremoniously into the minds of
clueless anime and manga fans. In 2019, I
get to write a fucking essay about it.
I love history, man. It rocks.
If all that stuff about the Klan and African
history doesn't really move you. If you're
still wondering what the hell a South Rhodesia
is (it's modern-day Zimbabwe). Here's the
proof why all of this is still important.
Black Peril might have been an idea that started
with strong associations to Africans and blackness,
but the idea that men of color are these rapist
hordes coming to deflower our beautiful young
fair-skinned maidens is an idea that has since
been grafted onto the entity of the Global
South.
The very stable genius that is the current
President of the United States, Donald J.
Trump, routinely uses the association of men
of color with rape to forward a rabidly xenophobic,
classist, anti-immigrant agenda.
Consider how, despite the fact that there
is no evidence that a link between undocumented
US immigrants and crime exists , the 2018
murder of Iowa State University student Mollie
Tibbetts was used to rally conservatives into
clamping down on immigration laws and rights
for undocumented immigrants.
Consider how this image alone, an attractive
young white woman juxtaposed with a scary
brown man, probably helped legitimize the
perceived need for concentration camps for
migrants at the US-Mexico border, where immigration
officials abuse, harass, and kill their occupants,
more than any trumped up statistic or fact
ever could.
Black Peril is not some obscure thing of the
past. Black Peril has just changed and evolved
to serve the needs of the present ruling class.
Terra Formars is part of this transformation.
The story is part of this colorful tradition
of using the idea that men from the Global
South are driven by some inexplicable yearning
to rape light-skinned women to implement policies
that further suppress the people in the Global
North that have the fewest rights: the poor,
the non-citizens, the minorities, and the
refugees.
It's not because the story was written in
Japan by a Japanese person that these realities
don't apply. The idea that only white people
can be racist is not one I support, so don't
parrot that "racism is privilege plus power"
shit to my goddamn face please.
The idea that Japan, a country that was fascist
imperialist empire that took over Korea, much
of China, South East Asia and showed no signs
of stopping until the US military indiscriminately
killed millions of civilians in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in 1945, a country which today
still has high profile citizens deny the war
crimes committed by this fascist imperialist
empire, a country which is 97% ethnically
homogeneous and is about to receive an influx
in immigrants to combat its dying labor force,
cannot possibly have a problem with racism
because "they're not white" is so insane and
so ahistorical that I honestly do not have
the time or patience to take it seriously.
I'm not saying that all Japanese people are
racist or whatever. And as someone who's never
lived in Japan and doesn't even speak enough
Japanese to hop on right-wing Japanese Twitter,
I'm not at all qualified to say if Japan is
a "racist country" or not. Calling a country
racist isn't even a meaningful delegation.
I'm only asking the world to stop using "but
Japan tho" to deflect criticism from this
obviously awful, obviously racist story.
Terra Formars and immigration
So speaking of immigration…
Ben Shapiro.
Heheheh, this has to be my favorite transition
yet.
Anyway, Ben Shapiro.
The ultra-conservative Orthodox Jewish political
commentator came into prominence following
a confluence of changes in the US political
landscape, on and off the Internet. From the
rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, to Ronald
Reagan's redefinition of religious American
conservatism, to the death of bi-partisanship
under Bill Clinton in the 90s, to 2010's reactionary,
racist Tea Party movement following the election
of America's first black president, to the
rise of Internet conservative talk radio around
2011 which sent conservative Americans further
to the Right, to the cultural colonization
of the Internet by the alt-right in 2014 propelled
largely by Gamergate, to the crystalization
of right-wing American populism following
the rise of Donald Trump… each one of these
cultural phenomena fused into the fast-talking-Arab-hating-college-campus-debating-climate-denying-feminist-owning-trans-woman-misgendering-4'11"-being-cool-kid's-philosopher
we know and love today.
"Men make their own history, but they do not
make it as they please; they do not make it
under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and
transmitted from the past." ~Karl Marx, The
18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte
In 2016, Ben Shapiro published a fiction novel
entitled True Allegiance. As far as I can
tell, it's a collection of of his various
conservative beliefs wrapped up in a novel
of flat characters and nonsensical plot lines.
I don't think I'll ever be covering it at
length on Mo's Home for Treatises and Hot
Takes, in part because there's a limit to
how much self-inflicted mental pain I can
take, and in part because it's been done better
already.
The book takes place in a dystopic alternate
version of the United States run by a """socialist"""
(read: center-left neoliberal) president.
The country is overrun by illegal immigrants
and drug cartels at the border, black crime,
and waves of Muslim terrorists entering the
country. All the while, the president cares
more about sucking up to the media than doing
what needs to be done to protect (white) Americans.
The heroes of the story include: oil tycoons
who use their own money to run for office
to combat EPA regulations, the US military,
the US government (when it cracks down on
poor people), terrorists (as long as they're
white), and cops that shoot 8-year-old black
kids. 
The story's villains include: the LIBERAL
MEDIA, the US government (when it hands out
welfare), terrorists (as long as they're Muslim),
and… civil rights leaders who "manipulate"
black people into getting mad when the cops
shoot 8-year-old black kids.
So, anyway Ben fucking Shapiro.
Near the beginning of the True Allegiance,
we learn that parts of California and New
Mexico have been given away to the Mexican
government under the current administration,
to atone for America's "imperialist past".
We visit a city in what remains of California,
which is particularly suffering due to the
president's open-borders policy. Ben writes,
Sunny Pool, a city in Eastern California.
The city with the greatest economic disparity
and the highest incidence of drug-related
crime in the developed nations. The drug cartels
of neighboring Mexico are mostly to blame.
69% of police officers die on the job, 4 of
10 females over age 13 have been raped, and
they pour into the area as if escaping from
hell. The illegal immigrants.
So, what's this have to do with Terra Formars?
The answer is that I'm a liar. You see, that
last bit I said about the president of True
Allegiance giving away parts of the US to
Mexico doesn't happen in the book. That quote
isn't from the book either.
Those things happen in Terra Formars.
I barely had to change the quote to make it
work. I just stripped away the little bit
of worldbuilding this story has. This is how
it actually reads in the manga:
Sunny Pool, a city in Eastern California.
The city with the greatest economic disparity
and the highest incidence of drug-related
crime in the developed nations in the 27th
Century. The drug cartels of neighboring Gran
Mexico are mostly to blame. 69% of police
officers die on the job, 4 of 10 females over
age 13 have been raped, and they pour into
the area as if escaping from hell. The illegal
immigrants.
The story seems to be confused as to what
the US-Mexico boarder really looks like. It
sorta implies that the highest, coldest parts
of the Rocky mountains lie between the US
and Gran Mexico. I took that to mean that
Gran Mexico has expanded in territory, but
it could just be that the author is an idiot.
(It's probably the later)
Point is, the story's two Mexican main characters,
Alex and Marcos, are treated with the tact
of a fucking Ben Shapiro novel. The two are
indistinguishable. Don't tell me I didn't
fool you there for a second. If you'd read
the book you were probably confused why you
didn't remember a quote that outrageous. A
quote so obviously Shapiro-like.
I think, despite it all, it's sometimes hard
to imagine an anime or manga as right-wing
propaganda. This is in part because we're
trained to "other" foreign media: because
these media are produced in a strange land
by people who speak a language we don't understand
and who don't look like us, the stories in
these media are always abstract, enjoyable
on some level but ultimately incapable of
speaking to anything past the material conditions
in Japan.
I'm reminded of when a friend told me about
an Islamic Civilizations class he was taking.
He mentioned being frustrated because the
other students in the class seemed incapable
of analyzing Islamic political figures past
the text of the Qur'an. Europe has had plenty
of religious heads of state, yet, we understand
that their motivations are not tied to the
Bible. They were human beings who wanted power,
land, control, wealth, and more. Yet, because
the Islamic world is seen as an other, as
something different, as something unrelatable
and irrelevant to the West, its leaders must
be driven by something equally strange and
unrelatable like the Qur'an.
It's the exact same dynamic here. Terra Formars
openly inserts itself into the ongoing conversation
on American immigration policy and civil rights.
