Well thankfully the Monogatari series is completely unproblematic wait no please come back

It’s time for the annual anime struggle session! Refer to my previous post for a brief breakdown of the history of anime and why it is shit.

So now’s as good a time as any to continue that story. I’m not drunk this time, but hell if I’m going to fact check everything I say so tpppppppppppbbbbbbbbbt.

Let’s talk about Narou-kei, Isekai and Sword Art Online.

So um, I’m not sure if you guys noticed this, but Japan hasn’t reeeeeeally been able to recover from the Asian Financial Crisis of the 90’s and the resulting Lost Decade (more like Lost Three Decades, amirite?). Its affect on the animation industry have been particularly pronounced- a lot of studios which did a lot of experimental/boundary pushing stuff with all the bubble money from the 80’s were forced to close down or transition to a gig-economy lite model where a skeleton crew of key permanent staff are kept on hand while freelancers are hired on an ad-hoc per-project basis. Unable to fund their own productions, animation studios had to depend on larger companies to foot the production costs- hence the formation of so-called production committees.

So, by an large animation isn’t really a profitable endeavour. It is labour intensive (you need huge teams of highly trained people), capital intensive (mostly to pay those people, but also for computers etc.) and time consuming to produce. As an entertainment product, it just can’t keep up with the volume demanded by it’s audience- comics and books, while just as time consuming to produce, can be made by small teams for dirt cheap. So the Japanese animation industry has more-or-less shifted its entire business model to serve as glorified advertising for popular known properties/franchises. Something sells well in Weekly Shonen Jump? Bam, anime! But no one company is willing to take the financial risk of an anime doing poorly, so instead several large companies divide up the bill in exchange for exclusive rights- for example, the tv anime must use a particular singer for the opening theme from the music company that footed the bill, or this company gets exclusive rights to make toys and merchandise of the characters, etc. Capitalism at work, basically. So yeah the animators, the people whose labour creates the product… they hardly see any of the profits, and their work is mostly used as promotional material for the original manga/light novels in order to drive sales for the franchise… which benefits someone sure, but it basically means that these studios are stuck making crappy adaptations until they can save up enough dough to maaaaaybe do an original anime once every few years- cause artists are artists and they want to make art, but they don’t want to starve.

However, there’s a problem with this model; there are only so many well-known franchises around at any given time, and companies want to make money.

So let’s talk about the miracle of the internet! Introducing Syosetsuka ni Narou, a website where any aspiring author can post up their work. You get enough people reading your stuff, an editor from a publishing house looking for the next Haruhi will pick you up and get your stuff published for real. Hurray! We’ve democratized media production! Hurray!

You may have heard about this small show called Sword Art Online, about some dweeb g*mer who gets stuck in a VR game where if he dies in the game, he dies in real life. Somehow he manages to become the bestest most special-est person to ever get his game on, and he somehow manages to get a girlfriend and even get laid before he frees everyone from the death game. (Oh, and there’s a lot of uh… rapey stuff in it. Like every other villian is basically a rapist.)

The guy who wrote SAO was 17 at the time.

We could go into the whole story of how SAO got published, but basically- story written by horny 17 year old finds an audience of horny 17 year olds on the internet. Big surprise. Big publisher notices this story is popular with horny 17 year olds on this website, picks up the rights. Story gets published as a book. Gets an anime adaptation. Anime adaptation get streamed worldwide, so said story is now exposed to every horny 17 year old on the planet.

SAO makes a ton of money, basically.

Now you could make the argument that SAO, while egregious in its depiction of women and SV, wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary- shows from the 80’s and 90’s like Ranma 1/2 or Oh my Goddess! aren’t exactly feminist masterpieces (Sailor Moon, however, is). The problem isn’t whether or not SAO was continuing a trend or being more egregious or whatnot-

The problem is that SAO made a ton of money.

Now everyone wants a piece of that isekai pie in the sky. (For reference, an isekai is a story about being transported to another world, and Narou-kei is a type of sub-genre of story of the kind published on the website Syosetsuka ni Narou, featuring a gamified setting with a main character who get stronger in a gamified way etc.) So Syosetsuka ni Narou and sites like it explode in popularity, and publishers ever hungry for the Next Big Thing ™ lap up whatever rises to the top, which theoretically would be only the best, right? After all, isn’t that how democracy and the free market should work?

Heh.

So, Syosetsuka ni Narou has two problems. One, there are no editors, so literally anything goes, as after all it’s really just a glorified fanfiction site- and two, its audience is already self-selected to be a majority of horny 17 year old males. Except it’s worse than that- like the entire internet, it’s an audience of horny 17 y.o. men who’ve lived their entire lives alienated and brainwashed by neoliberal capitalism and 30 years of austerity, and are so desperate for an escape they are willing to relive playing videogames ad nauseum even in their fantasies. So even as the mainstream Weekly Shonen Jump titles like My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer or Jujetsu Kaisen have become more progressive (or at least more liberal), Narou-kei have become progressively more reactionary- Goblin Slayer, Rising of Shield Hero, Re-do of Healer… the ideology (sniiiif) they’re peddling isn’t exactly sympathetic to a leftist worldview, even if their core themes are about exploring and pointing out the decay of living under neoliberalism. They just blame women or minorities for all their problems, rather than capitalists.

Which isn’t to say that every narou-kei is reactionary (Japan is fighting the Culture War too) or that WSJ has suddenly become some bastion of progressive Japanese thought, but the lack of editorial oversight and standards combined with the ease of access the internet brings has allowed dark things to fester.

Oh and of course, all those stories that prominently feature rape, slavery and torture just for the shock value got published, then got anime adaptations. Because reaction sells.

TL;DR There won’t be proper representation and un-problematic material in anime until we overthrow Capitalism. Get on it, Chapos.

If anyone wants a better look at Isekai and Narou-kei than what I outlined here I strongly urge you to check out Pause and Select’s youtube channel .

A tangent but am I the only one who’s weirded out by the incredible popularity of the whole isekai thing?

As a kid I used to love reading stories based on by favorite games and enjoyed seeing dry stats substituted with good description. Now people seem to want the opposite. They want the protagonist to have levels xp and shit like that. A kind of a map of a map of map thing.

Dunno, the fact that’s it’s gotten huge as a mainstream genre rubs me the wrong way. That’s probably how boomers feel about everything.

Yep, Japan is more socially conservative than even the U.S. likely, at least in significant part, due to a healthy dose of imperialism from the latter.

Despite that, anime/manga do indeed exist without this stuff, like Yotsuba for example.

There is a lot of weird sex stuff in anime. Excluding hentai, two characters never fuck in anime. It’s horny as hell, but two characters never get together. Always bugged me.

Even fucking Demon Slayer found a place to sneak in some creepy shit.

Is this referencing an anime in specific or just anime in general

how the fuck did this post get 200+ comments

what have i done

Little Witch Academia is a good anime

Yup that’s anime, gross

Watch anime made by women, it tends to be better