the next season has a female supervising director (ie in charge of the vision of the entire season). That was already announced a month ago, variety.com/2019/tv/news/love-death-and-robots-renewed-season-2-netflix-1203238060/
"Good Hunting" is based on a Ken Liu short story (2012) of the same name. In the short story the rape and "rebuilding" of Yan is told only through her dialogue and it is not at all titillating. In Ken Liu's original story, the plot point of Yan's literal body being altered against her will is building on the larger themes of colonialism, western imperialism during this time in history, and the forced "modernization" of China . "Good Hunting" is not by any means my favorite Ken Liu story but Love Death and Robots does not manage to communicating the themes of the original short story(imo) and presents Yan as a sex object through the visual storytelling.
Exactly. The horror is still there, but it's the horror of someone entirely unable to meaningfully affect their fate or protect their own body in the face of colonization.
Im really starting to think ive gotten so used to ignoring this that my brain only semi registers it, since thats kinda the point i got from the show too. And the second part might totally be me putting things into the material, but to me Yans sexualization by everyone in the narrative except for Liang meaningful for her comfort with him and their relationship.
@@squidcultist0022 Because they are suggesting the objectifying of women has anything to do with men, when women are 100% the cause of the problem. Sexual objectification is an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with men. If women being sexy, or wearing less clothes/naked is sexist, then why is that exactly what real women do?
@@CondorCalabasas Mate, I dunno how to break this to you, but... in media, particularly in film, everything you see on screen is the result of a deliberate choice. In the case of Love, Death + Robots, the director of every episode is male, and (so far as we can tell) straight. That doesn't mean anything in and of itself, but in the case of the sexual objectification of women throughout the show, it's absolutely something decided upon by men, as it is through much of media. Women being sexy is not a sexist thing, not on its own. Portraying women in media purely through a sexualised lens when omitting or specifically desexualising male bodies, on the other hand, is sexist.
I'm trying to use this series to talk to my husband about having more conversations about objectification. He told me I would LOVE the twist for Beyond the Aquila Rift, but I couldn't be anything but disappointed, both in him and the show. In the show because this episode is literally nothing without the sex scene, and it's incredibly annoying to watch, and in him for not seeing why I would get so upset. He watches film analysis and feminist theory videos with me, so I'm just hella confused. I'm super tired of watching women getting fucked when I just want to watch a good story.
@@justjess6636 this is an old comment, but I think I understand where your husband is coming from. Not that I disagree with you, hell no, there was really no need for a lot of the nudity and sex scene (in fact, cut that out, just focus on the guy not being able to concentrate on the problem that's right in front of him while his crewmate is very much onto it and the rift this causes between them), but the story does try and frame itself in a 'I am actually critisizing the male gaze'. And it's easy to fall for, even as a creator. Having said all that, I do think that Love Death and Robots is mostly style and often times very little substance, and a lot of substance is basically spilled by focussing on the amount of gore and nudity. Most of the stuff is there for us to think 'ooh, that looked so cool'. Not always bad, I really liked the episode with the farmers, even if it is just an action scene, but it was fun and well paced.
Yea its funny how you quoted this, as this quote itself has nothing to do with the male gaze, and is nothing more than a gay man projecting his sexuality on to the viewer. Of course he thinks about how gay he is when he sees a bunch of shirtless men in a scene lol. Its hilarious he thinks that has anything to do with the male gaze, when it has everything to do with his own sexuality.
I think top gun feels gay because two guys look into each others eyes and say "ive got the need, the need for speed" Any dialogue that awkward is between two people that want to get down to it.
⚠️ LOUD NOISES (+FLASHING COLORS/LIGHTS) for titles (after introductions) at 2:55-3:07, 3:55-4:00, 10:06-10:14, 16:09-16:16 ⚠️ PROLONGED FLASHING COLORS from 21:55 to the end ******CLIPS TO SKIP LOUD NOISES BELOW****** 0:00 for the warnings and intro to the whole video -------wait until 2:53 (warning especially for those with sensitive eyes and/or epilepsy) -------⚠️ flashing lights - wait until 2:50 and skip! 3:07 starting the talk -------wait until 3:54 (slight warning for potential sensitive eyes) 4:01 *Good Hunting* ; clip from Reservoir Dogs; clip from Oldboy; *Sonnie’s Edge* ; *The Secret War* -------wait until 10:05 (this one’s really loud and kinda bright, so be careful 🤞) 10:14 *Beyond the Aquila Rift* -------wait until 16:09 (this one comes quickly so be careful) 16:17 *Shapeshifters* ; *The Witness* (⚠️Epilepsy warning! If you have sensitive eyes, avoid looking at the screen from 21:55 to the end!) - The ending message is still good to listen to, but the visuals may be too much for some viewers
“18 entire episodes of frankly unprecedented stylistic episodes and EVERY one of them wants me to be straight” THANK you for explaining how I feel watching every piece of media in the world. i’m both appreciative and exhausted
with me it is "every piece of media thinks only one type of woman is attractive" and how that affects me as a woman is two-fold: 1) I'm fat! So. Not the best for my body image to only ever see in media women whose waists could fit in the circle of air between my thumb and index finger if I join them 👌 Also the excessive objectification that no other demographic of people are subjected to makes me feel gross about being of my gender, of being a woman. Also not the best feeling 2) I feel offended as a bisexual as these straight dudes behind the camera (or the straight dude target demographic informing the piece of media) lack imagination and are lazy. The type of sexy you want is boring my dudes! And again, the objectification is off-putting and does not turn me on
That isn't explaining how you feel. You have a victim complex, you feel that you're a victim when you aren't. That is explaining how you feel. There is a straight female gaze that is infinitely greater of an issue, but you wouldn't know anything about that would you. Art is depicted by an artist, sometimes that artist has a sexual orientation that you don't share. Thats literally it, thats all the depth there is. You need help. Go watch some gay, or straight female gaze movies and you'll feel much better I'm sure.
@@oof-rr5nf You objectify women by saying they are that thin. Your personality is gross to be honest. A healthy body is the best body image... You don't feel offended as a bisexual, you feel offended as someone with a victim complex.
"There's 18 slots and you already gave us a season of full of male directors. Why don't you give us a shot?" I know this video is absolute hell for you to upload, and I feel for that Patty. I just want to say that that line has given me chills and these tears of just, marveling, happiness. I can't believe their power.
@@brettthebest3978 right but if women are saying they don’t like the way they’re being portrayed in media wouldn’t it make sense to put more women in the room where these ideas and concepts are created? i’m sorry but what you’re saying is naive.
@@senakumapley9800 not everything you made needs to be political correct u’know If ur story is about that or you want that in it go right ahead its ur story But if ur story is something else and shouldn’t be view as such You shouldn’t be force to do that
This video is so validating. I thought i was being over-sensitive for not enjoying this series (except of course Pool Guy episode and the one with the cats and robots)
I think people are being overly-sensitive, if I'm being honest. Coming from a bi enby. I don't see what's sexist or wrong about horny garbage like this. Are people not allowed to enjoy horny media for straight people anymore? If it was equally as horny, but with most of the stories being about lesbian or gay dudes... would people be as upset over it? I don't think so.
@@bugjams No but it’s like the female presenting body being sexualized is a long long story, and unnecessary nudity is just further sexualizing female body and it’s characters by inviting the audience to join in. I’m not against nudity, but this type of nudity is just so out of proportion. As a cishet female I’m not against being horny and wanting to see nudes but there are plenty of opportunities to throw in male nudity.😢
@@bugjams I think you are missing the point. There is nothing wrong with the show being horny, as the autor of this video said. But it only sexualizing women and in such a dehumanizing way. This isnt made for straight people but straight men. The sexualization is often placed on moments where it becomes offensive. Did we really need to sexualize a woman being sacrificed, another one while she run for her life, and nother one while she went a forced operation? And even so, what is overly sensitive about critizing a show and saying hey maybe they need to make this changes for the next season? The truth is that as a woman it was uncomfortable fro me to watch. There is nothing wrong with the target audience being hetero men, the issue is with how they portrayed women. Is how obvious it is that women in this stories are just sex objects. Sonnie's edge was incredibly difficult to watch. And when you start annalyzing it, its hard. But believe me, if it had gay dudes or lesbian i would still be disgusted if they still portrayed women as theyve done.
@@afgusti4269 So it's a collection of media aimed at heterosexual men, and yet you're somehow disgusted that the women are sexualized? It's a fantasy, not reality. Heterosexual women would probably like it if you replaced all the sexy women with sexy men. There's nothing wrong with sexualization if you're being blunt and honest about it. Even objectification. That's what erotic fiction is. There's erotic fiction that objectifies men too, and nobody complains, because it's mainly made for women, so it's somehow not sexist. Like, I get what you're saying, and I'm against objectification in media that's supposed to be realistic, serious, or otherwise believable in some way. But LDR is basically light porn. It'd be like going to a monster truck show and complaining that it's too loud.
see this might be because im a genuine monsterfucker but i actually liked the spider gf story the best because i sympathised with her plight. the tragedy is more on her end, being constantly assaulted by this ships filled with lost souls who refuse to let her help them. the fact she has to keep up these charades just to let them know she'll keep them safe and how they respond to her true form with vitriol every time. i thought the ending makes it pretty clear that our sympathies are meant to shift from tom to spider gf, since he literally gets his mind wiped. its not meant to be scary, its meant to be sad. ...but maybe thats because I wanna live in her gunky space web and im bitter he doesnt appreciate it >:O
I love Love, Death + Robots but it definitely over-sexualizes women. Like you said you really tell it was made by a bunch of straight dudes. I hope they fix this if they have another season because I love wild animation shows like this. I still love it but I like to see more stories that aren't made by really horny dudes using rape and boobs for shock value.
Actually the sexy spider gf is my favorite episode. It is a mixture of 2 main themes. Male gaze as said in the video, male rape victims. Since the episode ends with the mind wipe and reset, it's left open to interpretation whether or not the spider is evil, just preying on random ships or told the truth and cares for the stranded people that end up there. As such it's a comment on both and sadly also neither. Like most LDR episodes it just waves its hand at a bunch of themes and says: you figure it out. Also the sex is really is just there to signal "THIS AIN'T YOUR NORMAL KIDS CARTOON! THIS IS FOR GROWNUPS, DAD!" but comes of just as really edgy.
I'm super late but this video was incredibly validating and refreshing to hear. I wanted to enjoy this series so bad as an animator and animation fan, but I couldn't get over the show's treatment of gender and, as you put it, "only one flavor of horny" haha. Especially in the treatment of sexual assault or mutilation of a woman's body as if that's meant to be titillating: I found those scenes to be uncomfortable and distasteful at best and really disturbing at worst--not because things like ero-guro as an art form are bad by themselves, but because in the context of the story they were trying to tell, portraying sexual assault as erotic just felt out-of-place and wrong. I also really agree that it's not that onscreen nudity or erotic content shouldn't exist, it's that LDR only served the heterosexual male audience with its erotic content. Where are the sexy guys in suggestive poses with the camera zooming in on their bodies (*cough* Yan)? Where are the different body types? Really amazing video that summarized everything I felt about this show. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts!
I remember seeing only 2 episodes of this show as recommended by a friend: Good Hunting and Sunnie's Edge in that order. The fan service in the first one made me cynical of the show's intentions, and then the second one is basically "this girl was raped and it made her into a monster who symbolically 'rapes' men" and I was like yep okay no more for me thanks
I feel that, as a monster fucker, I’m obligated to point out that furries and monster fuckers are not the same thing. Yes there’s some overlap, but on the whole they are very different communities.