If I sound like a broken record, it's because
I can't stress this enough. The story is talking
about us as much as it's talking about Japan.
Terra Formars likens the fall of US global
hegemony as a head that's been cut off. Once
powerful and in control, it's now lobbed off
and shriveled. This leaves the opportunity
for newcomers to suck the blood? What cut
off this head? Immigrants, of course. And
China (we'll get to that later!).
These are literally talking points ripped
out of the Trump White House. The only difference
here is, the author seems to be pleased about
it, because the decline of the United States,
unfortunate as it may be, will allow Japan
to rise to its rightful place as a global
superpower.
This is as much forethought Terra Formars
puts into its 27th Century geopolitics: the
world is basically the same except we've engineered
a situation in which Japan is the best country
now. Oh, and also I guess we recreate the
geopolitical circumstances of WWII as well
(more on that later)?
Also, I lied again. The world isn't the same.
The world is worse. The story asserts that
the future generations haven't been able to
curb breeding in the Global South. The world
is now overpopulated, and it's leading to
the decline of what should otherwise be great
nations like the United States of America.
Overpopulation is the stated reason why Mars
needs to be colonized.
Remember that all the candidates to get the
surgery needed to go
to Mars are explicitly the dregs of society:
the poor, the criminals, and other minorities.
This woman (her name's Michelle), and thus
the story, blatantly state that the best way
to make these "undesirables" useful to society
would be to kill them, experiment on them
for the greater good, or give them the most
dangerous jobs in society that we wouldn't
waste on the "desirables".
Daily reminder that the US government conducted
dangerous syphilis experiments on black men
in the thirties and the US's racial hierarchy
directly inspired laws created in Nazi Germany.
Genocide? Sure, I mean the world is overpopulated
anyway, right?
Let's circle back to Marcos and Alex. These
two characters lived in Gran Mexico with their
parents. Their families were poor, as are
the vast majority of Mexicans in this story,
of course. The only reason why they have decent
lives at all are because their dads work for
a rich, white landlord. The daughter of these
parasites I mean landlords is Sheila, who
befriends Marcos and Alex and protects them
from the roving hoards of gangsters that regularly
threaten their peaceful lives. Alex and Marcos
in turn take a liking to Sheila; they admire
her and want to protect her.
They're not interested in her sexually though.
Gross could you imagine? An old black ram
tupping a white ewe.
Their lives go to hell when Sheila's parents
refuse to pay their servants. The workers
go on strike and eventually revolt, burning
down Sheila's estate and leaving her as an
orphan. Alex and Marcos live with the guilt
that their dads killed their best friend's
parents.
I shit you not, the story presents the rich,
white landlords as the good guys here. Marcos
and Alex's parents are the greedy, ungrateful
browns who didn't realize how good they had
it since the white man started taking care
of them. The anime goes as far as to call
them greedy.
To be clear, the anime removes the context
from Marcos and Alex entirely. We don't know
they're illegal immigrants, and we're barely
made to understand that the two boys' parents
weren't getting paid at all. All the racist
manga subtext is paved over for the anime.
In the anime they're just poor people who
come from somewhere and know Sheila somehow.
That's not better, in case it wasn't clear.
That's worse. The anime knew the subtext of
the original work and reinforced it, just
choosing to cut around the parts most likely
to generate controversy. That's not the same
thing as rewriting the story to be less problematic.
Sheila, now an orphan, is able to emigrate
to the US using her family's wealth and connections.
However, Marcos and Alex must arrive illegally.
They note how there are no more jobs because
other undocumented immigrants took them all.
Job machine broke. Wack.
There's a "funny" line where Alex is afraid
someone will mistake him for an Indian. Because
good God is there nothing worse than being
Indian, I guess?
Wage theft and capitalist exploitation are
good and fine as long as there aren't too
many brown people taking up jobs that belong
to the white man This author is not just content
with hating brown people in the far off-lands
of Mexico and the Southwest United States.
He's perfectly capable of also hating brown
people a little closer to home, like Indians!
(These could actually be Native Americans.
I'm like, not sure, and unwilling to put in
the effort to find out.)
These undocumented immigrants were a drain
on the system when they were just trying to
get jobs and make a decent living for themselves.
The story respects them only after they're
willing to risk their lives on human experimentation
and a suicide war mission to Mars. After all,
there are too many of "their kind" around
anyway, right? The world is "overpopulated".
There are 7 billion people on the planet right
now, and we currently make enough food to
feed 10 billion . Terra Formars's definition
of "overpopulated to the point that we should
consider culling the Global South" is 9 billion
people six whole centuries into the future
where innovations have no doubt made food
production far easier and more efficient than
it already is.
Yeah so the story isn't concerned about "overpopulation",
if such a thing even exists. Keeping in line
with the long tradition of eugenicists and
capitalists who use "overpopulation" as a
pretense for population control and genocide
, Terra Formars is concerned with eliminating
certain groups people off the face of the
planet.
I'm running out of ways to say this story
is racist and gross. Let's shift gears a little
bit, and talk something way more fun.
Let's talk about boobs!
Section 2
Part 3: The Not-so-Obvious AKA Does Chad Shower?
Okay so I need to talk to y'all about Posititity
because this shit drives up the wall.
When I watch anime, I watch the dubs by default.
I promise this is going somewhere.
I'm not going to make this a whole tangent
about subs vs dubs, but my preference for
dubs basically comes down to the fact that
anime is an audio-visual experience created
with the assumption that you can understand
what the characters are saying through your
ears while you watch. When a show is dubbed
in a language you understand, that's closer
to the original intended experience than spending
20%-50% of your attention at the bottom of
the screen reading.
The thing about dubs, though, is that, politically
speaking, they are guaranteed to be the most
filtered form of the story you're consuming.
When a manga or light novel gets made into
an anime, some of the… let's say rougher
edges are cut down to appeal to a wider Japanese
audience and make that money off the backs
of underpaid animation staff. But then when
the anime is dubbed and brought to the West,
more edges are cut to make more money off
the backs of underpaid voice acting staff.
Somehow, the end result is still fucking awful.
So if you're me, watching the dub, disgusted
by how gross a particular anime might be,
it literally can only get worse. There's nowhere
to go but down. You dig into the source material
and things just get worse and worse and worse.
So, Posititity. Who is she, and why do we
care?
There's a woman on the Annex I named Eva Frost.
She serves under the German squadron. She's
very annoying as a character. She's scared
the entire time, she pisses her pants at one
point, she whines some more, and then she
dies.
This is what her character bio looks like
in the manga:
Alex says of her in episode 1,
"What is this chick's deal? She's got nice
tits, but she's super negative."
To which Marcos responds,
"Yeah, Ms. Negatitity."
[Gamer music]
Nice one, Marcos. Stellar wit. Thank you for
your input.
In episode 2, we meet another woman, Elena
Perepelkina. She's also annoying. We meet
her in the shower with her boobs flopping
around everywhere because she """forgot"""
to "lock the door" of the shower.
She kind of stares at Eva and Sheila for an
uncomfortable few seconds before saying, unprompted,
"Tell him how you feel. Women are meant to
fall in love. Whatever may come. Older men?
That's not really my thing though." [cackles
while walking away]
Elena later dies a horrible death.
So does Sheila, actually. And like a bunch
of other female characters.
Just mercilessly slaughtered by those evil
Africans. And always as to give some Japanese
or white man somewhere a reason to carry on
fighting the good fight.
Huh, weird.
Hopefully the idea that the purpose of women
is to fall in love with a man is sexist enough
to be obvious. Women aren't "meant" for anything
related to men, they just kind of are. Packaging
that idea inside a sexualized, hyperfeminine
mouthpiece is also awful, because the show
is asserting that this is what a "real woman"
looks like with "real woman thoughts" who
understands the plight of her less experienced
(and less endowed) acquaintances.
I'm really more interested in Eva's response,
however.
"I guess she's Ms. Posititity, or something."
We have entered the Anarcha-Feminist, Hegelian
dialectic phase of huge anime rack discourse.
