What has blown my mind about all of this, is like what happened to just watching anime and leaving it at that? Where did all these weirdoes who insist on spamming the internet with eye gouging NSFW art of whatever dumbass shit they're into, and seemingly making it the entirety of their persona come from?
Those people will call shonenfags "tourists/hood weebs" for only watching shonen, but they do the same with loli/moe content.
Nevertheless, now it's like they're such a loud segment of "fandom" that shit pandering to them (just in recent anime, don't even get me started on the vtuber shit) has become profitable enough to mass produce and push even if everyone else who attempts to avoid all the cancer is like "plz stop this, it's gross".
I kind of suspect it's the effect of irony poisoning over multiple online generations (or whatever, I'll let someone better informed/more well spoken chime in from here).
Early anime survived largely thanks to otaku culture, which has since become a core demographic that many modern shows cater to. Today, much of the anime industry isn't profitable without additional revenue streams like Blu-ray sales (often including uncensored or bonus fan service content), figurines, CDs, and various merchandise aimed at that degenerate fanbase.
Adding idol culture into the mix, including Vtubing, which is a subgenre of said culture, will turn all this into a pretty degenerate combo.
The west used to have a culture of simping too, with girls band/boys band, but it calmed down, and now you see a ton of people simping for k-pop idols since there is a hole there, but that's another discussion entirely. But this is why vtubing is huge with those groups, this is their version of idol culture.
To be back on topic, just as players who avoid AAA games are in the minority, the same could be said for anime viewers who seek content that doesn’t heavily rely on fan service or pandering to specific subcultures. Except "normal people" are the majority for AAA games, and niche games aren't.
Occasionally, an anime appeals to both normal people and degenerates.
Frieren is a good example. Its characters are attractive enough to be sexualized, while also including scenes (like those feet scenes) that are aimed at otakus.
On the other hand, some anime, like
Odd Taxi, are created primarily for adult viewers in Japan and tend to receive less attention in the West, since there is way less to sexualize there. (Even if some of it was sexualized by furries in the end, since degenerates can't just enjoy something without turning it into porn.)
Being a degenerate, sadly,
is the "normal" of the anime fandom. You'll find non degenerates and great anime every year, but you'll rarely hear about them, and even something that seem fully normal will still add a few "questionable scenes" or pander to that "normal" of the fandom.
In a way, the pedos are right to call others tourists, because that medium did grow through otaku culture, fan service, loli and so on, but it became so much more than this, and it wasn't all about that either.
