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Thanks for the input about the Bebop discs. I dunno if it's healthy or not, but I love being able to get trusted input about pretty much any purchasing decision I'm about to make. I feel so secure!

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I mean, the general sense of the show's historical era is the early 1800s, shortly before the Black Ships, the opening of Japan, and the decline of the bakufu. There are elements from before that time and elements from after, but they mostly combine to give a very "once upon a time" feeling, which I think is the intention, to set the show in a past just beyond living memory.

 

To get nerdy about it, the author has been even more specific: It's a fictional time period in the late 1800s, but where the opening of Japan has not occurred. So, it's after when the Black Ships came, except that that event never happened. Your analysis of the effect it's going for is spot on though, which is more important.

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I've got six episodes left on Cowboy Bebop and what I've seen so far is very good and I think the show deserves the praise it gets. That being said, I don't know that it resonates with my personal tastes enough for me to call it one of my favorites. The style and animation and story are all quite good but it seems like it walks a line between being too serious and yet not serious enough that it leaves me wanting a little bit more. I know that probably doesn't make much sense but one of the main things that really worked about Space Dandy for me was that it presented itself as kind of a dumb show that just parodied a bunch of popular things and then suddenly, out of nowhere, delved into some really serious or touching themes that pulled at my heart strings when I least suspected it. I like it when a show emotionally manipulates me like that and given the fact that I haven't seen a whole lot of anime, I am still surprised by a lot of that stuff and usually don't see it coming. There were definitely a good number of instances there where that show got me and I ended up with a lump in my throat.

 

With Cowboy Bebop though, I haven't seen a whole lot that has caught me off guard and all of the characters have such a relaxed, don't care kind of attitude that it's hard to feel the kind of emotional impact that I was hoping for. There are definitely some exceptions to this and there were a few episodes that were absolutely beautiful and nailed it for me but they were few and far between. Most of the show, it seems like the characters could more or less do without each other and only stick together out of convenience. We'll see if that changes in these last six episodes but as it stands now, Space Dandy has given me a lot more to chew on than Cowboy Bebop and I like it better because of that. But I don't think I could argue that it is a 'better' show than Cowboy Bebop. Also, I prefer the music in Space Dandy to the music in Cowboy Bebop (but I do still really like Cowboy Bebop's soundtrack). 

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To get nerdy about it, the author has been even more specific: It's a fictional time period in the late 1800s, but where the opening of Japan has not occurred. So, it's after when the Black Ships came, except that that event never happened. Your analysis of the effect it's going for is spot on though, which is more important.

 

Cool! That reminds me a lot of one of the more peculiar quirks of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, which gives the year in all its dates as if it were still the Shouwa era rather than the Heisei era. With a few other clues, especially some of the styles of dress and address, the implication is that Koji Kumeta is writing his manga in a world where the militarism and nationalism of the 1930s never took off and Japan never abandoned the ideals of the Taishou democracy.

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Also, I prefer the music in Space Dandy to the music in Cowboy Bebop

This is insane! THERE'S SO MUCH INSANITY HERE!

 

I do really like Space Dandy's music, though. It's among the best.

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I had this conversation with a female friend (who along with me is kind of new to anime) about the treatment of girls and women in this specific style moe/mostly female cast anime (haiyore nyarko-san, non non biyori, girl und panzer, chuunibyou). I was kind of surprised that she was totally ok with the weird porcelain doll effect I get from these kinds of series, where female characters are kind of just shallow, perfectly formed caricatures used to appeal to a male audience, with most male characters being similarly shallow and mostly generic audience surrogates that foil the antics of the female cast by being a voice of reason.

 

She told me that she was happy that there were girls doing crazy shit and being awesome, and didn't really care if it appealed to a latent sense of superiority in the male audience. It's possibly because she didn't really get the effect that I (a heterosexual male) got when I tried to watch stuff like it. I see this arrangement as portraying women to be universally silly and illegitimate, including characters that are "serious" or fit a less wacky or sexual stereotype since they still have a caricature to fill.

 

I feel weird about it. Most of the anime that are like that I view as inane trash anyway probably due to their being extremely refined appeals to a narrow otaku audience for the purpose of making a franchise, but it's such a huge part of the medium that when I bring up anime, "cartoons for sad horny dudes" is a universal touchstone.

 

Maybe I'm not looking in the right sources, but I never see this being critiqued or brought up since moe is supposed to be light and carefree with a feminine focus aimed at males. But I see it more as "watch this dynamic theater of extreme stereotypes and adore these half-humans", which just feels really wrong. Like sure it's comedy, but it's also often billed as "slice of life".

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I had this conversation with a female friend (who along with me is kind of new to anime) about the treatment of girls and women in this specific style moe/mostly female cast anime (haiyore nyarko-san, non non biyori, girl und panzer, chuunibyou). I was kind of surprised that she was totally ok with the weird porcelain doll effect I get from these kinds of series, where female characters are kind of just shallow, perfectly formed caricatures used to appeal to a male audience, with most male characters being similarly shallow and mostly generic audience surrogates that foil the antics of the female cast by being a voice of reason.

 

She told me that she was happy that there were girls doing crazy shit and being awesome, and didn't really care if it appealed to a latent sense of superiority in the male audience. It's possibly because she didn't really get the effect that I (a heterosexual male) got when I tried to watch stuff like it. I see this arrangement as portraying women to be universally silly and illegitimate, including characters that are "serious" or fit a less wacky or sexual stereotype since they still have a caricature to fill.

 

I feel weird about it. Most of the anime that are like that I view as inane trash anyway probably due to their being extremely refined appeals to a narrow otaku audience for the purpose of making a franchise, but it's such a huge part of the medium that when I bring up anime, "cartoons for sad horny dudes" is a universal touchstone.