Posititity and Negatitity clearly represent
the duality of man. But if we dig deeper,
we'll see that the two also illuminate the
permanent bifurcation of womanhood that took
place after the advent of the sexual revolution,
and the ramifications of the consequences
of the rapid spread of awareness of international
patriarchal oppression across class lines.
I'm… I'm fucking with you, of course. It
means nothing. As usual.
This is my hobby. This is what I've reduced
myself to.
The gags are supposed to be funny, I guess?
But it's only funny in that it's awful in
every way. I was a little too curious to take
such a bizarre running plot line on face value.
So I compared these scenes with their subbed
counterparts.
In the Japanese dub, Alex isn't complimenting
Eva's tits, even. The conversation instead
goes like this:
Alex: Not only does she look unfortunate,
but she's super negative.
Marcos: Yeah. She's negative boobies.
Likewise, Elena is "positive boobs". It's
a direct translation of the Japanese. I know
this because the Japanese is formed with an
English loanword for "negative", and then
"oppai". Sometimes it's really not that hard.
Someone decided that it would be in show's
best interest to swap Alex's naked disdain
for Eva looks with him creepily talking about
her body out of earshot. And I guess Marcos
making a pun too? Some executive somewhere
was convinced this was the route to making
as much money with this property as possible.
Capitalism and competition always lead to
innovation. Especially in the arts!
People read the words "Posititity" and "Negatitity"
and fucking thought this was acceptable writing.
Like, they gave it to voice actors who had
no choice but to birth it into reality to
keep a roof over their heads. Posititity and
Negatitity have existed and will always have
existed. This was someone's eternal contribution
to the human experiment.
But it gets even more bizarre.
You thought I was done? Ha ha, if you did
you must be new here.
In the manga, Alex doesn't make a comment
about her body at all. He just says she's
negative, and Marcos makes a crude, one-off
joke.
Oh, yeah, one-off joke. As in, "positive boobs"
is not a thing in the manga. The entire shower
scene where Elena forgets to lock the shower
door and we see her boobs falling out of her
costume does. Not. Exist. In the manga.
In the manga, Elena is introduced in the same
sequence she dies. In the anime, they bump
her introduction earlier to the shower scene.
Her boobs aren't even that big in the manga,
they upped her cup size for the anime by like
maybe a factor of two or something? I don't
know. I don't wear bras. I'm eyeballing it
here.
So now think about the entire evolution of
Posititity from the source material to the
dub.
In the Terra Formars manga, the author writes
in a random Russian/Soviet (I don't know,
the story kinda uses the two words interchangeably
for "some reason") woman who exists to die
for shock value. There's also an exchange
near the beginning of the story where two
characters calls a different girl "negative
boobs" because she's negative. These two characters
are not related. They never speak to each
other once.
The people making the Japanese version of
the anime realize intrinsically that there
are probably too many no-personality female
characters that get dismembered brutally for
no reason other than the original author views
female life as disposable, or only useful
for making men take action on things.
Someone on the Japanese writing staff, presumably
after snorting a fat line of cocaine and slamming
his head full force against his desk, thought
the way to fix this would be to relate the
random soviet character with "negative boobs".
Presumably this comparison works because they
both… have boobs. They both get double the
titty mass, just to hone in these character
similarities. This is what us in the business
call "organic character interaction".
But when they rework the manga into the anime,
they just call one of the girls ugly. This
doesn't come back or lead to anything. They
just do it because why not, right?
And then the Western dub makers come along.
The writer's room is looking at the script
for the Japanese dub. One writer says "This
line might be a little problematic for Western
audiences. Any ideas on how to change it?"
And some other guy shouts "NEGATITITY" and
everyone claps and he gets a raise and then
they graft that onto "positive boobs" too
because they have to for the aforementioned
"organic character interaction".
Anime fans watch this show. Female fans see
it and they're like, "Hey this is kinda sexist,
y'know?" The weebs rise up in retaliation,
united against the scourge of SJWs infecting
their safe spaces with "politics".
KEEP FEMINAZISM OUT OF ANIME. STOP BEING SO
SENSITIVE. THIS IS NORMAL STORYTELLING. RRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The story of Posititity is probably the most
clear example of just everything wrong with
how the industry treats female characters.
There is a systemic problem of underwriting
female characters. Too many manga and light
novels just get published with flat, and uninteresting
female characters that get used as plot devices.
Combined with capitalist pressures to extract
value out of female sexuality and a lack of
female representation on the creator and consumer
sides of the fandom, anime ends up being this
unholy mess of degrading imagery, undeveloped
female characters, and unrealistic body proportions.
If you're wondering why you can't watch Fire
Force without some awful ecchi scene showing
up every three seconds, or why your favorite
female characters from this or that shounen
don't get developed, or why scenes that are
basically men groping women without their
consent keep getting put into otherwise normal
shows… this is why.
This is the thing right here.
Instead of rejecting stories with this kind
of inherent misogyny, the industry signalboosts
them. Instead of fundamentally changing the
kind of stories that could be told, the industry
gives us half-solutions and quick-fixes to
sweep these attitudes under the rug.
These practices make everything awful, and
they're not accidental. The anime fandom has
been cultivated by ultra-rich capitalists
to be receptive to this kind of stuff. Anime
has perfected the art of turning sexism into
a profit.
I wish I could say this was only the case
in the shows more seasoned anime fans consume.
I wish I could say that the more forward-facing,
Western-friendly anime were better. But that's
simply not true.
My Hero Academia stumbled into a minor (I
repeat, very minor, don't let the anti-SJWs
blow this into a bigger deal than it was)
Twitter controversy recently over the how
it translated some of the characters for the
show's upcoming season from paper to animation.
The studio that produces My Hero Academia,
Studio Bones, is extremely good at replicating
the art-style of the manga they adopt into
anime. However, somehow, when it comes to
female characters and only female characters,
the girls that fall outside the four corners
of a very narrow, very specific, very profitable
beauty standard get… "tweaked". Always "tweaked"
and always in the exact same kind of way.
Keep in mind Kohei Horikoshi isn't trying
to make some feminist statement with his female
character designs. He just finds the girls
more attractive if they "have a little meat
on them". Horikoshi just wants to see thicc
bods in skimpy suits. The industry won't even
let that stand, let alone honest artwork that
treats female sexuality with dignity.
I hope it's becoming clearer why there's no
time like right now to talk about Terra Formars.
Because, while Terra Formars might've spent
its 15 minutes in the anime sun years ago,
and while its MAL scores may be lacking, the
fundamental, institutional problems that let
this show exist and let it make as much money
as it did still exist. They still plague our
media right now.
In addition to the Posititity debacle, which
I will continue to reference in my private
life for the rest of time, Terra Formars goes
out of its way to make sure we know where
it stands on the question of if women deserve
equal rights or nah.
There's a false rape accusation that makes
an underdog male character hate society and
commit acts of violence with impunity.
I'm not going to spend too much time on this.
I think there's some sort of rule that every
dumbfuck reactionary anime has a false rape
accusation somewhere in its lore.
I'm just going to drop a source here that
says that false rape accusations are exceedingly
rare: *boop*.
I'll add in a canned, common sense statement:
"Just because some rape accusations are false
that doesn't mean you can't take any seriously
when they come up and that doesn't mean you
can use that as a justification to hate half
the population you inbred morons." ~Past,
present, and future me
And we'll move on. Sometimes, the more you
argue about shit everyone should know, the
more you make it look like there's a debate.
There isn't.
So around the beginning of the story, after
the crew of the Annex I lands on Mars, the
Japanese-American squadron lands near a body
of water created from the sub-surface ice
that's been melting on Mars for the past 500
years. Michelle Davis, the American squad
leader, drops this line en passant.
As a non-lady, I admit that the first time
I heard this line in watching the anime, I
let it slide. There are plenty of aspects
of the female experience that are probably
not intuitive to men and vice versa. It wasn't
the most important line, and I was still busy
processing Posititity anyway, so I didn't
think about it much.
But after I read this in the manga, I started
to ask questions. Like, why exactly are women
needing more water than men?
