Thread by @SpacePirate369

Sleeping Beauty vs The Frog Prince: How NOT to get turned into a frog (a thread on fairy tales, anime girls, men and women, and societal decay)

First of all, I know there are wildly different versions both earlier and later, but for the sake of this comparison I will be looking at only the Grimm versions of both Sleeping Beauty and The Frog Prince.

So of course, in Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty, the princess is cured of her curse by a kiss from her true love, often referred to by the name of his character archetype, “Prince Charming.”

This represents a very deep and powerful male fantasy: The ideal woman to a mentally healthy man is simply a woman who loves you back, and Sleeping Beauty represents a fantastic version of this: A woman who is not just happy to receive your love, but who is healed and saved by it

But of course, like all healthy masculine fantasies, this is relentlessly demonized by modern society, as succinctly summarized by wikipedia on the page for “true love’s kiss.” A man and a woman, in mutual true love!? Scandalous!

Prince Charming himself is similarly vilified, with wikipedia’s page for him listing many modern deconstructions and subversions. If you’re a man with normal healthy fantasies about a woman loving you back and enjoy fiction that explores those, they hate you!

While you’re on wikipedia, by the way, you might want to check the early life of the people doing the subverting, I have a strange feeling most of them might have something in common…

Anyway, Sleeping Beauty represents something healthy and good. Now onto the bad…

In Grimm’s version of The Frog Prince, a prince cursed by a spell transforming him into a frog courts a princess who despises him and is violently abusive towards him, and he is healed of his curse only when the princess throws him against a wall.

However, the love of the Frog Prince towards the princess is only strengthened by this treatment and in addition to being cured by her hate-filled violence, he proposes to her after he returns to normal.

In Japan, this has inspired the phrase “kaerukagenshou” (frogification phenomenon) which refers to a man with such deepseated self-hatred that he considers himself so disgusting that anyone who loves him must also be disgusting and therefore he can only love someone who hates him

The phrase only became popular around 2019-2020 as more and more Japanese men developed this illness, and you know what else became more popular in Japan around that time? Female character archetypes like “mesugaki” that revolve around insulting and abusing men.

Being repulsed by love is the natural state of women, but the natural state of men is to reciprocate love, and so any man who has been turned into a ‘frog’ like this is an aberration. It’s a related phenomenon to the other attempt by men to imitate women by castrating themselves.

40 out of 58 female Japanese college students surveyed self-reported having experienced disgust towards a man they had a crush on once he reciprocated their feelings, according to the study that coined the phrase. This should not come as much of a surprise to anyone.

A woman drew this to protest male “catcalling” unironically because they just can’t comprehend that normal healthy men aren’t repulsed by kindness and love from the opposite sex the way women are. Think about that, think about what that implies. Sick people.

This is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time, look how mad Mr. Berkowitz is (every single time lmao) that normal men actually like it when women are into them. As you might guess from his name, Mr. Berkowitz wants all White men to be turned into eunuchs or frogs!

Modern media mostly serves that end (even in Japan), but there are some bright spots, so let me first describe a positive example of a Sleeping Beauty-style healthy male fantasy in modern media.

This is Atago from Azur Lane, a game with a wide variety of hundreds of characters both lovely and horrible, but one thing they all have in common is that you can propose to any of them with a ring and as long as you’ve raised their affection to max, they’ll always say yes.

Atago in particular has a character arc that taps into very primal male desires. As you raise her affection value through gameplay, she falls more and more in love with you, and in her final bond line before marriage, she has what can only really be described as a panic attack.

Here’s where I’m taking these from (my TL here tho), the text doesn't do it justice so listen to the audio. Her voice in the Love line is bone-chilling and the way she rattles off those dorky seduction lines at lightspeed is both precious and heartbreaking
algwiki.moe/ships/atago.ht…

She’s lovesick, in a very literal sense. But never fear, because Prince Charming (Commander Charming?) is here to save the day. If you marry her, she will completely calm down, totally return to her normal self, never have another panic attack again, and live happily ever after.

“Girl so in love with you she goes crazy and gets a panic attack over not being your wife but you can heal her and totally restore her to normal by reciprocating her love & marrying her” scratches a whole giant list of instinctive itches deep in the male soul. Very powerful stuff

I could talk about Atago all day but let’s move on to a bad example. Blue Archive is a similar game where you play as a male character in a setting full of cute anime girls. But unlike AL, you can’t marry anyone, and the player character (Sensei) is a complete frog.

BA is made by frogs, for frogs. Sensei will aggressively pursue every girl who is put off by him, but when a girl like Toki or Shiroko actually falls for him, he’ll suddenly discover he’s a straight-laced responsible teacher and can’t be having relationships with students.

(Reached the limit of tweets I can compose all at once so please wait warmly, you know the drill)

Imagine paying to roll a gacha for your favorite girl (another advantage of AL is that you can get any girl for free lol) only for your character to reject them on the final bond line and every other chance they get. Frogs love that and think it’s just fine.

Prince Charming can be a ‘foil’ to the female protagonist, and Sensei is also supposedly characterized in order to highlight the character traits of all the girls, but he does so by courting the girls who reject him and rejecting the girls who court him.

You decide: Is a female protagonist better highlighted by a blueballing tail-chasing non-relationship as in BA and most romance manga/anime, or by a successful courtship & loving relationship as in AL with certain characters like Atago and certain fairytales like Sleeping Beauty?

For one last example, I’d like to repost my own graphic I made out of frustration with the decline of vtubing from a genre focused on fanservice that appeals to normal healthy men to a genre focused on ‘frogservice’ that appeals to, well, frogs.

https://twitter.com/SpacePirate369/status/1723366140905234735

And it’s not just vtubing and not just in Japan, media in all countries that matter is moving towards frog-centric content, and works that unapologetically allow the male reader to enjoy a healthy male fantasy of receiving and reciprocating love have become rare.

With straight men totally despised by mainstream society (sadly including Japan to a large extent), it’s to be expected that many men are spiritually castrated and become frogs, and being a spiritual eunuch is just the first step to becoming a physical eunuch. But you must resist

More frogs just makes the problem worse, too. The BA devs for example are obviously frogs themselves, but even if they weren’t, they’d be pressured to pander to them because of how many people who play their game get off on being stepped on and insulted. It’s an infestation.

No matter what happens in media, you can always cultivate healthy virtues within yourself. Don’t fantasize about being a frog who proposes to the bitch who throws you against a wall, fantasize about being a Prince Charming who heals a girl with your love. Reject frogification.

So basically what I'm saying is they're putting chemicals in the water to turn the frickin frogs gay
(end)

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