8:20: And if Yan being forced to take the penultimate step was so important, just have her lose her legs in an industrial accident or something. Or even have her vaguely describe that something bad happened and she needed new legs to save her life. Anything is better than sexy dismemberment scenes! ...except for the guys with that exact fetish I guess. 14:35: From this summary, my take is that they were _trying_ to go subversive, but forgot to explain what was bad about the Truth beyond spider-Greta being unappealing. If there had been a twist beyond "Greta is actually an ugly spider alien," if she was using his titillation for some ulterior purpose, then the subversion might have landed. But then, I tend to give authors the benefit of the doubt when it comes to guessing intent.
Thank you! I've been trying to express for *years* how nudity can never be incidental in media. The human body is almost always shown in a sexualised manner if you see any of the "good bits", and if it is incidental, then it's censored to a larger or lesser degree. I'm a naturist, so this is an extreme frustration for me, since I try and advocate that clothes-free lifestyles or expressions of the human body don't need to be considered sexual all the time. Yet the endless cycle of pop culture re-enforcing existing beliefs keeps rolling on. I don't recall if it's archived or not, but there used to be a webcomic called "The Bare Pit" (formerly Loxie and Zoot) which is set in a naturist resort. That has entirely incidental nudity from people of all shapes, sizes and ages, none of which are ever censored or presented in a sexual manner. I highly recommend it to see how nudity can be presented without male gaze framing.
The problem is intent on the viewer. You can try to present it as 'non sexual', but the eyes of the beholder will decide that when the talk is about nudity.
Almost every short outside of Zima Blue, Three Robots, and the Mech Farmers was just cartoon titties, cursing, and blood to seem “adult and edgy.” I liked a few of them thematically, but I binged every short expecting edgy bullshit and coming away with the feeling of having watched exactly what I expected. Though Sonnie’s Edge and the Cyborgs one had some pretty badass designs.
@@Davesothoth I fucking hate the pussy jokes in it like they are so goddamn forced, the connection between the actual events of the plot and the joke they just made is such a stretch I'm surprised the episode didn't snap in half down the middle of that joke, then a different character does a similar joke and the character who made the first joke gets mad at her for not taking this seriously and then she proceeds to take things even less seriously and joke about how the blood of a previous character who died is on his body. Like what's even the point of this episode?
i agree with 90% of this video, however, do you really not think there's something horrifying about being locked in an endlessly repeating dream while you waste away from everyone you've ever known? even if instead of a spider monster it was a beautiful woman I'd still think the entire situation was a little sketchy.
@@zayindarkmore1616 just frustrated with how common this sand how I've never seen a reversal of it. imagine if the genders were reversed, that'd be boundary-pushing
Honestly, it would be sad more than horrifying. And even if it was horrifying, the horrifying part would be what he has already experienced in a dream: being thrown God knows where with no chance of returning.
@@leonardorossi998 That's the scariest part to me still, the fact that by some small error he's now in the middle of empty nothing with no hope of ever getting back, with only the option to slowly die in a fake reality, or to slowly die in a giant living space insect nest
As much as I'm on board with the many points made in this video, I think the most important lesson I'm going to take away from this is that Jack Saint is adorable as a cartoon bird. xD
Well damn. I'm pretty sure this is your best video yet. I love your media critiques. Even when I disagree with you (and I don't at all in this case) you always make me dig deep and think hard about WHY I disagree. And when I agree with you, I'm usually shouting "Yes! Thank you! Where's the werewolf dick!?"
I've been looking for an essay that is critical of this anthology since it came out, and youtube search engine have kept you hidden from me for over a year now, never showing this video. I am so fucking mad I am discoverng this only now, because this show upset me so much I actually didn't get past episode 4 I think (I later came back and watched Zima Blue to confirm that yes its great) and DEAR LORD I didn't know it Gets THIS MUCH WORSE with its depictions of women. Great video, thank you so much for it.
The spider is like The Crane Wife. And I feel for their lovers' horror, as much as my asexual ass can, but I choose to believe that the stories continue "offscreen" and they come to their senses eventually. Like, I'll buy the horror, but come on, you can get over it! Plus, you don't *have* to sleep with her if you don't want to, you can still let her take care of you, jeez. All that story needs is an extra couple minutes. Or a restructuring so the spider reveal happens sooner so they can move past it after. I do confess to being a monsterfucker though lmao
@@skele3310 it may have been an intentional choice but it's the one part of the video i didn't find enjoyable, personally. i feel like the points made about the show were great and i will still recommend it to people who ask me why i dislike love death and robots, but that the painfully loud music detracted from my over all enjoyment.
@@UnsanitaryCondition i can understand that. i personally thought the sudden increase in volume was actually pretty funny and very on brand for eric, art is subjective and all that.
@@skele3310 i agree with all of this and still find that it detracts from the over all experience, For Me Personally, like i said before. please don't say "art is subjective" to people like they're children when they disagree with you. i know that, and i'm exercising my right to a subjective opinion right now. jarring loud noise funny and on brand. i agree! i appreciate the joke in concept even if it made my ears ring! but! maybe a bit quieter next time for those of us with tinnitus or other issues with sudden loud noise? maybe even just a warning in the video to turn the sound down? i can't speak for maaz maaz, but that's literally all i'm saying.
This video was really insightful, clever and well worded overall. You make some brilliant points on how male and female nudity are treated. I also really liked your alternate story for Good Hunting, it would make so much sense for the woman to say "Magic is disappearing, I can no longer assume my true form, so I'll become a cyborg". However, and please pardon my frankness, the Beyond Aquila Rift take was just really dumb. Don't get me wrong, you start off making perfect sense, Tom's gaze is obviously distorted by horniness and egotism (in fact, I'd say that the portrayal of the sex scene is so "malegazey" because the simulation is meant to cater to his tastes)... but you honestly can't hold that against him when discussing his reaction to the final twist of the episode. Even if the spider's intentions were honest and kind, nobody in their right mind would be happy to realise that they have to leave their entire life behind and spend the rest of their life alone in the far reaches of the abyss, being "cared for" by a horrifying, unfathomable alien god, it's one of the most hopeless, maddening scenarios imaginable and no amount of deconstruction could change that.
Moreover, the spider-aliens actions, even if well intentioned, are horrifically unethical. Its not like the creature offered him a choice. It didn't ask him if he wanted to be saved. It didn't ask if he wanted a false reality. It didn't even tell him his scenario. It jumped straight to deception and imprisoned him within a dream. Maybe the spider loved him, but it sure as hell wasn't a consensual love. When he awakes he's literally and figuratively caught in its web being force-fed happy thoughts. Its absurd to call his reaction hypocritical or thinking with his dick. The woman he loved was an illusion crafted by the spider for him. He doesn't have any reason to believe that this act was benevolent. Nor does he have any reason to believe that the spider is anything like the illusion. All he knows for sure is that he has been lied to and imprisoned. The imaginary mind sex his captor provided does not and should not make him more comfortable.
My friend group watched a pretty random selection of episodes and we, unfortunately, didn't watch any of your favorites. The experience was miserable overall, but we loved The Secret War (besides the surprise naked disemboweled woman scene). Great video, I'm going to go watch another!
Great critique. Don't want to generalize, but maybe there's something deeply misogynistic at work in CGI design culture (think female representation in video games).
Honestly I just think it's a consequence of the tech industry still being quite male dominated, CGI design being no different. I think that will change with time though. I study Game Graphics and my class consists of 20 women and me, which is encouraging to see. On the programming side it's reversed though. Almost all guys and a couple women.
This is mental gymnastics, double think, and misandry. Women like to sexualize women. Women sexualize, and objectify women more than anyone else on the planet by far. There is nothing even somewhat misogynistic in gaming, or in CGI culture. Female representation in video games is literally better than it is for male representation. I know, I know you're a white knight, you couldn't actually care less about social issues, you're just desperately trying to get laid. Cringe.
There is some good news. The second season is gonna have a woman (Jennifer Yuh Nelson) as a supervisor director and oversee all the episodes. So there is a chance that the show is gonna improve with in the sexual department
Watching this (and by this I mean the real uncensored version) was truly cathartic. You summed up my feelings on the series quite nicely overall. Sexualized images of women are not necessarily inherently bad, but sexualized images of women (and only one kind of woman) in the absence of any sexualization of men, robots, or vampire monsters, is pretty suspect. Using rape/sexual violence as a plot point is not inherently bad, but using it as an opportunity to titillate an assumed heterosexual male audience is pretty suspect.
And yet as a male survivor, implying that there is anything remotely offensive about this Netflix series in terms of how women are treated outs you as a misogynist with a victim complex.
@@comradefrommars All the criticism you just said applies perfectly to the Magic Mike franchise yet we don't see people making that criticism because it isn't socially acceptable to be offended by good looking men's bodies like it is for women. This sexualization like cultural appropriation; is exclusively worship, celebration, appreciation. Nothing offensive or wrong with a nude attractive woman, thinking there is, is misogyny.
The uncensored version is so fucking fun to watch. I feel like youtube would be infinitely more entertaining if all of it's content restrictions were dismantled.
2:57 the only reason why i watched the show originally was because the trailer had industrial hardcore in it, and then you're just gonna open up a video essay with frenchcore????? i am instantly maximally invested
Even if you have a show that depicts female erotica, it doesn't have to be exploitative (though it usually is). What's especially disgusting about Good Hunting is that it sexualizes her terror; the fact that she's helpless. It sexualies the process of literally sawing into a woman and ripping her body apart for your own purposes. *and you can tell the camera fucking loves it.* The camera is jerking off to her pain and trauma. This is Ted Bundy shit.
It also just hurts the storytelling. The sequence sexualizing the horror is implicitly telling you not to care, that this is a weird sex fantasy. And that cannot be reconciled with the themes for me. I can only see this existing like this because the writers wanted to make amputation porn in a high quality format, but couldn't just pitch that to netflix directly so they wrote this story to get around it by framing it as a plot important scene.
I'm really sorry, but I just don't get some of this. Maybe someone can help me here. Sonnie's Edge was really on-the-nose with the rape backstory and I wasn't a fan of the lack of subtlety, but I don't understand the counter-penetration comment. I just thought it was a cool monster fight... The "saves woman from rape" moment with the huli jing was also a bit... obvious, but it felt like cathartic revenge for the episode, like stabbing back at the poison that seeped into their world. I also didn't feel like the shot before her legs were cut up was sexualized, it felt more like an expression of extreme vulnerability which added to the horror aspect of it for me. I also don't agree with Jack on the Spider GF episode. The horror was that Tom was living a lie, not that the hot girl was actually a spider. It's a caregiver, benevolent or otherwise, deluding him into a false sense of security, and that's scary. The Russian example didn't feel tittilating either, because HOLY SHIT SHE'S BEING DISEMBOWELED, that's fucking horrifying. Hey, I'll agree that there are a lot of things that made even me uncomfortable (The Witness, like wtf was that strip show for???), and the lack of male nudity weirded me out, but many of the examples Taxxon and Jack spend the longest time discussing I simply cannot understand. Maybe that's just me being a cis-het white American dude, but I just don't see a lot of what the video called sexy or tittilating as such. If anyone can help me out, that'd be awesome.