Don't get me wrong, I've had "the talk", I
went through sex-ed. Still, I was curious
enough to learn more. I'm willing to accept
that there may be obvious stuff I don't understand.
I opened up a trusty incognito tab on Google
Chrome and googled "women need more water
than men".
One study published in 2005 by the Institute
of Medicine in The National Academic Press
entitled Dietary Reference Intakes for Water,
Potassium, Sodium, Chloride, and Sulfate states
that on average, men over the age of 19 consume
3.7 liters of water per day, compared to the
2.7 liters of water per day of non-pregnant,
non-lactating women. The only group of women
the study found consumed more water per day
on average were lactating women at 3.8 liters
of water per day. As a reminder, none of the
principle characters in Terra Formars are
lactating.
Even then, these values aren't recommendations
for how much water men and women should be
drinking. Rather, as the report states:
This is one volume in a series of reports
that presents dietary reference values for
the intake of nutrients by Americans and Canadians. …
The development of DRIs [Daily Recommended
Intake measurements] expands and replaces
the series of reports called Recommended Dietary
Allowances (RDAs) published in the United
States and Recommended Nutrient Intakes (RNIs)
in Canada.
Think of these numbers as more of a sophisticated
average that found that cis men in the US
and Canada drink more water than non-lactating
cis women. It's not saying "drink this much
or you're unhealthy". In fact, it admits that
there are challenges to establishing such
a thing.
Given the extreme variability in water needs
that are not solely based on differences in
metabolism, but also on environmental conditions
and activity, there is not a single level
of water intake that would ensure adequate
hydration and optimal health for half of all
apparently healthy persons in all environmental
conditions.
The paper set out to determine four types
of values to help doctors in helping their
patients improve their diets. The type of
value relating to water intake is called an
"Adequate Intake" (AI) level, described as
follows:
… the recommended average daily intake level
based on observed or experimentally determined
approximations or estimates of nutrient intake
by a group (or groups) of apparently healthy
people that are assumed to be adequate.
On the AI of water specifically, the report
states:
Although a low intake of total water has been
associated with some chronic diseases, this
evidence is insufficient to establish water
intake recommendations as a means of reducing
the risk of chronic diseases. Instead, an
AI for total water is set to prevent deleterious
(primarily acute) effects of dehydration,
which include metabolic and functional abnormalities.
The report continues,
As with AIs for other nutrients, for a healthy
person, daily consumption below the AI may
not confer additional risk because wide ranges
of intakes are compatible with normal hydration.
In this setting, the AI should not be interpreted
as a specific requirement.
And, just in case that wasn't clear enough,
a footnote states that:
The AI is used if sufficient scientific evidence
is not available to derive an Estimated Average
Requirement. The AI is not equivalent to a
Recommended Dietary Allowance.
So dubious evidence at best that there's such
a thing as one sex "needing" more water than
another, or even the idea that there's a set
amount of water that any human "needs". And,
if there were such a distinction, biological
men would seem to need more water, not biological
women.
There are average amounts of water that people
seem to be able to drink and not get dehydrated,
and as long as you feel fine, there's really
no need to stress out over your water intake.
I'm not a doctor by any means. If you're worried
about your health, please see a licensed practitioner.
However, the scientific evidence does suggest
that if most people drank when they're thirsty,
they'd be fine.
At this point, I was very confused. Bad science?
In my anime? Heavens no! That's unheard of!
Literally impossible. I have lost my ability
to can. Chief drunk texted me to politely
let me know that this really ain't it. Chief
threw up later, but he's fine now.
So I talked to some friends, one female and
the other not. They both more or less told
me that they have no idea what womanly thing
women could be doing to femininely consume
more water than everyone else.
Terra Formars desperately wants to be a "scientific"
story. It's constantly quoting scientific
papers and books out of context and mangling
with scientific facts found on Wikipedia to
give the narrative a superficial sense of
authenticity. If I read a scientific paper
for everything this story got wrong, we'd
be here all day.
I decided to drop it. This little bit was
actually not supposed to make it into the
essay. The author has some unscientific misconception
about biological sex, metabolism, and water
intake. So what? It's no worse than that the
other time the author used mating behavior
in some bird species to try and explain female
infidelity in humans.
That's a real thing I had to read!
I'm slowly losing my mind But then I came
across this line, and I realized something.
Despite how much I loathe this story, I was
still giving it too much credit.
It's not that the author has a misunderstanding
about biological sex and metabolism. It's
not that he misstated an obscure scientific
fact.
It's that he literally believes bathing is
for fucking women.
Holy shit, I am going to lose my mind. Sometimes
it really is that simple.
"Alright boys, time to eat!
Don't mind the showers, once a week should be good enough"
ONCE A WEEK SHOULD BE G O O D  E N O U G H
Keep in mind these
characters are fighting for their lives every
day. They're undergoing immense physical strain.
They're living on a planet with limited plumbing.
They're covered in sweat, dirt, and blood
all day.
If this author says a shower a week is good
enough for men, that's a shower a week at
most when things get tough. That's a shower
a week maximum. Maximum.
Day-to-day, we're talking even less from this
guy!
I just…
I checked. Up until this point in the story,
one male character takes a shower. And it's
a scene that was cut from the anime and replaced
with fucking Posititity.
Look.
I am trying to understand the mindset you
need to be in to unironically believe "Chad
doesn't shower". I can't do it, it's breaking
my brain.
It could be said that it's convenient that
only women have to take showers, as then we
only ever have to see the girls get naked
and objectified.
But the thing is, the shower fanservice is
entirely a product of the anime. The source
material is weirdly titty free.
So to summarize, in case you're having as
hard a time keeping all this straight as I
am.
There's this racist prick somewhere alone
in his basement who hasn't showered in a month
because personal hygiene is pussy shit. He
hates women, and he's just pushing this abject
garbage into the world, rubber stamped by
manga publishers.
Otaku in the US and Japan are reading this
and going "this is great no problems here
make this into an anime please". And then
some anime executive took a look at the story
and was like "eh it's not bad the only problem
here is that there aren't more naked anime boobs".
[cursed ecchi sounds]
"There we go. Now it's perfect."
I think I need to go scream into a pillow
now. See you at the next part, okay?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Part 4: Colonialism AKA Exterminate the Black Organism
The bullshit asymmetry principle, introduced
by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini,
states the following:
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit
is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
It's a law applicable to most situations and
generally if you want to be smug about something
you can pull this one out of your back pocket.
However, when it comes to media criticism,
there's kind of a bit of truth to the idea.
Storytelling is a more powerful and efficient
way of getting ideas across than theory is.
This isn't to say theory, philosophy, facts,
and, yes, logic too, aren't important. We
need people knowledgeable on the data to implement
policies that will help people in the long
term.
But if your goal is a moral argument, to convert
people to your principles and sense of right
and wrong, rather than to simply relay stats
and figures, a story will always convey this
kind of information better.
It's an idea I explored in a Hot Take I did
a while back on Dexter's Laboratory.
It's also why the Left needs to stop trying
to recruit people with "READ MARX" or "READ
BREAD BOOK".
This comes with a downside, if a story or
joke conveys bad ideas, bad morality, and
bad principles, a lot of people are going
to absorb those principles without even realizing
that that's what's happening. Stories can
certainly fight bad principles, but a direct
refutation of propaganda requires it to be
addressed directly and stated more plainly,
lest that story also be recuperated by the
oppressive ideas it's trying to fight.
And therein lies the fundamental imbalance
in essays like this one. Through visuals,
framing, dialogue, and plot, Terra Formars
can argue that black people are genetically
inferior to others, that women need to keep
themselves clean more then men, or that immigrants
are ruining civilization, all in the space
of what amounts to a little more than 26 standard-length
anime episodes. That's 9 hours of content:
three to five full length movies. The Star
Wars films take longer to consume.
If that sounds like a lot to you, try to imagine
how long it would take to get this information
by reading theory: You'd start by reading
Nietzsche, chiefly Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
then you'd move on to Charles Darwin's The
Origin of the Species. Next, you'd read Francis
Galton and his fundamental text on eugenics,
Inquires into Human Faculty and Its Development.
