Quote:
Originally Posted by kyp275
Sounds like a personal problem to me.
If someone have grievances towards perceived negative trends of characterization in anime or literature in general, by all means voice them, in the proper forum and/or thread. Every story should be judged individually on their own merit.
Personally, what's far more annoying than the damsel-in-distress setting is the drove of people who inevitably shows up right afterwards to complain about it.
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There is a tendency for undue criticism to fall on characters who are turned into damsels in distress through no fault of their own, rather than the writers who decided to make things that way, which can be annoying. Some people will say that if a woman in media can't fight for any reason or shows any weakness, she suddenly becomes worthless - which is actually a really sexist point of view. Personally I'm not sure what to think about what Sword Art Online is doing at the moment; it'll all depend on how it treats Asuna throughout the rest of the arc. SOA has mostly treated her well.
Aside from that, I'm unsure what you're suggesting. It looks as if you're saying that people should not look at stories in the context they appear in - that stories should not be critically examined or compared to their peers or trends in any way, or that if they are, that examination should be in special forums dedicated for the purpose. If so, I think that's absurd. It would mean that people couldn't say, for example, that a series has good graphics (because there would be nothing to compare it to!). We would be unable to say "Yes, SOA has the tired imouto-love trope, but at the time it was written it had not been over-used yet, so let's not blame it for that". All those things require looking at the series in context and comparing them to their peers.
Trends, context, and problems which occur within them are not simply "personal problems". Media reflect the society that people live in, in some ways. To use another example with a similar structure to the one above - if you get a live-action British or American series A where all of the characters are, say, white except for a black guy who dies in the first five minutes, and there is no particular in-series reason for that distribution, that may be all right in isolation. But not if its peers series B, C, D, E, F, G and so forth all do the same, and a trend begins to appear, betraying racism. Somebody pointing out that racism in series A would not be wrong to do so - they would not be facing a neurotic "personal problem" - and it would not be right to dismiss them merely because other fans of series A did not want to hear any criticism of their favourite show.