Are they annoyed that it’s catering more and more to creepy isekai slave harem and loli shit?
On a side note, most modern isekai give me the impression of catering to an ever increasingly capitalism fatigued society. People are so desperate to escape and I see isekai taking advantage of that in a rather unhealthy way, whisking the self-insert protagonist away to a world where he is the dominator of others. I find myself disliking most modern anime that people recommend to me because a lot of it has leaned hard into the worst tropes of the genre. That’s not to say that all modern anime is bad and that old anime didn’t have the same problems, but I’m finding the ones that get popular seem to all be shit I hate lol.
Cells at Work looks cute tho
If you look at the stats, the average Japanese anime watcher is probably a child or a teen. The “core market” is people on their 20s because that’s the only demographic that watches a lot of anime and has any independent disposable income. Viewership drops off steadily with age.
https://www.f-ism.net/report/anime_mkt_2017_sammary.html
This bears out if you look at lists of earnings or viewership in Japan, with most of the top 10 being dominated by tame family friendly stuff like Demon Hunter, Detective Conan, Spy x Family, One Piece, Etc. Only number 10 on the list below (Quintessential Quintuplets) is a harem show, and that one is pretty tame (or so I’ve heard).
Also interestingly, the Isekai wave seems to be slowing down a lot, with Shield Hero, Overlord, and Re:Zero being the only recent releases to gain much traction, and they’re all continuations of previously established series.
Essentially, most Japanese anime watchers don’t engage online in English so most English speakers’ impressions of what’s popular or not is influenced by other English-speaking weebs.
Essentially, most Japanese anime watchers don’t engage online in English so most English speakers’ impressions of what’s popular or not is influenced by other English-speaking weebs.
I’ve always found it funny how Japanese people are low key celebrities to non-Japanese anime or manga fans. English speaking Japanese folks could easily be celebrities without trying too hard. And unfortunately the easiest way to do it would be to cater to Western chuds.
i love garbage isekai because I’m a trash person with garbage tastes and I was pleasantly surprised by The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest, all for surpassing the low low bar of “doesn’t glorify slavery,” while also not being conspicuously horny. I mean, it does still have a sort of harem thing going on, except they only depict attraction between the MC and one of the girls (and it’s just like, they keep blushing thinking about each other). Still gross though because this is a full ass adult man who reincarnated himself 5000 years in the future with all his memories intact. But hey, no sexualized character designs! They do have the weirdly common trope of a 5000 year old dragon turn into a loli character, but she’s played for laughs (haha she so strong she breaks things what a larf) instead of some weird ass horny :what-the-fuck-is-the-chris-hansen-emoji-FUCK: type thing
meanwhile I watch Black Summoner and like two episodes in this guy who can literally summon whatever monster and make it super strongk decides “oh I’ll just buy me a slave” why Japan why
Thanks, some of the emojis are just so :jesse-wtf: like why not :take-a-seat: or something
As the other poster said, all the most popular anime that the average Japanese person knows are kid friendly all-ages stuff- Demon Slayer, SpyxFamily, jujetsu kaisen being the most recent ones.
All the big recent mainstream anime hits are shonenjump alumni getting their inevitable adaptations-vast majority of these won’t have anything too egregious cos shonenjump has, y’know, editors, and more often than not they have a finger on the pulse so you get more and more left adjacent stuff creeping into the mainstream as they try get material that’ll speak to their young, indebted, climate crisis beset audience. Not that shonenjump is Pravda or anything.
On the other hand, the streaming boom means publishers are starving for content so they turn to fanfiction.net equivalents to pull new series from. That’s where things like goblin slayer, shield hero etc. got their start from, as well as the mass proliferation of isekai- in that literal wild west of online publishing. Thankfully, as with such things, the diminishing returns have started to set in and I’m just waiting for Japanese chuds to start complaining about the sjwing of shonen jump and beloved old institutions like Gundam.
more and more left adjacent stuff
Not doubting you, but do you have any examples? I’m not really familiar enough with new shonen but this sounds kinda interesting.
You’re definitely spot on with the rest.
Just to clarify, Shonenjump is becoming more liberal as opposed to out-and-out leftist, in the same-ish ways Marvel movies pay lip service to leftist messaging. Underdog stories about young people mobilizing to fight against the powers that be sell. Nowadays, even moreso.
Having said that- Demon Slayer is a pretty good example, because the demons are basically vampires and you know what Marx said about vampires. It’s not explicit but the subtext is there.
86 is Umberto Eco’s UR-FASCISM for dummies, and the fact that chud’s were bitching about the show’s portrayal of racism should tell you everything you need to know. Pretty lib, tho.