You'd then have to read some Alfred Baeumler [my German sucks]
and Alfred Rosenberg. Throw in Thomas Hobbes'
Leviathan just to get a good treatment on
the "benefits" of authoritarianism. And who
could forget Julius Evola, the premier thinker
of fascism and traditionalism? And that's
just the start.
(Not all of these philosophers were fascists
in and of themselves, and not all of these
texts are inherently fascist, but all of these
texts form the basis of fascist thought in
the West. If you pick up any of these authors
for any reason, please be careful.)
The next bitch who quotes Darwin gets the
guillotine This silly anime about cockroaches
on Mars and boobs synthesizes all of that
into a 9-hour study session where it doesn't
even feel like you're learning half the time.
Maybe you lack the facts and the philosophy
of reading fascist theory, but you have the
ideas. And, if you're unlucky, you believe
them.
Nowhere is this dynamic clearer than looking
at how Terra Formars treats colonialism. The
answer lies in the very premise of the show.
We're presented with a scenario where a pristine,
empty land is ripe for the taking. The only
problem? Hoards of lesser being already live
there, and they need to be exterminated to
make room for the new, civilized population.
I use the world "exterminate" here quite literally.
On the Bugs II mission, before most people
realize that the cockroaches have evolved,
the text says literally that. They land on
Mars to spray a planetary-scale pesticide
to make room for the human race.
The mission doesn't change once it's confirmed
that beings do indeed possess human-like qualities.
I'd actually argue that, the stronger and
more capable we learn the cockroaches are,
the more that justifies ever-increasing violent
action against them.
And now here's the part where we realize that,
historically speaking, this cavalier attitude
towards extermination of a people for the
expansion of civilization and the exploitation
of land and natural resources isn't new.
The United States is a settler colonialist
state. Here are what some of its founders
thought of the native populations their country
would eventually replace:
"If it be the design of Providence to extirpate
these Savages in order to make room for cultivators
of the Earth, it seems not improbable that
rum may be the appointed means." ~Benjamin
Franklin, The Autobiography of Ben Franklin
Or how about:
"The immediate objectives are the total destruction
and devastation of their settlements and the
capture of as many prisoners of every age
and sex as possible. It will be essential
to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent
their planting more." ~George Washington,
Letter from George Washington to Major John
Sullivan
And one more. Comedy tends to come in threes,
after all:
"This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking
so much pains to save and to civilize, have
by their unexpected desertion and ferocious
barbarities justified extermination and now
await our decision on their fate." ~Thomas
Jefferson, Letter from Thomas Jefferson to
David Bailie Warden
It's not particularly relevant that the author
probably didn't know enough about US history
to make specific reference to these specific
figures. The important thing is the attitude
is the same. No matter the culture, no matter
the time, when you see your group as civilized
and foreigners as not, when you see land as
a resource to exploit and deplete, when your
concern about "uncivilized" peoples is so
low you feel nothing at the idea of killing
them all, you converge to the same sentiment.
Terra Formars doesn't need to specifically
be aware of America's history of colonial
attitudes to forward those attitudes itself.
The colonialist attitude is simply much more
global than any one country.
Part 5: Nationalism AKA Friends Only Exist
in Japan
Terra Formars has some oddly specific hang-ups
when it comes to what different people from
different cultures can and can't understand.
The funniest and clearest example of that
is this bit here, when the manga asserts that
Americans don't have the concept of childhood
friends.
To be perfectly clear, the quality of the
translation can often work to make something
look more or less stupid.
The very concept of childhood friends is not
uniquely Japanese, though. I'll give you that
in Japanese culture, osananajimi might have
tropes, interpretations, and significations
that are specific to Japan. But that's a different
take entirely than "only in Japan does this
very rare phenomenon of kids growing up as
friends and staying that way happen".
That kind of thinking requires, y'know, nuance
or something.
I bring this up not to be pedantic and nit-picky
(though those things are mighty fun), but
because it's emblematic of a larger trend
in the series.
Terra Formars makes a clear effort to highlight
the competitive nature of individual nation-states
in geopolitics. This isn't inaccurate or anything,
but the text doesn't seem to realize this
is a bad thing. In fact, it takes this nature
of politics as a given, instead advocating
for its own side, Japan first and foremost,
to "win" at the expense of others.
We return to Victoria "tin can" Wood. Because,
y'know, of course we do.
In this chapter, Japanese crew member of the
Bugs II mission Ichiro Hiruma hand-wrings
about how because Japan doesn't have nuclear
weapons, it gets pushed around by larger powers.
If only Japan had a strong, powerful military
with which it could assert its interests.
To which Victoria responds, in at least one
translation, "Hm. Japan's going through a
lot for the prosperity of their people."
The nationalist tendencies of the text are
more subtle, baked into the background of
the show's assumptions, rather than some of
the more overt forces we've seen in the story
thus far. The nationalist undertones of the
series are better understood when we zoom
out for a bit and talk about the broader ideology
of the series.
Part 6: Selective Breeding AKA fascism_irl
This is a long essay. Longer than normal,
even for me.
There are a lot of moving parts that are important
to consider if we're looking at Terra Formars
as any kind of whole.
This is in part because, unlike with a lot
of other problematic anime, Terra Formars
was written with a highly developed sense
of ideological purpose. Any one sexist can
throw a false rape accusation into their story.
Hell, a ton of authors who are otherwise not
sexist will still end up writing their female
leads into the same three kinds of roles,
and ogle at their bodies with the camera.
A lot of well-intentioned centrists and liberals
who just don't know two things about Africa
will default to the same tired stereotypes
and cliches about Africans. And character
designs can always take on a racist or insensitive
tinge if an artist isn't careful enough.
The fact that regressive propaganda can be
made by "accident" doesn't change the fact
that these kinds of media are still regressive
propaganda.
However, it does differentiate itself from
propaganda made for that purpose.
Any one of these things I've talked about
so far could in and of themselves be their
own Treatises. The fact that we've got all
of this crammed into one story means there's
something else going on here. This isn't just
subconscious anti-black bias leaking into
the character design and world-building. This
isn't just thinking men don't shower. Terra
Formars is instead well aware of its own ideas,
and funnels almost all of its storytelling
and world-building efforts into selling you
those ideas.
Yeah, that's right. Terra Formars brought
politics into MY anime.
The missing ideological piece that collapses
each of these ideas into a single, super-heated
nucleus of utter bullshit can be found in
one character: Joseph Gustav Newton.
Daily reminder not to do steroids On the Annex
I, Joe was the leader of the European-African
division. The story (as it pretty much always
does if I'm being honest), tells us what we
need to know about him. In this case, one
character has a flashback to a time another
character was dryly rattling off a whole character
bio for some reason. It's really stellar writing.
"Joe? Oh yeah, Joe. The track-and-field star.
I first saw him on TV. In his junior year
of high school, at the age of 17, he won the
gold metal in the world decathlon. People
called him The King of Athletes. But that's
not the whole story. After graduating, he
quit track and field. He studied for exams,
got high marks, and earned a spot in the EU's
top university. He then attended an elite
Air Force academy and graduated at the top
of his class, earning him an Air Force Officer's
rank, and master's degree in biology and aeronautics.
His success is a testament to his intellect
and grit, but he got a lot of help from people
in high places."
So Joe's an Ivy League bourgeois brat. Or
what Republicans call "lifting yourself up
from your bootstraps".
Okay, sure. Continue.
"Of course, it also doesn't hurt that he comes
from a noble family.
I'm sorry a what?
"I've heard rumors that his family has, in
a way, engineered itself to perfection. Supposedly,
for centuries, members have picked spouses
not for their wealth, connections, race or
nationality. They've based their selection
on three factors alone: looks, talent, and
resistance to disease. In other words: his
family has engaged in selective breeding.
Oh my God.
