Netflix is facing a growing backlash to its streaming of movie 365 Days after viewers suggested it ‘perpetuates and promotes rape culture’.

Billed as the next 50 Shades of Grey, Polish film 365 DNI, also known as 365 days, tells the story of Laura Biel (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) who is kidnapped and imprisoned on a holiday to Sicily by mafia boss Massimo Torricelli (Michele Morrone).

On Thursday singer Duffy wrote a letter to Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, appealing to the service to use their influence ‘more responsibly’. And viewers online appear to agree with many suggesting it ‘glorifies kidnapping and sex trafficking’.

Grammy-winning singer Duffy, 35, who recently disclosed her own experience of being raped, drugged, and kidnapped, explains to Hastings why she feels that the glamorisation of kidnapping in 365 Days is dangerous.

She says the movie treats ‘the serious crime of kidnapping and sex trafficking’ as ‘erotic entertainment.’

Journalist Megan McGibney agreed, saying it was ‘disturbing that this movie was ever made in the first place’ and writing: ‘It’s getting bad reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes for those same reasons.’

The streaming service has not yet commented on the criticisms.

Another viewer said: ‘365 Days on Netflix is glorifying kidnapping, sexual/physical assault, and Stockholm syndrome. There is nothing romantic or sexy about this movie at all. Rape isn’t f***ing sexy. Bull**** movies like this perpetuate rape culture.’

One commented: ‘“365 days” promotes rape and stockholm syndrome and y’all be like’, followed by the loveheart emoji.

Another said: ‘365 Days is literally glorifying predatory behaviour, kidnapping, rape culture and domestic abuse. How the f*** do some of y’all think this is sexy.’

Fans had said it was the ‘hottest thing ever’ and ‘made Fifty Shades of Grey look PG,’ but critics have accused the creators of ‘romanticizing’ a dangerous relationship between a captor and victim.

One person wrote on Twitter: ‘Where is the petition to get Netflix to boycott 365 days and stop selling this trash that is clearly mysoginistic [sic] to young teenage girls and boys? Clearly the only reason it is popular is cos it’s an attractive lead doing all the raping and other non-consensual behavior.

‘I cannot f***ing believe Netflix is selling this content as if it is absolutely normal.

‘@netflix Please, it is my absolute humble request, take 365 days down before this content influences other men to believe that women like this s***.’

Another wrote: ‘i watched 365 days bc my coworker suggested it. literally 5 minutes into it, i felt really f***ing uncomfortable. this movie is literally the worst i’ve ever seen. it glorifies rape, sexual assault, kidnapping, stalking, sex trafficking, pedophilia……’

After landing on Netflix last month the film became the subject of widespread social media discussion thanks to its controversial depiction of sex between a kidnapper and his victim.

The storyline of the movie is based on the first book of a trilogy by Polish author Blanka Lipińska in which character Laura does not expect that on a trip to Sicily trying to save her relationship, Massimo will kidnap her and give her 365 days to fall in love with him.

Duffy has noted that fans of the movie have recently been seen ‘pleading’ to leading actor Morrone to kidnap them.

She penned: ‘I encourage the millions who have enjoyed the movie to reflect on the reality of kidnapping and trafficking, of force and sexual exploitation, and of an experience that is the polar opposite of the glossy fantasy depicted.’

Clinical psychologist Dr. Goali Saedi Bocci said: ‘There is clearly quite a bit of misunderstanding about sexual consent and assault and such films only continue to muddy the waters.

‘We have to be extra cautious of the media we consume because, like it or not, these things get into our subconscious.’

But fan Susana Rodriguez, 33, of Houston, told The New York Times: ‘Yes, it does romanticize Stockholm syndrome, but it’s just a movie.

‘Other movies have killers and people getting killed, but they’re not protesting those movies. It’s 2020. We need to separate fiction from reality.’

365 Days has already made headlines with its incredible graphic sex scenes between the two lead characters, with one seeing Laura tied up in a room so she can watch Massimo have a steamy encounter with a sex worker.

