It's because anime is multi-genre and sub-genres of anime cater to basically every demographic.
Anime includes masterpieces like Spirited Away, trashy harem / male fantasies like Jobless Reincarnation, touching dramas like Anohana, female oriented romances like Fruitsbasket, literally pornography like... Erm... Well you know.
Etc. etc. etc.
It's not fair to compare one anime with another. It's not like cartoons in the USA that fall under the rough set of same humor or writers. Anime is much broader and thus has something for everyone
And anime also has a lot that you'll hate. I personally hate recent male fantasy trends like Solo Leveling for example (despite enjoying Overlord, a male fantasy from yesteryear).
It's true that Anime is a broad field, but the vast majority of works is heavily shaped by Japanese idiosyncrasies and themes, which also means that, barring singular exceptions, anime is not really something for everyone. Conversely, the non-Western storytelling, themes, and character/interaction stereotypes are what many are drawn to (but still only a small minority of the population). I therefore don't see it "eating the world" in the sense of becoming completely mainstream. It's arguably not even mainstream in Japan itself.
However, to me this is a good thing, in terms of cultural diversity. Trying to adapt anime to more mainstream tastes in the name of global profit would do it a disservice.
And a large portion of those who do watch is due to a small number of very popular tentpole series. Most anime productions cater to a relatively niche nerd/geek audience.
32% of Japanese people watching anime is pretty damn mainstream. Marvel is indisputably some of the most mainstream US media in the past 20 years and yet "only" ~50% of the US population has seen a Marvel movie.[0]
I’m saying this in the context of the root comment claim that there is anime for everyone. Only a very few anime series are mainstream in the same sense that Marvel movies are mainstream. Continuing that analogy, most anime series are more akin to serialized superhero comics, which are only read by relatively few. Looking at the shape of the distribution here is important.
I think the main issue they didn't do a distribution, they just asked a single question without a range from weekly to daily, etc. etc. Most folks were probably too shy to admit it as a regular thing, but also didn't have a sometimes option.
To me it's just bad data, pretty much asking for folks to be like "no". But also I can't find anyone having bothered to do any other data collection on it.
You do not have to have a majority of people consuming something to be considered mainstream.
TFA quotes 31-32% of people (young and old) in Japan as anime watchers. That is very mainstream!
Your argument is like trying to claim Metallica is not mainstream. Sure, most people do not listen to them, but everyone has heard of them. I would wager back in the day less than 32% of people listened to Michael Jackson.
There's something to be said about Waifu lists transcending anime genres / subgenres. I would say compared to 70s-90s anime landscape, stylisitically anime / east asian animation has converged a lot. At least mainstream stuff - we've nearly reached peak moe, there's still seasonable optimizations / stylistic tweaks here and there - but IMO it's fair to suggest convergence in waifu/husbando aesthetic has driven and is driving a lot of growth, and it's fair to put everything under umbrella for extrapolating market trends. I feel animes' ability to make fans horny and the increasing culture around anime fandom (now) unabashedly wanking over their affection/fondness over random constructed characters across genres is... potent.
Even the aesthetic/art style varies tremendously - i.e. even the "big eyes" thing so often correlated with anime art isn't universal either.
Can you have "Western" anime? Some hardcore otakus scoff at the idea. If you made an animated version of Star Wars - is that anime? Is Avatar: The Last Airbender an anime?
"Chinese anime" or "Korean anime"? Again, some would scoff at the idea. But what is all that Hoyoverse stuff? Or all those Korean webtoons (though that's really more comparable with manga - and the korean word "manhwa" uses the exact same Chinese characters as "manga").
What I find the most interesting is that there is clearly something that makes anime stand out as being its own thing, distinct from the majority of other animated TV, but it's hard to put a finger on exactly what that attribute is and where to draw the line.
The anime community has, for as long as I've been a part of it (13 years or so), decided that anime is "animation made in Japan". This heuristic has actually worked pretty well.
