Current Events > is anime just cartoons for emos?

(+) Yeah! (+)

this is only my observation not trying to troll
let's see what ce thinks
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Thugs
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anime is cartoon for Japanese people.

Not with how many of them crow about friendship
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That's a pretty ignorant statement
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Anime is cartoons for perverts.
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No. Just like any other story telling medium, there are a lot of different styles, stories, and subjects. What is most popular does not have any bearing on what the medium is in all cases, or in what it can present. If you're having trouble finding anime that isn't 'emo', you never even looked.

lmfao yes
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Anime is cartoons for adults who want to pretend they're totally not into something childish but totally are
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Yeah, the same way books are for movies.

It's just varying flavors of pretension, right TC?
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Jet_Enduro101 posted...

No. Just like any other story telling medium, there are a lot of different styles, stories, and subjects. What is most popular does not have any bearing on what the medium is in all cases, or in what it can present. If you're having trouble finding anime that isn't 'emo', you never even looked.

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Mike Xtreme posted...

That's a pretty ignorant statement

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no it's for hard thugs


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Are emos still a thing?
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Jet_Enduro101 posted...

No. Just like any other story telling medium, there are a lot of different styles, stories, and subjects. What is most popular does not have any bearing on what the medium is in all cases, or in what it can present. If you're having trouble finding anime that isn't 'emo', you never even looked.

I get that this is true but I think it's fair to make some pretty general statements about the state of anime culture as a whole. This doesn't mean that all anime is like that or that all people who watch anime is like that.

Basically, the majority of very popular anime is your typical shonen power of friendship action fighter, school comedy harem or fanservicey type show with simplistic themes dressed up as more "adult" through the use of violence and occasional nudity. These "adult" attributes don't stop the themes and narrative being incredibly simplistic and digestible though.

For example: bad murdering dude gets beaten up by our hero, has a flashback and sees the error of his ways and becomes a good guy and renounces all his evil and everyone smiles and claps and that's the end of the plot-arc, everyone forgets what a megalomaniac psychopath he was just 15 minutes earlier. That neat little "everyone lives happily ever after" ending is how an anime is childish despite all the blood and swear words.

And that kind of show - Naruto, One Piece, Fairy Tail, Bleach etc. - is I think is more representative of "anime" than some critically acclaimed but slightly more esoteric seinen like Monster or Ghost in A Shell. It's what most people are watching, it's the kind of thing people usually talk about when they make tropes or jokes about anime.

All that said I get that it's technically just a medium and can be explored in a limitless amount of ways.
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I really do feel like the quality of more popular shows really went to shit in the last few years. There are exceptions, but even the more niche stuff from the 2000s had more effort put into the writing and characterization than a lot of the trash that's come out recently.

Like, Death Note isn't some masterpiece. but it's legitimately good. It's not derivative, it's not super cliched, and it has a workable plot with characters in it. A lot of the stuff that comes out now feels like badly disguised shonen or badly disguised harem shows or some mixture in an attempt to appeal to the larger anime crowd.

For example: bad murdering dude gets beaten up by our hero, has a flashback and sees the error of his ways and becomes a good guy and renounces all his evil and everyone smiles and claps and that's the end of the plot-arc, everyone forgets what a megalomaniac psychopath he was just 15 minutes earlier. That neat little "everyone lives happily ever after" ending is how an anime is childish despite all the blood and swear words.

I don't really think violence/swearing overlaps much with this style of storytelling. It kind of ended up doing that with Naruto, sort of, but for the most part Shonen is pretty light-hearted and doesn't devolve into edgy violence while carrying the DBZ/One Piece tropes.

Usually, when a show is really bloody and violent, the mistake on an anime's part is that it mistakes edginess by itself for good storytelling. Toonami's aired a bunch of this kind of shit recently. Akame ga Kill, Attack on Titan, and now Tokyo Ghoul all seem to be written with the premise of "durr violence = good plot".

Hellsing Ultimate is an exception since it's self-aware enough to get that it's dumb, so it just runs with it like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure does and ends up being really entertaining since it doesn't linger on melodrama the writers know it can't possibly manage due to how fucking ridiculous the plot is. A lot of bad edgy shit expects you to take it seriously which is just lol.
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I'm going to assume the garbage edge shit is probably where TC's question came from since I've seen Tokyo Ghoul DVDs in Walmart and AoT just started its second season. Might be a lot of similar type of shows running about Crunchyroll, idk.
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pinky0926 posted...

Jet_Enduro101 posted...

No. Just like any other story telling medium, there are a lot of different styles, stories, and subjects. What is most popular does not have any bearing on what the medium is in all cases, or in what it can present. If you're having trouble finding anime that isn't 'emo', you never even looked.

I get that this is true but I think it's fair to make some pretty general statements about the state of anime culture as a whole. This doesn't mean that all anime is like that or that all people who watch anime is like that.

Basically, the majority of very popular anime is your typical shonen power of friendship action fighter, school comedy harem or fanservicey type show with simplistic themes dressed up as more "adult" through the use of violence and occasional nudity. These "adult" attributes don't stop the themes and narrative being incredibly simplistic and digestible though.

For example: bad murdering dude gets beaten up by our hero, has a flashback and sees the error of his ways and becomes a good guy and renounces all his evil and everyone smiles and claps and that's the end of the plot-arc, everyone forgets what a megalomaniac psychopath he was just 15 minutes earlier. That neat little "everyone lives happily ever after" ending is how an anime is childish despite all the blood and swear words.

And that kind of show - Naruto, One Piece, Fairy Tail, Bleach etc. - is I think is more representative of "anime" than some critically acclaimed but slightly more esoteric seinen like Monster or Ghost in A Shell. It's what most people are watching, it's the kind of thing people usually talk about when they make tropes or jokes about anime.

All that said I get that it's technically just a medium and can be explored in a limitless amount of ways.

I think that's fair. I mean, I can enjoy a good or silly Shonen from time to time (JJBA, My hero academia, etc). I don't think there's anything wrong with that, so long as you're not pretending it's A grade storytelling. I've seen some anime with interesting stories and stuff, too. I guess from my perspective anime is more of a visual medium than a storytelling one, so I usually just watch shows that interest me aesthetically. One really great show for example would be Mononoke. Not princess mononoke, just mononoke. It's beautiful, coherent, and not really dramatic in any way.

I went through the entire library on crunchy roll and found 14 anime that looked interesting. Out of every one of them. 8 were more than 10 years old, so I think it is a fair point to say that anime from recent years sends derivative or uninspired.

bump
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I too enjoy Bill Burr
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pinky0926 posted...

Anime is cartoons for adults who want to pretend they're totally not into something childish but totally are

This seems pretty accurate