I’d be happy if grossly sexist/fan service-y jokes didn’t ripple out. My experience is that it seems to touch a good half of things it shouldn’t and I have to live with an amount in almost everything I like. For example, the sex jokes in Toriyama-derived works, even something into its dozenth Mickey Mouse-esque apotheosis like Dragon Quest, has things I feel uncomfortable letting people see.
As a person deeply invested in games I (and we) have developed the discrimination to overlook the meta-culture around a medium and pick out the good works, so I agree that those arguments don’t truck here.
yeah, I think the difference is that a) I don’t think anyone is contending that literally all anime is bad so much as we’re talking about why it’s dismissed, and b) I have like, decades of experience in determining whether I’m willing to engage with someone about games, and remedial anime dialogue is … not good enough.
I think the pushback is that we’ve got people here who are ready to do the b) conversation and make it real interesting.
Certainly I’ve learned a lot from everyone’s tastes and appreciate the conversation – even spending 3 years doing an oldschool mech genre pastiche wasn’t the education I got from the SB anime club members. Thank you all!
an addendum that I forgot to add is about how access and the framing around that kind of access massively changes the ways people think about this kind of thing
like, game of thrones can have all that bad shit because it’s on the TV and you watch it just like you watch anything else
for the longest time (and this is still the case for a lot of it), watching anime wasn’t just flipping on the TV and watching it, it was finding a distributor and/or downloading it and having to go through a whole process and checking subs/dubs and whatever
and so a person approaching it from the outside doesn’t do it with guideposts that are as “friendly” to them as they would with a tried and true context like HBO or whatever, and I’d argue it puts people in a mindset to “other” the media before they even start watching it
it’s like the difference between a warehouse rave where you don’t know the address until 2 hours before vs. coachella
and I guess one of the biggest issues with anime right now isn’t that it has troubling content but that for most anime distribution rights are really tight and the only way to experience a lot of anime is to just get it unofficially, which completely changes the context around how people conceive of the entire form (this is changing a lot though)
I think about this a lot because this is kind of exactly what happened to chiptune
like, as a scene, we didn’t really do a great job of understanding just how access informs context informs people’s perception of it
and so many people in the scene pushed the videogame-ness of it so hard that now the only way you experience chiptune these days is to be at the video game con or whatever, when chiptune is in fact a hugely diverse form that can encompass tons of different styles
but because of the videogame associations all the people making non-videogame-y chiptune just left
like, even anamanaguchi kind of moved away from it in the end
when the only people that you can get to show up are people who wouldn’t care about your music except that it was made on videogame stuff, that’s when it gets hard to justify doing anything else
but this kind of access/context dynamic is changing a lot in anime so I’m not worried about the same thing happening for anime just yet
thinking on it, something else that always concerned me to an extent about the exoticism of anime was that, at least when I was a teenager, so much of what Big Anime Heads had access to seemed to be these received drips and drops of an artistic interplay that they were obliged to experience thirdhand and struggle to piece together into any kind of dialogue, and I’m a little distrusting whenever someone’s content to have that relationship to Their Favourite Art that way, since it makes it so difficult to have a more than surface level understanding of the work that I think half the time you just give up and reduce it to this lens of permanent otherness.
it’s similar to what happens when you fall in love with some cultural moment that’s long passed – which is something I’m definitely guilty of – where you’re only now receiving it in whatever way it was reconciled at the end and you have to really struggle to not fetishize it as somehow more interesting than the present that you’re eliding in its favour. which is probably why I keep insisting that we shouldn’t totally overlook our biases or whatever hand was dealt as more accessible to us when it comes to art, though I know there’s also shades of elitism there as increasingly many people functionally believe they’re starting at zero anyway.
seriously tho can we not be yet another forum where “every work of art from [country] is bad and people who like it are all perverts” is a normal and accepted take. this sucks
im most annoyed because the bad takes come out of apathy and/or deliberate avoidance for really lazy reasons. you dont have to post itt if you just don’t care about anime.
