00:00Freeran. Beyond Journey's End is, for almost everyone, one of the best-written anime series
00:06of recent years. It won awards, was a critical smash hit, and even people who don't usually
00:12watch anime got hooked. So when I tell you that a segment of social media tried to launch a smear
00:17campaign against it, accusing it of being sexist, you'll probably think the same thing I did when
00:23I first read about this. Seriously? Let's take a look at exactly what was said, how the community
00:29responded and at the end, I'll give you my full take on all of this. Welcome back to the best
00:36anime
00:36here. Today we're diving into some fresh controversy, so buckle up, let's get straight to the facts.
00:42A segment of the audience on Chinese social media attempted to launch a cancel culture campaign
00:48against the animated adaptation of Su Su no Freeran, accusing the series of promoting sexism.
00:55Pay close attention to the specific arguments because this is important.
00:59The complaint was based on the fact that the female protagonists wear skirts and that the
01:05series includes a couple of jokes about breast size, claiming that these visual elements exist
01:11solely to please the male gaze. Just like that. It wasn't an accusation about a problematic plot,
01:19nor about how a particular character is treated. It was specifically about the costume design and a
01:25couple of isolated jokes within a series that, as anyone who has watched it in its entirety knows,
01:31is sustained almost entirely by its emotional writing, its handling of time and grief, not by
01:38fan service. As expected, this did not go unanswered. Defenders of the show were quick to point out that
01:45the series itself includes scenes where female characters use clairvoyance to mercilessly mock
01:50other male characters. In other words, body-shaming humor goes both ways within the series. It's not
01:57directed solely at one side. And this is where the double standard I mentioned in the title comes in.
02:03If the criterion for, this is sexist, is simply, there's a joke about a character's body,
02:11then for the sake of consistency, that same criterion would have to apply to the humor directed at male
02:17characters within the same series. And that joke, interestingly enough, didn't seem to bother
02:23anyone. If you only point out one direction of the joke and ignore the other that exists in the same
02:29work, that's where the argument loses its consistency. And I want to be clear about one
02:35thing. This isn't a problem with the series having fan service or jokes about its characters' bodies.
02:41That kind of humor has been a normal part of comedy for a century and a half, in anime and
02:46beyond,
02:47and it doesn't need to apologize for existing. The specific problem with this complaint is
02:53something else. It takes an element that is equally present in both directions within the same work,
02:59and condemns it only when it appears in one of them. It's that selectivity that doesn't hold up,
03:05not the joke itself. And honestly, this isn't the first or only strange controversy to surround
03:11the series on social media lately. Another curious controversy also circulated recently.
03:17A group of fans harshly criticized Fern's design in the manga, accusing the artist of drawing her
03:23fat and aggressively complaining about her appearance in recent chapters. And notice the pattern.
03:29In one case, the series is criticized for sexualizing its female characters with skirts and boob jokes.
03:36And, in another case, the same manga is criticized for not drawing a female protagonist who's thin
03:42enough. These are two complaints that are practically contradictory and both end up being directed at
03:48the same series within a matter of months. To me, that says more about how impossible it is to please
03:55every vocal segment of the internet than about any real problem with the work itself. What's strange is
04:01that there hasn't been a backlash for having a lowly protagonist, at least not one so far. Here's my
04:08full take on the matter. I firmly believe that criticism of a work should be evaluated based on
04:13its content, not automatically dismissed or accepted depending on where it comes from.
04:19In this specific case, when comparing the arguments, there are skirts, and there's a joke that also works
04:26the other way around within the same series. The argument simply doesn't hold up against an
04:31accusation as strong as sexism. That said, I don't think the solution is to dismiss en masse any
04:38criticism coming from social media or a specific country that's also lazy, and it ends up closing the
04:45door on the times when there is indeed a valid point behind the complaint. The healthy approach is
04:51what we did in this video. Examine the specific argument, compare it with the evidence within the work
04:57itself, and draw a conclusion based on that not on who said it. As for whether Japanese studios will pay
05:04attention, honestly, I highly doubt it in this specific case. Freeran already has too much critical and
05:11commercial support for this kind of isolated complaint to change creative decisions in production. And to put
05:17this into context, this isn't doing a thing to the show's popularity. Recently, a giant hyper-realistic
05:25mural of Freeran painted on the facade of a school in Jinan, China, the very country where part of this
05:31controversy originated went viral. That only confirms what we already knew. The series remains massively
05:39beloved, and this isolated backlash is just noise from a specific sector, not a reflection of the
05:45general sentiment toward the show. And that's the whole story. Let me know in the comments. What do
05:52you think? Do you believe there's some merit to the complaint, or do you think they went way overboard?
05:58If you like this analysis, give it a like, subscribe, and see you in the next video. Take care.
06:16Bye-bye.
06:17Bye-bye.
06:18Bye-bye.
06:19Bye-bye.
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