But the lines are increasingly blurred.
- Japanese produced shows are outsourcing some animation to China and Korea, and sometimes taking direct funding and story writing input from the USA.
- Non-Japan produced shows are taking notes on what works, drawing on it for inspiration, and in rare recent cases even outsourcing animation directly to Japan.
- There is a TON of money in gacha games, and the biggest "anime" titles some people may recognize are gacha games, butand the majority of those are run 100% by Chinese companies. Ironically, sometimes sending them over to Japan for the TV adaptation.
Just like food: Italy may have "invented" pizza, but New York pizza is now its own thing.
> What I find the most interesting is that there is clearly something that makes anime stand out as being its own thing, distinct from the majority of other animated TV, but it's hard to put a finger on exactly what that attribute is and where to draw the line.
On the higher quality end of the spectrum, I think one of the main differentiators is just how seriously the staff takes the production. They lean into the cinematography, storyboarding, directing, music, choreography, etc just as much or more as one might expect from western live action prestige TV. This is exceedingly rare in TV animation in the US and is only really seen in our animated movies (which are rare these days, at least in 2D form).
The other thing is that high quality anime is exceedingly good at building atmosphere and creating vibes. Half of the enjoyment of Cowboy Bebop for example is just basking in the ambience.
Another aspect is that it was assumed virtually all animation outside of Japan was solely meant for young kids and the content reflected that.
To be fair, most Japanese anime is also meant for kids and teens, but they were willing to explore content that would absolutely shock Western parents (violence, sex, nudity, as well as more nuanced stuff like sociopolitical commentary).
Is this different today? I feel modern Japanese anime is more toned down compared to say, the 1990s, while non-Japanese animation has been “toned up” in content.
Yeah. The anime community has a lot of debate on these things. I guess it makes sense that not everyone is on the same page with regards to the eternal flame wars / arguments here.
Avatar, Star Wars, even Boondocks comes up.
I think My Adventures with Superman was Korean at least, but stylistically it's close to anime.
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The one people may have forgotten about is RWBY, which was the famous Texas Anime (erm... Texas made anime-inspired art?) that split so many people with debates on 'Anime or Not'.
"The famous Texas anime" is King of the Hill. People in Japan argue over whether watching it is better with subs or dubs. It's a slice of life anime in all but drawing style and origin.
I would definitely think that all the French-Japanese and Italo-Japanese coproductions of the 80s somehow qualify as western anime, yes. See for exemple Ulysses 31 and Esteban: Child of the Sun.
Then you have things like Radiant which a “manga” by a French artist in French which was turned into an anime by a Japanese studio.
I guess there probably is animation made in the typically Japanese somewhere. I can’t really help you there because I only read mangas and never watch adaptations (they are always strictly inferior to the material they adapt). So the only Japanese/Korean animation I watch is original content of which there is sadly very little.
I think it should be the other way around and we should call anime "animation". Anime is just the word Japan borrowed for animation, no need to borrow it back when English has a perfectly usable word for it already.
Why not? Animes signature 'Big Eyes' are attributed to Astroboy (early 1950s anime) but the Astroboy style was clearly from Mickey Mouse.
Similarly: One Piece / Luffys gears have been confirmed to be various powers that Tom and Jerry (the cartoon cat and mouse) have done over the decades with Gear 5 being a full on cartoon logic power up.
The amount of play and borrowing from Japan to America and back to Japan and back to America is epic.
Samurai films are inspired by Westerns. But then Star Wars was inspired by Samurai films.
Bouncing back and forth between the two cultures is part of the fun of it all. Including borrowing words like anime, Isekai. Or Japan borrowing the letter 'H' (ecchi) from us with completely new meanings.
> Can you have "Western" anime? Some hardcore otakus scoff at the idea.
