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Bullying in VN's always seems like the worst ever.


Mkilbride

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I mean, I didn't see much bullying in my school, from the U.S here, I know it happens, but the shit I read in VNS is crazy.

 

Suicide clubs, people beating the ever loving shit, stealing their stuff, the entire class hating on them, not just like one bully bullying them, but everyone, many VNs I've read I see this in, animes too, I never see it in other media except Japanese anime, Manga, and VNs, bullying so bad it makes the entire class look like sociopaths.

 

Is it really so bad over there? I know such media isn't an accurate representation of their culture, but more of a parody in the way that U.S Cartoons / Books / TV shows can be, and I know stress from school can make them suicidal, but it gets so absurd reading this stuff sometimes it completely removes me from the story because it becomes so unbelievable that in a class of 26 kids, 25 of them decide to make that one kids life a living hell.

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there is a lot of info about it on the net, I really don't want to say something because I'm not Japanese and saying why there is bully probably will be wrong because I don't know its culture I just read about it, one thing is to read about how a culture behaves and another different thing is to actually live it and experience it first hand.

 

Like I said there are lots of articles that you can read if you are interested.

 

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Shoko-YONEYAMA/3001/article.pdf

http://thisjapaneselife.org/2013/06/12/japan-ijime-bullies/

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/tag/bullying/

http://blog.gaijinpot.com/bullying-in-japan/ 

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Bullying is never "that big of an issue" unless/until you're the target, believe me.

 

Most of the time it's not one but a few kids singled out, depending on group / gender makeup within the class, and gets even worse in bigger subjects/courses like P.E. or arts classes.

 

It's not limited to Japan or the US either, but is pretty much happening everywhere. Just be thankful no one put you through the hell that is year-long bullying.

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A lot of it is that Japan is a collectivist society... which means it sanctions the sacrifice of an individual's happiness for the sake of the harmony of the group pretty much instinctively.  Not to mention that moral cowardice seems to be ingrained into the modern culture amongst young people...

 

I know, I am a long-time otaku and in many ways a weaboo... but if you obsess about something, you shouldn't be blind to its faults.  Collectivism has a lot of advantages socially... but from an individual perspective, the peer pressure is unbelievably destructive at times. 

 

One particular Japanese saying says it all... 'The stake that sticks out will be pounded down'.

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Yume Miru Kusuri with Aeka's route is propably one of the best examples to start with.

 

Don't make it sound like it's a Japanese-specific problem; bullying is more or less the same around the globe; it depends on people and enviroments - both they come from and where they lead their daily lives. Japan actually deals with it preety decently, mainly because of their collective society and general kindness engraved into their daily lives. There are places where it's far worse with people affected by this issue literally having no one to turn to for help.

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Bullying is never "that big of an issue" unless/until you're the target, believe me.

 

Most of the time it's not one but a few kids singled out, depending on group / gender makeup within the class, and gets even worse in bigger subjects/courses like P.E. or arts classes.

 

It's not limited to Japan or the US either, but is pretty much happening everywhere. Just be thankful no one put you through the hell that is year-long bullying.

 

Nor did anyone at my schools seem bullied, and I went to to a pretty hellish publish school in terms of student body, lots of assholes, but no really bullying, I'm a people watcher, creeper perhaps, but I like to watch social interaction and I never noticed anyone being singled out.

 

Nor did I notice an entire classroom collectively coming together and trying to get a student to commit suicide.  I don't know about other states, or countries, but I've only seen this in Japanese Media.

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Nor did anyone at my schools seem bullied, and I went to to a pretty hellish publish school in terms of student body, lots of assholes, but no really bullying, I'm a people watcher, creeper perhaps, but I like to watch social interaction and I never noticed anyone being singled out.

Nor did I notice an entire classroom collectively coming together and trying to get a student to commit suicide. I don't know about other states, or countries, but I've only seen this in Japanese Media.

Don't forget, that no mater what, those stories are still nothing more than social fiction; they might be based on personal experience or relate to reality in one way or another, but they mostly never represent the real state of things. We're not living in some sort of a dark fantasy and contrary to some beliefs, majority of people on this planet is actually emphatic and still believes (or at least wants to) that most of us are decent and trustworthy, as ironic it may sound.

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Because people just don't give a fuck about others. Most people will sympathize with you, but few will actually help. Using the example you're stating over there, in a class consists of 26 person, not all actually 25 person just want to run a living hell for that one person. the person who's really behind the curtain is usually just one person, or even nobody at all, starts by just a rumor made worse.

 

If you say a lie many times enough, it'd become a truth, at least from another person's eyes.

 

It's even worse in Japan where suicide is tolerable culture (at least long time ago). where people just hold everything inside.

(出る杭は打たれる) the nail that sticks out gets hammered proverb is a perfect words to describe it. what's different is the 'standard' line where the hammer stops hitting, which in Japan is simply lower than another country, i guess. :amane:

heard even worse in korea from a korean friend.

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I don't know a lot about how extensive it is in Japan but bullying in high quantities isn't exclusive to Japan.

 

I do recall hearing a story from my high school about a student who got bullied so much he snapped and stabbed his bully. 