"For starters, they're working with the mightiest
predator in the animal kingdom: humans. With
the endurance and lung capacity to run 42
km/hr at full speed. The throwing power that
drove the mammoth to extinction. The intelligence
of a person with an IQ of 186. An accelerated
metabolism capable of immediate digestion
and absorption of nutrients [???]. The ability
to create any kind of military weapon, and
use it like a master." ~Michelle Davis
Please. Please stop. I'm begging. We can have
a nice, civil conversation, just -
"It's taken 600 years. Behold the pinnacle
of humanity! A human being created in the
perfect image of God." ~Joseph Gustav Newton.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
"The Mosaic Organ Procedure for military combatants
depends on the individual's innate strength
and abilities. So, there was never any doubt.
We know he'd be the strongest. He is rank
#1. Mars Ranking 1: Humanity in its ultimate
form. Joseph G. Newton." ~Michelle Davis
Fuck it. We've gone full mask off then.
This is just fascist propaganda. That's the
missing piece. The story is just fascism with
extra steps.
I want to remind you that this anime fucking
censored characters being undocumented immigrants
and made sure to add in naked anime tits but
it didn't censor, like
y'know
SELECTIVE BREEDING
I do not know where the fuck to start with
this trainwreck of a passage.
Maybe I could start with the fact that things
like "talent" are usually not hereditary but
a result of years of practice and study. What
people often refer to as "intelligence", scientists
and sociologists are now beginning to consider
a combination of different skills that can't
accurately be measured by something like an
IQ test. If nothing else, the strongest indicator
of IQ is parental income, so things like "hereditary
intelligence" are far more likely to be the
by product of wealth hoarding.
I could point out that we can't breed "perfection"
into people, if there even is one standard
of perfection people an hope to attain. I
could ask why the fuck "perfection" and "in
God's image" seem to mean blond-haired and
blue-eyed.
I could point out that the history of thinkers
asserting that the Abrahamic God/Jesus is/was
an Aryan is intertwined with the development
of fascist thought. Seriously, the history
of Positive Christianity in Nazi Germany basically
redefined the story of Jesus of Nazareth as
one where Jesus was an Aryan man who was betrayed
and killed by the Jews.
Positive Christianity was the Nazi-party's
attempt to incorporate Germany's white Christian
majority into the fold of the Nazi regime
before de-Christianizing the country as a
whole. The whole "every soul is equal under
the eyes of God", "the meek shall inherit
the Earth", and "love thy neighbor" stuff
apparently just doesn't jive well with an
ideology based entirely around exclusion and
hierarchy.
You can't tell me that because the author
Japanese there can't be a connection here
the dude makes a literal fucking cross with
his body as the music swells to a climax.
If this was any more blatant we'd be reviewing
a Zack Snyder movie!
I could talk about all of that. But I think
there's one, important observation we need
to make about the idea of Joseph Gustav Newton.
I think it's kind of interesting that we're
told outright that the Newton noble family
"isn't racist". By that I mean, it's specified
that their selective breeding does not care
about race or ethnicity. They just pick the
"objectively best" mates on the planet for
hundreds of years and this is the result.
You know I've actually, unironically seen
this as a defense for the show.
It doesn't mean anything that "Humanity in
its ultimate form" just so happens to be a
blond Aryan. That's just how it turned out.
I'm going fucking jump off a cliff.
No. No no no. Nope. Nah. Nada. Non.
What the story actually asserts is the opposite.
That if we objectively rated the genetic quality
of the entire planet and picked the "best"
traits: the best looking people, the smartest
people, the strongest people, the fastest
people, the people best suited for combat,
and we bred those genes into people for generations
on end, the only group of people who would
have a significant role to play, the group
of people this process would produce, would
be Aryans.
I'm sitting here. It's like 8:26 PM. On a
Saturday. No one invites me out to things.
Trying to explain in words how racist this
is to the void of the Internet. And I cannot.
It's like proving the sky is blue.
I also don't want to gloss over the fact that
Joe is a man. Not just a man, but a cisgendered,
heterosexual man. It is codifying one of the
most dangerous ideas in the fascist's ideological
toolbox: the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche's
übermensch, the overman. Nietzsche's original
idea was still masculine, he considered it
woman's job to rear the overman into the world
instead (it's somewhere in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Just go fucking read it somewhere). But the
Nazis took that and asserted that their race
was the only race capable of producing the
overman, and that they actively needed to
do so by controlling who got to breed in their
country and who didn't.
Terra Formars took the idea central to Nazi
philosophy. An idea that led to the most devastating
war in human history, six million Jews dead,
millions of German ethnic minorities dead,
millions of LGBT people dead, millions of
disabled people experimented on or killed,
and just propped it up on full display for
the world to see.
Like an old man flashing his wrinkly dick
to 4-year-old girls at the park at noon, Terra
Formars is shameless, obvious, and disgusting.
And somehow, despite all of this, I'm like
one of five people that's written about this
in any way.
People watched this or read this and didn't
see anything wrong. Not only that, but then
they went on the badger all the "hyper-sensitive
SJW snowflake cultural Marxists" for being
"too sensitive" and "whining" and "making
everything political" when there's a story
pedaling Nazi talking points out in the open.
When I was 15, I was on the wrong side of
Gamergate. I fully bought the narrative that
Anita Sarkeesian was an unhinged, man-hating
radical Stalinist feminist who was just looking
for a reason to cry "racist" or "sexist" for
money.
I was fully steeped in anti-PC, anti-SJW culture.
I was on r/TumblrInAction all the time, a
Reddit forum supposedly there to mock crazy
Tumblr feminists, otherkin, and beauty at
any size activists. I regularly listened to
YouTube personalities such as TL;DR, SargonOfAkkad,
and other such "content" "creators".
And you know what I distinctly remember from
that awful, awful time? Whenever these people
attacked a feminist for going crazy or some
"race baiter" for making something about race
when it isn't, there was always this veneer
of responsibility and civility.
"When I see real racism, I'll of course call
it out. When I see real sexism, I'll of course
call it out. When I see real homophobia, I'll
of course call it out. But this specifically
is just bullshit."
Guess what never actually happened for the
years I spent in those online circles?
Yeah, that.
I eventually figured out something that, to
this day, I wish I knew sooner. These professional
nitpickers who obsess over liberal and Leftist
journalists, content creators and bloggers,
harassing them, taking them out of context,
engaging in bad faith arguments, and in general
doing everything they can to discredit them
or get them to stop making content. These
people are racists. They are bigots.
There is nothing they will not defend. The
same logic that they use to attack 16-year-old
Tumblr progressives who haven't studied enough
to have good takes all the time is the logic
they'll use to attack anyone else that's actually
trying to dismantle actual bigots, actual
neo-nazis, actual racist policies, and actual
hate.
Rather than being the pinnacle of human evolution,
Joseph G. Newton is instead the pinnacle of
all the toxic ideas the anti-PC internet crowd
is willing defend. They are fascists. This
is what they want. And the more people they
have who don't know better, who reflexively
parrot the same three anti-SJW talking points
whenever someone tries to point out how problematic
media can be, the larger their numbers.
I've unfortunately taken my analysis of this
series from a Eurocentric lens. The truth
is, I just don't know enough about Japan.
Books on Japanese nationalism in English are
actually sort of hard to find. I got this
one book on my Kindle but like…
I think it's broken.
Thus, a full breakdown of nationalistic tenancies
in Japan, how they interact with neo-nazi
movements in the West, and how Terra Formars
fits in the larger Japanese conversation of
inclusion and race is sadly just not something
I'm capable of doing.
I can say that the story has of course adopted
many of the same ideas fascism has in the
West, from white supremacist patriarchy to
colonialism. I can say that the story tends
to frame the Chinese, both the people and
the country itself, as a geopolitical scapegoat.
I can say, given that the Japanese today see
China as the biggest current geo-political
threat to world peace , and given the numerous
war crimes that Imperial Japan committed in
China that many would argue still have not
been properly repaid or acknowledged, that
the constant need for the story to have Chinese
characters betray all of humanity probably
definitely plays into the story's fascist
narrative.
I can say that in choosing the five global
superpowers of the 27th century to be: The
Roman Federation (Italy), Russia/The Soviet
Union (again, I've seen it translated as both),
The United States, China, and Japan, the story
seems to want to recreate a situation where
we redo World War II except Japan wins.