"but I don't understand the counter-penetration comment. I just thought it was a cool monster fight... " There is an incredibly obvious couple of shots in that fight, where the fight is framed to look like a rape scene. I don't know how you could've missed that. "It's a caregiver, benevolent or otherwise, deluding him into a false sense of security, and that's scary. " What exactly is "false" about that sense of security? As I far as I understood, the spider gf wasn't secretly planning to kill him or smth. She genuinely cared about him, so the only caveat seems to be that she is a gross spider monster. "because HOLY SHIT SHE'S BEING DISEMBOWELED, that's fucking horrifying. " Yes, but before we even see that, we first get a very clear shot of her ass and bush. As mentioned in the video, there are lots of good ways to show violence/nudity without being so gratuitous. I'd give this shot a pass, if it was in anything else. But it's in Love Death +Robots, where sexualized violence is commonplace, so I am not feeling charitable
@@TooFatTooFurious counterpoint to the spider gf point: he looks extremely malnourished when he wakes up, meaning he wasn't being cared for appropriately.
To be honest Sonnies Edge is one of my favourite pieces of media ever. I wish they didnt have the rape backstory, but i feel like it was a passable subversion of the trope and aside from that it is one of the most visually incredible things i have ever seen. The charicter design, lighting, movement, everything about it was amazing. Also the dump episode was really fun, and lucky 13 was mindnumbingly boring
To be fair, the original “Good Hunting” short story (by Ken Liu) did have the plot point of Yan’s forced robotization. It didn’t have the gratuitous nudity though (because text, not visual), or the assault scene from the ending.
Okay I will say this much, in Good Hunting while I think they 100% didn’t have to show as much as they did and handled it clumsily, I don’t hate forcing Yuan to be a robot? It’s heavy handed and there are less exploitative ways to handle it, but it is I think a pretty obvi heavy handed example of “colonialism raping a culture,” I guess. I agree with the rest of your analysis and even your analysis of that scene, but I do see what they were trying to do? Not that that matters when the execution was, as you say, deeply problematic :T
Some of these episodes are essentially animated Black Mirror. I loved it. If you haven't - watch *Animatrix.* It's the same concept of short animations but based on Matrix movies.
I agree with almost everything you said here, but am I just missing something when I think the Woman in Secret war wasnt sexualized? I dont think Being naked is inherently sexual, and I just thought that scene was supposed to be scary and seeing a (presumably) innocent person strung up naked and disemboweled felt really y'know, demonic. Maybe Its something I dont get since I'm not straight but I feel like I can see the sexualized nature of the other female nudity but not this one
Yeah, being naked isn't inherently sexual, but she's being sacrificed. She's been forced to be naked and she isn't in control. That's what makes it fucked, the weird sexual framing of her body, and not her face and actual humanity, which I would argue would make it more terrifying and provoke a stronger reaction that this gratuitous body shot.
As a straight guy, I can safely say I wasn't turned on by the sacrificial lady simply because she was naked. I didn't lose any immersion in the fucked up demon shit simply because there were boobs and a butt there too. That scene was not sexualized. It simply had nudity.
This vid reminded me of one of the stories I wrote, where one of the main characters (a young girl who was a sort of trauma standin for myself at her age) was very violently abused by human traffickers in a similar way to myself. Though, the abuse itself is never shown at all. What you saw was the effects, not the violence itself. You’d see her flinch, make poor interpretations of situations because of the psychological effects of the abuse, and eventually attempt suicide (just like I did). The thing is though, it wasn’t all for some man to have motivation to do XYZ, it was her story, she was the main character. The only people who knew were her abusers, and the woman who bought her from the traffickers to get her away from them. The story doesn’t end with theatrical revenge, it ends with a woman and her adoptive daughter walking alone in the desert, trying to find their way home. The story is primarily about ideas of ownership, capitalism, abuse, and the real life effects being enslaved can have on a person. It was a complicated story, with a total of nine main characters. But Lyono was the most important to me. The other characters showed their trauma in totally different ways. Rohir Nahko, a several hundred year old Haruspex, was never without his Revolver, and refused to go outside at Night in spite of how afraid most people were of him. For context Rohir is a trans man, but unless you had an exceptionally deep understanding of the world and it’s lore you’d never really know that outside of some of the fears he has that other men in the story don’t. That and the languages the characters speak have no word for “transgender”, Rohir is occasionally referred to with “brother of the blue sky” but most characters are not Hasveki Rodach like he is, and won’t pick up on the phrases meaning. A man by the name of Rizev Karkanis shows his trauma via brutality, but it’s not played to be “cool”. Sometimes it’s played for humor, but the focus in those scenes really is more of how his history in special forces has stolen away his sense of peace and safety in life.
The witness is probably my favorite, just because I’m a sucker for anything that panders to me as a kinky drag and burlesque performer. Zima Blue had the best execution though
The whole spider thing makes no sense, she clearly isn't looking after him because he is wasting away and his friends are wasted away, isn't it possible she was merely feeding on them.
It’s possible that she didn’t have anything to feed them, as her own nutritional needs might be so drastically differently from our own that the only “food” she had would be toxic to humans. It seemed like her intent was to make them as comfortable as she could until they inevitably passed away.
Comrade from Mars or maybe that the spider thingy is trying to make them be peaceful and less likely to attempt escape. In the ending you can see multiple ships in this “web” so I assume she puts the crew in some form of dream then feeds off them
This was meant to be a spiritual successor to Heavy Metal, which is also an anthology movie with animated shorts and the "male gaze" in mind. Nostalgia Critic panned it years ago, yet people still fondly remember it for nostalgic reasons.
This is a little late but Heavy Metal magazine was a grungy adult fantasy magazine following the underground comic scene of sex and violence with added fantasy stories on top. Heavy Metal the movie seems like a big mash of all those elements, a dumb dirty movie with great artists working on it.
I don't consume media that much anymore except occasionally watching radically different RUclipsrs and way too much weird music (just got into your stuff btw and I'm liking it). I've never understood much of the ideation of making diversity in creative outlets more necessary, until watching this. I watched the uncensored version and was honestly quite upset about the werewolf one, it's perfect to sexualize them as a subversion on the raunchy female sexualization, and I feel robbed for not seeing dog dick when there was fox ass. I feel the horniness directed at the women would be fine if it weren't for what you stated, the camera doesn't want the man naked. As a gay man who's going into the military soon it honestly upsets me even more about the clear discrimination against the wolves as if they're gay soldiers, then dropping it like a hot rock. However the market cap must grow while being fed false diversity by using token gay and trans characters just like they did and still do ethnic minorities. Now I remember why I stopped consuming common media. The male gaze effects even in ignorance.
After scrolling through comments and reading the rest I feel I should shed some light on the elephant in the room rather than just the part that spoke to me. Rape is one of the worst story telling devices in most forms of media. Especially highly detailed and over sexualized forms of it. I know that Tarantino is a very male gaze type of director, but the scene of the kitsune getting dismembered only made me think of the scene in kill bill pt 2 with o ren killing the pedo Yakuza boss. The scene was very sexual and even showed her riding him but hidden by the covers before focusing on the true plot of the scene, the assassination of the boss. It seemed to lose track of that and even when showing her torture and dismemberment still focused on her nudity. Outlast whistleblower has a great scene somewhat like it with the doctor trying to saw you some new bits, and even though the whole plot in that scene was emasculation your dick isn't even the focus, it's the crazed man with an angle grinder.
@@the_weezman I think you are misremembering the Kill Bill scene, it is in volume 1 not 2 and there aren't any covers, and while she is straddling him (very sus I admit) there is no explicit detail that they are in the act of intercourse at the momement and in fact O ren is fully clothed
@@doubletrouble7355 You are correct, sorry. However still heavily implied, and the scene doesn't change with or without the clothes. Thank you for the correction though.
15:29 That are the two readings that make the most sense? Yeah, maybe from a Male Gaze perspective. If you throw that out the window, the episode accually gets more interesting than that. I would go as far as saying that the protagonist of the story is the alien, not Tom. Beyond the Aquila Rift is about a alien that happens to inhabit an old, abandoned spacestation where every once in a while humans strand because of a rare malfunction of the warp gate created by another alien race. So with no idea on how to send the humans back and most of them going insane when they realize that they are stranded in a nightmare-ish place, she tries to gain the trust and explain what happened in simulations. There she can work out a solution by communicating with the humans in a comfortable location and atmosphere. I dont think the alien spider is very intelligent. She mostly goes by try-and-error in order to gain the trust of the humans to then be able to slowly open up about their current situation. She will have to find out how to do that on a person-by-person basis, because every invidual is different. So with that try-and-error approach she slowly gathers information that helps her acommplish that. With time, she figures out what makes humans trust her. Comfort, a familiar Face, Intimacy, Love, Sex, Desire. In case of Tom, she figures out that he had a relationship with Greta, so she uses that to try and make him understand. We need to assume that she is doing this for a while now and thats how far she has gotten with x amount of simulations run. We can even see her use a sentence "it is nice to see a familiar face" Tom said to her in the previous simulation in the next one when she first meets him. It is obviously a very easy and primitive way which make me assume that the alien has only limited intelligence. That is just how far the alien spider has gotten with her try-and-error approach. This is basically a moral dilemma. How would you approach such a situation where everybody goes insane when they realize where they are, that they are going to die and that there is only a scary spider alien monster with them? Do you outright kill the stranded people since there is no hope? Or do you ease their pain in simulations until they die? Or do you try to slowly open up about where they are and that there is not a lot of hope for rescue? So that maybe one day you will gain enough knowledge to help the people and send them back via cooperation with the stranded. Maybe a technician strands and he can send a message back so that others come and rescue them or they can activate another jump gate nearby. Tom is just one of many. Many came before and many will come after him. Many more simulations will happen. There may or may not be a happy ending far in the future for future stranded people. You could also argue that the alien spider is a hivemind trying to convience Tom to join the hivemind and everything she does is intentionally lying and manipulating him to accomplish that. That she is accually feeding on the stranded. I dont like this interpretation, probably because it turns her into a one-dimensional, malevolent villain, not a tragic moral dilemma. And there are also not a lot of hints towards that interpretation, so you would just have to roll with the assumption that she is a lying bitch all the way. But if she is so intelligent, then why does she use this primitive try-and-error approach. Thats where the whole hivemind interpretation falls flat. Thats my intepretation by the way. Which I find much more interesting than whatever you got out of the episode with the Male Gaze perspective :S TLDR: Your subjective assessment with Male Gaze is kind of incomplete because it leaves out a lot of details from the episode and only looks at it from the Male Gaze perspective. I prefer my analysis to yours. Which kind of applies to the whole series.
Had to say, thank you for this, was a great read and one i appreciated, when i first watched the series this episode stuck out to me and became my favorite. The Alien spider's motivations can be guessed but the story does lead toward her being a more sympathetic and caring being. That she's taken it upon herself to care for the lost souls that end up trapped there, possibly just like her (If she is female at all). I absolutely loved seeing a horrifying looking, intelligent alien that is essentially the 'good guy' in the story which is great to see as it's not often you come across media that tells that kind of story. At first i didn't like the sex scenes at all in this short as it went on for far too long, but when reading your comment about trial and error made me re-think that whole aspect of the short.
While I can definitely see where you're coming from, I just don't understand where the implication of the alien being "good" comes from. It comes off more to me as another take on The Matrix, with how humans "live" a false life in their minds while their bodies are being used to generate power for the Machines. This spider creature lives in a massive web of long forgotten ships filled with the decayed remains of countless crews just like Tom's. This is a feeding zone, "caught in the spider's web", for this creature. The psychic induced memories/simulations allow her prey to remain "alive" while it gains nutrition from them through some means. It is pretty on the nose with it being a spider-like creature with webs reaching far out into space, implying there is potentially far more of it's kind running around among the graveyard of ships. This doesn't make the creature evil or good, but merely a being with some measure of sentience doing what comes naturally for all living beings. To consume, survive, and reproduce.
