This week's rather serious poll was suggested by jacob66. If an artist is involved in some scandal or controversy, does that affect how you view their works? For manga examples, there's MATSUKI Tatsuya and ACT-AGE and WATSUKI Nobuhiro and Rurouni Kenshin.

You can submit poll ideas here
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: Preferred digital reading mode
Choices:
Don't care - votes: 123 (4.8%)
Display two pages at a time, click to go to next pages - votes: 141 (5.5%)
Display all pages at once in vertical scrolling fashion - votes: 1502 (58.6%)
Display one page at a time, click to go to next page - votes: 796 (31.1%)
There were 2562 total votes.
The poll ended: October 16th 2021

I'm curious if MangaDex has public stats on what settings users have

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

Haven't we had several variants of this question in the past year already? My answer is still the same-- their actions and controversies may or may not be reflected in their work, but it certainly does recontextualize some of them

there should be an option, it depends on the the controversy, we can't compere child pornography/pedophilia and real rape with inapropiate touching. But in general I prefer to avoid (if i know) stuff made by heavily mentally ill/sick people who do disturbing crimes.

Yes Like there really is no reason to give your time & money to someone who has done an extreme wrong, when there are like thousand of copycats & derivatives that exist in that same area.

The artist's work is good but does work compare to artist 55, 135, 1001?! You'll find something, its just annoying that you have to look.

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Internet Lurker At Heart

It looks like the last time this topic came up as referring to authors was in 2017, after the Watsuki Nobuhiro news broke. Though you may be remembering the "spouse is a murderer" poll, which is somewhat related.

There have been some other crime related polls, involving amnesia, lobotomy as punishment, etc., but none of them were author-focused.

Also, I'll note that Manga Sagawa-san still hasn't been translated, since I brought it up in the 2017 thread.

Yes, art is an expression of the individual so who they are and what they do matters as art can´t be meaningless but basic definition. It expresses something and a person or group came up with it all but there are degrees to this. Lethal Weapon is more than Mel Gibson. He simply executed a role that could have been cast differently and he wasn´t in charge of the production. His The Passion of the Christ on the other hand was directed, produced and written by him. It is more than a violent Bible epic. It´s his barely filtered personal view on life and religion caught on film so we have to factor in his actual opinions on jews (at the time) and his bizarre obsession with suffering. Both poison the in itself well-done film beyond repair.

Kenshin doesn´t immediately fall apart after knowing that it was made by a pedophile who got away scot free as such content isn´t in the manga. Misao is a reasonable 16, is never sexualized and the decade older Aoshi shows no interest in her crush on him so the work itself is "untainted". I can continue to recommend the work. My opinion on it still "changes" as I now know what sort of hypocrite made. The quirky author interviews in the manga are now unreadable on the other hand and I have no interest in supporting the man further. Viz correctly canceled his sequel as they would continue to support an abuser otherwise but the original is still on Manga Plus. Is that justified? The manga is an important part of Jump´s history and truly in the past so you are giving people (limited) access to comic history but some sort of check is still being signed. That moral quandary is harder to answer.

On a more positive note. My favorite author Grant Morrison unsurprisingly came out as non-binary in 2020 and that too changed my opinion on their work. The personal touches are now easier to see in the often politically charged work and the many queer characters appear in a new light. My better understanding of the person who made these comics let me understand them even better. I don´t like these comics more or less not but I "get" some of them better.

Finally. Cancel Culture Isn't A Thing, You Snowflakes - Some More News - Sep 25, 2019:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szybEhqUmVI&t=474s
Dave Chappelle is featured due to his mediocre and weird AF 2019 special. How timely. I wonder how many awards he will win for his even more of the the rails and rather hate-filled 2021 special. The last one won 4. Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), a gay man, came up with that term in 1996 and Nobuhiro Watsuki continues being a bestseller in Japan with 2 movies based on his manga freshly released. 2 years passed and Cody remains right. Cancel Culture = Fake News

Last edited by residentgrigo at 6:57 am, Oct 16 2021

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I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb

As much as I enjoy the works of some artists and try the "separate the art from the artist" approach, I honestly just can't. While I do understand that one act doesn't necessarily define a person, sometimes they just seem too heinous to ignore.

When I was younger I loved Chris Benoit. Then well, things happened.

No. A good book is a good books, regardless of how scummy the author is; and a terrible book is a terrible book, regardless of how virtuous the author is. Whether or not I would continue sponsoring the guy and giving him attention is a completely different question.

