Dr_LucienSanchez
Banned
From The A.V. Club, by one of my favorite writers there (Sean O'Neal).
Pretty accurately reflects my experience with anime, and how my views have changed over the years. I watched a bunch of Miyazaki films when I was a kid (and still love them), but the stigma around the rest of the medium, as well as the (sometimes crazy) fandom, has always turned me off from checking anything else out as I got older. That's changing slowly, but it's certainly difficult to fully get into.
Anyway, choice blurbs from the beginning:
The rest of the article goes into the specific shows/movies that the author watches. It's definitely worth a read, even if I'm sure some of the fans here will have some issues with how the writer tackled the medium.
Pretty accurately reflects my experience with anime, and how my views have changed over the years. I watched a bunch of Miyazaki films when I was a kid (and still love them), but the stigma around the rest of the medium, as well as the (sometimes crazy) fandom, has always turned me off from checking anything else out as I got older. That's changing slowly, but it's certainly difficult to fully get into.
Anyway, choice blurbs from the beginning:
Spiky-haired characters with illogical bodies yelling at each other about magic totems or weird animals. Skimpily dressed schoolgirls who alternate between displaying chipper, flushed-cheeked innocence and furiously shooting lasers from their hands. Somebody straps into a big robot or is revealed to be the ancient spirit of something or other or simply balloons to enormous size, then they begin rampaging through the city until theyre vanquished by more lasers and yelling, and everything wraps up with an incongruously silly pop song. Anime fans will tell me this is an unfairly reductive summary of a widely varied art form. But Im only telling them what they already know: Anime has a branding problem.
In the lull between Star Wars films, anime somehow became the lingua franca of not just the internets proudest weirdos, but also its loudest assholesand that was even before it became all tangled up with the alt-right. Professed anime fans like Milo Yiannopoulos used it to speak directly to the lonely, 4chan-dwelling men who would make up the soldiers of their meme war. Yiannopoulos started out doing Digimon reviews for Breitbart and ranting about the wrong kinds of anime fans as a pretext to pivoting into an even more toxic form of obnoxiousness. And while widely punched white nationalist Richard Spencer has admitted hes not all that familiar with it, hes certainly embraced it as a marketing tool. He told BuzzFeed News earlier this year that the aesthetics of the alt-right, I would say, could involve animeaesthetics, in this case, involving the online proliferation of anime girls wearing Make America Great Again hats that Spencer and his troll ilk believe constitute their cultural revolution.
But anime is not its fans. And besides, these daysas with so many former geek provincesit seems like a lot of people are into anime, not just the socially marginalized.
Anyway, after I got done making fun of her, I realized that the fact that I could love an anime fan, marry an anime fan, and father potentially anime-loving children with her well, it only confirmed that theres nothing inherently self-defining about liking anime. Maybe I would like it, too, if only I saw the right stuff? So I polled my anime-loving co-workers, most of whom prefaced their recommendations with I wouldnt call myself an anime fan, but After letting them squabble among themselves for a bit, they designed this four-course syllabus for me, which I then assigned myself to watch something from, every single week. And so my anime education began. Maybe I would emerge a secret, self-loathing anime fan, too?
The rest of the article goes into the specific shows/movies that the author watches. It's definitely worth a read, even if I'm sure some of the fans here will have some issues with how the writer tackled the medium.