Why is the school setting liked so much in anime? It cannot just be that the target audience is mostly children, because there are a lot of anime of this sort oriented to older otaku also. Do anime ever make more than passing attempts at portraying so called "adulthood" as a future to be excited about?
>>7837School represents the last time people could have fun without having any responsibility other than studying. Many Japanese didn't have a nice time in high school due the pressure of exams and getting into university, then there's bullying, heartbreaks and so on. An idealized high school life might be entertaining to watch, both for adults who slave away every day and for teenagers, after all there a lot of different genre you can set in a school, it's a very versatile setting.
Personally, I wish there were more anime and manga set during university years because that's actually when Japanese people have fun: they can finally drink, smoke, drive and have all kind without too much pressure (no one studies in university in Japan, unless they study medicine). I'd even appreciate more work settings if they weren't so boring and repetitive.
>>7837The japanese government wants to keep their citizens complacent
so they keep having japan forcing the school setting into everything
>>7886Exactly.
When I talked to Japanese about university they all said it was easy and relaxed, with very high (90-99%) passing rates for exams. I only had one exam that was this easy in my career, they were shocked to hear that I had exams with 30% passing rate (in humanities!)
Are schools a foretaste of society under Communism?
You usually have most of the necessities taken care of, and every day is spent in the study, practice, and cultivation of various disciplines.
Some attempts are made to prevent social alienation, not to mention, and give definite purpose to life.
Is this not a more than small resemblance to Marx's eschatological, admittedly facetious possibly, description of the Communist future?
Of course, currently in the bourgeois capitalist system, schools can be miserable, tedious, and overly restrictive for many that lack quality educational services, but that does not mean that schools are inherently bad.
Is all this perhaps why around the world, there is oftentimes nostalgia, even if rose-tinted, for more youthful days, as is much glorified in anime sometimes excessively?
>>13990No. Fuck off with your pseud bullshit.
>most of the necessities taken care ofWho takes care of these "necessities"? Slaves?
I think you just need to pick better anime. There's plenty of anime about people in adulthood, even ones that aren't fantasy, isekai or apocalypse.
Odd taxi, Yakuza shows, spy series, plenty.
Even looking at the current season, and filtering out the fact that 70 perfect is fantasy of some sort, there's still some that focus on adult life, like pic related.
Keep in mind that it's very hard to write an engaging story about someone working a 10 hour a day slog job with mandatory drinking with the bossman afterwards. On that note, how many shows do you know that focus on regular people doing regular jobs? No, it's shows about outlaw lunatics murdering superheroes, fantasy kingdoms fighting each other with dragons, depressive murder games for money, or unrealistic characters doing stupid shit like "coach a shitty football team to success despite clear incompetence".
For Japanese people (and fuck, for Americans it's college given how much college comedy movies there are), high school is an easy relatable setting, because it's the only time people had time and lack of obligations enough to do shit like "let's make an entire shitty anime by ourselves" or "be in a band" or "make elaborate cosplay costumes".
Out of the top 20 anime of all time, 4 are set in a high school, 2 are set in nominally real life, and the other 14 are high fantasy worlds disconnected from reality.
And inb4
>Why western tv shows all in our reality
Because it's fucking expensive to make fantasy in live action and cheap to make realistic life action shows, but when you have an anime it makes no sense to just draw every day life as you completely waste the potential of the medium to tell stories that couldn't otherwise be shown, why not go for fukken demons magic and shit.
>>7837> Do anime ever make more than passing attempts at portraying so called "adulthood" as a future to be excited about?I don't watch anime as much as read manga but there are a lot of mangas where it starts off in highschool and eventually ends up with the characters as college students and working adults.
Actually there is an anime of this one.
That's why I think it's kind of pointless to talk about anime. There is hardly any anime that isn't just a manga series either abbreviated, or stuffed with shitty filler. Hardly any original anime shows so anime is pointless to discuss. Better to discuss the source material.
>>7838>>7883Seriously?
Why do people think high school is the best years of life?
It's not. Just because you don't have bills to pay doesn't mean it was easier.
Goddamn.
The only difference between children and adults is the ability to work. Everything else is fair game. I'm tired of people downplaying the stress of school.
People whom long to relive adolescence are often former delinquents/jocks. Or people whom just really suck at adulting.
>>9478Adulthood is misery with freedom for luxury.
Adolescence is misery with no freedom.
I choose adulthood.
