Signal boosts

[petrea_mitchell]

A couple of things you probably haven't seen reposted a zillion times already:

Campaign Zero has been collecting the research on what works and what doesn't to reduce police violence. Whether you want to demilitarize the police, fix their training, or replace them with some other people entirely for non-life-threatening situations, Campaign Zero has the details on how.

"Pride, Policing, and the Conservative Politics of My Hero Academia" at Anime Feminist picks apart a worldview you may recognize from a fair amount of Western media.

(Also, My Hero Academia is terrible for other reasons too, please stop helping promote it, sf fans. If you want to encourage people to watch a foreign show using Western superhero tropes, then here are a couple of recommendations: Tiger & Bunny, where the guy who wants to outright execute all criminals is a secondary antagonist and the heroes include an extravagantly non-tragic nonbinary person; and Concrete Revolutio, which is about the messy intersection of freedom, justice, and truth set against a background of 1960s turmoil.)

Comments

[petrea_mitchell]

I feel that understanding another culture's biases can make it easier to see our own, especially if they are similar ones. For instance, I have long listened to minority voices calling out persistent problems with depiction of non-white people in Western media, but there is a level at which I did not truly understand it until I saw the anti-white racism that's part of the background noise of anime.

[delosharriman]

Mind you—

Under those social assumptions, where one group of superpowered people is using their powers/"quirks" in a way which they assert to be for the benefit of society as a whole, they are automatically the heroes. Another group opposes them, & are automatically the villains. A better show than MHA would pull on that string, let the protagonist get in deep with the "hero" faction & then lead him to question whether it is in fact what it claims to be; but no more than about 20% of shonen anime, I'd say, have that level of self-awareness.