this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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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