There's not really anything stopping creative individuals who aren't Japanese from producing anime. The thing that many attempts miss (and I suspect what makes hardcores bristle) is that they tend to miss the point in one way or another, resulting in a product that might have many of the outward characteristics but ultimately misses the mark.
In my opinion Avatar is actually pretty close. I've seen clips from various animated productions from France that also seem to capture a similar spirit.
Jobless Reincarnation is simultaneously trashy and also prestige drama. I feel like you could have picked almost any other harem show and been better off for your example lol
I mean, yes I wanted a Trashy shown for my example. But I also wanted... A good show with merits.
I was optimizing on controversy with this pick. Looks like it mostly worked given the conflicting viewpoints that have come up.
There's very well written drama in Jobless Reincarnation. But it is also paired up with a literally panty worshipping (holy artifact of Roxy) panty-thief.
Jobless Reincarnation has a lot of fucked-up trashy aspects to it, but it also explores how those things fuck people up, why and how, and goes deep into character development and a realistic depiction of what healing from trauma (and people who haven't healed from trauma) looks like.
There are a lot of harem anime out there that do not do that type of deeper character work and function solely as male power-fantasies. See, for instance, Tsukimitchi or Rosario X Vampire
'Pedophilic undertones' doesn't relate to 'trashy' or 'harem', even if you read the anime that way. In fact, it can be extremely interesting to see something which is so rarely portrayed or discussed in fiction, even fiction for adults.
The reality of child abuse is neither solved nor rebuked by depictions or explorations of psychology in adult fiction.
I don't even know what this show is, but I can guarantee you any pedo-related stuff in there is highly unlikely to be for the purpose of "depictions or explorations of psychology".
Come on, don't try to kid me. It's there for the same reason all the other seinen anime have a ton of borderline softcore porn tropes in them.
In this case, it's not; but even if it were, does that limit the ability of a text to explore interesting themes? Why?
I'd recommend reading deeper into the scholarly literature of sexual themes in anime and manga before assuming that fans necessarily interpret 'children' into the text. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639806
>if you could even call the writing of some guy with no credentials that
The researcher I'm quoting (who's by far not alone on writing this topic in his field) is Patrick Galbraith, a researcher and associate professor of cultural anthropology at Senshu University in Tokyo.
I think anyone deeply familiar with anime knows the harem tropes and sexual-comedy setups that Jobless Reincarnation uses as the basis of their story.
The difference is that Jobless Reincarnation plays out these sexual situations out to the full extend of their drama (ex: Paul Grayrat is caught making a child with the hot maid, there's multiple episodes of fallout because of this as Paul and Zenith, his first wife, have arguments over this).
I'm not sure if this is a teaching moment for Rudy (the main character) though, as it becomes clear that the entirety of the Grayrat line is full of sexual deviants and even some inbreeding.
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Doing the sexy time with the hot maid is... I mean.... its a trope. Its normally a comedy routine. But its played straight here.
Stealing the panties the main character's 40+ year old hot teacher (who is from the demon continent so she looks like only a teenager) is... a comedy trope in anime. (Ie: Panty stealing is all over Konosuba, a comedy anime). But its completely different when its played out straight and in a dramatic anime.
Being open with what fetishes you're cool with, and which ones make you squeemish is part of growing up. I can comfortably say that the stuff Jobless Reincarnation takes as core plot points are uncomfortable to me / "squicky" and unsatisfying sources of drama for me. And due to their long history as a comedy trope in older anime, its difficult for me to take it seriously.
Perhaps your argument is that the "point" is to take these adultery scenes more seriously and think deeply about them and the characters they affect. Except I already know that adultery is wrong, that panty stealing is wrong and I don't have any plans to do either.
So as a source of Drama, my overall confusion with this show is "Why are you dramatizing porn/harem/eroge plots?".
Uh no. Its a stupid plot for stupid porn-level writing setup. I don't consider it a source of drama at all. Personally anyway. I see that a lot of other people seem to like it so I don't want to hate on it too much or cause undo harm to your opinions or whatever. But... its really hard for me to take the eroge/hentai level plots seriously in Jobless Reincarnation. That's all.