I can say that, one by one, the countries
either fold or betray Japan. We talked about
China already, but the Newton noble family
and Joe himself, who run the Roman Federation,
end up turning on Japan too for geo-political
reasons. Japan more or less ends up being
the last good country standing.
I can say that there's a German commander
named Adolf. Adolf Reinhard. Not to be confused
with this Reinhard from a show actually worth
watching.
Oh yes Adolf the German commander sacrifices
his life for his country, under attack and
surrounded by all sides. Adolf "not a failed
art student" Reinhard married a woman who
cheats on him with a very ethnic looking Asian
man.
Adolf "does anyone else hear that dog whistle"
Reinhard forgives his wife, only to find out
later that their first son isn't theirs.
The story makes sure to call her a whore and
slut, in case you were wondering.
Adolf "I'm not a Nazi I'm an ultra-traditionalist
who believes in strong borders" Reinhard is
told by his mother to "never stop fighting
for what he believes in", whatever that is.
He's also an Aryan.
He was born on Christmas.
The fucking ship is literally called the Annex
I. Like let's annex one third world pls.
How much more of this show must I consume
to prove that this is just fashy nonsense?
How many chapters into the 200+ manga chapters
do I have to read? How many sequels and prequels
do I need to read?
Part 7: What Is Terra Formars? AKA Steve Biko
and Where We Go from Here
So we've finally gotten to The Point: Terra
Formars is fascist propaganda written by a
fascist and, despite the controversy that
surrounded this show when it first aired,
no one's caught on to this.
"Oh great there the SJWs go again calling
everyone a Nazi!"
No. I'm a writer. I choose my words pretty
carefully. I disagree with Ben Shapiro, and
you'll notice that in the section I talked
about him, I never called him a fascist or
a Nazi. This is deliberate: words have meaning.
I don't think that Terra Formars was written
by a Nazi. It was written by a fascist.
The Nazis, by successfully entering history
as humanity's ultimate bad guys, often end
up getting used as a petty insult. Your friend's
a "Grammar Nazi" because he's a dick on Twitter.
Your physics professor was a total Nazi because
she wouldn't even give out partial credit
when you made a rounding error on the midterm.
Liberals are Nazis because they don't want
you misgendering people.
This, coupled with the fact that US history
courses tend to focus on the history and the
numbers behind the Nazi regime during World
War II, and not the ideas that fueled this
regime, where they came from, and how they
still shape politics today, people don't have
a good grasp as to what fascism is at the
level of ideas.
The fascists of course, love this. They don't
care if they have to drop the label "fascist".
They care about their ideas, and if people
are accepting them. If the mainstream hates
"fascism" but accepts all the core tenants
of the ideology under words like "identitarianism",
"race realism", "chauvinism" or "alt-right",
that's fine for them. If people hate Adolf
Hitler in the abstract but ultimately seek
to build society around his values, that's
fine for them.
Fascism is an ideology that maintains that
humans can be split into distinct, scientific
races. It asserts these races exist in an
objective, universal hierarchy, where some
races are more evolved than others. It asserts
that the best way to organize society is for
each race to have one or more nation-states:
authoritarian governments which implement
the will of the race they serve. Fascism is
an ideology that maintains the superiority
of masculinity over femininity, and seeks
to have female sexuality controlled.
Fascism is concerned with the genetic strength
of the race its nation-state serves. It seeks
to purge genetic inferiority; race-mixing,
disabled people, the poor, and LGBT people;
from the population. If inferior races and
populations must live within the nation, they
must prove themselves by directly serving
the needs and interests of the superior race.
Fascism seeks to prevent the "degeneration"
of the superior race by controlling breeding
and culture through the state.
Fascism is not exclusive to white people.
Rather, in societies where white people hold
the majority of the power and capital, fascism
that holds the superiority of white people
over others is especially dangerous.
Fascism maintains that each nation-state is
entitled to take whatever action it deems
necessary to better its own population. It
is inherently imperialist, in the sense that
the conquest and exploitation by the strong
nations of the weak will always be seen as
natural.
And always in fascism is there a scapegoat.
A group of powerful people who have betrayed
the efforts of the fascists. A group to help
explain why their side isn't winning.
When I say Terra Formars was written by a
fascist, I'm saying it was written by someone
who fundamentally shares this worldview. And
when I say the story is fascist propaganda,
I'm saying the events of the story are constructed
to buy into these ideas, either in part or
in full.
Plenty of people have said that the story
is racist. Plenty have pointed out its obvious
sexism. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have
thought this story is fascist to some degree.
But I am one of the only people to write about
it like this.
That means one of two things. Either I've
gone off the deep end this early in my writing
"career" and I'll never be the same again.
Or we're bad at recognizing fascist messaging
in our media. We're bad at recognizing when
we're being propagandized to. Fascists and
people with fascist sympathies have such a
grip on Otaku culture that any conversation
in the opposite direction stops before we
can get anywhere useful. Fascists have such
control over Otaku culture that fascists are
seen as neutral centrists, apolitical people,
even by people who, in any other context,
would staunchly position themselves against
this ideology.
I've presented the history, the context, the
source material, the facts, and my analysis
in the best, most honest way I know how: a
two-hour long profanity laden video essay
plastered on some Internet server I don't
own.
Steve Biko was a radical anti-apartheid activist.
He died in prison at the age of 30 in 1977.
While alive, Biko created the South African
Students Organisation, a student's group created
to mobilize young black people into pressuring
the South African regime into systematic change
and the advancement of black people in the
country.
Through the SASO, Biko was at the head of
a philosophy and movement known as Black Consciousness.
Black Consciousness was a pan-African movement
that asserted first and foremost that liberation
for black people cannot truly be achieved
unless black people lead the movements for
change and set the terms for the end of oppression.
In Biko's own words,
"I am not sneering at the liberals and their
involvement. Neither am I suggesting that
they are the most to blame for the black man's
plight. Rather I am illustrating the fundamental
fact that total identification [by white liberals]
with an oppressed group [blacks] in a system
that forces one group to enjoy privilege and
to live on the sweat of another, is impossible. . . .
[I]n South Africa political power has always
rested with white society. Not only have the
whites been guilty of being on the offensive
but, by some skillful manoeuvres, they have
managed to control the responses of the blacks
to the provocation. Not only have they kicked
the black but they have also told him how
to react to the kick. . . . [H]e is now
beginning to show signs that it is his right
and duty to respond to the kick in the way
he sees fit. . . . 
The call for Black Consciousness is the most
positive call to come from any group in the
black world for a long time. It is more than
just a reactionary rejection of whites by
blacks. The quintessence of it is the realisation
by the blacks that, in order to feature well
in this game of power politics, they have
to use the concept of group power and to build
a strong foundation for this . . ." ~Steve
Biko, 1971 speech "White Racism and Black
Consciousness"
This goes without saying, but struggling to
overthrow one of the most evil forms of government
on the face of the planet and, like, anime
being bad, are not remotely comparable. I
don't want this essay to do anything more
than it already does: to entertain, educate,
and warn about the intersections between pop
culture and politics.
However, there is an idea of Biko's that I
think works well in what we've talked about
so far.
(Encyclopedia Britannica. © Everett Collection/age
fotostock)2014's Gamergate allowed the far
right to openly colonize the Internet, and
they've especially taken advantage of nerd
communities - communities known to have
an over-representation of cishet white men.
I'm not saying that weebdom was a stateless,
classless, moneyless utopia before Gamergate
or anything. But the connection between anime
culture and reactionary politics was, far,
far more blurry. It's perhaps always been
hard for minority groups to express their
concerns in anime spaces, but I think it's
safe to safe that Gamergate has turned anime
fandom, as well as gaming, comic books, movie
fandom, and many, many more fandoms into spaces
that are openly hostile to anti-fascist, anti-sexist,
anti-racist, and anti-capitalist ideas.
