So I’m housesitting/dogsitting and the first channel on the TV when I turned it on is a channel that streams old anime, I guess. I never bothered to change it since I always just airplay videos from my phone, but today I left it playing normally for background noise. The current anime playing is City Hunter and I noticed the main character is a HUGE pervert. In the beginning of an episode he literally steals and revels in a pile of girls bras and underwear.
I’ve grown up seeing these types of characters in every anime I’ve watched but I guess I’m a little put off by the fact that it goes farther back than my era. Pervert characters have always bothered me, even when I was younger and less aware, and I know they’re supposed to be comedic relief but I have a hard time finding the comedy in sexual harassment. Some even go as far as sexual assault. They are so common and also happen to be part of the main cast which, for me, makes it so much worse. One Piece is a show I had to stop watching because of Sanji, I had other issues too but he was a big contributor.
Does anyone know why these characters are so prevalent?
Anime is also an example of media referencing itself so often that the original concept is lost in translation. New anime takes abusive harem protagonists seriously, for example. But the first harem anime (Ranma 1/2) was originally written in the manga in such a way that the Ranma is repeatedly punished for straying from the main ship (with Akane). The author is also a woman and she went to great lengths to make Akane into a strong character that readers would find interesting.
The anime (largely produced by men) throws out most of Akane’s subplots and focuses largely on fanservice, leaving most of the relationships ambiguous enough that fans could make their own decisions. The anime also cuts out certain scenes to make the men in the series more sympathetic and less like the buffoons they were actually supposed to be (who needed the women they had in their lives to keep them from self destructing). The original message had a very conservative brand of patriarchal monogamy, but the numerous series that have since spawned from it take all the negative traits of harem tropes and spin them into positives.