You don’t get a pass because your 13 year olds of choice are japanese and drawn characters. It’s creepy as fuck and I am judging you for it.
You don’t get a pass because your 13 year olds of choice are japanese and drawn characters. It’s creepy as fuck and I am judging you for it.
A couple of things:
Trashy western sex appeal (or tacticool fetish, drug glorification, or whatever) is a fair point. That’s a problem. Some of those trashy western shows are popular, too.
But I don’t buy whataboutism. It doesn’t make either thing okay.
Some popular anime really takes things to an… extreme.
And even outside the notorious anime, I kept finding problematic tropes when I tried to get into anime, like these women written in a way that got me to squirm in my seat and turn off my TV. When I sample critically acclaimed western TV/animation, this is not such an issue; I don’t mean to make a comparison, but just to convey that anime sampling made me uncharacteristically uncomfortable.
It’s fine for you to not enjoy things. Why is it that other people shouldn’t be able to enjoy them?
I like to mountain bike. You might think it’s miserable and awful and dangerous. Should I not mountain bike because of your feelings about it?
A lot of people enjoy shit I find disgusting myself, but I am under no delusion that it my discomfort with it doesn’t mean other people enjoy it and it brings meaning and joy to their lives. Clubbing, for instance.
My point is that you, a westerner, being comfortable with Western media but uncomfortable with Japanese media, is not as much indicative of the character of the content as it is indicative of the things that have been normalized for you vs the things that have been normalized for others.
That’s the thing you’re missing: every culture has problematic content, every culture gets desensitized to their own problematic stuff but not others’, and every culture has complex reasons why those things developed there.
I promise you: people around the world squirm at your favorite media just as much as you squirm at theirs, because your cultural history, standards, Overton Window, and exposure to media are significantly different.
You have been describing your subjective experiences as if they provide objective facts about the content. It is hard to step back, recognize your own cultural biases, and remove them before assessing both other cultures’ media and your own culture’s.
Like, imagine an American saying “I’ve sampled a lot of American food and almost never find it disgusting. But when I sample food from other countries I frequently find things I don’t like.” Wouldn’t you be like “yeah? And? Obviously that’s because you grew up with American food”
Ah yes of course, your romantic depictions of children are ok because they’re nuanced and cultural and any adults who call it weird just aren’t cultured enough to appreciate all that n
uaonce.