Why does anime always get caught in the middle? - no matter who wins, anime loses

[skykiii]

Maybe nobody said it yet because every discussion about anime devolves into talk about it. Just watch Mobile Fighter: G Gundam and Yu Yu Hakusho instead of "Suzy-Chan no Doki Doki Lolicon Gaiden".

Right.

I said earlier that sometimes this "anime is animated kiddy porn" shit strikes me as people whose idea of anime is stuck in the 1990s.

But I neglected to mention another suspicion I have:

I mean, just imagine if someone said they hated how common rape scenes are in movies, and they were able to name tons of movies that had rape scenes and maybe one of them is one a normie might have heard of and the rest are kinda obscure. It would kinda create the impression that there's no way that person found all these movies by accident, would it not?

It goes way deeper than what I'm going to say, but there is certainly a shallowness in anime, style without substance.

Admittedly this more than anything is what dampens my inner weeb. Sometimes a series sounds interesting but then I watch it and within a few episodes I feel like I've seen this show before, and I'm tired of all the generic as heck themes and lessons.

One of my biggest things is I wish anime would do something different with bad guys. I feel like they always have the same motivations and are all "sympathetic" in the same ways--either they have a tragic backstory, or else they're goofy villains like Team Rocket.

We need more that are like Skeletor or the weird dynamic between Megatron and Starscream.

 

[Stalingrad]

People hate on anime/manga because it's almost all complete and total degenerate slop garbage, has almost universally dogshit writing, hilariously incompetent dialogue, nonsensical lazy plots, the same copy-pasted tropes and fucking characters over and over again and always baits with an interesting hook concept the writer almost never, ever gives a single fuck about after the first 2 episodes/chapters. Throw on top all the cringe fanservice/pedo shit that ruins even the best of anime, and that most normies are trained to think animation = children, and it maks it hard to swallow for the average person and an easy target for hate.

If you think I'm being harsh, watch live action manga/anime J-Dramas and tell me that when you see those same scenes and dialogue played out with real humans, that is good character writing or dialogue. For all it's faults, Arcane actually would have worked in live action, you cannot say the same with most anime, even something like Bebop or Ghost in the Shell would need heavy dialogue rewriting to get rid of the massive exposition dumps.

It doesn't help as well Weebs have absolutely the most dogshit taste in anime and overhype absolute garbage like Re:Zero or Frieren. Go read any "best native/isekai" list on any weeb forum, and see how often actual good shows like 12 Kingdoms, Now and Then, Magical Shopping Arcade, Shin Sekai Yori come up. Spoiler: Zero.

 

[skykiii]

It doesn't help as well Weebs have absolutely the most dogshit taste in anime and overhype absolute garbage

Oh absolutely.

Even Cowboy Bebop really isn't that good, IMO. Heck the episodes before Ed shows up are kind of a chore to sit through.

Ghost in the Shell (if you mean the original movie) my biggest problem after a recent rewatch was that the movie's dialogue is just kinda hammering in the themes. It's like they don't expect the viewer to just pick up on the themes of individuality and consciousness--The Major literally looks at the camera and expounds on these concepts.

My own biggest problem with anime though.... is something I'm not sure how to explain.

But here's an example, using the anime Saint Seiya.

So the first villain, Ikki the Phoenix, is a member of the Saints who went evil essentially because the organization subjected him to child abuse, so now he's rising up against it. But then when Seiya actually confronts him, all Seiya has to say is the same tired "I will win because I have friends!" while Ikki is like "I will show you the power of a lone wolf!"

Which doesn't even track, because Ikki had friends and supporters--the Black Saints. But the bigger problem is it introduces this organic character angle, but then nobody actually addresses the problem but instead spouts platitudes (sort of the thing the guy was criticizing about Naegi in Danganronpa 3).

This is what I was getting at with my comparison to American cartoons earlier. He-Man, Thundercats, etc. all had similar "friendship" morals but the way they were handled felt a lot more organic. Its not just "I said friendship, therefore I get magical superpowers!" they would demonstrate it in a way like where, for example, everyone contributes to rebuilding a house or some other group activity. And nobody ever tried to imply Skeletor doesn't have friends--clearly he does, even if he doesn't think of them as such.

I'm not sure I'm making sense, but... it's not the tropeyness itself I mind, its the lack of effort to make it feel like it was organically integrated.