Even if I 100% recognize that the author works very hard to set up these situations and think out the fallout and drama in a reasonably "realistic" way (or at least, all the characters acting like they should while still qualifying for the trope). And I think that's the part a lot of people like: the deep thought the author put into this work. Thinking deeply about how all these characters would act in the face of these sexually deviant actions.
I don't know why I even bothered to try to push back, beyond the fact that these kind of "philosophers" plague the anime community. The pattern is very predictable. Tons and tons of ink spilled to try to explain why they're not a pedophile while not doing anything more than distracting from the original point and dithering endlessly. And nobody wants to push back because of it, so they take silence as complicit assent.
If you're head hunting for polarizing anime with borderline underage sexual objectification, you could have gone with the "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime" anime - take one look at the clothing (or lack thereof) of Milim Nava.
In before people furiously try to rationalize by saying, "Well sure she looks like she's a prepubescent 12 year but ACTUALLY she's 3000 years old", yeah okay sure - but as the saying goes "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...".
So people know: I've chosen a highly controversial anime on purpose to prove that there's anime some people hate and other anime people love.
I personally couldn't get very far into Jobless Reincarnation. So I'm on the haters side. But in any case, the controversies of this anime are well known.
I actually didn't know there was any controversy around it, but this:
> I personally couldn't get very far into Jobless Reincarnation.
explains your choice. Based on how other modern isekais typically go, it definitely starts out looking like this one is going to go down a similar route, but it really doesn't. The overall character development for the main character is about him figuring out how to relate to others and develop healthy relationships instead of the fixations and fears he started with.
It's a modern Fate/Stay Night. It took a lot of trash Isekai tropes but played them straight and dramatic.
Like F/SN took your harem tropes and video game stats and crafted a magic system out of it... Jobless Reincarnation starts with panty thieves, sex scenes, voyeurism, a harem of three girlfriends and the tries to reverse engineer a story out of the tropes.
It's good for what it is. But it doesn't change that it's fundamentally starting with so called trashy tropes.
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It's clear that they're setting up a love triangle between the Red Head Tsundere hothead, the quiet traditional wife type, and his hot teacher who is a 100+ year old demon but looks like a teenager.
Like, there's more merit to this than maybe I'm making fun of. Because the author tries really really hard to make these situations play out with how a real life person might react to these revelations. But that doesn't change the fact that I can smell these trash tropes from a mile away.
Subjectively, I think Saber/Rin/Sakura of Fate/SN played out more realistically with their harem tropes than Jobless Reincarnations Roxy/Sylphie/Eris.
There's the benefit that F/SN are three different universes so each waifu pick is a totally different story. Jobless Reincarnation is on the other hand separated out by many years. But it's bloody obvious that all three girlfriends are going to come back together later for your old school anime triangle drama.
I guess that was what I liked with F/SN. The three girls were not yet another cheesy triangle.
The interesting thing about Jobless Reincarnation is that, even though the Anime was a late comer in the Isekai genre, the original work, the online novel, is actually a precursor if not the starting point of the current wave of Isekai works.
I'm not sure i agree. Yes there are exceptions, but they tend to be few and far between, and fairly niche themselves.
Most american animation seems to be: stuff aimed at young children (pixar type shows), super hero adjacent stuff, or adult commedy (like south park). A few exceptions here and there but on the whole there just isn't that much variety.
I can pull the same thing with anime - the vast majority pumped out are either:
- slice of life
- isekai
- shonen
Here's a few more: (not super hero, not necessarily geared towards children, and not comedy)
- Owl House
- Pantheon
- Infinity Train
- Final Space
- Castlevania
I think you're simply less well versed in the variety of western animation. There's also not nearly as much MONEY in western animation, so of course there's less of it.