 

Another example of bullying in vns is Sango's route in Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort

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This is a weird topic for me.

 

On one hand, I feel really good about myself, because I successfully beat my 8th grade "tormentors" socially, physically and psychologically and effectively turned the tide on them. The flipside to that is, that I never did anything to save someone else, even though I easily could've done so.

 

I don't think VNs are that far away from the global truth, although intensity surely varies on the location.  

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I've been bullied for 6 years and I honestly couldn't say what's worse, being isolated from the group (being ignored, people talking behind your back) or being integrated into the group in a negative way (mean nicknames, making you the scapegoat, public humiliation, ...)

The nastiest things I remember happening was girls feigning interest in me, only for them to reject me in public and make a big scene about it, completely humiliating me in the process

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Japanese are naturally more timid than Americans. They aren't vocal with themselves and think have to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. I'm not saying every Japanese is like this, but it's more prevailing than other cultures. I can easily observe this amongst my circle of friends. I ask my friend who is black if he has the guts to do something embarrassing like dance in public and he's like "Yo, I'll do it but how much you willing to pay?" vs my Japanese friend who will not do it no matter what. 

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As stated, bullying is essentially ubiquitous on the international scale, a manifestation of our sociological desires to belong to an exclusive group and be perceived as superior, etc. To address the question, "Is it really so bad over there?" I believe, as a fellow American, that we need to take a wider look at how things work in the US.

 

Your experience and indeed my own are limited to the statistical significance of anecdotes. Education in the US is defined by arguably the most disparity out of any developed nation in the world: “If you’re in the top economic quarter of the population, your children have a 76% chance of getting through college and graduating by age 24…If you’re in the bottom quarter, however, the figure is 4%”[1]. I will to some extent generalize by assuming that your experience is that of a school, perhaps a public one located in a fairly suburban area or a private one located anywhere, in which you may not have often witnessed day-to-day violence, in which what drug dealers existed were not of such a quantity as to threaten the well-being of unassociated students, in which a divide in performance could not be well-defined by the color of one's skin, in which the well-being of the school was not determined by statistical results as seen from the bird's-eye view of urban politicians. In this capitalist American society, in which any strive for equality is seen as an malicious threat to liberty, it is expected that those at the bottom, who old white guys deem to have "equality of opportunity" while equality of outcome is an unknown term, will compete for what they perceive as a higher spot in the pyramid.

 

The only difference in Japan is that inequality[2] is less pervasive and less visible; unlike in the US, in which suburbaners can say, "I may not be at your level, but at least neither of us is one of them" (for having a common enemy is among the most uniting factors of humans), Japan, to my knowledge, has a comparatively shallow pit of poverty. Thus, instead of focusing all of the "ghetto"-ness into one hopeless area, we may find that bullying, while stretched thin, is still notably stretched. And in a nation that shares the capitalist competitiveness of the US but not per se its inequality, where standardized tests more so determine an individual's worth and our phrase "Good luck" can be most accurately translated as 頑張って ("Do your best"), there are bound to be people in all areas who seek to secure their place on the ladder, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to push somebody else down the ladder.

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I'm sure that part of it is dramatic hyperbole (though it's not like bullying leading to someone's death is unheard of), but bullying is definitely a problem pretty much everywhere including Japan. And it's a vicious cycle too, if someone starts getting bullied others don't want to help for fear of getting bullied themselves; it's easier to be part of the 25 people bullying the 26th than part of the 2 people being bullied by the other 24.

 

I got bullied a lot in middle school and early high school in Russia, didn't get bullied at all when I moved to Canada in the later years of high school. Part of it was probably due to the fact that it was a pretty good catholic school (although I was in a private school in Russia, so it's not like bullying doesn't happen in places like that), and part of it was that I just didn't talk to anyone.

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I have a hard time believing alot of the bullying in visual novels, for example in Yumi Miru Kusuri when Aeka got tased in the middle of class and no one batted an eye. What the hell does someone have to do to get in trouble in this school? Shoot a classmate in the middle class? Although I find the "stealth" bullying alot more believable, such as the thumbtacks in the locker and defacing desks before class.

 

Well, since everyone is opening up about their bullying experience in school I might as well put in my two cents. I was the target of the verbal abuse of various classmates from the latter grade school years through out the last of my highschool years. For some reason people loved telling me how much of a jack ass I was for following the various rules of class and informing myself of the lack of physical prowess I possed. It usually never really bothered me much, because compared to the insults I got from my Dad, it was kinda sad how creatively lacking my bullies were.

 

In middle school and high school I was occasionaly physically assaulted. It was nothing major, like being beaten by 4 people at the same time, just every once in a while someone would kick my shins or trip me over. Again, I simply ignored them and got up. Although there was an odd bloke who acted like we were best friends, but everytime we would meet in the hallway he would punch me in the gut soo hard that I usually lost my breath and buckled over on my knees to regain my breath. He would than pass by my wheezing self laughing like a maniac.

 

In hindsight the bullying I endured probably did cause some psychological damage. My constant attempts at ignoring them kinda spread to the point where I ignored all social contact with other people.

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