Quote Originally Posted by Lunaxia View Post
Sexual harassment isn't funny, and it was never really was funny to anyone else to begin with except for ardent anime fans who place Japanese culture on a pedestal, and no translation is ever lacking for its omission. It's an unfortunate fact of reality and making light of it only benefits its perpetrators by purporting disturbing and unwanted behaviour as harmless.
Sexual harassment is defined as actual acts or advances of a sexual nature that are unwarranted by the opposing party. The type of characterization that was Haurchefant, his archetype, and other characters which embody this trope are literally designed to make light of sexuality and perversion.
They are harmless jokes, and they're not intended to be nor do they function as de facto permission slips for bad actors to engage in real-life acts of sexual harassment, nor is there any evidence to support the claim that they contribute to a culture of tolerance for these things.

Knowing the difference between a joke in fiction vs. actual acts is key to media literacy. If your argument that less humor of this type and more censorship/suppression of it is a good thing, then you're basically asking for a society that never tests itself with respect to how fiction is allowed to operate.

It's thankfully become an awkward and outdated mode of comedy that is now on the outs in the West, and hopefully in time it will on the JP side too. I suggest accepting that and moving on.
Lmao it's not, not in the West and certainly not in Japan. I can point to dozens of still-running Netflix shows which feature character jokes and archetypes like that of Haurchefant, and no shortage of those which appear in anime.

It's this same type of philosophy that writers and critics like Andrea Dworkin and Anita Sarkeesian have been found to be wrong in much of their critiques about sex in media and how they affect culture, only for them to be found to be wrong, in that sexism, sexual harassment, etc have not changed with the way different S&P practices have changed in order to accommodate their criticisms.