> The owl house literally won an award for best childrens tv (albeit it does look deep enough to be enjoyed by adults)
Yes, but it also has a large adult following. It is not TARGETING children unlike a show like Blue's Clues. Therefore I don't think you can classify it as you put "pixar level children shows" (which I don't even know what that means).
> Wikipedia describes Final Space as a comedy
Maybe... personally while I think Final Space does have comedic elements - it also has an overarching storyline and is more of an epic adventure dealing with tragedy, death, and loss at a pretty adult level.
> Infinity Train can't be legally purchased
Literally this has nothing to do with the main point which was that western animation does not have variety
> Sure, but that is both a cause and effect of it failing to capture audiences the way anime has.
We weren't discussing whether or not something appeals to an audience. We were discussing whether or not there was sufficient variety. I think the root of our disagreement is in "volume" and I would argue that there is plenty unless you absolutely need to be consuming media every day.
There might be significantly LESS from a quantity perspective, but the DIVERSITY in shows is 100% available if you know where to look.
And in fact the actual OP post that I was addressing (because I think we're getting a bit off track) was that "cartoons in the USA fall under the rough set of same humor or writers" which is, assuming one possesses even a modest amount of experience with western animation, patently false.
Western animation is varied, but I think anime overall still has an upper hand.
In anime not too unusual to see shows like Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju which is a historical drama that follows the apprentice of a master stage entertainer in the Showa era. Very niche, but also quite interesting. Stuff like that almost never gets animated TV shows in the US.
I think the traditional outlet for that stuff is like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.
USA certainly produces a lot of entertainment and celebrates niches.
What's weird and interesting though is that Japanese Anime covers just so many genres (including edutainment. I'd add Ninja Girl and Samurai Master as a very educational plot about the Warring States period of Japan). Maybe even Kenshin as a more mainstream historical fiction about Mejia Era / dawn of industrial Japan as the perspective of an old Samurai assassin.
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USA has assassins creed for example (or Canada does at least??) but that's a video game. Shogun and Game of Thrones has fantasy + history in them.
I guess general USA entertainment certainly covers all the genres. But anime alone attempts to cover all the bases. That's quite unique for a medium IMO.
Are you talking about made for TV animation or others? I would suggest animated feature films such as The Secret of Kells, A Scanner Darkly, or even Waking Life and Heavy Metal to see that this is not entirely the case.
Bojack deals with very heavy themes (depression, self destructive behavior, etc) in a scatological and satirical manner.
Without listing specific cartoons that you watched, it's hard to know where you "went wrong". Part of it might have been a culture gap - pop culture heavy cartoons wouldn't really appeal to somebody who didn't grow up in the US.
This could have just as easily happened to you if you'd moved to Japan and been exposed to shows like:
- Failure Frame (PARALYZE POISON PARALYZE POISON LOOK LISTEN LOOK LOOK) - if you get this joke, you get it.
- Faraway Paladin (devolves into some of the cheapest flash animation YTMND level I've ever seen)
- Diabolik lovers (...)
Conversely there's a lot of good anime out there as well:
Sure but have you watched anime? Id say american cartoons are still very niche, the same way comic books are mostly about super heros compared to mangas or french BDs
You are underestimating the sheer amount of Anime produced every year. You probably get as much variety in a single year as a decade of western animation.
That's true, but it's also not the point I was addressing which was that all western animation has the same humor/writers which is LLM hallucination level wrong.
I like that about Anime. I think part of my it and Manga have such a broad spectrum is because it is relatively cheap to produce - meaning the companies bankrolling production are less risk averse, and as a result lots more weird ideas get to be tried.
You do not have to watch too much of it to get the sense that writers are just going nuts tossing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Endless remixing of ideas from what came before, and outside influences.
Example: Legend of Black Heaven, which featured a middle aged retired rockstar guitar player working as a software engineer, who is tracked down by aliens to get him to use his guitar playing as a weapon in an intergalactic war. Sure, why not? Is it good? Debatable. Have you seen anything like it before? Unlikely.