In one of the movie’s most memorable scenes the pair finally have sex in a boat as Laura begins to fall under Massimo’s spell.

But their dysfunctional relationship doesn’t always run smoothly, as Massimo lashes out at Laura by dragging her into the bedroom after she sees one of his exes at a function.

One person wrote: ‘Please remember that there is a huge difference between fantasy and reality. If you are a guy, please don’t get any ideas.

‘No girl wants to be kidnapped and made to fall in love.’

Meanwhile, another viewer, tweeted: ‘It romanticizes harassment (which is so messy by the way), there’s Stockholm syndrome (which is a mental condition from which a victim falls in love with her abductor and should not be normalized).’

Video games, as a medium, don’t have many auteur creators — designers who produce games for big publishers yet somehow manage for their personal obsessions and peculiarities to shine through.

Consider Jeff Minter, a man whose catalog demonstrates an equal fascination with Atari’s Tempest and camelids. Or Hideo Kojima’s obsession with Hollywood popcorn flicks has led to Metal Gear, a series of intricate action games with arcane storylines. Akitoshi Kawazu’s abiding interest in tabletop games gave us SaGa, Square Enix’s most mechanically impenetrable role-playing franchise. Fumito Ueda created Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian, three games about the role that companionship plays in overcoming isolation. And so forth: all games heavily driven by a singular vision, even when the pursuit of those passions works to the detriment of the end product.

Twenty years ago, another auteur appeared on the scene with the arrival of the first game based around his own obsessions: Tetsuya Takahashi, the author behind the dense tangle of story that powered Squaresoft’s Xenogears. While Xenogears was the work of dozens of people, the last two decades have made it quite clear that Xenogears’ most memorable traits embody concepts and themes that Takahashi holds dear to his heart. The seven Xeno games Takahashi has overseen have come to us from three different publishers across multiple consoles, and they’ve involved two different fresh starts on telling the story in Takahashi’s mind. Yet they all undeniably constitute a body of interrelated work.

That Takahashi would use the RPG format as his canvas should come as no surprise. He cut his teeth creating art and graphics for pillars of the genre, including Nihon Falcom’s Dragon Slayer franchise and Square’s 16-bit Final Fantasy and SaGa games. With Xenogears, he took a lead creative role for the first time, conceiving and writing the game’s story. Xenogears’ plot, reworked from a pitch the company had rejected as the premise for Final Fantasy 7 (“too dark,” Square said) was by far the most ambitious component of a game defined by big ideas.

From the word “go,” Xenogears set itself apart from Square’s other PlayStation creations. It eschewed the pre-rendered, computer-graphic movie sequences that Final Fantasy 7 had made the industry standard, beginning instead with an old-fashioned anime mini-movie. And where Square’s other RPGs for PS1 presented their worlds as static, pre-rendered scenes and background populated by polygonal characters, Xenogears inverted things: Its characters existed as hand-drawn sprites running around 3D worlds. It also shrugged off the Final Fantasy-driven trend toward real-time battle systems with its turn-based combat system.

But musty as that framework may have looked at first, it played like no other RPG, thanks to the fixation on mecha anime that pervades Takahashi’s work. There’s as much of Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion in Xenogears as there is Dragon Quest, a fact that came through with unmistakable clarity when players summoned their massive mech suits into battle. To top it all off, Xenogears even integrated occasional platform gaming mechanics into its traditional dungeon sequences.

Likewise, its story played out like no RPG before it. The overall plot shared a few common elements with Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 7, both of which Takahashi had worked on: Those games had pitted players against a disastrous, world-ending threat that had crashed to earth from outer space countless aeons ago. Yet while they never really went beyond treating entities like Lavos and Jenova as simple monsters to be overcome in battle, Xenogears depicted a world whose entire existence revolved around that otherworldly force. Villains acted to achieve relatable desires, and even once the final credits rolled, it was never entirely clear if Xenogears truly had a bad guy at all.