@@sackofpeas2470 Well, I guess I do not see the reason why the alien would go through all that trouble of trying to tell the crew where they are and that they are stranded with no hope. Why not just simulate different entirely and accually create a Matrix for them if she is feeding off them. Furthermore, it also makes no sense that she does grant Tom his wish to see reality as well as herself. Whats in there for her? Is she feeding off his terror? I am not so sure how such a being would evolve in the first place, but I guess if it exists, then we couldnt trust anything we saw. And I dont think that is the concept that is being presented here. I rather see the alien as a benevolent and carrying mother archtype with a twist on her appearance (which looks horrifying to us but is independent from her intentions) rather than a manipulative and egoistic force of nature.
The intermissions are rough. I had to stop watching at about halfway through. I'm surprised considering I'd expect a good chunk of people following Patricia are on the spectrum and might have sensory issues. Being stabbed with loud volume at absolutely random points in the video hurts. I know the video is old, but it *is* still up and on the channel, with no warnings accompanying it.
You're right, so many episodes and only one single flavor of horny. I only got interested about the show when I heard about there being werewolves, and then the werewolf episode ends up being the absolute worst one! ...besides the secret war at the end, anyway. Zima Blue was insanely amazing though, like, some others were really good trash, but that one actually hit all notes of the title, "love, death, & robots" in such a neat way.
God I love The Witness, it’s the first time I saw Mielgo’s now very influential visual aesthetic. It works as a proof of concept of it. But it certainly falls into the overarching problem seen here. Jibaro also has issues, but it feels like a more self aware version of that first episode.
very late to this, but im realizing this is why i think devilman crybaby on the whole handled these aspects better? because i feel like it definitely, maybe not evenly, but also made sure that the male characters were sexualized- and also that any random male gaze exploitativeness, didnt feel so much as a fantasy but more as a reality (ex: the one completely full frontal nude of miki has pubes- which is not something you would see in anything ever, on top of it because directly because its his from perspective and shown to be a not healthy good thing) im realizing thats completely random and hardly related, but its something i thought about it and felt like word vomiting on the internet about also im curious why you dont like the 3 robots. i always liked that one.
Beyond the Aquila Rift is a short story by Alistair Reynolds. I have read most of his books and yeah, I don't really know what his views are either. He has a really really negative view of humanity as pretty much every human being is bad and the general populace are dumb masses. Yet all the books are about saving humanity from annihilation by the suppressors. The characters go to some ridiculous extremes to achieve their goals even though there is never anything shown that would be worth saving. The Sludge Aliens even propose an alternative: just fucking hide and wait till the suppressors are gone again, yet that's not even considered. So yeah, I never really got what the entire thing was ultimately about. Mostly the scifi tech I guess as a lot of time is spent explaining physics and stuff. PS. The final book in the series is really really awful, kills off the main character of the previous book in the first few pages and then stumbles along into forced twist that wasn't foreshadowed at all.
If the spider alien not being a hot lady isn’t part of the horror then explain how when she walks toward the camera in her true form it’s lit in such a way to give the vague shapes of a human or at least humanoid head, legs, arms and big breasts, and then the light reveals more limbs and body parts
12:12 I was gonna rebut with "to some people *ahemrule34ahem*" but I actually went to rule 34 and searched up love death and robots, and literally all the porn (all 8 images) was of Khanivore so yeah, your right.
Also, I think the werewolf myth has a lot of potential as a metaphor for toxic masculinity that is varely explored most of the time (there is a Jack Nicholson movie, the Twilight accidentaly does it, and thats kind of all the examples I know) ... But its potential also varies from culture to culture (sudamerican werewolves, for example, are extremely aichmophobic and would visciously pursuit and kill anyone who cuts them, because the smallest injury could reveal their human identity. Violently harm anybody to mantain secret your vulnerability? I don't know you but to me that sounds a lot like "toxic tough-guy machismo")
IDK about this one chief. I'd love to see more fetishes and kinds represented, but some things are taboo for a reason. Don't wanna see any pedo-shit, or bestiality or incest etc in my media, no matter how "edgy" it tries to be.
I know this video is 4 years old but I just want to give my outlook, that this whole video is correct I mean for the series claiming how 'messed up' it is I really did not see it, it was like your daily adult swim tv show just more of woman being exploited, honestly I mainly watched it for it's amazing art and stylizing but at one point I got tired of seeing naked woman every 2nd episode and just got out my laptop and just did random shit, I used the series at background noise since yes, visually Love, Death & Robots is really great but plot wise they really need more woman on the team since it's disgusting to say that I got used to seeing naked woman, and when are men are considered to be 'naked' its used for a funny joke, or for a gross factor and when not used like that their thing just fly's across the screen or the camera just just extremely far away from the character but with woman, nope they just close up on everything beside their face and its gross, the episode The Witness is a good example of that since I loved the episode probably my favourite episode, it had a cool hook to the story and an amazing art style but the random ass str*p club why was that needed, and not to mention after the girl leaves the club SHES STILL NAKED, I mean yes she was being chased but we did not need to see her chest for this supposed too be thrilling and suspenseful scene.. But for the most part I enjoyed the series mainly for the art and all the episodes that didn't include anyone naked and had a good plot point, but they really need to get more female directors.
Sonny's Edge was a short literally about how no one saw past the Rape and it irritated the hell out of the Sonny, and how her real advantage was that she'd become an incredibly powerful monster in fact (instead of by proxy) whose sexualized form is an entirely disposable act covering for her true self (the powerful monster)... whereas for the men around her they are truly monsters in their true human forms, but by proxy become visibly mostrous acts. It was represented here through the main male Villain's conclusion, as a story about a girl who got raped and thus has superpowers. The REAL STORY is that she's changed their game, and the part they sexualize and feel power over is little more than an Anglerfish Lure for something more powerful and deep. But the episode where a man is repeatedly raped(via deception and literal mindfuckery) by an alien pretending to be his ex is the feminist one? I really really hope I'm misunderstanding.
I tried to get through the series but just couldn't. When the Robotech farmers episode felt like it was justifying building a border wall, I started feeling sick. Well, more sick than I already was.
I'll be honest, maybe it's just me but I'm not pulling any of these subtextual meanings from these works. I don't see how a premise of establishing rural agriculture on a hostile alien world equates to the US immigration discussion... I just don't. If you could explain it to me, I'd appreciate it, because I agree with the sentiments expressed but am befuddled at the cited examples.
I really liked that episode as being rather on the wholesome end of the series, but yeah, it's hard to shake the bitter feeling I got about it being a story about some good ol' boys protecting their borders from the evil invading alien horde...
It’s honestly not feeling like it’s justifying borders. You see from what I can tell they’re a bunch of farmers selected to begin terraforming or cultivating plant life in the planet. Now if we take a example of colonial America what did the first settlers do? Build towns with walls since the walls protects them from an Unkown threat that could be there. It has parallels with colonialism and is interesting. I just think it’s getting way too looked into than what the creator thought it would like.
I haven't wat hed yet but the title has me feeling seen. I felt like I was the ONLY one who didn't like this show, most of the eps left such a bad taste in my mouth. Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave Also Jack Saint??? My fav whiteboy feminist beta male??? Sign me tf up
14:57 Maybe I am overthinking this, but it looks like there was some intent to use the darkness of the scene to make the spider form at first appear humanoid and effeminate (the light catching on the 'top of the head', 'breasts', 'forearms', and 'knees' as she walks towards the viewer and into the light)- albeit heavily abstracted- to intensify the reveal of this much more bizarre form that isn't even approximately human, much less feminine in most folks' conception of the concept. Just food for thought.
Zima blue is really the only epsiode ive gone back too. Overall I love the heavy metal (the movie) concept the show but overall i felt disapointed by the series, some of the episodes are pretty forgetable.
I mostly just liked the world of Sonnie's edge and it'd be cool to have some fucked up game like that, ultraviolence fighting game with mutations and stuff sounds rad.
Ok, i think this is the last time im going to have to upload this. thank u all for your patience & support
Eric Taxxon to be fair, Shapeshifters was directed by a woman.
gabriele isn't a woman, just italian
@@Patricia_Taxxon the 2 genders
the next season has a female supervising director (ie in charge of the vision of the entire season). That was already announced a month ago, variety.com/2019/tv/news/love-death-and-robots-renewed-season-2-netflix-1203238060/
Thanks for your persistence!
"Good Hunting" is based on a Ken Liu short story (2012) of the same name. In the short story the rape and "rebuilding" of Yan is told only through her dialogue and it is not at all titillating. In Ken Liu's original story, the plot point of Yan's literal body being altered against her will is building on the larger themes of colonialism, western imperialism during this time in history, and the forced "modernization" of China . "Good Hunting" is not by any means my favorite Ken Liu story but Love Death and Robots does not manage to communicating the themes of the original short story(imo) and presents Yan as a sex object through the visual storytelling.
So what you're telling me is that they appropriated a story about appropriating
@@a.parker7362 yeah
Exactly. The horror is still there, but it's the horror of someone entirely unable to meaningfully affect their fate or protect their own body in the face of colonization.
Im really starting to think ive gotten so used to ignoring this that my brain only semi registers it, since thats kinda the point i got from the show too. And the second part might totally be me putting things into the material, but to me Yans sexualization by everyone in the narrative except for Liang meaningful for her comfort with him and their relationship.
I remember Ken Liu! He was the guy who translated that chinese short story collection "Broken Stars".
For anyone wondering, SFW means ‘sexy fox woman’
And this video is made by a Cringey Projecting Misandrist a CPM.
@@CondorCalabasas b- whuh,...
@@CondorCalabasas how are they at all mysandrist? Or is not male supremacist considered mysandrist?
@@squidcultist0022 Because they are suggesting the objectifying of women has anything to do with men, when women are 100% the cause of the problem. Sexual objectification is an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with men.
If women being sexy, or wearing less clothes/naked is sexist, then why is that exactly what real women do?
@@CondorCalabasas Mate, I dunno how to break this to you, but... in media, particularly in film, everything you see on screen is the result of a deliberate choice. In the case of Love, Death + Robots, the director of every episode is male, and (so far as we can tell) straight. That doesn't mean anything in and of itself, but in the case of the sexual objectification of women throughout the show, it's absolutely something decided upon by men, as it is through much of media.
Women being sexy is not a sexist thing, not on its own. Portraying women in media purely through a sexualised lens when omitting or specifically desexualising male bodies, on the other hand, is sexist.
The sexiest male-coded character in this entire anthology is a goddamn pool cleaner.
I'm trying to use this series to talk to my husband about having more conversations about objectification. He told me I would LOVE the twist for Beyond the Aquila Rift, but I couldn't be anything but disappointed, both in him and the show. In the show because this episode is literally nothing without the sex scene, and it's incredibly annoying to watch, and in him for not seeing why I would get so upset. He watches film analysis and feminist theory videos with me, so I'm just hella confused. I'm super tired of watching women getting fucked when I just want to watch a good story.
I smell a porn parodyyyyy!
Just like in Mulholland Drive!
@@justjess6636 RIP your poor Husband.
@@justjess6636 this is an old comment, but I think I understand where your husband is coming from. Not that I disagree with you, hell no, there was really no need for a lot of the nudity and sex scene (in fact, cut that out, just focus on the guy not being able to concentrate on the problem that's right in front of him while his crewmate is very much onto it and the rift this causes between them), but the story does try and frame itself in a 'I am actually critisizing the male gaze'. And it's easy to fall for, even as a creator.
Having said all that, I do think that Love Death and Robots is mostly style and often times very little substance, and a lot of substance is basically spilled by focussing on the amount of gore and nudity. Most of the stuff is there for us to think 'ooh, that looked so cool'. Not always bad, I really liked the episode with the farmers, even if it is just an action scene, but it was fun and well paced.