Legend of Black Heaven is one of my all-time favorites.
I think he's a middle manager, not an engineer. His title is "Section Manager" and I only remember this because the Japanese title of the show is Kacho Ouji, which translates to Section Manager Ouji or Section Manager Prince if you translate his name
Right, this article is lumping together a bunch of different things that are maybe loosely related because of anime as a style.
The unstated thesis might just be surprise that this once-nerdy stuff has become mainstream at all and therefore has investment potential that was heretofore unrecognized.
It also can't be overlooked that the anime style is both highly flexible and also very easy to reproduce. Like I remember it being old hat to see books on "how to draw anime" when I was a kid, and anime didn't have nearly the presence it did in the west as it does now.
I'm genuinely not trying to be a shithead or anything, it's just a style that lends itself well to industrialization and specialized tooling to speed up the process of creating. Unless you get into highly stylized executions, if you as a company just want to turn out a perfectly average and forgettable anime, you can do so at scale pretty easily, and the glut of artists looking for work means you don't have to pay a lot for the labor either.
I have nothing against this but frankly as a creative it is slightly demoralizing to see just more and more consolidation and mechanization in industry. There's so little that feels genuinely creative anymore, and it feels like year over year the art people produce is crushed harder and harder into pre-made molds that do well on content algorithms.
The Solo Leveling anime adapts a Korean Manhwa, so maybe not the best example here. Not that there is any shortage of male wish fulfilment in original Japanese works.
Shite, I wasn't expecting bad sentiment on Solo Levelling. I love games and this series touches me so differently. But unlike the parent comment, I have watched may be 4-5 anime series in total because I generally don't like anime, they look all same to me.
There's a lot of better trapped in a video game anime out there.
Overlord does a better job with grimdark. I'm fond of Log Horizon though S3 sucked. Solo Leveling came out the same time as Weakest Tamer began a journey to pick up Trash, and that was delightful for me.
I think the visceral stuck at the bottom of the ladder feeling was better handled by weakest tamer. A young girl who was forced to run away from home because her village considered her 0-star skill literally a heresy and religious blight.
Unlike Solo Leveling, the Weakest Tamer actually sticks with the plot. She never becomes much more powerful than she was, and instead leverages her relationships / friends she makes rather than literally solo leveling.
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The Isekai / Reverse Isekai genre is literally animes biggest genre right now. There's so so so many better shows out there than Solo Leveling.
But I guess the question is: what do you like about it? Solo Leveling is a passable male fantasy do-it-myself-by-plot-armor always win kind of show. But.... This plot honestly has been done better back by Sword Art Online (and I didn't even like that anime either).
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Jobless Reincarnation, despite all the controversy, is probably the local optimum on that 'Do it myself' / solo leveling / get stronger loop.
Hmmmmm... I'd give either Reincarnated as a Slime or I'm a Spider, So What? As my top picks on this genre / storytelling style. For personal enjoyment. Maaayyyyybe Re:Zero if you're into the body horror stuff that Solo Leveling also does.
> Unlike Solo Leveling, the Weakest Tamer actually sticks with the plot. She never becomes much more powerful than she was, and instead leverages her relationships / friends she makes rather than literally solo leveling.
But that’s a different plot than Solo Leveling, and in particular, a female rather than male power fantasy. (Social control vs individual strength.)
Your criticism that Solo Leveling isn’t something it wasn’t meant to be is strange.
Because literally every mainstream anime, Sword Art Online. Attack on Titan, Fate/Heavens Feel arc, Reincarnated as a Slime, Jobless Reincarnation, I'm a Spider So What?, Overlord, Demon Slayer, My Hero Academia.... Does these story beats better.
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The number of anime that goes in the direction of Weakest Tamer is
... much fewer. A bit of variety and branching out is nice.