..........

Incidentally I love that a topic about people having a hateboner for anime.... seems to have attracted people (including the author) who have a hateboner for anime.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Right.

I said earlier that sometimes this "anime is animated kiddy porn" shit strikes me as people whose idea of anime is stuck in the 1990s.

But I neglected to mention another suspicion I have:

I mean, just imagine if someone said they hated how common rape scenes are in movies, and they were able to name tons of movies that had rape scenes and maybe one of them is one a normie might have heard of and the rest are kinda obscure. It would kinda create the impression that there's no way that person found all these movies by accident, would it not?

I basically agree, but to be fair there's a lot less rape in film and television.

If you think I'm being harsh, watch live action manga/anime J-Dramas and tell me that when you see those same scenes and dialogue played out with real humans, that is good character writing or dialogue.

That's mostly because the adaptations are just poor. I mean, they messed up Cowboy Bebop and Death Note, that's on them. I can understand screwing up Dragon Ball, but even that's not the manga's fault, some mediums simply don't translate well to other ones.

 

[Thé au lait]

Depending on your politics, anime is either the wellspring for patriarchal misogynistic thought or else it actually causes people to troon out.

These are the same thing, though

 

[Groon]

As other pals says, anime cover a wide range of genders and caters to all tastes and anyone can find any content they want.

So if Jack says anime is only about porn and pedo shit, it says more about Jack than anime itself.

 

[Dawdler]

I mean, just imagine if someone said they hated how common rape scenes are in movies, and they were able to name tons of movies that had rape scenes and maybe one of them is one a normie might have heard of and the rest are kinda obscure. It would kinda create the impression that there's no way that person found all these movies by accident, would it not?

Movies are just soft porn for the normies for government mandated programming.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

As other pals says, anime cover a wide range of genders and caters to all tastes and anyone can find any content they want.

So if Jack says anime is only about porn and pedo shit, it says more about Jack than anime itself.

It's like saying all Western animation is just stupid bean mouth comedies for kids. Aeon Flux is definitely not any of that and it's Western animation. Fritz the Cat or really anything from the guy who directed that isn't. Neither are Avatar the Last Airbender, Batman the Animated Series, Gargoyles, the Disney movies from the 90's, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Felidea, Heavy Metal, or Wallace and Gromet. It's retarded to generalize a massive category of entertainment with millions of genres.

 

[The Lawgiver]

I've nooticed a pattern more and more over a decade now, and it's whenever someone decides to become a sellout for some corpo or political party/organization they always go and start dong clearly faux-boomer takes framed as legitimate and decides to smear either video games, anime, or rock music. Cases of Reddit/twitter/bluesky brainworms can also achieve a similar type of behavior from people as well, but that's another story tied to another yet similar part of the beast of the eternal current year.

There's a difference between someone making the internet joke funny of "haha you ahve anime pfp so you don't count" and actually trying to frame that as an actual thing. It's kind of like how after elon musk did the retarded little hand wave people made memes about being a hitler salute quickly got picked up by the media spin cycle into it being an actual nazi salute even when it was pointed out that it wasn't and was a meme screengrab showcasng other similar ones with other people from all different politics backgrounds. Didn't matter, didn't fit the narrative, that became "right wing elon musk defenders are the only ones that think he didn't do the salute!!!" Similar shit with how anime and media in general is treated by political sellouts/reddit brainworm infected. You can show all the examples in the world disproving their claims and they'll fucking dismiss it and lie to your face anyways claiming you secretly support abhorrent shit because you don't align perfectly with the chorus.

Started seeing symptoms of that behavior here last year or so but I've rambled about that like 3 times n other similar threads. Basically pointing out missed info in some threads was met with "who cares" type shit and faming it as some kind of defense of shit. I'd say t was due to reddit/sharty refugees but it wasn't just here that start showing up. Close friends I've known for years started pulling the same shit last year (and now they're also constantly screaming about trump/elon but that's another story) .

