(Hated)changing somenthing to be more "progressive" ends up being a bad thing

[u/Morr4Seiya]

Now to be clear,i am not one of these "anti-woke" losers that complain some people exist,and i am also not the type to complain about changing somenthing in a new version or adaptation,however there are cases where it did ended up being a bad idea.

-In the anime of Cowboy Bebop there is the character Gren,despite being short lived the character is very memorable specially thanks to his tragic story.Basically his story was that he was a soldier from the titan war who was a great friend with Vicious(the main bad guy)after the war he was emprisioned thanks to Vicious who testified against him and he was forced to take a experimental drug that caused him hormonal problems,giving him a feminine appearence and even breasts.

In the Netflix live action,for some reasons they decided Gren was going to be non-binary,which wouldn't be a problem(some people believe he was gay in the anime)if it wasn't for the fact that they also removed all the nuances and complexities that made the character memorable and interesting,instead of a tragic war veteran that was betrayed and had his body changed against his will,Gren is just kinda there.

-The original Rugrats cartoon had the couple Betty and Howard,Betty was a big and masculine woman while Howard was a smaller and nervous man,it was a genuine interesting relationship that stood out from the other couples who were the standard straight couple.

In the new series however they replaced Howard with a woman named Trish,two things,first off why?What was the problem with having a woman being the stronger in a straight relationship?Second why does Hollywood seem to think that every tomboy or masculine woman is a lesbian?

Overall not the worst thing but it is jarring that they had a gender reverse roled that was progressive and decided that wasn't enough.

-Oh man,this one pisses me off the most so i am gonna have to break it down

So back in the late 80s and 90s there was this anime called Saint Seiya also knows as Knights of the zodiac,it tells the story of knights who fight for the Goddess Athena to protect earth,being divided in the golden,silver and bronze knights,the anime was a huge hit in latin america and Europe and while it floped in the US it still has a loyal fanbase.

Being a fan myself i can't recommend it enough,now granted the story does have a fair share of flaws,and that's because the author was honestly just making stuff up as he went along(also a lot of side characters are poorly used or even forgotten about)still it is a great story you should check out

But then a couple of years back Netflix got the rights and decided to a 3D reboot,in this reboot they decided to make the story more "american" to try to bring more american viewers,now i could go on and on a big rant about how that was a bad idea and the execution was so terrible that it made me want to strangle someone but this post is about one specific change.

So Saint Seiya has five main characters,those are Pegasus Seiya,Dragon Shiryu,Cygnus Hyoga,Phoenix Ikki and finally Andromeda Shun.

While the other four characters were the standard masculine and brute male characters who were always ready to throw punches,Shun was smaller,more sensitive and even feminine looking,a pacifist who didn't liked fighting,but don't mistake that for weakness because Shun was loyal to his friends and was extremely powerful.

Then Netflix decided to change Shun into a girl named Shaun.

So wait,you have a male character who goes against every male stereotype and you turn him into just another generic female character?

When asked about it,the showrunner Eugene Son said he made that change because there was no girl in the group and having a all boys group wouldn't be acceptable nowadays

First off that's not true because Athena was also part of the main cast,yeah she wasn't the fighting type but she still helped quite a lot in the story even saving the knights on several occasions,second if you wanted to add a girl to the main group why not use Marin or Shaina?Hell,if you were going to change the story anyway why not turn Seiya sister into a knight?

Thankfully this monstrosity was cancelled(so much for trying to bring more fans)

[u/Theta-Sigma45]

I hated Gren becoming a camp stereotype. He was one of the best characters in the original show and one of the characters I most related to. It was never really about his sexuality or gender; his loneliness and longing to believe in someone genuinely got me.

The non-binary aspect was trying to ‘update’ him having breasts in the anime due to experimental drugs. There is a lot to dig into about how well that aspect has aged, but making him a completely different, far more shallow character isn’t the way to go about it.

[u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 → u/Theta-Sigma45]

I think it aged fantastically. Gren is essentially an example of what trans people go through when they experience the 'wrong' puberty. He is, for all purposes a man, and its implied he feels a lot of body dysmphoria over having undergone forced feminization. His whole plan was more or less to get revenge and die because he had very little reason to keep living. He wasn't happy with the way he was.

[u/GrittyGambit → u/ThatKaleidoscope3388]

Wow, I never made that connection before to the wrong puberty thing but that seems to carry more weight than what I had thought watching the anime. For some reason, Gren always stuck out in my mind as accepting (but not forgiving) what happened to him and embracing his body's gender as other. He was always unambiguously male in my eyes, but accepted his body as something else. His unhappiness didn't seem to stem from the fact his body had changed, it stemmed from the fact that it changed because of betrayal.

But Gren's past and body being a transmasc allegory is a just as, if not more, interesting take.

[u/pinkstrawberymonster → u/GrittyGambit]

because that's what happens, you accept that this how things are now because you don't want to face the pain every day, you become numb to it... until you discover there is something you can do to change and suddenly it's the one thing you want more then anything in the world. 

[u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 → u/pinkstrawberymonster]

Yeah, even in the shower scene, Gren acts like he’s basically disassociating constantly.

[u/pinkstrawberymonster → u/ThatKaleidoscope3388]

That one hits close to home. 

[u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 → u/GrittyGambit]

The clue to look for is how he constantly looks and acts like he’s disassociating. His eyes are almost always glassy and unfocused in every scene he’s in.

CB uses a lot of symbolism too, and Gren and the entire Jupiter segment has a sort of hazy / foggy / dream like quality to it.

It’s also interesting to watch his assassination attempt on viscous. He basically makes zero attempt to try to preserve his own life during it. I’d almost describe it as lazy really, like he didn’t actually care about the outcome all that much. He just wanted to see which way things would fall so it would be over.

[u/MommaBigDick → u/Theta-Sigma45]

And it shows that the producers/writers, though acting like they're progressive and understanding, dont even understand the difference between being non-binary and looking androgynous.

Gren in the anime was mostly androgynous and the main cast all believe (correctly) he is a man.

When Faye opens the shower curtain to confront him, she notices the breasts and asks if hes a woman, then notices the rest and asks what he is.

Gren looked androgynous but was a man, full stop.

This next part is purely conjecture on my part, but I think the anime was trying to allude that Gren was being chemically castrated as part of his sentence, and the medication they were using to do so was experimental and caused elevated levels of estrogen by accident.

[u/oujikara → u/MommaBigDick]

Exactly. I haven't seen the shows so I don't have the full context, but this change sounds so incredibly anti-progressive, transphobic even. Any nonbinary person would tell you that a character should be enby because they simply are, not because their body is.  It's like they're saying that you have to conform to whatever your body's sex is. That if you're intersex or whatever then you have to be nonbinary.

And when you add the circumstance of it being done to him against his will, it becomes even more disturbing. So you have to just accept and bow down to whatever your abusers do to you? Let it control your life? Like what message are we trying to send here? 

[u/PrezMoocow → u/oujikara]

exactly. These shows aren't being made in consultation with actual trans people. It's executives going "she calls herself a man, so that must be one if those nonbinaries"

[u/Ramekink → u/MommaBigDick]

Exactly this, Gren is more intersex than enbi. 

[u/TreelyOutstanding → u/Theta-Sigma45]

Sensitive, feminine, male but not actually gay, queer or explicitly non-binary characters are abundant in Japanese anime. But for some reason, the west has a hard time interpreting and mapping these characters to our local stereotypes. So we butcher them and force them to be typical gay or non-binary.