What's needed is a new consciousness in nerd
culture. We need to start choosing how we
react to these kicks. Not just a black consciousness,
but one that encompasses all the people and
all the ideas that the alt-right has been
working so very hard to suppress.
We can't expect that consciousness to come
from the "anime establishment". The overwhelmingly
white, overwhelmingly straight, overwhelmingly
male politics of mainstream anime fandom will
never recognize something like Terra Formars
as something that merits a debate, let alone
as a problem. This new consciousness needs
to instead come from us. From the people stand
the most to lose from the alt-right co-opting
our hobbies to make it harder for us to live
in our own countries.
It's long past time we stopped tolerating
media that hates us. It's long past time we
stopped letting people who are the least affected
by the proliferation of fascist ideology tell
us when we're being "too sensitive" or when
things are "just jokes". It's long past time
that we tell the people who want to keep "politics"
out of their hobbies that it's always been
political.
It's always been political for the gay and
trans people who are mocked through caricature
and fetishization. It's always been political
for the women who have to watch their experiences
with sexual harassment and assault be made
light of, encouraged, and sexualized. It's
always been political for the black and brown
people who are constantly told that they're
inferior, and that the world would be better
off without us.
We don't have to stand for this shit anymore.
Part 8: Conclusion
So here's a question out of the blue: You're
a writer. How do you make an army stronger?
I've been pretty critical of reactionary fans
of problematic anime hyper-focusing on the
apolitical, on the aesthetic, on the core
mechanics of functional storytelling an anime
as a way to avoid discussion and criticism
of the types of media we consume and trust.
However, for this last point, we're going
to need to take off our revolutionary hats
and look at Terra Formars from a purely mechanical
lens.
The "plot" of Terra Formars more-or-less doesn't
exist. The enjoyment of the series is hedged
almost entirely around the threat of the Martian
roach people themselves. The characters need
to survive wave after wave of violent mobs
that know nothing but to kill. It's a standard
thriller, mechanically speaking of course.
Nothing standard about it at all, politically
speaking.
The "villain" of the series swaps hands between
various political factions that stand in the
way of Japan's national interests, however,
The Villain™ is this ever-present army of
Terra Formars. The issue with villains is
that, if you see them around too much, it
gets harder and harder to justify why the
heroes should ever be afraid of them, especially
the heroes always win.
If the villain of the story was a single person,
we could do a rivalry, where both the hero
and the villain are constantly growing and
getting stronger, and thus we can't know which
character is going to win the next encounter.
The Terra Formars aren't a single person.
They're an army. How do you make an army stronger?
Maybe we could just make the army bigger?
Maybe, but the story blows its load on this
front way too early. We're effectively told
that there's an infinite number of these creatures
on Mars. The Martian roach people never mourn
their dead or otherwise fight in a way that
conserves their troops or resources. They
just attack, attack, attack in huge swarms.
What else can you do?
Well, in a nutshell, the army needs to get
better at killing. Maybe the army finds a
new weapon that's a lot stronger than anything
the heroes have. Maybe the army has improved
its organization. Maybe its soldiers fight
with new forms of martial arts.
To do any of this requires the army be capable
of growth.
To do any of this requires the army be human.
Terra Formars spends a lot of effort through
its dialogue and framing to dehumanize the
Terra Formars and, by extension, people of
color. These people must be subhuman, the
show argues, so that they can be purged from
existence for the benefit of the "real humans",
the master Aryan race, its Japanese equivalent,
and a handful of other minorities that have
proven themselves to be "one of the good ones".
Yet, to continue the plot, the roach people
must be humanized. Over time we learn they
have complex social structures, understand
technology, are capable of learning science,
are capable of formulating battle plans. Some
even learn to speak human languages.
If the Terra Formars are intelligent enough
to be a threat, are they not also intelligent
enough to be reasoned with?
How are the roach people both smart enough
to constantly threaten the existence of the
master races, yet be too primitive and inhuman
to aspire to be anything more than killing
machines? How is their wholesale slaughter
justified when, as the story progresses, we
see them act and feel as humans do?
This contradiction is at the core of all fascist
movements. The Jews/Muslims/Central Americans/Koreans/Chinese/Africans/gays/whoever
else are all too degenerate, uncivilized,
and undeveloped to run their own societies.
Yet, if we let them in our countries, their
mere existence is enough to destroy our way
of life. They're so sophisticated and organized
they can singlehandedly end civilization.
As Italian thinker Umberto Eco puts it in
his essay Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackshirt,
"… The followers of [fascism] must …
be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies.
Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical
focus, the enemies are at the same time too
strong and too weak."
In this specific case, mechanical storytelling
and ideology become one in the same.
Sure, fascism is always contradictory. But
Terra Formars is forced to contradict its
own world-building, dialogue, and aesthetic
for the story to be anywhere close to enjoyable.
It's mathematically impossible for this story
to be good. It was doomed to be a self-defeating
mess from the start.
And that's just glorious.
I think it says something else too. It can
be discouraging to look at the world, see
the rise in Right-wing politics around the
world, especially in the face of destabilizing
geopolitics and climate refugees. Fascists
work to make us feel unwelcome where we ought
to belong. They work to question our abilities,
our worth, and our claims to equality. But
the fact is, any time fascists do so much
as breathe, this same contradiction exists
in the back of their heads.
The fact that they are so afraid of us, the
fact that they hate us enough to want us gone,
is in and of itself proof of our worth. To
be a fascist is to acknowledge that your so-called
enemies are intelligent and capable enough
to defeat you. And to be afraid as a fascist
is to acknowledge your enemies are just as
human as anyone else.
Samory Touré oki fag
Almamy Touré oyi faga
Ba bemba oki faga
Lumumba oki faga
Tafawa Belewa oki faga
Victor Biaka Boda oki faga
Haïlé Sélassié oki faga
Marcus Garvey oki faga
Malcom X oki faga
Martin Luther King oki faga
Steve Biko oki faga
Diallo Telli oki faga
Sékou Touré oki faga
Anouar El Sadate oki faga
Amilcar Cabral oki faga
Kwamé N'krumah oki faga
Anga mouné kê ayila
Anga mouné kê ayila
Anga mouné kê ayila
Anga mouné kê ayila (afôh n'gné bi)
Anga mouné kê ayila (afôh n'gné)
Ambê yé Allah dén'hou yé
Ambê yé Allah danfin ouyé
Part 9: Epilogue
If you liked this any, the first person I
have to thank is /u/Trenov17 over on Reddit.
They were the ones that gave me the idea and
now it's a thing.
I was actually almost not about to do this
essay. Terra Formars was just so glaringly
obvious and awful that I assumed someone had
already done something like this in the years
this property has been public. But nope :/
So it had to do it to 'em. You know this,
fams.
As usual, I'd like to thank Raghava Kovvali/Kranas
Angel for reading this over. I'm not sure
who's holding the record for best human right
now but they're about to yoink it from you.
Try being a little less awesome sometime around,
dude. It's hard to compete with.
The next Treatise is NOT Fire Force. If you're
backing me on Patreon, you'd already know
this, because I did an update about it. Basically,
Fire Force sucks and is bad. More specifically,
while it's problematic in some areas, and
impressive in others, it's not consistent
enough in terms of quality or themework to
do much of a Treatise with.
There sure is a lot of isekai this season,
though, huh? Fall 2019 has like, what, 600
of them?
I've got a Frankfurt School vs Isekai Treatise
floating around in my head. Instead of roasting
a single anime I'mma end an entire genre.
It'll be great. Or not. We'll see.
So if you've got an isekai or any other story
where a person from the real world gets stuck
in another world (yes, I'm counting Western
media in this) that you'd like to maybe see
reviewed send it my way and maybe you'll see
me write about it all smug-like.
I've already got
The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious
Re: Zero - Starting a Life in Another
World - 
Sword Art Online
Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average
in the Next Life?!
On the watch list, as well as the American
webcomic Erfworld.
Don't give me Shield Hero, though. I did that.
That train passed.
And speaking of stuff I've done…
Make sure to follow me on Medium and YouTube.
If I have to plug myself anymore I might just
fall over.
This is it for now.
See ya 💕