Kaguya-sama has kinda interesting things to say on the intersection between gender and class except that 1) the anime isn’t finished so I dunno if they’ll stick the landing in lib land and 2) any deeper social commentary takes a backseat to the relationship drama and comedy. But it’s easy to end up with a reading of it which identifies the war in the title as class war.
Jujetsu Kaisen’s artist draws non-sexualised female characters because “his mom reads his stuff”, and probably had the best speech articulating women’s liberation for dummies from any protagonist shonen character I can recall recently.
SpyxFamily is set in a fictionalized East Germany except that it’s fascist instead of communist? I can’t tell if it’s libs unable to tell the difference or a knowing wink-wink nudge-nudge from the author. Probably lib :brainworms: , if I’m being honest. Very cute story about found family.
Promised Neverland is probably the most explicitly leftist show on this list, but that should be a given considering horror-as-a-genre’s long ties to leftism. Go in blind if you can and stop after season 1.
One Piece has become a story about a bunch of revolutionaries trying to overthrow a corrupt world government? But I don’t have the time to keep up so that’s just hearsay on my part.
Likewise I have it on pretty good authority that Chainsaw Man is incel recovery 101 but I’m a filthy anime only so I dunno.
This is what I got, it’s late here so I probably missed some stuff and there’s definitely better stuff you can find if you go off the beaten track- I’m a bit behind on anime cos I have to adult and have no time :kumagawa-jokerfied:
i’ve tried asking Japanese people at bars about anime during the times I’ve been to Japan. And at least from the situation of some random foreigner with broken Japanese in a bar asking them what shows they like, the answer was universally “Yeah I used to watch some when I was younger.” Most people were surprised I even knew what anime was, they didn’t seem to know it was popular overseas. When I asked what they used to watch it was almost always Doraemon, Dragonball, and Sailor Moon. If they’ve seen anything newer it was Attack on Titan or Demon Slayer. They were surprisingly mainstream in their tastes.
One person just laughed, said anime is for kids, so I gave them a “oh, wakarimashita.” (understandable)
I had a feeling that was the case. Interesting. I guess Otaku are the Japanese equivalent of Disney adults lol
I was going to recommend Reincarnation of a Bookworm but like the main character with vast knowledge on how to create books and has magic capabilities is nothing more than a libertarian.
She is born into a poor family, sees and hears regularly that nobles are able to do whatever and the peasants cannot fo anything. Yet she’s born with an insane amount of magic is capable of bringing books to the masses, has several run ins with death due to mobility. Yet, yet she allows herself to be adopted by a prince/king and will. Use her knowledge for the betterment of the nobilty rather than starting a revolution.
Like legit its shown that the city state (or country) shes in lacks magically powerfully nobles, and her power is so massive that many other extremely powerful nobles fully capitulate to several of her demands at several points in the story. Hell its mentioned the country recently had either a civil war or mass exodus of powerful individuals and now are scraping the bottom of the barrel for magical users for use in their knights order. But rather than seeing this as “hey I may be so powerful that if rn I catch off guard the kingdoms 2 OP trump cards because they respect me I could just steamroll this empire because they lack power due to a recent civil war” and freeing her family from the caste just joins higher caste because hey that’ll allow her to have books!
Edit: I was going to recommend because I actually really liked and enjoyed the anime but as I began to write my thoughts about the plot I actually began hating it lol. Still a good slop with good world building which I love in stories
Yes libertarian by modern standards. She ends up running an orphanage and only the children who work in either gathering supplies for her, or making the books she wants get to eat. Granted they are only able to get the funds to eat by selling the books she’s a god send to those children.
They were literally just dying and starving while the church didn’t give two shits before her. And luckily many of those children now know how to read and write because of her and may have a chance at being writers for nobility rather than dying as 7yrs old.
Maybe the writer will have a time skip and she’ll start a revolution once her health improves but idk isekai always have that :lea-why: feel .
Okay maybe so in the manga or light novel. But in her anger state from what I’ve seen in the anime, she could go all Darth Vader and force choke the entirety of the nobility shown. It seems to take setup time to put up a barrier while the choke is essentially instantly.
And I’ll grant you her fragile health would make a revolution difficult for her currently, but her mind is mid-20’s to early-30’s. She kind of accepted that this how society is and not want to change it drastically. The only changes we’ve seen have been in ways that further her only goal of getting more books. Sure that ended up saving a few dozen orphans from starving, but Myne bringing forth “modern” book manufacturing process could very easily bring forth a cultural revolution. Thats substantially more change than I could do if say I was isekai’d.