"Have you ever thought about why Top Gun feels so gay?"
I am literally incapable of conceiving any other thought.
Yea its funny how you quoted this, as this quote itself has nothing to do with the male gaze, and is nothing more than a gay man projecting his sexuality on to the viewer. Of course he thinks about how gay he is when he sees a bunch of shirtless men in a scene lol. Its hilarious he thinks that has anything to do with the male gaze, when it has everything to do with his own sexuality.
@@CondorCalabasas you should watch the actual video lol
I think top gun feels gay because two guys look into each others eyes and say "ive got the need, the need for speed"
Any dialogue that awkward is between two people that want to get down to it.
I don't think topgun is gay at all.
@@melo7038 watch the second one.
⚠️ LOUD NOISES (+FLASHING COLORS/LIGHTS) for titles (after introductions) at 2:55-3:07, 3:55-4:00, 10:06-10:14, 16:09-16:16 ⚠️ PROLONGED FLASHING COLORS from 21:55 to the end
******CLIPS TO SKIP LOUD NOISES BELOW******
0:00 for the warnings and intro to the whole video
-------wait until 2:53 (warning especially for those with sensitive eyes and/or epilepsy)
-------⚠️ flashing lights - wait until 2:50 and skip!
3:07 starting the talk
-------wait until 3:54 (slight warning for potential sensitive eyes)
4:01 *Good Hunting* ; clip from Reservoir Dogs; clip from Oldboy; *Sonnie’s Edge* ; *The Secret War*
-------wait until 10:05 (this one’s really loud and kinda bright, so be careful 🤞)
10:14 *Beyond the Aquila Rift*
-------wait until 16:09 (this one comes quickly so be careful)
16:17 *Shapeshifters* ; *The Witness*
(⚠️Epilepsy warning! If you have sensitive eyes, avoid looking at the screen from 21:55 to the end!)
- The ending message is still good to listen to, but the visuals may be too much for some viewers
Appreciate these warnings
my hero
“18 entire episodes of frankly unprecedented stylistic episodes and EVERY one of them wants me to be straight” THANK you for explaining how I feel watching every piece of media in the world. i’m both appreciative and exhausted
with me it is "every piece of media thinks only one type of woman is attractive" and how that affects me as a woman is two-fold:
1) I'm fat! So. Not the best for my body image to only ever see in media women whose waists could fit in the circle of air between my thumb and index finger if I join them 👌 Also the excessive objectification that no other demographic of people are subjected to makes me feel gross about being of my gender, of being a woman. Also not the best feeling
2) I feel offended as a bisexual as these straight dudes behind the camera (or the straight dude target demographic informing the piece of media) lack imagination and are lazy. The type of sexy you want is boring my dudes! And again, the objectification is off-putting and does not turn me on
Its because 95% of the population is straight...
@thanks guys i got 3 subscriber no vids ok
That isn't explaining how you feel. You have a victim complex, you feel that you're a victim when you aren't. That is explaining how you feel.
There is a straight female gaze that is infinitely greater of an issue, but you wouldn't know anything about that would you.
Art is depicted by an artist, sometimes that artist has a sexual orientation that you don't share. Thats literally it, thats all the depth there is. You need help. Go watch some gay, or straight female gaze movies and you'll feel much better I'm sure.
@@oof-rr5nf You objectify women by saying they are that thin. Your personality is gross to be honest. A healthy body is the best body image...
You don't feel offended as a bisexual, you feel offended as someone with a victim complex.
everybody gangsta until the video author fursona crosse its arms
anzhaanxirkrcjlgk stop
"There's 18 slots and you already gave us a season of full of male directors. Why don't you give us a shot?"
I know this video is absolute hell for you to upload, and I feel for that Patty. I just want to say that that line has given me chills and these tears of just, marveling, happiness. I can't believe their power.
Except there are female directors more then 30% of them are women
@@abusivechancletas9999 That's just a lie bro they're all men
I thought we are at an age where gender shouldn’t matter?
It’s about the person not what’s between there legs.....
@@brettthebest3978 right but if women are saying they don’t like the way they’re being portrayed in media wouldn’t it make sense to put more women in the room where these ideas and concepts are created? i’m sorry but what you’re saying is naive.
@@senakumapley9800 not everything you made needs to be political correct u’know
If ur story is about that or you want that in it go right ahead its ur story
But if ur story is something else and shouldn’t be view as such
You shouldn’t be force to do that
This video is so validating. I thought i was being over-sensitive for not enjoying this series (except of course Pool Guy episode and the one with the cats and robots)
I think people are being overly-sensitive, if I'm being honest. Coming from a bi enby. I don't see what's sexist or wrong about horny garbage like this. Are people not allowed to enjoy horny media for straight people anymore? If it was equally as horny, but with most of the stories being about lesbian or gay dudes... would people be as upset over it? I don't think so.
Yo I loved the cats & robots episode hell yeah
@@bugjams No but it’s like the female presenting body being sexualized is a long long story, and unnecessary nudity is just further sexualizing female body and it’s characters by inviting the audience to join in.
I’m not against nudity, but this type of nudity is just so out of proportion. As a cishet female I’m not against being horny and wanting to see nudes but there are plenty of opportunities to throw in male nudity.😢
@@bugjams I think you are missing the point. There is nothing wrong with the show being horny, as the autor of this video said. But it only sexualizing women and in such a dehumanizing way. This isnt made for straight people but straight men. The sexualization is often placed on moments where it becomes offensive. Did we really need to sexualize a woman being sacrificed, another one while she run for her life, and nother one while she went a forced operation?
And even so, what is overly sensitive about critizing a show and saying hey maybe they need to make this changes for the next season?
The truth is that as a woman it was uncomfortable fro me to watch. There is nothing wrong with the target audience being hetero men, the issue is with how they portrayed women. Is how obvious it is that women in this stories are just sex objects. Sonnie's edge was incredibly difficult to watch. And when you start annalyzing it, its hard.
But believe me, if it had gay dudes or lesbian i would still be disgusted if they still portrayed women as theyve done.
@@afgusti4269 So it's a collection of media aimed at heterosexual men, and yet you're somehow disgusted that the women are sexualized? It's a fantasy, not reality. Heterosexual women would probably like it if you replaced all the sexy women with sexy men. There's nothing wrong with sexualization if you're being blunt and honest about it. Even objectification. That's what erotic fiction is. There's erotic fiction that objectifies men too, and nobody complains, because it's mainly made for women, so it's somehow not sexist.
Like, I get what you're saying, and I'm against objectification in media that's supposed to be realistic, serious, or otherwise believable in some way. But LDR is basically light porn. It'd be like going to a monster truck show and complaining that it's too loud.
see this might be because im a genuine monsterfucker but i actually liked the spider gf story the best because i sympathised with her plight. the tragedy is more on her end, being constantly assaulted by this ships filled with lost souls who refuse to let her help them. the fact she has to keep up these charades just to let them know she'll keep them safe and how they respond to her true form with vitriol every time. i thought the ending makes it pretty clear that our sympathies are meant to shift from tom to spider gf, since he literally gets his mind wiped. its not meant to be scary, its meant to be sad.
...but maybe thats because I wanna live in her gunky space web and im bitter he doesnt appreciate it >:O
Oh my god! Yes! So much fucking yes!
your take is morally wrong and i'm here for it
That episode made me fantasize about being lovingly cared for by a massive space millipede 😭
@@reran sameeee
Sonnie's Edge was the best episode of the series hands down for me by a MILE for similar reasons lmaoooo
I love Love, Death + Robots but it definitely over-sexualizes women. Like you said you really tell it was made by a bunch of straight dudes. I hope they fix this if they have another season because I love wild animation shows like this. I still love it but I like to see more stories that aren't made by really horny dudes using rape and boobs for shock value.
I just thought the plotlines didn't live up to how good the animation was. Like how you gonna waste this amazing art on shitty writers
Fursona BreadTube is my new favourite genre
"Hey, anyone wanna talk about the titty spider gf episode?
...hell yeah!" *EXTREMELY LOUD MUSIC*
I love you guys
i know it's because i am a philistine well on the path to destroying my hearing, but i really liked the music
Ugh I want a big tiddy spider bf
Actually the sexy spider gf is my favorite episode. It is a mixture of 2 main themes. Male gaze as said in the video, male rape victims. Since the episode ends with the mind wipe and reset, it's left open to interpretation whether or not the spider is evil, just preying on random ships or told the truth and cares for the stranded people that end up there. As such it's a comment on both and sadly also neither. Like most LDR episodes it just waves its hand at a bunch of themes and says: you figure it out.
Also the sex is really is just there to signal "THIS AIN'T YOUR NORMAL KIDS CARTOON! THIS IS FOR GROWNUPS, DAD!" but comes of just as really edgy.
What is that track??
Then I learned to read the description: Terrorfakt - Welcome To Hell
I'm super late but this video was incredibly validating and refreshing to hear. I wanted to enjoy this series so bad as an animator and animation fan, but I couldn't get over the show's treatment of gender and, as you put it, "only one flavor of horny" haha. Especially in the treatment of sexual assault or mutilation of a woman's body as if that's meant to be titillating: I found those scenes to be uncomfortable and distasteful at best and really disturbing at worst--not because things like ero-guro as an art form are bad by themselves, but because in the context of the story they were trying to tell, portraying sexual assault as erotic just felt out-of-place and wrong. I also really agree that it's not that onscreen nudity or erotic content shouldn't exist, it's that LDR only served the heterosexual male audience with its erotic content. Where are the sexy guys in suggestive poses with the camera zooming in on their bodies (*cough* Yan)? Where are the different body types? Really amazing video that summarized everything I felt about this show. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts!
I remember seeing only 2 episodes of
this show as recommended by a friend: Good Hunting and Sunnie's Edge in that order. The fan service in the first one made me cynical of the show's intentions, and then the second one is basically "this girl was raped and it made her into a monster who symbolically 'rapes' men" and I was like yep okay no more for me thanks
I feel that, as a monster fucker, I’m obligated to point out that furries and monster fuckers are not the same thing. Yes there’s some overlap, but on the whole they are very different communities.
As an ace person, the undying horniness of this series push me towards madness.
Lol as an ace I didn't notice a lot of these stuff. But the video was still very informative tho
8:20: And if Yan being forced to take the penultimate step was so important, just have her lose her legs in an industrial accident or something. Or even have her vaguely describe that something bad happened and she needed new legs to save her life. Anything is better than sexy dismemberment scenes! ...except for the guys with that exact fetish I guess.
14:35: From this summary, my take is that they were _trying_ to go subversive, but forgot to explain what was bad about the Truth beyond spider-Greta being unappealing. If there had been a twist beyond "Greta is actually an ugly spider alien," if she was using his titillation for some ulterior purpose, then the subversion might have landed. But then, I tend to give authors the benefit of the doubt when it comes to guessing intent.
Thank you! I've been trying to express for *years* how nudity can never be incidental in media. The human body is almost always shown in a sexualised manner if you see any of the "good bits", and if it is incidental, then it's censored to a larger or lesser degree.
I'm a naturist, so this is an extreme frustration for me, since I try and advocate that clothes-free lifestyles or expressions of the human body don't need to be considered sexual all the time. Yet the endless cycle of pop culture re-enforcing existing beliefs keeps rolling on.
I don't recall if it's archived or not, but there used to be a webcomic called "The Bare Pit" (formerly Loxie and Zoot) which is set in a naturist resort. That has entirely incidental nudity from people of all shapes, sizes and ages, none of which are ever censored or presented in a sexual manner.