The closest thing was Deus, an extraterrestrial super-weapon that had crashed to earth millennia earlier, and created the entire human race to serve as fuel to return to space and complete its original mission. Protagonist Fei Fong Wong, along with a handful of other characters, existed in an eternal cycle of conflict, love, hatred and codependency with one another, with Deus and with the Wave Existence (an enigmatic cosmic force trapped inside Deus’ power matrix). It was a big, messy story, and its sometimes muddled presentation didn’t help make it any easier to parse. But it certainly was interesting.

Xenogears’ narrative stood apart from Square’s standard fare in another way. Where the company’s most popular RPGs saw no end of numbered sequels, each game in those series amounted to a standalone tale. Final Fantasy 6 had nothing to do with Final Fantasy 7, just as SaGa Frontier and SaGa Frontier 2 shared no meaningful connections. On the other hand, Takahashi envisioned Xenogears as one chapter of a much larger saga. In the tradition of George Lucas’ Star-Wars-is-actually-Episode-4 retcon, the ending credits of Xenogears denote the game as “episode 5” of a series — a six-part series, the supplemental Xenogears: Perfect Works book revealed. Vast as the millennia-long, cyclical plot of Xenogears was, in Takahashi’s mind, it constituted only a single chapter of an even grander tale.

Sadly, those other five chapters never happened. For various reasons, Square declined to publish a Xenogears 2 (or Xenogears Episode 1, or whatever might have come next). Critics have long criticized Xenogears for the way its second disc mostly consists of character monologues that describe the plot rather than letting players act out the events, but Takahashi revealed in an interview with Kotaku last year that the project ran out of time to design the second half of the game. So the team decided to summarize the story’s back half rather than end on a cliffhanger … which is just as well, as it turns out that cliffhanger would never have been resolved.

Takahashi and several of his key collaborators — including his wife, Xenogears character designer Soraya Saga — departed Square a few years after Xenogears’ debut and established a studio called Monolith Soft in collaboration with Namco. Monolith has produced or co-created more than a dozen RPGs over the past 15 years, including the entertaining (if impossibly lightweight) corporate crossover strategy series Project X Zone. But its first order of business was to reboot Xenogears. 2002 brought us Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zer Macht, an attempt to retell the Xenogears story from the start … with just enough details changed from Square’s intellectual property, so as not to be legally actionable.

Uneven as Xenogears turned out to be, Xenosaga Episode I proved to be an even more challenging love-it-or-hate-it proposition. It turned the “cutscene” dial to 11, while reducing the playable portions of the game to linear, minimalistic sequences. In fact, the first Xenosaga may well have been the world’s first video game to feature save points in the middle of cutscenes — some of them ran for nearly an hour, so you’d occasionally receive a little prompt to ask if you wanted to record your progress during scene transitions. That’s pretty intense, and it didn’t sit well with many fans, who bought the game expecting something more akin to the story/play balance found in the first disc of Xenogears rather than the second.

Taken aback by criticisms — and, perhaps, sales — Namco and Monolith retooled both the company and the Xenosaga project. Takahashi had launched the series with the intent of overseeing a full, glorious six chapters, but instead he took a reduced role in its development and truncated the plan to a mere three entries. Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse arrived in 2004, and it brought with it a massive overhaul to the game’s visual style, flow and mechanics. The doll-like character designs of Episode I shifted to something still undeniably anime-influenced, but far more naturalistic in style. The narrative took on a simpler tone, allowing more room for players to wander around futuristic dungeons and fight monsters with the help of their robotic suits. The final entry of the series, 2006’s Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra, more or less wrapped the storyline as intended and earned wide acclaim as the most satisfying chapter of the franchise. But by that point, many Xeno fans had already moved on.

Monolith and Namco drifted apart as the latter company began talks to merge with toymaker Bandai, which gave Takahashi the opportunity to take another fresh attempt at the Xeno series. In a lot of ways, 2010’s Xenoblade Chronicles couldn’t have had less in common with Xenogears or Xenosaga: It took the form of an open-world, sandbox RPG with automated combat mechanics and A.I.-controlled partner characters. It certainly came a long way from the stifling, linear format and progression of the likes of Episode I.

