/anime/ - Anime

https://thecartdriver.wordpress.com/2020/02/14/psycho-pass-carole-and-tuesday-and-more-why-anime-features-anti-immigration-elections/

I see a lot of people like in the article’s author, especially leftists, talk about it, and honestly? I’m not seeing it, at all. Maybe because I haven’t been active in the anime fandom for a decade by now (last discourse I got caught up in was the dumb flame war over “elitists” vs “casuals” on MAL), or maybe because I only consoome old (read: 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s) media because I don’t like much of contemporary media, but can’t say with certainty, but I just don’t see it.

Sure, perhaps the proportion of Japanese creators being chuds increased in recent years, but I don’t see that being particularly well-reflected in the current output of the Japanese animation and comic industries. The political messaging of 20th century and early 2000s anime and manga seems to be same as 2020s anime and manga insofar that both are all over the place in equal amounts.

Among “chuddy” anime, I can only think of GATE (literal JSDF propaganda), HighSchool Of The Dead (zombie shounen ecchi horror with big tiddie girls made by a far-right mangaka who hates leftists, supports the JSDF, a gun nut, and hates Koreans), and Frieren (what with the genocided human-like predatory demons being portrayed in deterministic ways in spite of showing signs of actual sapience the story never addresses), but that’s about it.

As for manga, the best I can think of as of late is Drama Queen with many seeing the aliens as allegory for immigrants in Japan, although many can’t decide if they’re supposed to be stand-ins for American/Euro expats, tourists, East Asian renters, SEA and SA migrant workers, Kurdish refugees, or a pastiche of all of them. But that’s like an exception compared to the shit-ton of manga that pushes feminist, anti-racist and other socially progressive themes.

I think it has already been discussed before, but Japan being NPC-topia combined with how being a busherite is deemed as the most acceptable way to express oneself in Japanese politics as opposed to, say, being a Maoist might have a lot to do with why a lot of mangakas seem to be chuds, which is easy as the majority of Japanese people in general are disconnected iPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Anime is pretty much the only place today where you can make high-budget, high-production art where sex is a major focus, without becoming outright pornography. There's a lot you could do with that. There should be more erotic thrillers, or gritty dramas about the psychology of sex, or trippy surreal erotica, and really just anything more interesting than mid action with jiggly boobs or comedies that mostly come down to "oh noes I accidentally groped her boob!" I'm not saying there isn't anything that stands out, every few years something does, the Fujiko Mine anime is a recent example of something that felt pretty fresh, but for all the money and attention that gets poured into this genre, it feels like the ambition is almost null.

What do we think about this disgusting nicotine-addicted lumpen of a cat girl?

Can't tell if this anime is even for or against smoking. Bunch of poop, piss, nyaa jokes and what not actually I appreciate how unhinged it is

was thinking about how ive never seen an anime with legitimately criminal protags. every "crime" anime either revolves around A. vigilantes or B. criminals targeting other criminals, aka its easily justifiable and theres no real dilemmas. no drug dealers, no robbers, no organ thieves etc
great pretender almost did this in the first episode with the protag being a legitimate convict who scams civilians. then they said "actually now he works for an informal looney tunes crime syndicate that somehow has hundreds of actors on their payroll and can do literally anything lmao" which was super lame

one of these is LITERALLY YOU:

<the shonenfag
>never grew out of his childhood tastes
>might watch other action-heavy anime but that's pretty much the bulk of his diet
>genuinely kind of stupid
<the post-shonenfag
>slightly grown up, broadened his tastes somewhat, mostly into light novel adaptations and romance now that he no longer thinks girls are icky
>still, at heart, kind of stupid
<the artfag
>cares sincerely about history and technical details
>knows a bunch of cool obscure shit, but also likes a lot of actual rubbish
>will eventually get tired of sharing a fandom with all these other people and leave
<the otaku
>makes funny haha jokes about how random forgettable CGDCT or ecchi is better than acclaimed stuff, pretty much entirely because of a female character he likes
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i cant watch anything anymore without being irrationally annoyed at how theatrical 99% of anime is. the dialogue, the action, etc makes me start imagining whatever nerd wrote it without experiencing anything even remotely similar.
gimme something real!!

what are some anime/movies/series/cartoons that you think that insist upon themselves? To me evangelion is one of them

"Cheap hack of a writer's guide to creating a morally ambigous antagonist:"
>Have a character be a smug self-centered asshole for 80% of the story
>Have him ally with the main baddie and commit some war crimes
>Have him turn on the main baddie after realising that the main baddie had killed their favorite dog (or is going to kill their favorite dog soon)
>Help the main characters for one or two scenes and then be killed by the main baddie
>The main characters in the epilogue are shown standing besides his grave and musing "He wasn't a bad person, after all. Such a tragedy!"

Post examples of this which had annoyed you the most. Shounen genre specifically is ripe with them, isn't it?

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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Recommend good yaoi for me
Picrel is Warehouse which is actually korean, not japanese, but I think manhwa is close enough to manga
Doesn't have to be explicit, can be full of yearning as well.