I'm not even sure what in Solo Leveling sets it apart that all the other shows didn't do better.
I can say that Overlords focus on leadership / kingsctaft is next to none. Slime's leadership and optimism sets it apart from Overlord even if Overlord does the leadership thing better.
Demon Slayer has better animation.
Sword Art Online came out first and was freshest (there were older Isekai but not this Solo Leveling type aloneness / level up grind).
Spider So What was one of the most compressed boss raid stories with the shear number of fights being quite impressive.
Shun's storyline is literally traditional Isekai plot (and I'd argue that it skewers Solo Leveling even in its satire).
Shun is an underdog who is suddenly thrust into war because the Spider Demon Queen attacks. He obtains the sacred power of the hero and is the one destined to kill demon lords.
Fortunately for our Spider protagonist, Kumoko is not the demon lord but just an underling (a major underling... but nonetheless an underling) of the Spider Demon.
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IMO, it's fun to see Shun do 'Regular Isekai Things' while Kumoko has to survive in the dark dungeon.
It's also very interesting to me that Shun's entire world and story ends up being irrelevant in terms of world powers.
Still, I love street level and other such 'less powered' beings in my stories. It gives you a sense of what the ordinary humans are up to while our Spider is leveling up in the dungeons.
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Solo leveling doesn't do the power of friendship thing that Shun and his party does. But otherwise, Sung Jinwoo is a chosen 'hero' of sorts thrust into a role. Much like Shun is suddenly chosen by God to be a hero as the skill passed to him.
It's from Shuns perspective that we see how Kumoko's far away actions have a rippling effect onto human society. It's an integral part of the story despite being a bit more boring.
Serious question, do Korean web comics count as Manhwa? I mean, the difference in media makes it a very different art form. (Although, in the case of Solo Leveling, it started as a web novel)
At least the Wikipedia article counts them as such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webtoon.
Good point about the web novel, I have only passing familiarity with the franchise.
As far as community parlance goes, Webtoon is a specific website (webtoons dot com) which is very popular in SK but the word is getting kleenex'd for korean webcomics in general. Manhwa is for published/printed works only.
Though the most popular anime by far around the world is shonen. Which caters to the typical male teen/pre-teen audience, but also adults and is typically characterized by action, typical underdog protagonist stereotypes of a loner, outcast, who develops a tight knit support group or team on their quest to overtake or defeat a great evil in the world.
E.g. One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Attack on Titan, etc.
Everyone likes a good retelling of “A Hero’s Journey”.
That’s why properties like Star Wars rose to prominence as well:
> underdog protagonist stereotypes of a loner, outcast, who develops a tight knit support group or team on their quest to overtake or defeat a great evil in the world
You are mixing together under anime shows which are produced in Japan from manga or from light novels with shows produced in South Korea from manhwas. They don’t have much in common. Even the art style is different. It’s a bit like mixing together European comics and American ones. It doesn’t make much sense.
outside of the actual pornography, more and more of anime is just emotional pornography for people with attachment troubles.
it can be a great art form. even some of the emotional pornography can have artistic merit (recently: Frieren). but increasingly, despite diversity in genre and visual presentation, all anime just tries to push the same emotional buttons of loneliness, belonging, connection, in a very heavy-handed way that is more about provoking the emotions in the body than about artistic expression.
not everyone has those buttons, which is why anime fans are a devoted minority, and why it seems like lonely, traumatized, and marginalized people are drawn to it.
Mass-produced media always recycles the same thematic stories.
Western cartoons aimed at kids recycled the "power of being yourself" to death. Ask my tweens about the shows they've watched, and they'll pick apart how repetitive the story beats are between them.
The beats that anime is recycling may be different, but all of them get tiresome and feel pandering.
It's a bit social commentary (not very heavy but you can feel it). But I don't think it's about loneliness or relations much at all (I guess the Walrus and the Nurse Llama have a bit of a romantic fling but I don't consider it a major part of the show).
