Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on Pokémon's “Electric Soldier Porygon” - Anime Feminist
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As an Epileptic, I’ve been very outspoken about my opinions on the increased use of strobe lighting effects in American cartoons. Yet people have accused me of being a hypocrite: why do I continue to love Pokémon? My response often surprises people. That, in my personal opinion, morally speaking, the animators were not responsible for what happened. That Porygon was, in fact, innocent.
  • wjs018@ani.socialMEnglish
    1·
    42 minutes ago

    Really interesting perspective on this issue. Out of curiosity at one point, I got my hands on the porygon episode and the flashing is certainly jarring. It didn’t really bother me, but my wife said it gave her a headache (just a minor one, not a migraine fortunately). I had no idea that there was so much that came out of that incident. Really neat!

  • zabadoh@ani.socialEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    What a great article!

    I always thought the annoying dimming was some kind of copy protection scheme, like the old Macrovision from back in the days of VHS.

    • wjs018@ani.socialMEnglish
      1·
      46 minutes ago

      Wow, that sent me down a rabbit hole of searching. I am old enough to have messed around with lots of VHS tapes in my day, but I was still too young to know what was going wrong with the picture. Reading how Macrovision screwed up the picture through desyncing the scanning explains why some of the “non-authentic” tapes I got never played right for me.

  • Chronographs@lemmy.zipEnglish
    5·
    8 hours ago

    I wish streaming services would have the dimming as an accessibility option like captions or audio description; you could even have it on by default and have the uncensored version be opt-in