Anime Popularity

[Dooly95]

Just on the people screaming bloody murder to anime being called cartoons - guys, anime is a cartoon. It's short for animation; the Japanese have just coined it to mean different meanings to what cartoons mean here.

The problem is that 'cartoon' has specific connotations that, when applied to anime, make it seem like something it's not.

Also, there are a lot of "anime" that would fall under what we'd classify as cartoons, so don't get all riled up whenever people equate anime = cartoons = little kids.

It's a factually incorrect equation.

So you go off trying to tell every single person otherwise to what they believe. Good luck with that, by the way. While you're at it, go on and tell people that your religion (or lack of one) is the only one that's right.

You can all list anime that won't fall under the connotations of cartoons, but I'm just trying to point out that there are two sides of a coin.

 

[Seldon2639]

It's not "special", and I think that the "nerdy okatu" stereotype is something that alienates gamers from society, and from other gamers. I enjoy both video games and anime, as well as film, television, books, and music. The form of the medium isn't as important as the content.

There's great anime (Full Metal Panic; that's Panic), and there's terrible anime (Gundam Wing). There's great television (The West Wing) and terrible television (My Mother The Car). I think that there is a tendency to see people who like anime as being obsessive, screaming, inane, twits. I think there's a tendency to apply to all of anime the schema we learned from the first few animes we were exposed to as kids: simple, low-production quality, screaming sky, terrible voice acting.

Plenty of people see "anime" as one entire genre, and the problem is that it isn't. Of course, that problem isn't mitigated by the howling hordes of Narutards out there, or the shrieking girls at any convention, or the arguments about whether the name actually is "Arucard".

By the way, it's not "Arucard":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VjSfnhCNm8

 

[Caliostro]

I play videogames because it's fun. Videogames are NOTHING like real life except the concept of shooting people, in videogames you're just pressing buttons. It's a blend of graphics, gameplay and story that creates an immersion set to distract you from that fact, it's not a simulation for killing people.

If you say "I want to shoot people, but I can't so instead I'll do it in a videogame because that will satisfy my urge to kill" then you probably have a mental condition.

It's fun to shoot people IN A VIDEO GAME, it's fun to drive 100 mph IN A VIDEO GAME. They are not things I would consider fun in real life. Videogames makes things like shooting people fun through its simplicity.

We all play videogames because they are fun. If I play a shooter with really crappy controls, I would hate that game, even if it would be the most realistic game ever made. If you say that you play videogames to fulfill fantasies real life won't allow, then you're basically saying that you would play any kind of game, no matter how shitty it was in gameplay, as long as it had good graphics and guns.

We play games because they are fun. A game can be fun without fulfilling fantasies real life won't allow, but a game that fulfills your fantasies can still be bad. Hence, the description of playing games because they fulfill fantasies is faulty.

I love how you're just proving me right, but you're too thick to get it.

"We wanna do stuff! But we don't like the consequences it has in real life! But it's fun in game because it doesn't have those consequences!", "I like doing these things in game, but not in real life!", "I'm living experiences vicariously through a game that I otherwise wouldn't in real life!".

Do me a favor and facepalm for me too ok?

 

[Deleted]

Anime that makes you think usually gets the dumbest fans. Deathnote is an example. you never hear "Light should have wrote matsuda shoots everyone in the room except for the man behind him" instead you hear 'OMG L is soooooo cute kawaii ne ^_______________^"

 

[Ocelano]

I LOOOOVE Hellsing OVA.
But generally I'm rather neutral towards it, what I don't like is:
1)That it's omnipresent, you won't find a modern cartoon character that is not a horribly disfigured mutant, which seems quite normal for the standards in anime/manga.
2)Its' fans(not all of course, but the most retarded seem to be the most...active on the internet). This is the only true reason to hate japanese animation. Every single anime fanclub ever I have ever seen usually consisted of Worlds Most Unwanted with so many different kinds of issues, that I could write a book about it.

Hate to point this out to you but you are aware that most of the people whom read this are going to be the internet active kind you describe in point 2?

