this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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It also has a wildly over the top revenge fantasy built in for every creepy nerd's favorite preoccupation: fear of false rape accusations. The materials beyond the anime go directions in that that are very... telling (extreme CW: gore, snuff, sv)
spoiler
and portray the false rape accusing character getting raped to death while being dismembered and mutilated before a cheering audience as "just desserts."Even the longer version of that which more correctly translates what he said is legit: he said the problem with contemporary anime was that it was by and large made by, and for, otaku. That is to say, it was an industry that was getting further and further away from lived experience and actual humanity in favor of cartoons based on cartoons based on cartoons, with copy-of-a-copy syndrome stripping them of meaning.
chuds seem to enjoy the simulacrum copy-of-copies more than the original thing itself. they like how everything in anime is set along rigid tropes and formulas, with immersion-breaking gimmicks like fan service. they like how everything is video-gamey and follows a very specific set of in-universe "rules" that is very hierarchical and systematized and quantified (ever notice that every single world with super powers has a ranking system where the powers are boiled down to 1-dimensional quantities?)
This lack of realism, and favoring of idealistic platonic forms, soothes the chud mind who hates the messy chaos of the real world and wishes everything fit into tiny boxes they could sort. This sort of guilty pleasure of re-making reality to fit into platonism and overpowered main characters is inherent to the appeal of anime to a lot of reclusive people who aren't looking for any type of realistic portrayal or connection to the world, but instead want to get lost permanently in a fake one that they have full mastery over.
Hence waifus becoming more desirable than actual women.
Little wonder that "let gamers design games" slogans were about making characters less distinctive and more generically fanservicey.
It still baffles me that so many reactionary
and otaku crave a seemingly endless number of escapist "isekai" worlds... but the first thing they want to do with them is crush them under the wheels of capitalism and use metagaming tricks to exploit everyone and everything in them. Maybe they didn't want an escapist world at all; they just wanted to rule over the one they're currently in.
Except they want the women to look like cartoons.
Turns out some people just want to believe they can become the boot.
Really just feels like AI art of "attractive women" really fills this gap of creating the reactionary construct of the same damn person ad nauseam, that or nerd and chuds have some version of face blindness where they get upset at having to deal with varied faces of women.
If you can track down a copy of Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, Hiroki Azuma actually describes this process.
To summarize the book- he says that in our current postmodern landscape, what consumers want isn't narrative (because stories are pointless). What they want is a database of their favourite things, and they want to selectively consume the things in the database based on their own tastes, just remixed forever (A Tsundere is a Tsundere is a Tsundere, it doesn't matter what color is the waifu's hair). In effect trading 'humanity' to become 'animals', just mindlessly consuming the same things over and over again.
The analysis is postmodern and not marxist tho, so he attributes all this to the death of grand narratives and not capital. Still, the book is interesting since you can see those processes happening right now, with the Marvelification/Disneyfication of media
He honestly saw where the industry was heading before most and as a communist knew that capital would ride an industry into the ground to better reap money from easily pleased groups such as men with disposable income and very little in the way of inhibitions.
The consequences of Macross
Could you elaborate on that? I think I agree with you but I wanted to make sure I knew what you were getting at specifically.
Arguably, the entire Battletech franchise is like copy-of-a-copy Macross that went a very different direction that found a different valid form.
(I'm kind of sad that it shuns/dunks on the once-definitive transforming jet mecha because of IP legal struggles though)
Macross is one of the first huge TV anime that was specifically made by anime fans. It remixed pieces of older shows, like Space Battleship Yamato, and mixed in a city pop soundtrack to gain a broad appeal.
I think you're mixing it up with Robotech, which adapted the first Macross show, Mospeeda, and Southern Cross into one big show. The Macross bit is mostly intact, but the English music sucks so much ass that it really messes up the show.
Battletech did snag the Valkyrie robots from Macross at some point (though I'm not too knowledgeable about that franchise), and Transformers used one of the Valkyrie toys as like Starscream or someone early on.
The original Macross show and movie are genuine classics - but they do mark a big shift away from earlier mecha shows like Gundam and Votoms, since their creators are mostly only being inspired by other anime rather than the broader influences Tomino and Takahashi drew from.
I thought that was done moreso with Voltron: Defender of the Universe, in its western release. Maybe I was mistaken in what I read.
Now I see the bigger point at least. Thank you.
Jetfire, who was named "Skyfire" in the cartoon and given a moderate re-design (and stopped appearing soon after the first season), because the toy design was licensed from Bandai, and Hasbro/Takara didn't want to include what was basically free advertisement for their competitors' design.
A company called Harmony Gold owns the American broadcast rights to Macross, and has been infamously litigious about defending their IP, despite not using it much. It's a hell of a story, which continues to this day I think.
Yeah, it's why Disney has the streaming rights to everything else Macross right now in the USA besides the original show and the first movie, Do You Remember Love