You’ll have to forgive this one because I think I’m going feral.

So, unfortunately for me, Funimation recently removed Interspecies Reviewers from its docket, citing that the show falls outside the “standards” of the company. Since then, for the past few days, AniTube has been throwing a perpetual fucking fit about this. I have watched no less than six cishet white men flip on a camera behind a shelf of Funko Pop figurines complaining about how the SJW soyboy Cultural Maxists over at Funimation have censored the anime of our generation. This show is apparently literally the best thing to come out of this season, somehow. It’s better than the manga, supposedly.

And since I’m a Marxist of the regular variety, and not the lamer (and way faker) “cultural” kind of Marxist, I figured I wouldn’t let a good reactionary shit fest go to waste.

The on-the-box description of Interspecies Reviewers is something like this: In a fantasy-adventure world replete with brothels and a diversity of fantasy races, a group of men take it upon themselves to have sex with every single kind of woman imaginable to review them all for the good of the populace.

The actual show is… well, literally just that. That’s just what happens. Uh, one of them’s named Skunk I think. The tall one? I don’t care.

I guess, if I wanted to, I could do my obnoxious SJW bit. This is a Hot Take on Mo’s Home for Treatises and Hot Takes. The show is as problematic as the description belies.

Fantasy races in general are racist in my opinion? Or, more specifically, this Planet of Hats trope where each race gets boiled down to a single concept and every member of the race looks/acts exactly the same. It’s abstracted behind the jiggle of huge elf titties, but this is the same logic behind people who won’t sleep with Asian men or black women because “Asian men” are effeminate and gross or “black women” are fat and masculine.

The idea that there are some “species” of women who are more submissive than others is literally just what white reactionaries think Asian women are like, and it’s… bad.

To rate women on a scale that reduces them to how sexually gratifying they are to men is also pretty sexist. Boiling women down to just exotic animals you can shop around for on the market. Actually, just applying market logic to female sexuality is dehumanizing enough.

What else. Oh, so interestingly, in a show whose premise is literally based on sexual deviancy, the show still finds it in itself to shame trans and gay people. Somehow. I was shocked too.

Truly.

It mainly takes place through this intersex character, Crim.

(Used under Fair Use)

They’re an angle, and immediately when they fall from heaven, the guys ask them if they’re a guy too. Crim says they’ve got a massive bulge so the guys say “of course that’s a man”. And to be fair, they have a hefty penis. It’s of incredible in size and girth, as we learn in detail in episode 2.

The anime subtitles refers to them as they/them/theirs, which is why I’ve chosen those pronouns here. I’m not sure how that translates into Japanese, but I do know that Crim never refers to themself as a man. It’s a designation imposed upon them by the other characters upon learning they have a penis.

This behavior is the definition of being a total piece of shit, to be clear.

Crim is also at least bi and the narrative is sure to mock them when they vaguely suggest being into men and women. It is mind boggling to me that, in a world where people regularly have sex with slimes, actual animals, people who look suspiciously like children, and the literal devil, somehow consenting, average sex with another man is the real scary thing here.

The show wants you to jack off to it still. Like “male” sexual attraction to men can only exist after being submerged in shame. Crim being into men is the least weird thing the main cast is into, I guarantee it.

Some of y’all who haven’t seen this show thought I was kidding about the cloaca shit. This dude literally wants to fuck a bird and he talking bout some GAY BAD lmao sit the fuck down elf kid (Used under Fair Use)

Speaking of which, the show is dripping with toxic masculinity. The premise could actually be used to make an interesting space where people can safely explore the more hidden sides of their sexualities. But instead it’s a space where “boys will be boys” about sex. As in men are just creatures driven by an uncontrollable desire to sleep with women and if a little sexual harassment happens along the way… whatever, right?

I like how anti-feminists accuse people like me for hating men when they’re the ones constantly reducing our whole gender to a fucking stereotype. Pretty gosh-darn sexist if you asked me.

Which you didn’t. Yet you’re still reading.

Curious.

The show promotes capitalism pretty hard. We learn that the current governing party in this world —

(Used under Fair Use)

Okay, I should back up. The show has politics. There.

Anyway, the current governing party’s entire platform is just neoliberalism but we fund the brothels. It’s a platform of deregulation and lowering taxes to let businesses do what they please, while investing in agriculture and distracting the people from their collective misery with a thriving sex work industry.

This makes a pretty great dystopia actually. You could juxtapose the high life in the city’s well-off citizens spending every night at this or that brothel arguing over which girl is best with the fact that sex work itself is highly exploitative and the women these men buy see but a fraction of the wages they produce. We could talk about how the people at the bottom left with nothing, and left out on the street, and how no one cares because OMG brothels!!!