Anime that makes you think usually gets the dumbest fans. Deathnote is an example. you never hear "Light should have wrote matsuda shoots everyone in the room except for the man behind him" instead you hear 'OMG L is soooooo cute kawaii ne ^_______________^"

Firstly if he had wrote that then whomever took over the case would wonder why light was the only survivor secondly Light could have won had he merely been mature enough to ignore L from the get go if he had never reacted to anything L did then L would never have got beyond that he was a japanese student

 

[BonsaiK]

Lately as I have been browsing the Escapist I've noticed an enormous amount of anime threads

Now, I'm not saying anime is bad, but I just find it strange why almost every gamer I know loves anime when frankly, I find it kind of disturbing. At this point I would like to point out that I am not talking about children's cartoons such as Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon, nor am I talking about creepy japanese porn, I'm talking about M-rated stuff.

Also note that I was brought up in Australia where we rarely get anything anime (unless we have Austar) and I just can't shake the feeling of anime being a cartoon, which makes it rather disturbing when I see someone get stabbed or shot in the face. Think of it this way: Your watching an episode of Spongebob Squarepants and Spongebob and a customer are in a heated argument at the local Krusty Krab when all of a sudden Spongebob pulls out a rather large revolver and blows the customer's head to peices. That's how I find it disturbing.

So what do you think? What makes anime so special for you? And how do I get the image of cartoon slaughter out of my head now?

There is no overlap between games and anime that doesn't also exist between games and action movies.

I think having adult-oriented cartoons is fine. The problem with a lot of anime that has adult content, is that the adult content isn't handled in a very adult way, due to several factors including but not limited to the preconceptions cartoon-makers have about cartoon characterisation and also Japanese culture in general.

You don't get the image of cartoon slaughter out of your head. Apparently, humans remember EVERYTING and the only reason why we "forget" stuff is because it moves to a part of our brain that is harder for us to directly access. That doesn't mean it's gone, though. Every experience you've ever had is in your brain, somewhere. Congratulations, you are scarred for life.

 

[Deleted]

Firstly if he had wrote that then whomever took over the case would wonder why light was the only survivor secondly Light could have won had he merely been mature enough to ignore L from the get go if he had never reacted to anything L did then L would never have got beyond that he was a japanese student

But after that nobody except light would know about the deathnote so it would be pretty hard for another person "N" to start from scratch.

 

[Nerdfury]

Why do I get the feeling I've travelled back to the internet, circa early nineties? I didn't know people were still all "Zomg, anime??? WEIRDOS!"

 

[Ocelano]

Firstly if he had wrote that then whomever took over the case would wonder why light was the only survivor secondly Light could have won had he merely been mature enough to ignore L from the get go if he had never reacted to anything L did then L would never have got beyond that he was a japanese student

But after that nobody except light would know about the deathnote so it would be pretty hard for another person "N" to start from scratch.

That was Lights original thought in the manga but L set up postmortem email's if you recall

 

[TheGreatCoolEnergy]

Well I have never realy seen the appeal of Anime, but I have a deep gut feeling that my dream girl would be into it, or possibly one of my children. so I will probably learn to like it at some point in my life.

 

[Kuchinawa212]

I used to be a huge fan of old cartoons, but around middle school, I just said I need more depth in my cartoons. (yeah crazy right?) But Dexter and DeeDee running around was good, but I wanted a story. Anime provided that story, and depth i was looking for. So that's why I stuck around.

It's not bad. Just sometimes you can get really junky ones with no plot, but I don't watch them.

 

[ReepNeep]

Ghost in the Shell is, without a doubt, a brilliant film. It's deep, provocative and provides a great deal of insight into the human condition, at least from the minds of the writers. That didn't stop me thinking "The guys all have hoodies that turn them invisible... Why does Kusanagi have to get naked? What the fuck? (assuming this was an issue with anime, I tried manga, and was greeted with a page that actually had the words "FAN SERVICE" on it, and an upskirt shot of one of the characters...)

She isn't naked, she has a bodysuit.

Well, she is and she isn't. The only part of her that is flesh is her brain. Everything else is metal and polymer and assembled in a factory. From the way she acts when nude (naked doesn't seem to be the right word) her body is, to her, nothing but a tool or a piece of clothing. Its no different from a jacket. Like she's not entirely human in mind, as well as body.