I highly recommend it to see how nudity can be presented without male gaze framing.
Mystic Mind Analysis the male gaze doesn’t exist
God shut up you are boring...
@@BurningRubber454 It does unfortunately.
@@thenotsoamazinggracetnsag3463 actually it doesn’t
The problem is intent on the viewer. You can try to present it as 'non sexual', but the eyes of the beholder will decide that when the talk is about nudity.
Almost every short outside of Zima Blue, Three Robots, and the Mech Farmers was just cartoon titties, cursing, and blood to seem “adult and edgy.” I liked a few of them thematically, but I binged every short expecting edgy bullshit and coming away with the feeling of having watched exactly what I expected.
Though Sonnie’s Edge and the Cyborgs one had some pretty badass designs.
I mean ur right but that’s the point
It never try to be anything else than being “adult and edgy”
Why can’t we have stories like that?
Sucker of Souls was absolutely abysmal, hard to finish
@@Davesothoth I fucking hate the pussy jokes in it like they are so goddamn forced, the connection between the actual events of the plot and the joke they just made is such a stretch I'm surprised the episode didn't snap in half down the middle of that joke, then a different character does a similar joke and the character who made the first joke gets mad at her for not taking this seriously and then she proceeds to take things even less seriously and joke about how the blood of a previous character who died is on his body.
Like what's even the point of this episode?
i agree with 90% of this video, however, do you really not think there's something horrifying about being locked in an endlessly repeating dream while you waste away from everyone you've ever known? even if instead of a spider monster it was a beautiful woman I'd still think the entire situation was a little sketchy.
I came here from the nsfw version looking for someone to say that.
Honestly though horrible at first i could make peace with it, the spider monster seems genuinely kind and caring.
@@zayindarkmore1616 just frustrated with how common this sand how I've never seen a reversal of it. imagine if the genders were reversed, that'd be boundary-pushing
Honestly, it would be sad more than horrifying. And even if it was horrifying, the horrifying part would be what he has already experienced in a dream: being thrown God knows where with no chance of returning.
@@leonardorossi998 That's the scariest part to me still, the fact that by some small error he's now in the middle of empty nothing with no hope of ever getting back, with only the option to slowly die in a fake reality, or to slowly die in a giant living space insect nest
The spider episode deducted 10 sanity points from me
As much as I'm on board with the many points made in this video, I think the most important lesson I'm going to take away from this is that Jack Saint is adorable as a cartoon bird. xD
Well damn. I'm pretty sure this is your best video yet. I love your media critiques. Even when I disagree with you (and I don't at all in this case) you always make me dig deep and think hard about WHY I disagree. And when I agree with you, I'm usually shouting "Yes! Thank you! Where's the werewolf dick!?"
I was not expecting that last line, but well, I'll take it.
Edit: and so, I join the cry _Where's the werewolf dick!?_
I've been looking for an essay that is critical of this anthology since it came out, and youtube search engine have kept you hidden from me for over a year now, never showing this video. I am so fucking mad I am discoverng this only now, because this show upset me so much I actually didn't get past episode 4 I think (I later came back and watched Zima Blue to confirm that yes its great) and DEAR LORD I didn't know it Gets THIS MUCH WORSE with its depictions of women.
Great video, thank you so much for it.
The spider is like The Crane Wife. And I feel for their lovers' horror, as much as my asexual ass can, but I choose to believe that the stories continue "offscreen" and they come to their senses eventually. Like, I'll buy the horror, but come on, you can get over it! Plus, you don't *have* to sleep with her if you don't want to, you can still let her take care of you, jeez.
All that story needs is an extra couple minutes. Or a restructuring so the spider reveal happens sooner so they can move past it after.
I do confess to being a monsterfucker though lmao
OK that music was sudden and loud enough to kick my tinnitus in gear. Please balance audio better.
also the clips from the show were too quiet
i believe that was an intentional choice.
@@skele3310 it may have been an intentional choice but it's the one part of the video i didn't find enjoyable, personally. i feel like the points made about the show were great and i will still recommend it to people who ask me why i dislike love death and robots, but that the painfully loud music detracted from my over all enjoyment.
@@UnsanitaryCondition i can understand that.
i personally thought the sudden increase in volume was actually pretty funny and very on brand for eric, art is subjective and all that.
@@skele3310 i agree with all of this and still find that it detracts from the over all experience, For Me Personally, like i said before. please don't say "art is subjective" to people like they're children when they disagree with you. i know that, and i'm exercising my right to a subjective opinion right now.
jarring loud noise funny and on brand. i agree! i appreciate the joke in concept even if it made my ears ring!
but!
maybe a bit quieter next time for those of us with tinnitus or other issues with sudden loud noise? maybe even just a warning in the video to turn the sound down? i can't speak for maaz maaz, but that's literally all i'm saying.
Wish the music in the transitions was a bit less loud because it triggers my anxiety and jumpscares me, but *god* do i love your video essays
You're so fragile
The Unknown Psycho get fuuucked
@@psychobillynumbnuts1 alright, so?
everyone's got their issues and problems to deal with, you're just stating the obvious
This video was really insightful, clever and well worded overall. You make some brilliant points on how male and female nudity are treated. I also really liked your alternate story for Good Hunting, it would make so much sense for the woman to say "Magic is disappearing, I can no longer assume my true form, so I'll become a cyborg".
However, and please pardon my frankness, the Beyond Aquila Rift take was just really dumb. Don't get me wrong, you start off making perfect sense, Tom's gaze is obviously distorted by horniness and egotism (in fact, I'd say that the portrayal of the sex scene is so "malegazey" because the simulation is meant to cater to his tastes)... but you honestly can't hold that against him when discussing his reaction to the final twist of the episode. Even if the spider's intentions were honest and kind, nobody in their right mind would be happy to realise that they have to leave their entire life behind and spend the rest of their life alone in the far reaches of the abyss, being "cared for" by a horrifying, unfathomable alien god, it's one of the most hopeless, maddening scenarios imaginable and no amount of deconstruction could change that.
Moreover, the spider-aliens actions, even if well intentioned, are horrifically unethical. Its not like the creature offered him a choice. It didn't ask him if he wanted to be saved. It didn't ask if he wanted a false reality. It didn't even tell him his scenario. It jumped straight to deception and imprisoned him within a dream. Maybe the spider loved him, but it sure as hell wasn't a consensual love. When he awakes he's literally and figuratively caught in its web being force-fed happy thoughts.
Its absurd to call his reaction hypocritical or thinking with his dick. The woman he loved was an illusion crafted by the spider for him. He doesn't have any reason to believe that this act was benevolent. Nor does he have any reason to believe that the spider is anything like the illusion. All he knows for sure is that he has been lied to and imprisoned. The imaginary mind sex his captor provided does not and should not make him more comfortable.
Spiders often show up in gynophobic fantasies.
Hmm, you want to indulge me?
@@BurningRubber454 I would
But why? Why spiders?
@@squidcultist0022 Spiders are the hotest creatures. They are nearly literally all legs.
@@squidcultist0022 tropes about entanglement!
My friend group watched a pretty random selection of episodes and we, unfortunately, didn't watch any of your favorites. The experience was miserable overall, but we loved The Secret War (besides the surprise naked disemboweled woman scene). Great video, I'm going to go watch another!
Great critique. Don't want to generalize, but maybe there's something deeply misogynistic at work in CGI design culture (think female representation in video games).
Brb, suing Quantic Dream.
@@Martianorbit Good move. Keep us updated.
Honestly I just think it's a consequence of the tech industry still being quite male dominated, CGI design being no different. I think that will change with time though. I study Game Graphics and my class consists of 20 women and me, which is encouraging to see. On the programming side it's reversed though. Almost all guys and a couple women.
This is mental gymnastics, double think, and misandry. Women like to sexualize women. Women sexualize, and objectify women more than anyone else on the planet by far. There is nothing even somewhat misogynistic in gaming, or in CGI culture. Female representation in video games is literally better than it is for male representation. I know, I know you're a white knight, you couldn't actually care less about social issues, you're just desperately trying to get laid. Cringe.
@@CondorCalabasas dude
There is some good news. The second season is gonna have a woman (Jennifer Yuh Nelson) as a supervisor director and oversee all the episodes. So there is a chance that the show is gonna improve with in the sexual department
Watching this (and by this I mean the real uncensored version) was truly cathartic. You summed up my feelings on the series quite nicely overall. Sexualized images of women are not necessarily inherently bad, but sexualized images of women (and only one kind of woman) in the absence of any sexualization of men, robots, or vampire monsters, is pretty suspect. Using rape/sexual violence as a plot point is not inherently bad, but using it as an opportunity to titillate an assumed heterosexual male audience is pretty suspect.
i *love* how you said this!! THANK YOU!!
And yet as a male survivor, implying that there is anything remotely offensive about this Netflix series in terms of how women are treated outs you as a misogynist with a victim complex.
@@CondorCalabasas How so?
@@comradefrommars All the criticism you just said applies perfectly to the Magic Mike franchise yet we don't see people making that criticism because it isn't socially acceptable to be offended by good looking men's bodies like it is for women. This sexualization like cultural appropriation; is exclusively worship, celebration, appreciation. Nothing offensive or wrong with a nude attractive woman, thinking there is, is misogyny.
yeee
The uncensored version is so fucking fun to watch. I feel like youtube would be infinitely more entertaining if all of it's content restrictions were dismantled.
2:57 the only reason why i watched the show originally was because the trailer had industrial hardcore in it, and then you're just gonna open up a video essay with frenchcore????? i am instantly maximally invested
Even if you have a show that depicts female erotica, it doesn't have to be exploitative (though it usually is). What's especially disgusting about Good Hunting is that it sexualizes her terror; the fact that she's helpless. It sexualies the process of literally sawing into a woman and ripping her body apart for your own purposes. *and you can tell the camera fucking loves it.* The camera is jerking off to her pain and trauma. This is Ted Bundy shit.
It also just hurts the storytelling. The sequence sexualizing the horror is implicitly telling you not to care, that this is a weird sex fantasy. And that cannot be reconciled with the themes for me. I can only see this existing like this because the writers wanted to make amputation porn in a high quality format, but couldn't just pitch that to netflix directly so they wrote this story to get around it by framing it as a plot important scene.
I'm really sorry, but I just don't get some of this. Maybe someone can help me here.
Sonnie's Edge was really on-the-nose with the rape backstory and I wasn't a fan of the lack of subtlety, but I don't understand the counter-penetration comment. I just thought it was a cool monster fight...
The "saves woman from rape" moment with the huli jing was also a bit... obvious, but it felt like cathartic revenge for the episode, like stabbing back at the poison that seeped into their world. I also didn't feel like the shot before her legs were cut up was sexualized, it felt more like an expression of extreme vulnerability which added to the horror aspect of it for me.
I also don't agree with Jack on the Spider GF episode. The horror was that Tom was living a lie, not that the hot girl was actually a spider. It's a caregiver, benevolent or otherwise, deluding him into a false sense of security, and that's scary.
The Russian example didn't feel tittilating either, because HOLY SHIT SHE'S BEING DISEMBOWELED, that's fucking horrifying.
Hey, I'll agree that there are a lot of things that made even me uncomfortable (The Witness, like wtf was that strip show for???), and the lack of male nudity weirded me out, but many of the examples Taxxon and Jack spend the longest time discussing I simply cannot understand. Maybe that's just me being a cis-het white American dude, but I just don't see a lot of what the video called sexy or tittilating as such.
If anyone can help me out, that'd be awesome.
