You are proceeding to a page containing mature content. Is this OK?

check Yes, show me everything
close No, hide anything sensitive

Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari Very Problematic: “Women Never Fake R**e Accusations!”

As previously prophesied, false r**e accusation anime Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari managed to enrage those online who take offense at the mere thought that a precious woman could falsely accuse a man of violation.

Anime News Network has been receiving a lot of flak after one of their critics ranted about the author’s “personal hardships” – some particularly incendiary quotes from the review:

Framing a show around a false r**e accusation doesn’t automatically make for a terrible story, but it does potentially provide an indicator of where the author is coming from. Though some authors are more transparent in their attempted social commentary than others, each choice a writer makes will carry with it some unavoidable real-world baggage.

A false r**e accusation isn’t always the wrong choice, but it is always a weighty choice that relies heavily on context. We exist in a world where rapes are staggeringly under-reported, women are constantly shamed and attacked for acknowledging abuses against them, and false r**e reports are a tiny statistical aberration, vastly overshadowed by the number of assaults that are not reported at all. Given all this, Shield Hero’s premise feels like a tone deaf story choice at best, and an indicator of the author’s own feelings about women at worst.

In context, Shield Hero’s premiere did every conceivable thing in its power to communicate that this was the latter case. But this author isn’t just angry at women—his bitter paranoia extends to basically everyone around him.

Though Naofumi himself is already unlikable in a casually misogynistic way (at one point he assesses a very vague drawing of a woman to be “too slutty to be a princess”), all of his compatriots are pointlessly rude and mean to him at all times. There’s not much established motivation for them to hold a grudge against him; they’re just mean because someone at some point was mean to the author, and this is his way of working through those feelings.

Despite the Shield Hero ostensibly being one of the four people who will save this planet, everyone immediately responds to Naofumi with resentment and derision, presumably because that’s how the author sees certain people around him.

It’d be hard enough to buy into this under-developed video game world under any circumstances, but the fact that this world’s salvation myth has to constantly justify the protagonist’s relentless victim complex makes it feel even less like a complex narrative and even more like an unpleasantly bitter venting exercise.

Through the course of a “trial” that feels eerily similar to several paranoid conspiratorial memes about feminists I’ve seen online, Naofumi finds himself villainized by everyone, crucified by all of the author’s social anxieties and hangups about women at once.

“Her kindness was all fake,” Naofumi thinks to himself, articulating the resentment of a million boys angry that simple kindness did not equal sexual interest from a woman.

Many around the internet shared similar hatred for the anime:

Leave a Comment

All comments must abide by the commenting rules.

230 Comments