one funny thing about Re:Zero is Nagatsuki’s mild lolicon restrained sufficiently by taste or popularity to avoid any Made In Abyss shit manifests as one of the only medieval fantasies I’ve read to humanely represent something like Philippe Aries’ vision of premodern childhood. this vision may have been, in fact (per DeMause), a fantasy, but that makes it all the more interesting to incorporate into the idealized "Middle Ages" of a fantasy novel
"Anime/Manga is like Weimar classicism in the sense of often combining a very conservative bourgeois/feudal, even to the point of out right cozy, setting with the uncanny and the deviant. There is more of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in say, NGE then in anything Disney will ever produce.
It is not because Americans are “sexually repressed” (lol) or less twisted by the memories of fascistic violence (double lol).
Rather it is because both Germany and Japan, unlike America, raise(d) modernization to the level of a conscious project juxtaposed against the mental domestic home of premodern realities, and entertain(ed) the hope that somehow one could combine the mos mairorum in the very midst of the storm of technological/capitalistic becoming.
Americans, right and left, have by contrast mostly gotten by with half assed confusion of the two methods of processing reality without understanding the beauty, the charms and the tragedy of their real distinctiveness. One could qualify this that communities historically diagonal to the main civic religion of Protestant flavored deism overlaid on dollar and nuke hegemony may parallel the mental atmosphere and affective disposition of insurgent/sentry state capitalist nations.