- Joined
- Jan 7, 2021
The Dragon Ball and Pokemon bit just reminded me of something. Part of the reason for the disconnect with sexual harassment being treated way more jokingly has to do with how they've historically been more lenient about sexual content while being more restrictive with violence in comparison to the west. You can trace this all the way back to religious origin as Japan largely has its roots in Shintoism and Buddhism and those are both a lot more permissive regarding sexuality than something like Christianity, which tends to condemn non-reproductive sex as a whole. As a result of this openness, lighter harassment doesn't have the same gravitas and is more likely to be treated as a mere annoyance and punchline for a joke which leaves westerners wondering how the character in question hasn't gotten arrested.
I think the other part of this is that animation here in the west typically has the stigma of being seen as a children's specific medium. There's not really adult animation that isn't comedy, and even those largely rely on vulgarity to forcibly disassociate themselves from typical conceptions of what animated content is for. The only exceptions to that trend in adult animation I can really think of off the top of my head are the 5th season of Samurai Jack (A bit of a special case, the original show was already pushing it for a kids show and season 5 took so long to come out that they figured everyone who'd been a fan of the early stuff had just grown up by now) and Invincible (Adaptation of a very violent comic book, the comic's actually pretty good). Over in Japan, it's more an all-ages medium rather than a kid focused one. Think TV-G vs TV-Y7 in that regard. This enables more prominence for adult oriented anime as a whole, but it also means that concerns about filtering for the young ones are a bit lessened.
A final factor is just that there really is a lot of weird stuff in Western Animation and kids content too and that you just didn't notice it because you weren't looking for it or expecting it, see all the Dan Schneider nonsense and the general gross-out humor that tends to be prevalent there, but this is less of a factor in most cases I'd say.
I think the other part of this is that animation here in the west typically has the stigma of being seen as a children's specific medium. There's not really adult animation that isn't comedy, and even those largely rely on vulgarity to forcibly disassociate themselves from typical conceptions of what animated content is for. The only exceptions to that trend in adult animation I can really think of off the top of my head are the 5th season of Samurai Jack (A bit of a special case, the original show was already pushing it for a kids show and season 5 took so long to come out that they figured everyone who'd been a fan of the early stuff had just grown up by now) and Invincible (Adaptation of a very violent comic book, the comic's actually pretty good). Over in Japan, it's more an all-ages medium rather than a kid focused one. Think TV-G vs TV-Y7 in that regard. This enables more prominence for adult oriented anime as a whole, but it also means that concerns about filtering for the young ones are a bit lessened.
A final factor is just that there really is a lot of weird stuff in Western Animation and kids content too and that you just didn't notice it because you weren't looking for it or expecting it, see all the Dan Schneider nonsense and the general gross-out humor that tends to be prevalent there, but this is less of a factor in most cases I'd say.