Nevertheless, the longer players stuck with Xenoblade and its sequels (including last year’s Xenoblade Chronicles 2), the clearer its connections to Takahashi’s previous efforts became. Giant robots factored into the storyline, along with the dense Judeo-Christian iconography of the older games. Powerful super-weapons designed to resemble young women play a critical role in the games, hearkening back to Xenosaga’s KOS-MOS and Xenogears’ Emeralda. On top of that, Xenoblade 2 revealed that (mild spoilers!) the Xenoblade games do indeed comprise an interconnected, episodic story. Although Monolith and publisher Nintendo have never actively pitched the games as such, these unpublicized connections might finally allow Takahashi — who continues to shape the direction of the series as its scenario writer — to create the Xeno saga he’s always dreamed of.

There’s something special about the Xeno games. They’ve faced a constant uphill struggle between corporate upheavals and the general gaming audience’s inherent distrust of wordy games. (Xenosaga’s tendency to use Nietzsche quotes as subtitles undoubtedly didn’t do the series any favors, sales-wise.) Nevertheless, Tetsuya Takahashi has proven above all else to be a man who wants to tell an elaborate story about God, robots and the origins of all life. He’s been wrestling with that particular angle for 20 years now, and Xenoblade 2 seems to have done pretty well for itself … which means he’s probably not about to give up now.

Hello everyone, thank you for clicking on this video! I want to express that everything discussed in this video is from my own experience, thoughts, and opinions – everyone is unique and experiences different circumstances. I hope you enjoyed the video, please like and subscribe, and leave a comment if you’d like!

It’s been exactly 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci died, and even after all this time we’re still trying to discover new things about the famous Italian polymath.

Two scientists have studied historical accounts of da Vinci’s life and come to the conclusion that he had a behavioural condition – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD.

Leonardo da Vinci is widely known for his paintings – especially the iconic Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. But he’s also been recognised for his inventive mind: da Vinci’s journals and notes are brimming with ideas, including sketches of early versions of a parachute, a helicopter and even a tank.

“The story of Da Vinci is one of a paradox – a great mind that has compassed the wonders of anatomy, natural philosophy and art, but also failed to complete so many projects,” neurophysiologist Marco Catani and medical historian Paolo Mazzarello write in a new paper.

“The excessive time dedicated to idea planning and the lack of perseverance seems to have been particularly detrimental to finalise tasks that at first had attracted his enthusiasm.”

Catani – who specialises in autism and ADHD – and his colleague argue that the littering of commissioned works that were abandoned, da Vinci’s lack of discipline, his weird work hours and lack of sleep could all be symptomatic of ADHD.

“He was left-handed and aged 65 he suffered a severe left hemisphere stroke, which left his language abilities intact. These clinical observations strongly indicate a reverse right-hemisphere dominance for language in Leonardo’s brain, which is found in less than 5 percent of the general population,” the pair explain in the paper.

“Furthermore, his notebooks show mirror writing and spelling errors that have been considered suggestive of dyslexia. Atypical hemispheric dominance, left-handedness and dyslexia are more prevalent in children with neurodevelopmental conditions, including ADHD.”

But while this might be a fun exercise for the 500th death-versary of a ‘Universal Genius’, it actually highlights something that scientists and historians have been arguing about for decades – retrospective diagnoses.

Retrodiagnoses are exactly what they sound like: an attempt to medically diagnose historical figures long after death.

In a 2014 paper, medical ethicist Osamu Muramoto explained that although doctors and scientists use these retrodiagnoses as a sort-of interesting brain teaser, those in humanities argue that medical professionals don’t have the skills to investigate historical sources in their proper context.

“These ‘hobbyist’ historians are not following the methodological disciplines of historiography, literary criticism, and other relevant subject areas of the humanities and social sciences. For example, they often literally interpret the documents in translation without critically analysing the primary source in the original language,” Muramoto wrote in the 2014 paper.

