The anime is Genshiken (2004), I picked it up on a whim. It’s alright so far. Very “by weebs, for weebs”. The manga is from 2002.
The 80s and 90s being a pass of the baton from veterans of the early days to more modern staff, which already grew up with anime, and the success of Evangelion and merchandising had some awful long-term consequences even if it was probably unavoidable under capitalism.
straight up the only way to save the anime industry at this point would be to ban the depiction of any children or small people.
in a good year we get maybe 1 or 2 shows that’s not sexualizing minors in some way.
:this:
Every high school slice of life now has characters with wrinkles and 5 o’clock shadows. Just like when Hollywood gets a 35 year old to play a teenager.
I also wish fads died out like they used to. It used to be that something like isekai harem self-insert slop or certain art styles (moeblob comes to mind) would have their moment and then everyone would move on. It’s been like 15 years, please fucking stop. It feels like the entire industry and most of the fandom suffers from arrested development. They are all literal coomer-brained children from the top down. I want more shit like Perfect Blue and Mushi-shi, not Help! I Woke Up in a World Where Everyone Is an Anthropomorphic Sexy Penguin Demon and I Always Thought Penguins Were Kind of Stupid Animals but Now I Want to Fuck the Penguin Girls!
I also wish fads died out like they used to. It used to be that something like isekai harem self-insert slop or certain art styles (moeblob comes to mind) would have their moment and then everyone would move on. It’s been like 15 years, please fucking stop.
The wheels of weeb pandering industry require increasingly efficient pandering, where even the title of the weeb pandering directly tells the weeb what specific sexual pathologies that are going to catered to.
See my edit lol
I want more shit like Perfect Blue and Mushi-shi, not Help! I Woke Up in a World Where Everyone Is an Anthropomorphic Sexy Penguin Demon and I Always Thought Penguins Were Kind of Stupid Animals but Now I Want to Fuck the Penguin Girls!
Almost a
post, and I wholeheartedly agree.The western slop novel equivalent is shit like “My Boyfriend Is A Billionaire Navy Seal Werewolf.”
Yes, that’s an actual novel for sale (may have got the name slightly wrong) and as far as I can tell it’s selling well.
Yeah, the romance novel world got real weird with it after the internet let people share their extremely specific fetishes and ebooks let people self-publish literally anything. Of course, we also get Chuck Tingle, so it’s there’s some good with the bad.
Chuck Tingle had his finger on the pulse of the pandering horny slop novel world… and then that finger something something pounded in the butt dinosaur something something.
ChatGPTingle, an AI that’s only ever read Chuck Tingle and cranks out 1000s of pastiches per day
Romancing the Coronavirus my beloved
100%. Arrested development describes it perfectly.
I can’t handle another pathetic male looser coomer teen MC. 99% of all MCs fit these trope now. That or the pathetic male looser coomer teen power fantasy trope. Shows used to have such a broad interesting cast of characters, even bad shows.
Pretty much the entire industry is creatively bankrupt at this point.
I barely have any shows to look forward to these last few seasons.
Animation quality has improved significantly, but by almost every other metric shows are worse now.
There’s usually a few good mid to high budget shows each year, everything else is mostly slop.
The pandering is so staggeringly direct now: “mediocre creepy otaku is now the epic video game boy that uses video game cheats/metagaming to build limitless power and have limitless sex.”
Mushishi is seriously an absolute masterpiece. It actually upsets me how good it is, because it so meticulously highlights how unbearably trope-ridden and artistically bankrupt more or less all other anime is (yes even the good ones, yes even your personal fave thats “good actually i promise”)
Yuki Urushibara is a goddamn treasure and you should check out her other manga; they’re all great. I also really like Chica Umino’s work which is more slice of life but really wholesome and cozy.
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Probably the usual way: Self-Insert Epic Bideo Bame Boy uses bideo bame logic and metagaming/cheating to subjugate and take over the penguin world and all the penguin girls (almost certainly not of visibly adult age, so can’t say women) mewl at the Epic Bideo Bame Boy’s feet and fight for their senpai.
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I feel that the only ideological difference between Goblin Slayer and Shield Hero is whether the chuds behind them hate foreigners or hate feeemales more.
I remember when Azumaga Daioh was first taking the western weeb world by storm.
That “mai waifu” line said by the creepy teacher started a cognitohazard and
that continue to spread and mutate across the globe.EDIT: I forgot which character said “mai waifu” and fixed it after being corrected.
Not the janitor. The pedo teacher (worst character and every character in-universe hates him, but whatever).
Azumanga is one of those shows like Tenchi Muyo (funnily, the Azumanga author started by creating basically Tenchi Muyo fanfiction) or Evangelion that are fine, even good by themselves, but contain aspects that would be picked up on and create bothersome trends.
Evangelion
Anno wanted to dunk the “teenagers conscripted to save the world with giant robots” troupe in anime and even added some existential horror like the legion of Rei clones that effectively “reset” the character every time a Rei dies, but the otaku/weebs just got horny for that too.