Spoiler: further explaining/mildly off topic tangent spergery

I cannot really emphasize just how disgusted and enraged I was last year when me wondering what kind of skeletons were in twitch staff's closets after finding out they held onto evidence of dr. disrespect being a pedo for YEARS without contacting any investigators was met with "OH WOWW YIKES. YOU'RE DEFENDING DR. DISRESPECT? I CAN'T BELIEVE IT MAYBE I'M GONNA HAVE TO REEVALUATE OUR RELATONSHIP YOU SICKO". There is NO fucking world where bringing up the fact there might be even more pedos in twitch's hierarchy should equal "oh so you just support pedos!" I should not have to deal with potentially being cut off from people I've known for over a decade because they decided me being concerned about pedo media cliques somehow means I support pedos because wasn't just blindly cheering dr. disrespect's DMs twitch held onto for like 5 fucking years getting made public as a great victory against pedos. You don't fucking consciously hold onto that shit for so long without telling anyone without something else being up behind the scenes, that shit raises SO MANY FUCKING RED FLAGS about twitch staff.

The twitch staff/disespect situation I just recalled kinda also reminded me of when discord changed their TOS in a way that allowed child porn if it was furry shit, only for people to notice and then find out that a "cubfur" was on discord's admin team which led to people getting banned for calling out him being a fucking pedo a few years back. Back then though this fake fucking redditized world wasn't as embedded in people's minds as it is now, so me pointing out there might be more pedos instead of blindly celebrating him being called out wasn't met with the gay fucking "oh so you SUPPORT PEDOS?" shit.

Not to mention Japan's - and by extention anime's - opinion of Christianity. (less than positive to say the least)

There's actually a weirdly high amount of christian anime from the 70s-80s if I'm remembering this right.

 

[skykiii]

There's actually a weirdly high amount of christian anime from the 70s-80s if I'm remembering this right.

You are. You totally are.

That's the thing about Japanese media. For all the cringe, sometimes it can be surprisingly based.

 

[Slap47]

It seems like no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, anime gets to be the bad guy. Anime is like counter-Earth Wolverine--instead of being so popular that every team wants to claim him, he's so hated that everyone assumes he's working for somebody else.

There are many sides in the Autism Civil War.... simple as.

Even the #BasedTradCathAnimeIsEvil faction is autistic.

 

[Scritti Politti]

You are. You totally are.

That's the thing about Japanese media. For all the cringe, sometimes it can be surprisingly based.

I knew a family of kids were raised in a hyper-strict religious household, where they were allowed to watch nothing but Christian anime of the 70s; they were the only people I've ever met who actually watched Superbook. They grewup as un-based as humanly possible i.e. one became a homo, the other became a meth-addicted deadbeat dad.

I'm not saying the act of being exposed to Christianity in such a debased form drove them into the arms of degeneracy, but it certainly couldn't have helped!

 

[Skeletron Prime]

There's actually a weirdly high amount of christian anime from the 70s-80s if I'm remembering this right.

Fuck yeah SUPERBOOK!

You might be thinking specifically of World Masterpiece Theatre which would be responsible for a major portion of that. Adapting a lot of famous western stories means Christianity is involved more often than not. But even anime like Prairie Girl Laura (their adaptation of the early Little House series) also counts.

The Japs post WWII just consider Christian imagery to be exotic. Similar to how a ninja star immediately resonates in the heart of a 12 year old white boy, so does a cross necklace to some 12 year old Japanese kid with Eighth Grade Syndrome.

 

[skykiii]

I knew a family of kids were raised in a hyper-strict religious household, where they were allowed to watch nothing but Christian anime of the 70s;

Wait, so the parents specifically made sure it was all anime?

What, would their parents get mad if they caught the kids watching non-anime Bible cartoons like Adventures in Odyssey?

And if this was the 70s/80s how did they even know what "anime" was, anyhow? That there was even a distinction wasn't noticed by much of the world until the 1990s.

they were the only people I've ever met who actually watched Superbook. They grewup as un-based as humanly possible i.e. one became a homo, the other became a meth-addicted deadbeat dad.

I'm not saying the act of being exposed to Christianity in such a debased form drove them into the arms of degeneracy, but it certainly couldn't have helped!

You're gonna have to explain how this is a "debased form."

And not gonna lie... your story reeks of bullshit. Not necessarily that you're making it up (though that's not off the table), but just that you're bending facts over a table to try and fit what you want to believe. Your own story presents the far more believable idea.

As the Oompa Loompas sang:
Blaming the child is a lie and a shame,
you know exactly who's to blame:
the mother and the father.

