I don’t do enough punching down. Surely, criticizing anime fans, is punching down. I get sick at the thought that someone sitting in one of my classes could be an anime fan. Now that I’m gonna be a TA, I can’t wait to put this into action, I will be pretending to vomit when a student pitches a project of that tone.
Sickening that we see such a modern normalization of this perverted media. One which incentivizes pervert behavior from its consumers. The normalization of people consuming anime is one of the largest examples of the problems that the ‘let people enjoy things’ sentiment has led to. Asian-fetishizing porn-addicted non-social parasocial slopping perverts—which is putting it lightly. It’s low barrier of entry for consumption makes it so dangerously easy to watch because its a cartoon with the allure of a foreign alien culture.
An anime fan engages in social faux pas galore. They cannot stop themselves. The damage of it now is that entire digital communities and fandoms normalize that behavior because everyone talks like that. Their digital cliques reproduced in real life through physical ticks. Anime is a medium where everything is communicated without needing the actual words being said. You can understand everything from the exaggerated facial and physical expressions each character does. It is why hardcore anime fans are immediately spottable in public. 100s of hours spent consuming anime leads to them reproducing the actions they goon to in real life. They avert their eyes, maybe scream/yell or speak too loudly, talk in a purposefully anime-stilted cadence, they emote like they themselves are characters. Humour to them is just the act of shouting out loud, or someone being a pervert. Truly the peak of entertainment.
Japan has always been ahead of the curve in regards to alienation and causing social maladjustment in its society, so it is truly wonderful now that all of us globally can catch up to them through their effective imperializing media.
Anime is such a disgusting, commodified, perverse medium. Worthless artless cartoons for adult children made by adult men at board meetings for mass market appeal. It is tough to just write-off a whole medium, I will defend Satoshi Kon’s work because he understood the medium and its audiences to be of these negative characteristics. His works critical of these perversions and fantacisms. I’m sure there are others, but I will be monolithic towards the whole medium, employing an orientalist criticism towards the country and its media.
Try checking out the SFU Anime Discord, this shit should not be allowed to be associated with a university setting. Pure perversion, pure mental illness on display. You get sad looking at it, and judging from their channel sadfessions where people leave anonymous paragraphs of the troubles in their life, they’re even sadder themselves. The most recent sadfession was #2235, they’ve got a long and illustrated history of therapeutic discord discourse. 3400 members on the SFU Anime Discord. That’s 10% of SFU students. We should be identifying who they are and charge them double the international student tuition price. For the amount they spend on merchandise (body pillows, funkos, breasted mousepads, maid dresses) Communication anime fans should be even more ashamed of themselves. I get it if it’s Satoshi Kohn or the occasional Ghibli movie. But someone watching 300 episodes of some shitty series should be kicked out of the program for not having learned anything in the last few unattended years of their degree.
The true danger of anime is that it is a constant portrayl of wish fullfilment, the very appeal of it is for the alienated, and for lack of a better word, losers, to vicariously live out their dreams through the media of choice. Basic plot lines of prophecies, being special in a fantasy world, beating your bullies, getting the girl, of course it is appealing to all those who feel themselves as gifted children, which is just coping that their current life situation isn’t as ambitious as the one time they solved a multiplication table within the 30-second mark in the 4th grade. Now their wish fullfilment media gives them a mix of infantilization and a degenerate perversion. The harm of this scales with the increasing age of an audience member. It’s all YA fiction, and the act of reading YA once you are no longer a young adult damages you regardless if it is anime or Harry Potter.
End of the day it’s probably just another flavor of trash entertainment that proliferates the world, but anime is an interesting situation where the way it molds and shapes the behavior of its fans that other media doesn’t seem to quite capture in the same way. I’m sure the animated nature of it plays a huge part in that, it is inherently not real, so the degenerate actions of characters and the medium don’t ever get compared to a human counterpart. Audiences live in that world of the animated and not of the real, no longer able to consume any media that is not animated.
What saddens me is the potential of the medium, no doubt that quality anime was made in the early 80s and 90s, or by the quickly suicided Satoshi Kon, but audiences don’t want that, they want to see pre-pubescent 1000 year old girls with huge swords fighting and yelling. How mainstream anime has gotten globally is really shocking when you consider how it was treated 10-15 years ago. And the moment something goes mainstream these days means that it is exempt from criticism because so many people watch it, and so many people love it. There must be something that Adorno or Baudrillard has written about the culture industry’s import of foreign work, you can look at the rising import of korea’s mediocre media by Netflix and the West. At least their media revolves heavily around class issues, but I doubt some new dating drama where a secretary has a secret relationship with their model boss will tackle that.
-> Slopunk <- 