Dude, thank you so much for stressing my thoughts on the subject. Looks like this video completely misses the point of the show.
Igor Marcautan Cause it does!!! Ahahaha!
"but I don't understand the counter-penetration comment. I just thought it was a cool monster fight...
"
There is an incredibly obvious couple of shots in that fight, where the fight is framed to look like a rape scene. I don't know how you could've missed that.
"It's a caregiver, benevolent or otherwise, deluding him into a false sense of security, and that's scary. "
What exactly is "false" about that sense of security? As I far as I understood, the spider gf wasn't secretly planning to kill him or smth. She genuinely cared about him, so the only caveat seems to be that she is a gross spider monster.
"because HOLY SHIT SHE'S BEING DISEMBOWELED, that's fucking horrifying. "
Yes, but before we even see that, we first get a very clear shot of her ass and bush. As mentioned in the video, there are lots of good ways to show violence/nudity without being so gratuitous. I'd give this shot a pass, if it was in anything else. But it's in Love Death +Robots, where sexualized violence is commonplace, so I am not feeling charitable
@@igormarcautan8888 what's the point of the show then?
@@TooFatTooFurious counterpoint to the spider gf point: he looks extremely malnourished when he wakes up, meaning he wasn't being cared for appropriately.
Hate the overly loud music outbursts, love everything else 💖
This was a very compelling argumentation and also a very well edited video. Can't wait for next season now, provided it introduces some variety.
To be honest Sonnies Edge is one of my favourite pieces of media ever. I wish they didnt have the rape backstory, but i feel like it was a passable subversion of the trope and aside from that it is one of the most visually incredible things i have ever seen. The charicter design, lighting, movement, everything about it was amazing.
Also the dump episode was really fun, and lucky 13 was mindnumbingly boring
To be fair, the original “Good Hunting” short story (by Ken Liu) did have the plot point of Yan’s forced robotization. It didn’t have the gratuitous nudity though (because text, not visual), or the assault scene from the ending.
Okay I will say this much, in Good Hunting while I think they 100% didn’t have to show as much as they did and handled it clumsily, I don’t hate forcing Yuan to be a robot? It’s heavy handed and there are less exploitative ways to handle it, but it is I think a pretty obvi heavy handed example of “colonialism raping a culture,” I guess. I agree with the rest of your analysis and even your analysis of that scene, but I do see what they were trying to do? Not that that matters when the execution was, as you say, deeply problematic :T
Some of these episodes are essentially animated Black Mirror. I loved it.
If you haven't - watch *Animatrix.*
It's the same concept of short animations but based on Matrix movies.
This is amazing
You gotta throw the brown goths a bone.
Also audio balance good. Don't change the audio balance.
DifferentPerson Impeccable disguise.
I agree with almost everything you said here, but am I just missing something when I think the Woman in Secret war wasnt sexualized? I dont think Being naked is inherently sexual, and I just thought that scene was supposed to be scary and seeing a (presumably) innocent person strung up naked and disemboweled felt really y'know, demonic. Maybe Its something I dont get since I'm not straight but I feel like I can see the sexualized nature of the other female nudity but not this one
Yeah, being naked isn't inherently sexual, but she's being sacrificed. She's been forced to be naked and she isn't in control. That's what makes it fucked, the weird sexual framing of her body, and not her face and actual humanity, which I would argue would make it more terrifying and provoke a stronger reaction that this gratuitous body shot.
As a straight guy, I can safely say I wasn't turned on by the sacrificial lady simply because she was naked. I didn't lose any immersion in the fucked up demon shit simply because there were boobs and a butt there too. That scene was not sexualized. It simply had nudity.
@@vigorouslethargy yeah I think he’s stretching a bit of it IMO
@@aemcp Yan's face is prominently in frame and it's still an issue. I don't think Patty would be fine with the scene if the womans face was shown
It's a fucking cult sacrificing someone, what's sexual about it????
I friggin need more videos like this
This vid reminded me of one of the stories I wrote, where one of the main characters (a young girl who was a sort of trauma standin for myself at her age) was very violently abused by human traffickers in a similar way to myself.
Though, the abuse itself is never shown at all. What you saw was the effects, not the violence itself. You’d see her flinch, make poor interpretations of situations because of the psychological effects of the abuse, and eventually attempt suicide (just like I did).
The thing is though, it wasn’t all for some man to have motivation to do XYZ, it was her story, she was the main character. The only people who knew were her abusers, and the woman who bought her from the traffickers to get her away from them.
The story doesn’t end with theatrical revenge, it ends with a woman and her adoptive daughter walking alone in the desert, trying to find their way home.
The story is primarily about ideas of ownership, capitalism, abuse, and the real life effects being enslaved can have on a person. It was a complicated story, with a total of nine main characters. But Lyono was the most important to me. The other characters showed their trauma in totally different ways. Rohir Nahko, a several hundred year old Haruspex, was never without his Revolver, and refused to go outside at Night in spite of how afraid most people were of him.
For context Rohir is a trans man, but unless you had an exceptionally deep understanding of the world and it’s lore you’d never really know that outside of some of the fears he has that other men in the story don’t. That and the languages the characters speak have no word for “transgender”, Rohir is occasionally referred to with “brother of the blue sky” but most characters are not Hasveki Rodach like he is, and won’t pick up on the phrases meaning.
A man by the name of Rizev Karkanis shows his trauma via brutality, but it’s not played to be “cool”. Sometimes it’s played for humor, but the focus in those scenes really is more of how his history in special forces has stolen away his sense of peace and safety in life.
Finally somebody agrees that Zima Blue is the best episode.
The witness is probably my favorite, just because I’m a sucker for anything that panders to me as a kinky drag and burlesque performer. Zima Blue had the best execution though
the uncanny feeling that "Naked Monsters and Naked Robots" is surely the name of my favorite prog rock album, right? @22:46
The whole spider thing makes no sense, she clearly isn't looking after him because he is wasting away and his friends are wasted away, isn't it possible she was merely feeding on them.
It’s possible that she didn’t have anything to feed them, as her own nutritional needs might be so drastically differently from our own that the only “food” she had would be toxic to humans. It seemed like her intent was to make them as comfortable as she could until they inevitably passed away.
Comrade from Mars or maybe that the spider thingy is trying to make them be peaceful and less likely to attempt escape. In the ending you can see multiple ships in this “web” so I assume she puts the crew in some form of dream then feeds off them
The fuck are you supposed to feed someone in deep space?
This was meant to be a spiritual successor to Heavy Metal, which is also an anthology movie with animated shorts and the "male gaze" in mind. Nostalgia Critic panned it years ago, yet people still fondly remember it for nostalgic reasons.
This is a little late but Heavy Metal magazine was a grungy adult fantasy magazine following the underground comic scene of sex and violence with added fantasy stories on top. Heavy Metal the movie seems like a big mash of all those elements, a dumb dirty movie with great artists working on it.
I don't consume media that much anymore except occasionally watching radically different RUclipsrs and way too much weird music (just got into your stuff btw and I'm liking it). I've never understood much of the ideation of making diversity in creative outlets more necessary, until watching this. I watched the uncensored version and was honestly quite upset about the werewolf one, it's perfect to sexualize them as a subversion on the raunchy female sexualization, and I feel robbed for not seeing dog dick when there was fox ass. I feel the horniness directed at the women would be fine if it weren't for what you stated, the camera doesn't want the man naked. As a gay man who's going into the military soon it honestly upsets me even more about the clear discrimination against the wolves as if they're gay soldiers, then dropping it like a hot rock. However the market cap must grow while being fed false diversity by using token gay and trans characters just like they did and still do ethnic minorities. Now I remember why I stopped consuming common media. The male gaze effects even in ignorance.
After scrolling through comments and reading the rest I feel I should shed some light on the elephant in the room rather than just the part that spoke to me.
Rape is one of the worst story telling devices in most forms of media. Especially highly detailed and over sexualized forms of it. I know that Tarantino is a very male gaze type of director, but the scene of the kitsune getting dismembered only made me think of the scene in kill bill pt 2 with o ren killing the pedo Yakuza boss. The scene was very sexual and even showed her riding him but hidden by the covers before focusing on the true plot of the scene, the assassination of the boss. It seemed to lose track of that and even when showing her torture and dismemberment still focused on her nudity. Outlast whistleblower has a great scene somewhat like it with the doctor trying to saw you some new bits, and even though the whole plot in that scene was emasculation your dick isn't even the focus, it's the crazed man with an angle grinder.
@@the_weezman I think you are misremembering the Kill Bill scene, it is in volume 1 not 2 and there aren't any covers, and while she is straddling him (very sus I admit) there is no explicit detail that they are in the act of intercourse at the momement and in fact O ren is fully clothed
@@doubletrouble7355 You are correct, sorry. However still heavily implied, and the scene doesn't change with or without the clothes. Thank you for the correction though.
15:29 That are the two readings that make the most sense? Yeah, maybe from a Male Gaze perspective. If you throw that out the window, the episode accually gets more interesting than that.
I would go as far as saying that the protagonist of the story is the alien, not Tom. Beyond the Aquila Rift is about a alien that happens to inhabit an old, abandoned spacestation where every once in a while humans strand because of a rare malfunction of the warp gate created by another alien race. So with no idea on how to send the humans back and most of them going insane when they realize that they are stranded in a nightmare-ish place, she tries to gain the trust and explain what happened in simulations. There she can work out a solution by communicating with the humans in a comfortable location and atmosphere. I dont think the alien spider is very intelligent. She mostly goes by try-and-error in order to gain the trust of the humans to then be able to slowly open up about their current situation. She will have to find out how to do that on a person-by-person basis, because every invidual is different. So with that try-and-error approach she slowly gathers information that helps her acommplish that.
With time, she figures out what makes humans trust her. Comfort, a familiar Face, Intimacy, Love, Sex, Desire. In case of Tom, she figures out that he had a relationship with Greta, so she uses that to try and make him understand. We need to assume that she is doing this for a while now and thats how far she has gotten with x amount of simulations run. We can even see her use a sentence "it is nice to see a familiar face" Tom said to her in the previous simulation in the next one when she first meets him. It is obviously a very easy and primitive way which make me assume that the alien has only limited intelligence. That is just how far the alien spider has gotten with her try-and-error approach.
This is basically a moral dilemma. How would you approach such a situation where everybody goes insane when they realize where they are, that they are going to die and that there is only a scary spider alien monster with them? Do you outright kill the stranded people since there is no hope? Or do you ease their pain in simulations until they die? Or do you try to slowly open up about where they are and that there is not a lot of hope for rescue? So that maybe one day you will gain enough knowledge to help the people and send them back via cooperation with the stranded. Maybe a technician strands and he can send a message back so that others come and rescue them or they can activate another jump gate nearby.
Tom is just one of many. Many came before and many will come after him. Many more simulations will happen. There may or may not be a happy ending far in the future for future stranded people.
You could also argue that the alien spider is a hivemind trying to convience Tom to join the hivemind and everything she does is intentionally lying and manipulating him to accomplish that. That she is accually feeding on the stranded. I dont like this interpretation, probably because it turns her into a one-dimensional, malevolent villain, not a tragic moral dilemma. And there are also not a lot of hints towards that interpretation, so you would just have to roll with the assumption that she is a lying bitch all the way. But if she is so intelligent, then why does she use this primitive try-and-error approach. Thats where the whole hivemind interpretation falls flat.
Thats my intepretation by the way. Which I find much more interesting than whatever you got out of the episode with the Male Gaze perspective :S
TLDR: Your subjective assessment with Male Gaze is kind of incomplete because it leaves out a lot of details from the episode and only looks at it from the Male Gaze perspective. I prefer my analysis to yours. Which kind of applies to the whole series.