>>7837School provides an easy contained setting that is relatable to pretty much all readers: children are living through it, and adults can remember their days going through it. It follows a strict framework that makes it easier to write, given the expected conventions of tests, clubs, school trips, etc., and is thus very convenient for many genres (romantic comedies being a prime example, but not only).
As anons above have pointed out, the Japanese in particular have a weird idealized version of school in their culture whereas it takes this sort of landmark place as "the last time you could be free" since labor in Japan is so nightmarish that once you enter the working force your life becomes hell. This, of course, isn't entirely correct; school life is often quite terrible, with ungodly pressures from absurd and constant testing, tons of drama, bullying, and misery all around.
As I see it, school is chosen as a setting so constantly not for its concrete characteristics, which very few works actually have the guts to delve into ("delinquent" manga often being a prime example), but to follow an easy framework that feels like a comforting narrative device, guaranteeing the reader that nothing really unexpected is bound to happen, and they can read with certainty that their beliefs probably won't be questioned. It's form convenient for a work aimed at mass cultural output. This, of course, becomes absurd in those manga that have schools with like ten thousand students that are functionally a self-governing society, at which point the plot device unwittingly becomes a parody of itself.
The easiest way to demonstrate the way school is merely a convenient plot device is by the problem of parenting and reproduction (in the marxist sense): how many manga set in school have to come up with contrived plot devices (working overseas, not giving a shit about their children, just plain never appearing) in order to remove parents from the narrative, and thus not have to grapple with the actual reality that being school-aged entails: that the "freedom" of schoolkids is in real life anything but, given they must answer to several different authorities they have no meaningful way to recourse against.
I find that for better understanding of these kinds of plot devices reading "How to read Donald Duck", a marxist classic by some folks in the Allende government, was very helpful.
All that being said it sure doesn't also hurt that having your story set in a school makes it so that its characters are school aged, and thus likely to be popular with people of certain unsavory sexual proclivities.
>>14214Forgot I already answered this.
Leftypseuds can write paragraphs and paragraphs over easily answered questions. Your elderly otaku ass isn't the target demo.
Lots of adults watch Adventure Time and Harry Potter and My Little Pony and whatever.
Only manga like Battle Royale(I know it's originally a novel) or something could we consider to be high school stories aimed at an adult demo.
>>20668Its not like you have a choice. Adults make you take it seriously. Yet, when you graduate, they just shrug you off. All that acdemic bulkshit you go through and they say "meh you dont know shit" even though they crininalize kids for skipping school.
I really think adults underestimate the treachery of school largely because theyve been away from it for so long.
Thats the beauty of childhood nostalgia and marketing.
>>14930It could be a cultural difference
From what i can tell japanese schools are usually better than ones overseas
In america unless you went to a good school you're lucky to get one that has clubs and shit to hang out in
>>7837What i find funny about the school setting is that a lot of these anime don't even take place in the school itself
It's just there to remind you that these characters are in fact teenagers that go to school, but then they just stop having them attend school at some point
>>15622>explanations for this quasi-OrientalismIt's probably largely due to this sentiment.
The factors that seem to contribute would be:
1. The alternative modernity that Japan represents to the people from more Western parts of the West, as opposed to the still quite culturally hegemonic— in the imperial core that the Western nations comprise— American ilk of modernity, has offered some sort of avenue of escapism that is exotic, convenient, and amassed as @Orikron aforementioned has said basically, yet not actually Other to the empire, as
Eurasian civilizations Russia, China, and Iran are; so as to go and step outside of the hegemony's boundaries.
2. To paraphrase someone, stagnation fuels novelty, and the popular culture industry and the subcultural niches in Japan, as other researchers have noted, have enormously flourished, while the Japanese society itself has suffered the malaises of the bust— this phenomenon is probably noticeable incidentally in the content of some anime; furthermore, Japan was also one of the first countries to venture into that postmodernity, into the sort of societal impasse that now afflicts numerous nations elsewhere in the West, too, with the failure of the old narratives and similar
(go check out Utena also), and plus further Japan was one of the first countries in Asia to modernize, so the
Orientalistic stereotypes about the aesthetic of Asian modernity and the alterity of it took heavy influence likely from their course, the early impressions and later fetishization of Shibuya to raise one example.
3. The sovereignty of Japan is also as vassal state quite subjugated to the American empire, and many people in the imperial core likely consider the place to be their wacky, "thing, Japan" being sort of the demonstration of this mentality, tourist spot, and the Japanese govt. encourages this sort of almost self exoticization, because of geopolitical cuckoldry or glowie shit.
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