I've always found those scenes to be profoundly non-erotic and slightly unnerving.

 

[Booze Zombie]

So what do you think? What makes anime so special for you? And how do I get the image of cartoon slaughter out of my head now?

That's the point with anime, you're not meant to look at it like "a cartoon", you're supposed to look at it like it's a movie or a series, like you do with other movies or series.

 

[Therumancer]

To respond to the OP, I can understand your feelings, and you are far from alone. A lot of people are conditioned to see cartoons as being for kids only. Anime is intended to entertain a wider audience. Some people can adjust, others cannot. It's no big thing.

Most of my interests which I broadly define as "fandom" (though I guess that isn't accurate) revolve around science fiction, fantasy, and horror in all of their incarnations, and that includes Anime (which like anything varies in quality).

If it helps at all, it's best to look at anime by stripping away the pretensions of Weeaboos and Wapanese who act like it's some kind of massively intellectual medium. In reality like 99% of the anime out there is aimed at an audience of teenagers ranging from like 13 to 17. Albeit it's done in a culture with differant standards about sex and violence. What it's doing pretty much is following through on a lot of the stuff that was dancing around the fringes of your consciousness back around that time. It's sort of like how with my generation for example you'd watch GI Joe and notice that nobody ever gets shot, and even the bad guys in exploding jets parachute away. Well, anime is pretty much what you get when you do something like GI Joe, but remove the enforced morality/pro-active censorship. A typical anime being a sort of science fiction action thriller, where unlike western cartoons the weapons have realistic impacts, and where the characters in a western cartoon are always chaste except for the occasional kiss, the sexuality is obvious and oftentimes as over the top as the rest of the overall storyline.

Where anime gets the occasional "intellectual" defense is that it sometimes will use science fiction concepts that are fairly complex, or generally only handled in text/novels. Anime was introducing and explaining concepts like nano technology, mental manipulation through memes, and other things before they were more commonly used science fiction stereotypes. They also played around with the idea of evil mega corperations and such before they became stock villains, things like "Genom" (from the original Bubble Gum Crisis) being the mould from which most of them derived. Indeed the whole "Aztechnology" thing and their CEO in Shadowrun seemed to be a homage to this.

Now don't get me wrong, anime can vary like anything in quality and intended audience. I'm talking in generalities here, and what most of it is about.

Something like Spongebob is directed at very small children, the majority of Anime is not, and it's easier to see it as like the guys from GI Joe firing at some Cobra troops and simply not missing, than say Spongebob going on a psycho murder rampage.

At least these are my thoughts.

As I have said in some other posts, I also think there has gotten to be a tremendous amount of absolute anime garbage shoveled into the US. I think one of the problems is that for a lot of Anime fanboys, the ones usually called "Weeaboos" they'll defend anything anime, or coming from Japan just because it's anime or from Japan. I still like anime to a great extent but I have little problem with calling a turd a turd, and right now we get like 9 turds released in the US for every decent series.

Anime became part of my overall sci-fi/fantasy/horror interests because when I first encountered it I was seeing a lot of stuff that was good. If my first experiences were with the majority of the stuff choking the shelves of your local Best Buy nowadays I might very well have become a hater.

 

[RandV80]

I'm in the 'like anime but don't like its fans or where it's going' crowd. In my teens I got exposed to series like Ranma 1/2, Record of Lodos War, and Slayers, which has got me hooked ever since.

I think the real problem with anime today is that it's hardcore fanbase is becoming increasingly sexually deviant, and there are too many creators catering to this. If you go back to when Ranma 1/2 was airing on TV, you got the occasional bit of nudity, but this was always for comedic purposes, not fan service. Today's anime they've cleaned that up and don't show nudity anymore, but they can be far more suggestive with big tits, pointless panty shots, even clearly underage girls, all with the purpose of entertaining the viewer that likes that sort of thing, and nothing to do with the story at hand. Or I don't know, maybe it was always like that but you just get more subbed now a days. There's still a lot I can enjoy being made (Gintama is my new Ranma 1/2), but too much is leaning towards this above crap.

Oh, and for the record, I always thought Monster was better than Death Note.