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tbh it's hard for me to separate art from the artist cuz I don't feel like it's right to read/watch/listen to things from bad people. Like if an artist said something racist to black ppl I'm probably gonna stop listening to their music because I'm black and it just doesn't feel right 😳 honestly IDC care if you separate art from the artist unless it's the art that's the problematic thing.

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hi <BR>

I can call a morally corrupt person a great artist who make great work. Jackson is a great artist, but a questionable person. Cosby has done a lot of humanitarian work and has helped the black community in so many ways....but he is a convicted rapists. Being a good artist doesn't make a good person. Being a good person doesn't make your art better

On a tangent about the Chappelle special, because part of how a view it first was the same as I view some anime/manga, I knew nothing of the guy and just checked it as I have been watching other comedy on the platform, I may have stopped 5-10 minutes in because it was simply not funny, he was being edgy for the sake of being edgy just like there's gore that's just there for the impact value without adding feeling the story.

Though there are better representatives of each case Psycho-Pass first and second season are a good contrast of it, where in the first the dominator executions add weight and many times they "move the camera" partially away from the explosion the second season put them in a pedestal in order to compesate for a lesser plot.

But indeed many times where people start crying about cancel culture it just happens that the work people are criticizing just isn't good.

If you stopped being so damn apologetic about your died ancestors following political beliefs that were popular at the time, you'd realize that not everything is about "DA JEWS". Especially when much of Western ideology and history does center itself around men suffering and struggling to find their way in the world.




What did he actually say that got people so ticked off? I haven't seen this much talk about a black people and gay sex in the same sentence since the "Totally 100% accurate fact-based documentary that has absolutely nothing to do with my S&M fantasies" that was Buck Breaking. And, if it really is complaining about the guy being "edgy", the clips I have seen of him led me to believe that is his shtick, so what's wrong with that now?

Last edited by Transdude1996 at 10:55 pm, Oct 16 2021

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You could at the very least also realize and/or mention that Gibson was an alcoholic, which taints every single word coming out of his mouth.

Though whatever. This entire piece was just... embarassing. Please try to acknowledge nuances and looking at things from more than your own angle in the future. This is some 2D-bullshieeeeeeeeet.

To me, it depends on if the work is the person themselves.

People have mentioned wrestlers and actors, and in these cases the person is front-facing.

I can't separate the character of Hulk Hogan from the racist individual of Terry Bollea.
I can't look at a match featuring Chris Benoit and not think of him as a murderer.
I can't watch JonTron's videos without seeing him as a racist piece of shit.

And that's because there's no separation between the individual and what they're putting out there...

I can still read a chapter of Rurouni Kenshin and not think about Nobuhiro Watsuki's child pornography scandal.
I can still watch a Harry Potter movie and not think about J. K. Rowling's horribly transphobic rhetoric on Twitter.
I can still listen to a musical artist's songs without thinking about their personal scandals.
Heck, I can even still watch a movie starring Trump-supporting Clint Eastwood as long as he didn't write or direct it.

There just has to be something in place to separate the individual from the work, and when there is, that makes me generally okay with it.
Of course, the main thing would be to not support the works of people who I find to be horrible individuals, so piracy can be kind of useful in these cases. However, even if I no longer want to support one of the creators of a work... my opinions of the work itself still do not change, especially if I held those opinions prior to the creator's scandal.

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Jammin' Scans

::End of Transmission::

imo, what an artist produces is an expression of how he feels at the very moment he produces it.

So what he produces is also an expression of who he is at that very moment.

But i think people can change.

But the thing here is about scandals and controversies isn't it ? Morality is not the same in every place or in every moment of human history. It evolves like everything. And so does art.

I think that judging someone for what he did in terms of morality is one thing. And judging him in terms of artistic production is another. If you mix it, you're judging the source instead of the idea.

That mix might be profitable for the morality in question, but definitely not for the artistic value of what's been produced by the artist.

That said, i would clearly feel strange if i heard things that would shock me (in a bad way) about an artist i admire. But in the end, i think i would stick to the feeling of what i liked about the artist in the first place while thinking to myself "he was worth my admiration when he produced that one masterpiece".

Unfortunately (or fortunately?), we're not as strong as we would want to be, we all can change and same goes for how we feel. And an artist's feelings are the key for his work i guess, so for me it's a no. The key to art is how it affects those experiencing it, so it's separate from the artist.



Last edited by NoKissNoLife at 10:05 am, Oct 17 2021