One of the most horrifying takes I ever heard from an actual weeb in the offline world was
(CW: extreme weeb misogyny/snuff/SV/kiddie creeping)
spoiler
that Rei was his favorite character because he, quote, “could take her virginity, kill her, reset her virginity and her innocence and repeat” as much as he liked.
Anno’s intent and the actual response of the fandom is proof that god isn’t real
I remember the late 90s and early 2000s where self described “otaku” insisted that the end of Evangelion was really mysterious and deep and would never be fully understood.
It was Anno directly saying “look. LOOK. THIS. Is this what you wanted? HUH? You’re so fucked up.”
It’s worse than that… we killed god
Is this the reason why Christians like the idea of women “saving themselves before marriage?” There is a sadistic pleasure in fucking a virgin?
When dealing with chuds like that, I always tell them. “Now imagine how you’d feel if a gay man said that about Rei if they were a guy.”
Is this the reason why Christians like the idea of women “saving themselves before marriage?” There is a sadistic pleasure in fucking a virgin?
“Purity culture” is sexual pathology and always has been, yeah.
I think Frieren didn’t have any sus stuff? I remember watching it when it aired. It was a pure 10/10. Give it a watch. I’ve watched a lot of anime over more than a decade. Nothing comes close to Frieren.
Currently, Orb: On the Movements of Earth is very good. Just an anime set in 15th century Poland about people discovering heliocentrism and the church trying to maintain control. Violent cuz of the Church but not sus. Three eps out and DO NOT LOOK UP SYNOPSIS OR DISCUSSIONS. Just watch the trailer and see if it’s for you or no.
Dungeon Meishi is seemingly devoid of any skeevy stuff, coincidentally the mangakas for both Frieren and Meishi are women.
frieren as a character especially has like a comically old-fashioned take on seduction
Frieren had Aura who is definitely right on the line of “But she’s a 5000 year old demon!”
500
0year old demon
I’ve never heard of Orb but that sounds like a super interesting premise for an anime–I’l check it out!
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
I was reading Ah My Goddess yesterday and there’s an early chapter ripping on weebs which you couldn’t make today because said weebs would get mad getting clowned on.
Otaku
Gamers“Women exist solely to please men”
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I was there, Gandalf, in 2004 watching Genshiken as it aired. There’s a degree of leering but the show does have a bit of a critical eye at least.
Rambly thoughts on anime and the infinite sexualization of the medium.
I feel like the thing about anime that gets exceptionally icky is a product of its animated nature. I can watch Olivia Newton John in the tight leather pants in Grease without feeling like a total creep (though I feel bad because getting into them must have been torture) because she was 30 at the time. Just because the show says she’s 17 or 18 does not change the fact she’s an adult woman playing a high schooler (same goes for Travolta and the others). The camera’s connection to the reality where she’s 30 reduces the creepy nature of it all.
Anime though, you can have Yoko from Gurren Lagann who is 14 at the beginning of the show even as she’s the object of
constantly. And if she were being played by a 23 year old, it would be gross but not gross in the same way where there’s just the choice of the show. And the character designers aren’t constrained by “reality” and still choose to sexualize a character they’ve made underage by fiat. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so dark sometimes (Yoko’s design is very ‘mature’ after all - you could have said she was 18 and no one would have questioned it). The reverse is, of course, even worse (2000 year old dragon), but it cuts both ways and I just think its interesting that until Euphoria I feel this kind of grossness was confined to anime. That show, with the age of its cast, feels like it’s trying to do the kind of gross service that anime does all the time.For me, it’s foreign, even alien, that there’s this widescale and persistent and aggressive “the younger, the sexier” fixation from increasingly older and disgusting Hollywood/anime industrial people. Even when I was a hormone-flooded teenager, I had the hots for people my age or older, and that stayed roughly the same as I got into my 20s, then my 30s. I started seeing younger people, especially teenagers, as what they are: children.
I can’t help but assume that’s typical and dare I say it healthy for a stable society. Old men shouldn’t be creeping on children, and entertainment shouldn’t emphasize old men creeping on children either.
I’ve said before that a lot of it does feel like Hollywood casting late-20s/early-30s actors for teenage characters, because you get characters that scan as like 20 something and act like adults, but then the narrative makes them like 14 for no reason. You also get characters that scan as 30-40 being assigned ages like 20, too. It’s weird, like artists are compressing a multi-decade-wide range of adult character designs down into a range of six years and labeling all of them as teens for no story-related reason.
Someone else pointed out that at least some of it is adult writers basically writing a story with adult characters and then aging them all down to make them more relatable to an intended teen audience, but without actually changing their appearances or behavior.
I don’t like when y’all post shows I’ve definitely seen, but can’t remember the slightest detail.
She’s actually a 200 year old goddess so it’s fine
The trans depiction in S3 can be a bit sketchy at best in my opinion but it is very much an early 2000s anime, has this vibe that you just can’t get these days.
The vibe’s one thing, but what’s worse about modern shows is that the seasonal format doesn’t let the show take any time to develop the story.