I'd say one of the major villains is someone who has fallen into the stereotypical gachapon gamer / whale / hikkomori type shut-in that sounds like you'd enjoy him as a villain.
So rather than catering to that demographic, OddTaxi skewers it by clearly marking that character as villainous.
It's just a solid Film Noir murder mystery, except the main character is the Taxi Driver with damn near perfect memory and facial recognition rather than a proper detective. It takes some time and discussions with various people around town to figure out the murder plot, but I was quite satisfied by it.
It's a dry show with a lot of talking. The bulk of the show is just the Walrus / Protagonist picking up customers around town, talking with them for 5 minutes and dropping them off.
But it's those discussions alone that leads him to the murder plot. It's really fun to see how everyone around town was so close to the murderer.
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I agree with you that there's a genre of anime that celebrates or dramatizes the Hikkomori / shut-in type (ex: Re:Zero, Jobless Reincarnation). But at this point, the Hikkomori is a stock character, just one tool to tell a story.
There's a lot of different uses of the "emotionally stunted Hikkomori" (ex: Anohana is the Hikkomori who through the drama of a Ghost coming back to talk with him, he gets pulled out of it and emotionally heals).
But anime and anime culture is above all, about stock characters that are borrowed, remixed, and turned into something new in the next story. The emotionally-stunted Hikkomori can become the hero in Re:Zero, the antagonist of OddTaxi, or a source of Comedy in Devil is a Part-Timer.
Frieren seems to cover a lot of Hikkomori Tropes (emotionally stunted character who is suddenly learning how to deal with emotions as she interacts with humans). So I think you're right in that she's seemingly related to the trope. I don't think I thought of her like that before but it seems to match up more-and-more that I think of it. She has all the markings of a Hikkomori in terms of attitude and even story progression (Himmel had to convince her to get up and try)
this is a good point about stock characters. a very lively and thriving art form can rely on these (as theater, movies, novels have at various times).
that’s not all of what bothers me though. if you look at Frieren, every main character is going through some kind of lonely attachment thing, even the ones that follow other stock character archetypes. it’s the whole show. It’s also the main drama in Spy x Family (another show that’s good on the merits).
I recently watched the first episode of “Wind Breakers”. They set you up for 5 minutes to think it will be about a strong guy fighting his way to the top. Surprise! It’s actually about belonging and finding friends who care about you.
Fine to have works of art about lonely people coming together and finding belonging. But it really is weird how much of a dominant theme this is, seemingly in the majority of new anime and manga.
“Chainsaw Man” is interesting because it sets up and subverts this at every possible turn, over and over.
I wouldn't say that that's a recent trend in anime at all, but rather a side effect of following what's coming out at any given time. In other words, recency bias.
If you dig through the older stuff for just the gems, you'll be ignoring a mountain of "emotional pornography" shows from the past that are largely ignored today because they weren't especially good art.
It's disgusting to claim that Western "Cartoons" fall under a "rough set of same humor or writers". It is just as varied, and frankly as good if not better than eastern Anime.
You obviously didn't watch enough varied western cartoons. The following are just a small sample of different, highly varied western studios/artists.
It didn't apply directly, but a lot of cartoons used comics for the source material. And even without that, Hollywood had to worry about ratings, and that resulted in similar restrictions.
Anime includes masterpieces like Spirited Away, trashy harem / male fantasies like Jobless Reincarnation, touching dramas like Anohana, female oriented romances like Fruitsbasket, literally pornography like... Erm... Well you know.
Etc. etc. etc.
It's not fair to compare one anime with another. It's not like cartoons in the USA that fall under the rough set of same humor or writers. Anime is much broader and thus has something for everyone
And anime also has a lot that you'll hate. I personally hate recent male fantasy trends like Solo Leveling for example (despite enjoying Overlord, a male fantasy from yesteryear).