Sex work is real work. It’s an industry rife with abuse and exploitation. The struggles of sex workers deserve as much attention and as much of a push for change as the struggles of office workers, factory workers, miners, and any other kind of worker. A show like Interspecies Reviwers could humanize sex work in a way that helps make a positive difference no matter how small. There’s a potential here for real solidarity through storytelling.

It’s somewhat funnier if you can read the Japanese (Used under Fair Use)

But something tells me I’m watching the wrong show for that.

Truth be told, I could go on. I honestly, no-bullshit, could. Because I just spent a thousand words trying to take this show seriously. Trying to find out what would drive so, so many sad Otaku whitebois into defending this show with their lives after it got booted off Funimation.

Funimation only handled the English dub of the show. There will be more episodes of Interspecies Reviewers. That’s confirmed. Just no more in English. And there’s a source material too. These are the exact same people who make fun of me for watching anime in my own fucking language, saying I’m not a real fan and my opinions on this or that don’t matter. So why do we suddenly care that one show isn’t available in English anymore?

So here’s the tea, right? Interspecies Reviwers is literally just porn.

What? Did you want me to apply dialectics to hentai now? Do you think I have no standards? No self-respect?

I mean, I don’t, but that has nothing to do with this.

Interspecies Reviewers exists to be porn and literally nothing else. There are no characters, just porn. There are no stories, just porn. The politics I talked about?

Pete Buttigieg after rigging the Iowa Democratic caucuses [2020, colorized] (Used under Fair Use)

You better bet your god damn ass it’s fucking porn.

THE SHOW HAS AN UNCENSORED VERSION. Only hardcore porn comes in uncensored copies that’s a literal fact. Funimation just isn’t in the business of putting actual hentai on their site. There’s literally nothing else to this “controversy”.

Like, okay I watched it uncensored first. I switched over to the censored version and there’s no point! The show was clearly not made to be watched without the sex scenes. Nothing happens without them. There’s no plot.

It’s not even that great on a pornographic level? I mean, some of the girls are hot I guess but it’s nothing you wouldn’t find on any rule34 forum.

Are anime mayos really this upset over not being able to jack it to the hottest new porno of the season in English? Are they just that concerned about their hentai with senpai?

In the delirium induced by the sleep deprivation I’ve imposed upon myself, I’m imagining some dude who saw Interspecies Reviewers for the first time in English hanging off his bed upside down. His neurons crossed in that exact moment so that this specific situation is the only way he can achieve an orgasm now. Then, the evil SJWs cancelled Interspecies Reviwers, barring this poor soul from ever experiencing happiness again.

But no, actually, the real reason why AniTube is so pissed off by this has nothing to do with defending some porn series that would literally just drown in the sea of anime porn that exists on the Internet already.

The reason why AniTube cares about this is that it’s just another axe to grind against Funimation, who fired renowned and now infamous voice actor Vic Mignogna after having many, many credible accusations of sexual harassment filed against him. The actor sued Funimation and his former colleagues for defamation and subsequently had the charges from his defamation suit dropped because his lawsuit was bullshit and the accusations against him are credible enough to take action. This is just more “Funimation bad”.

The reactionary hatred of Funimation goes back even further. For example, in 2017, the company got into trouble for changing single line in Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid so it’s less creepy and weird. It’s not like that one change even fixes the show, by the way, but that’s a story for another time.

I don’t think the line is well written, and I don’t think it fits the comedic pacing of the original scene. But that’s also not what people were/are mad at Funimation for. They resent Funimation for their (bare minimum) efforts in making Western anime fandom more tolerable for non-men

Behind the sheer absurdity of pretending that Interspecies Reviewers is totally a great show that real Chad weebs should be watching right now, is a sustained campaign by reactionaries within the online anime community to paint Funimation as an institution beholden to SJWs and their mythical “cancel culture”. Not everyone who’s upset about this cares about Vic Mignogna, but reactionary hatred is the fire that has let this controversy burn for as long as it has.

By ruining Funimation, reactionaries send the message to any of these anime companies that to take accusations of sexual abuse seriously is to put their business in the line of fire of the hate mob.

I’m obviously not a fan of defending corporations. Still, if Funimation burns to the ground, it’ll be because the syndicalist revolution kicked the bosses out of their ivory towers, not because some sexist losers on the Internet want to make the world a hellish place to live for survivors of sexual abuse.

But hey. To any of you so-called anti-idpol Leftists out there. Please explain again how it’s actually the “wokescolds” and “puritans” on our side that are the problem. Go ahead, I’m waiting.

Get a life guys. Please. It’s pathetic. If anything, get a life so I can have my YouTube recommends back.

(Used under Fair Use)

One day, my parents are going to find out about this blog. I’ll need an explanation for this one.