I lurked across many anime forums, and at this point I don’t think there’s any interesting discourse to be had, leftist or rightist, regarding anime. Of course, due to Sturgeon’s law, few anime are actual gems. But that’s not the point. The point is that:
Is there any point in re-hashing the same old arguments.
Last time I remember, the only engaging discourses among weebs were about Frieren and Drama Queen, but for different reasons.
Frieren moreso for its depiction of demons and its comparisons to Tolkien’s orcs. For those who don’t know, a YouTuber named Lextorias made an hour-long video discussing the narrative problems with demons and the manga’s/anime’s inconsistent portrayal of demons as being absolutely evil, explaining via both in-story and authorial reasons for it, coming to the conclusion that Frieren’s demons are just a badly-written species. What was the reaction to it? Chuds coming out in defense of the series and attacking Lextorias with the kind of arguments he himself predicted and criticised in his own video:
https://www.lextorias.com/references/frieren-dilemma/Suffice to say, he singlehandedly managed to create an entire discourse that lasted for days in Twitter as culture war BS.
Coming up next is Drama Queen, a manga that is yet to be adapted into an anime, and highly unlikely. It’s about humans living alongside with aliens who saved them from an asteroid impact. It would’ve been another slice of life manga if it wasn’t for the fact that it caught weebs’ attention due to the MCs being sociopaths who hate the aliens and are contracted by a shady org that makes a profit off of killing the alien residents whose head is a dude with a double life as an “anti-racist” professor, with said aliens being pompous and arrogant foreigners who are taking up human life.
Long story short, people caught on it as a Japanese commentary on modern immigration to Japan with said aliens being allegory for immigrants. Which immigrants (white expats, Chinese house buyers, US troops, POC non-Japanese immigrants, etc…) is debated, but it’s clearly about immigration from a right-wing POV so far, although we’ll see how it goes since the story is still being published.
But yh, there’s no interesting discussion to be had as these themes have already been discussed to death on mainstream social media.
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