 

[BigKant]

Anime fans are easy to pick on. Even if anime is mainstream.
They are weebs, they are cringe etc. etc.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

They targeted anime fans.

Anime fans.

We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than unlocking a waifu pillow.

We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun.

We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the orderto watch Fate, all to experience in the most sublime way possible.

Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same episodes over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such weeb nirvana that they can literally watch these jap cartoons blindfolded.

Do these people have any idea how many bodypillows have been smashed, collectible action figures broken, flatscreens and hard disks destroyed in frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?

These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our animators? Weebs aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the anime our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 1000 year old vampires with a gratuitous panty shots. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to pedophilia. Who enjoy the battle of attrition over perceived age of a character. Who take it as a challenge when they tell us she looks 8 years old. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.

Anime fans are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another wank fest.

 

[Grub]

I've never understood the idea that anime is anything other than cartoons from Japan. When I was a kid I didn't know or care about the difference between Japanese cartoons and other cartoons. I still don't really care about the difference. I don't really understand the intense emotions towards anime negative or positive. A lot of the degenerate stuff in anime isn't specifically because it's anime, it's because Japan is a fucked up country with a fucked up society and Japan just so happens to produce anime which just so happens to regularly reflect its fucked up culture and society.

The problem with anime seems to be more the people that gravitate towards it and obsess over it rather than anime itself. Weird autistic people just seem to really latch onto it. I still remember back in high school around the time when Naruto first started being dubbed there was a group of ninja kids that were super into anime that would dress up and run around playing Naruto and shit. I'm talking like 17-18 year olds. That's shit's fucking weird and super autistic and it was only ever the weird anime kids that did shit like that.

It only gets weirder and more autistic the older they get. Had this customer at my work a couple years ago. Seriously one of the creepiest fucking dudes I've ever met. He was like late 40's, early 50's lived on the first floor of his mom's townhouse. Walk into the place, there's sailor moon and anime posters all over the walls, go into the dude's bedroom to do our work and he's got a full size hentai body pillow on the bed, computer on with a desktop absolutely jam packed with a million pictures, all hentai and porn by the looks of the thumbnails. His mom comes in tidying a bit and apologizing and saying some shit about being disappointed in her son.

None of that was worst part though. We had to move his bed so we could get to the heat pump on his wall. Fucking under his bed was a collection of these lifelike toddler looking dolls. Full size, about 3 feet tall, with a bunch of outfits for them and shit. The creepiest part was they live about a block away from an elementary school. I don't think I've ever wanted to get out of a house faster in my life.

Anyway, my point is, anime would probably have a less shitty reputation if the people that enjoyed it weren't so unbelievably fucked up.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

The problem with anime seems to be more the people that gravitate towards it and obsess over it rather than anime itself. Weird autistic people just seem to really latch onto it. I still remember back in high school around the time when Naruto first started being dubbed there was a group of ninja kids that were super into anime that would dress up and run around playing Naruto and shit. I'm talking like 17-18 year olds. That's shit's fucking weird and super autistic and it was only ever the weird anime kids that did shit like that.

Playing Naruto on the playground was fun in elementary school. Had no idea high schoolers were doing that. Did it look like Kingdom Hearts Parking Lot?

 

[Grub]

Playing Naruto on the playground was fun in elementary school.

Naruto didn't exist when I was in elementary school. The WWF or WWE or whatever it was at that time and wrestling was pretty popular though. So there was a lot of kids doing stone cold Steve Austin shit.

Had no idea high schoolers were doing that. Did it look like Kingdom Hearts Parking Lot?

Yeah pretty much except they would wear ninja bandanas and shit. Except this one dude who would dress like some kind of fantasy adventurer/fairy dude. Like had a fucking leather satchel on his belt and for some reason an nes controller as a belt buckle. They used to do this shit in the back parking lot of the school near where the stoner kids smoked weed. The stoner kids would just get stoned and laugh at them. They had a bit of overlap with the emo kids and the weird art kids.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

I don't really understand the intense emotions towards anime negative or positive

It's a bit like liking disney. It is/was a distinct style and people usually have strong opinions about evocative styles.

Also, if you don't get it, just think about the matrix which was quite an impactful movie and for many people in the west the first experience with an anime (without being animated).