“But more importantly, as these retrospective diagnoses become more and more medically sophisticated as medical knowledge advances, these critics are increasingly skeptical about the authenticity of such highly specific and speculative diagnoses.”

That’s not to suggest that this paper on da Vinci necessarily falls into the same trap, but it does show it’s important to take these types of arguments with a grain of salt.

ADHD is a diagnosis which has only been defined relatively recently, it’s tricky to pin down, and it’s even harder to spot in adults than children.

Without a time machine, we’re not going to find out whether da Vinci’s lack of discipline and abandoned projects were symptoms of ADHD. But it does show than even five centuries later, we’re still trying to understand da Vinci’s incredible mind.

The paper has been published in Brain.

I like Pokémon as much as the next person! In fact I am currently waiting for my copy of Pikachu: Let’s Go to appear in the mail, looking out my door every few minutes. I’ve been watching Pokémon on Netflix since hearing about the release of this Nintendo Switch game. And I have been enjoying the world around these creatures and the — not-so-great at catching — Pokémon trainer Ash.

But, I’ll admit, I have not seen a Pokémon movie in a while. After everyone on my Twitter timeline started freaking out about Detective Pikachu, I started craving the animated versions of my hero Ash. Coincidentally, I was invited to the press screening of Pokémon: The Power of Us.

This animated movie felt, to me, much like an episode as opposed to an epic movie, and that was perfectly fine with me.

The movie started up with Risa — a young athlete who isn’t actually a Pokémon trainer. This theme continued to follow within the story; many of the characters and individuals weren’t actually trainers, but instead were normal people living within the world of Pokémon. Risa’s younger brother had broken his leg — rendering him unable to catch Pokémon or explore during the city’s Wind Festival in honor of the legendary Lugia, which is going on very soon. As he is out of action, Risa is tasked with catching a specific, unknown to us, Pokémon that will be somewhere around the festival.

Risa isn’t the only character who doesn’t have much interest in becoming a pokemon trainer; Callahan, a middle-aged man who is only pretending to be a trainer to impress his niece appears soon, as well as the mayor’s young daughter Kelly, a girl too young to have Pokémon, but with a big heart for them. There also is Harriet, an old woman who doesn’t like Pokémon at all and Toren — a researcher with tons of anxiety towards public speaking and talking to other individuals.

Harriet, out of these newly introduced characters is by far my favorite. Living in a world surrounded by creatures she hates, for seemingly no reason, provides for some very funny interactions as the Pokémon around her are celebrated and roam freely. Callahan, on the other side of the spectrum, was my least favorite character to follow. He seemed to only care about his appearance to others, often lying and misleading people to keep up his appearance. He does change over time within the movie, however, I feel that as an adult, he should have known better than to trick children all along.

And of course, there is Ash — our beloved trainer who comes into the festival to see what it’s all about. Despite all of these characters being very different in their likes, hobbies, and opinion of Pokémon — when the town needs them, they come together.

Pokémon: The Power of Us spends quite some time setting up the backstories of all of these characters and allowing them to subtly interact with one and other. Everyone seems to have their own problems and fears to overcome, and they each almost seem like main characters of the same story — all with different angles to view it at.

The legendary Pokémon Zeraora is what brings these individuals together, despite not being the biggest fan of humans to begin with. It is worth noting that as opposed to having some bad person to fight against, this movie brought everyone together through a random disaster that occurred. Instead of battling against each other, everyone, no matter what their background or love of Pokémon, needed to work together to save each other.

The movie had a clear ending message, much like a fairytale would. Also, everyone starts suddenly saying ‘Poké Power’ towards the end, which is really quite strange. It was a delightful watch with so many different people — all fleshed out with their stories well integrated with one and other. I quite enjoyed the screening.

Tickets are now available for screens of Pokémon: The Power of Us which is coming to the UK & Ireland on November 24th and December 1st.