You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not at all. That leads me to the second rule: the girl can’t have ever been in a romantic relationship with anyone else, ever. The sexual excitement, rather than a sideshow to an interesting story, becomes the reason for the show itself. The dating conditions for otaku mentioned above, and the tendency of anime to exaggerate its unique traits, regardless of their merit, have bred a new generation of anime inundated with gratuitous fan service that goes beyond mere titillation. It never got in the way of trying to tell a story. It was obviously there just to get a rise, so to speak, out of its audience, but it was never excessive. The nudity never felt unnatural or out of place. I guess it’s natural for anything targeting teenage boys to be titillating in some way. Tenchi Muyo, one of the shows that got me into the stuff, has full-frontal nudity in it (although the American TV broadcast I watched airbrushed swimsuits onto the characters (even in the bath)). There’s been some element of sex to a lot of anime for at least as long as I’ve been watching it. It’s not like there aren’t exceptions-ones that I hope I can write about here-but your typical anime targeted at otaku is a constant, nonstop barrage of bewildering or crudely exploitative conventions that make no sense out of context, and very little in it.Īnd the core of it, the part I’m most interested in talking about now, is a warped sexuality that celebrates and glorifies its disconnection from actual sexual intimacy.Īs much as anime girls' skirts flap up in the wind, you'd think schools would make them longer. And, I’ll be honest, the kind most anime has on display is strange and perverse. You see, you can learn a lot about people from the kinds of escapism they prefer. I think it’s the fact that a lot of anime is made by people in a close-knit subculture for people in a close-knit subculture, or another, equally close-knit subculture across the ocean. And, although Japan produces a lot of weird, foreign stuff, I don’t think it’s because it’s Japanese, per se. There’s something very foreign about a lot of anime. They may be free of anvils and painted doors, but they still operate according to the alien logic of an unreal world. I know most anime apologists get really defensive about calling them ‘cartoons’, but they really are. Even for a population born and raised on unreality, there’s still something uncomfortably alien about the medium. I think one of the things that makes anime hard for people to get into is the sheer unreality of it. It’s part of what makes television so entertaining: the escape from everyday reality. The world doesn’t have a lot of good-looking 20-somethings who have crazy adventures, suave advertising executives with troubled pasts, secret agents with superhuman abilities or sinister ancient conspiracies in service of alien horrors beyond our ken. Most TV shows and movies take place in worlds that, although they may look or sound like real life, really bear very little resemblance to it.
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