Had to say, thank you for this, was a great read and one i appreciated, when i first watched the series this episode stuck out to me and became my favorite.
The Alien spider's motivations can be guessed but the story does lead toward her being a more sympathetic and caring being. That she's taken it upon herself to care for the lost souls that end up trapped there, possibly just like her (If she is female at all).
I absolutely loved seeing a horrifying looking, intelligent alien that is essentially the 'good guy' in the story which is great to see as it's not often you come across media that tells that kind of story.
At first i didn't like the sex scenes at all in this short as it went on for far too long, but when reading your comment about trial and error made me re-think that whole aspect of the short.
@@Posts_Comments I am glad you liked it :)
I wasnt even sure if anybody would even read that wall of text.
While I can definitely see where you're coming from, I just don't understand where the implication of the alien being "good" comes from. It comes off more to me as another take on The Matrix, with how humans "live" a false life in their minds while their bodies are being used to generate power for the Machines. This spider creature lives in a massive web of long forgotten ships filled with the decayed remains of countless crews just like Tom's.
This is a feeding zone, "caught in the spider's web", for this creature. The psychic induced memories/simulations allow her prey to remain "alive" while it gains nutrition from them through some means. It is pretty on the nose with it being a spider-like creature with webs reaching far out into space, implying there is potentially far more of it's kind running around among the graveyard of ships.
This doesn't make the creature evil or good, but merely a being with some measure of sentience doing what comes naturally for all living beings. To consume, survive, and reproduce.
@@sackofpeas2470 Well, I guess I do not see the reason why the alien would go through all that trouble of trying to tell the crew where they are and that they are stranded with no hope. Why not just simulate different entirely and accually create a Matrix for them if she is feeding off them. Furthermore, it also makes no sense that she does grant Tom his wish to see reality as well as herself. Whats in there for her? Is she feeding off his terror? I am not so sure how such a being would evolve in the first place, but I guess if it exists, then we couldnt trust anything we saw. And I dont think that is the concept that is being presented here. I rather see the alien as a benevolent and carrying mother archtype with a twist on her appearance (which looks horrifying to us but is independent from her intentions) rather than a manipulative and egoistic force of nature.
Seth the male gaze doesn’t exist
As a male, I don't mind the female gaze
Lol ok
Jezus christ please turn down the music
The intermissions are rough. I had to stop watching at about halfway through. I'm surprised considering I'd expect a good chunk of people following Patricia are on the spectrum and might have sensory issues. Being stabbed with loud volume at absolutely random points in the video hurts. I know the video is old, but it *is* still up and on the channel, with no warnings accompanying it.
i completely forgot about this series except for the zima blue episode until now
You're right, so many episodes and only one single flavor of horny. I only got interested about the show when I heard about there being werewolves, and then the werewolf episode ends up being the absolute worst one! ...besides the secret war at the end, anyway. Zima Blue was insanely amazing though, like, some others were really good trash, but that one actually hit all notes of the title, "love, death, & robots" in such a neat way.
Thanks for re-uploading
Not normally a fan of RUclipsrs with rantsonas who cross their arms but this ain’t bad
I didn't know the word "rantsona" was a thing until now, woah
At long last, Eric Taxxon has come down from his throne once again to fill our content troughs. Oink oink
God I love The Witness, it’s the first time I saw Mielgo’s now very influential visual aesthetic. It works as a proof of concept of it. But it certainly falls into the overarching problem seen here. Jibaro also has issues, but it feels like a more self aware version of that first episode.
very late to this, but im realizing this is why i think devilman crybaby on the whole handled these aspects better? because i feel like it definitely, maybe not evenly, but also made sure that the male characters were sexualized- and also that any random male gaze exploitativeness, didnt feel so much as a fantasy but more as a reality (ex: the one completely full frontal nude of miki has pubes- which is not something you would see in anything ever, on top of it because directly because its his from perspective and shown to be a not healthy good thing)
im realizing thats completely random and hardly related, but its something i thought about it and felt like word vomiting on the internet about
also im curious why you dont like the 3 robots. i always liked that one.
Damn I love love death and robots and that was a really difficult critique to have to hear. But I’m better for having heard it.
I love your videos but the loud music makes this one really hard to want to watch
Beyond the Aquila Rift is a short story by Alistair Reynolds. I have read most of his books and yeah, I don't really know what his views are either. He has a really really negative view of humanity as pretty much every human being is bad and the general populace are dumb masses. Yet all the books are about saving humanity from annihilation by the suppressors. The characters go to some ridiculous extremes to achieve their goals even though there is never anything shown that would be worth saving. The Sludge Aliens even propose an alternative: just fucking hide and wait till the suppressors are gone again, yet that's not even considered.
So yeah, I never really got what the entire thing was ultimately about. Mostly the scifi tech I guess as a lot of time is spent explaining physics and stuff.
PS. The final book in the series is really really awful, kills off the main character of the previous book in the first few pages and then stumbles along into forced twist that wasn't foreshadowed at all.
tbh they should just make a show about those farmers with mechs fighting the bugs
"now you have to live with a creepy spider that loves you"
It was even harder getting through the second half of this vid
If the spider alien not being a hot lady isn’t part of the horror then explain how when she walks toward the camera in her true form it’s lit in such a way to give the vague shapes of a human or at least humanoid head, legs, arms and big breasts, and then the light reveals more limbs and body parts
Problematic sure, but I enjoyed it. I'm not adverse to more diversity in the medium for viewers that aren't me.
12:12 I was gonna rebut with "to some people *ahemrule34ahem*" but I actually went to rule 34 and searched up love death and robots, and literally all the porn (all 8 images) was of Khanivore so yeah, your right.
This was an awesome video (I originally saw the NSFW version) subbed!
Hey I like your name
Thanks for the link. The unedited version was quite 👌
Also, I think the werewolf myth has a lot of potential as a metaphor for toxic masculinity that is varely explored most of the time (there is a Jack Nicholson movie, the Twilight accidentaly does it, and thats kind of all the examples I know) ... But its potential also varies from culture to culture (sudamerican werewolves, for example, are extremely aichmophobic and would visciously pursuit and kill anyone who cuts them, because the smallest injury could reveal their human identity. Violently harm anybody to mantain secret your vulnerability? I don't know you but to me that sounds a lot like "toxic tough-guy machismo")
23:10
Hell, don't just stop at sexuality, represent as many taboo sexual desires as possible in there until watching it feels like browsing /d/
yes, i agree, but without sexualization of anyone underage ever
IDK about this one chief. I'd love to see more fetishes and kinds represented, but some things are taboo for a reason. Don't wanna see any pedo-shit, or bestiality or incest etc in my media, no matter how "edgy" it tries to be.
I thought the spider lady was feeding off their minds in some way, hence how emaciated he looks.
I know this video is 4 years old but I just want to give my outlook, that this whole video is correct I mean for the series claiming how 'messed up' it is I really did not see it, it was like your daily adult swim tv show just more of woman being exploited, honestly I mainly watched it for it's amazing art and stylizing but at one point I got tired of seeing naked woman every 2nd episode and just got out my laptop and just did random shit, I used the series at background noise since yes, visually Love, Death & Robots is really great but plot wise they really need more woman on the team since it's disgusting to say that I got used to seeing naked woman, and when are men are considered to be 'naked' its used for a funny joke, or for a gross factor and when not used like that their thing just fly's across the screen or the camera just just extremely far away from the character but with woman, nope they just close up on everything beside their face and its gross, the episode The Witness is a good example of that since I loved the episode probably my favourite episode, it had a cool hook to the story and an amazing art style but the random ass str*p club why was that needed, and not to mention after the girl leaves the club SHES STILL NAKED, I mean yes she was being chased but we did not need to see her chest for this supposed too be thrilling and suspenseful scene.. But for the most part I enjoyed the series mainly for the art and all the episodes that didn't include anyone naked and had a good plot point, but they really need to get more female directors.
The Like + Dislike Bar is Kinda Sexist (feat. Eric Taxxon)
Being ace causes love death and robots to lose a lot of draw for me
Sonny's Edge was a short literally about how no one saw past the Rape and it irritated the hell out of the Sonny, and how her real advantage was that she'd become an incredibly powerful monster in fact (instead of by proxy) whose sexualized form is an entirely disposable act covering for her true self (the powerful monster)... whereas for the men around her they are truly monsters in their true human forms, but by proxy become visibly mostrous acts.
It was represented here through the main male Villain's conclusion, as a story about a girl who got raped and thus has superpowers. The REAL STORY is that she's changed their game, and the part they sexualize and feel power over is little more than an Anglerfish Lure for something more powerful and deep.
But the episode where a man is repeatedly raped(via deception and literal mindfuckery) by an alien pretending to be his ex is the feminist one? I really really hope I'm misunderstanding.
oh i thought you were gonna talk about the game, but ill watch this too
Edit: Wait thats choice of robots, nvm
This was a good video except for the music being waayyyy too loud and hurting my ears with headphones. Can you please not.
3rd times the charm
*looks at third reich*
@@blipboigilgamesh7865 *jazz music stops*
I really hope you’ll cover season 2!!
I tried to get through the series but just couldn't. When the Robotech farmers episode felt like it was justifying building a border wall, I started feeling sick. Well, more sick than I already was.
I'll be honest, maybe it's just me but I'm not pulling any of these subtextual meanings from these works. I don't see how a premise of establishing rural agriculture on a hostile alien world equates to the US immigration discussion... I just don't. If you could explain it to me, I'd appreciate it, because I agree with the sentiments expressed but am befuddled at the cited examples.
Come to think of it, wasn't the crux of the plot that the wall failed?
I really liked that episode as being rather on the wholesome end of the series, but yeah, it's hard to shake the bitter feeling I got about it being a story about some good ol' boys protecting their borders from the evil invading alien horde...
It’s honestly not feeling like it’s justifying borders. You see from what I can tell they’re a bunch of farmers selected to begin terraforming or cultivating plant life in the planet. Now if we take a example of colonial America what did the first settlers do? Build towns with walls since the walls protects them from an Unkown threat that could be there. It has parallels with colonialism and is interesting.
I just think it’s getting way too looked into than what the creator thought it would like.
Dude you guys are professionals at reaching oh my god.
4:11 I loved this story it was so heart wrenching and bitter sweet
little did she know, the show wanted patty to be gay all along
I realize this comment is about 3 years late but as a spider hybrid myself I have no clue what bug furries are called
I haven't wat hed yet but the title has me feeling seen. I felt like I was the ONLY one who didn't like this show, most of the eps left such a bad taste in my mouth. Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave
Also Jack Saint??? My fav whiteboy feminist beta male??? Sign me tf up
14:57 Maybe I am overthinking this, but it looks like there was some intent to use the darkness of the scene to make the spider form at first appear humanoid and effeminate (the light catching on the 'top of the head', 'breasts', 'forearms', and 'knees' as she walks towards the viewer and into the light)- albeit heavily abstracted- to intensify the reveal of this much more bizarre form that isn't even approximately human, much less feminine in most folks' conception of the concept. Just food for thought.
Please stop blowing my ears out
I've liked and commented, but I saw the original yesterday and it was good!
Zima blue is really the only epsiode ive gone back too. Overall I love the heavy metal (the movie) concept the show but overall i felt disapointed by the series, some of the episodes are pretty forgetable.
I mostly just liked the world of Sonnie's edge and it'd be cool to have some fucked up game like that, ultraviolence fighting game with mutations and stuff sounds rad.
Really digging the music in this one