 

Maybe I'm not looking in the right sources, but I never see this being critiqued or brought up since moe is supposed to be light and carefree with a feminine focus aimed at males. But I see it more as "watch this dynamic theater of extreme stereotypes and adore these half-humans", which just feels really wrong. Like sure it's comedy, but it's also often billed as "slice of life".

 

It feels really odd for you to list Girls und Panzer, one of my favorite shows the past few years, alongside Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!, one of my least favorite shows the past few years, just because they share a moe aesthetic. Moe has a lot of different purposes for different shows, even though the most common effect is the simplification of the show's emotional spectrum to deescalate conflict and emphasize certain feelings in both the character and the audience. In Chuunibyou, the efficacy of the show's themes depend on you feeling indulgent towards and protective of Rikka, so a moe aesthetic is almost a given. In Girls und Panzer, the crux of the show is fairly extreme armored combat with a high degree of realism, so a moe aesthetic is used to contrast that with the mundane lives of the girls who participate in that combat. The goal of neither is strict emotional realism, because neither show would be served by it, and I don't think the vast majority of the audience would mistake the characters and their behaviors for reflections of real life.

 

I don't know. I understand concerns about the exploitative potential of shows where the entire female cast is composed of vapid caricatures, but I don't think many shows are just that. Even if they are, I agree more with your friend than with you that sometimes a simpler show set in a simpler universe with simpler people is pleasant to watch. It's more common with shows dominated by female characters, but that's because more slice-of-life shows feature girls, largely because the audience's unfamiliarity with them make it easier to get away with more outre depictions of ostensibly human behavior. I mean, it's for that same reason that K-On! destroys the Bechdel test in a way that a male-oriented Western cartoon never has and never will. Even so, when they make a slice-of-life anime featuring guys, like Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou, you see the same caricatures, except there's no concerns about it being a sexual thing because who the fuck feels sexual about high school boys. Moe is gendered in use, not in intent.

 

If you're interested in reading more, there's not much Japanese scholarship that's been translated to English, but I think that Saito Tamaki's Beautiful Fighting Girl discusses the cultural weight of what you're talking about, along with a lot of other stuff, in depth. There's also Patrick Galbraith's recent book The Moe Manifesto, which directly addresses moe, but I understand that it's a book primarily written for advocacy and doesn't really have much independent value outside of a series of interviews with anime and manga creators about what moe means to them.

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I feel weird about it. Most of the anime that are like that I view as inane trash anyway probably due to their being extremely refined appeals to a narrow otaku audience for the purpose of making a franchise, but it's such a huge part of the medium that when I bring up anime, "cartoons for sad horny dudes" is a universal touchstone.

 

The specific moe aesthetic aside, this is definitely a popular perception of anime: that it caters to the sexual interests of heterosexual men even more so than other mediums.

 

It may or may not be fair, but it's an impression the medium definitely makes, and I can't help but let it inform my own opinions of both anime in general and specific series individually. I know intellectually that most shows aren't engineered for "sad horny dudes", but the feeling is that a disproportionate number of them are, so whenever I'm watching an anime and there's any amount of female fan service I can't help but feel uncomfortable. If I'm being honest, this is mostly a personal image concern: that anyone watching over my shoulder will see an anime art style and sexualized imagery and make unflattering but reasonable conclusions about content of what I'm watching.

 

This is why I couldn't get into Kill la Kill, and it's the hurdle I'm facing now with Space Dandy. I know I'm not being fair: in another medium I'd more easily take a restaurant chain called "Boobies" as the absurd joke that it is and not as a frustrating piece of titillation that I have to overlook. But I can't deny how I feel.

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Yeah, I probably should've been less hasty to impose some intentional sexism on the part of the creators, and to be honest I only have a very shallow experience with the shows I listed (I only got halfway through the first episode of Girl und Panzer). But I feel that this knee jerk reaction could be somewhat valid at least, since what I'm talking about is the subconscious effects that this arrangement has on the audience that might be residual to the actual aesthetic/narrative takeaway of these shows. I don't mean to judge the shows, I meant to comment on the existence of moe period, before any context of the show is taken into account.

Also I didn't mean to express that all characters must be well rounded and that all anime should be deep character studies, I meant to underline the effect that shallow characters have in this specific arrangement of male-female,tsukkomi-boke, or all female cast of adorable wackos (K-On was this to me) where the audience effectively acts as tsukkomi in the consumption of it. Nichijou was really not deep at all, but I felt that it presented its female characters in a way that was way more acceptable to me as respectful, since it was less about "look at the daily lives of high school girls and look how silly the girls are", it was "look at the daily lives of these high school girls and how they, as regular people, would react to weird things in life and each other". I might have a ridiculous selective memory of nichijou but it felt way more like the main characters had personalities and reactions that were more self-identifiable by the audience, which made the series as a whole more focused on the jokes than on the characters telling/being jokes.

Also I have mixed feelings about using the bechdel test as a metric for how well women are presented because of this specific thing. You can have an all female cast with completely un-male related plot, but if the audience doesn't properly identify with any of them, they are all objects. Objects to be adored, but still objects. This is also probably why my friend could stand watching a whole season of K-ON and the movie, and I couldn't, since I really couldn't identify with any of it. But I could see why it's attractive to sympathize with and have a vicarious experience of a perspective I have no access to, or to just watch cute girls being wacky.

Nichibros apparently has a pretty big female audience, and I suspect for the same reasons above, but with the genders reversed.

So I guess I'm just not the right audience for it, but statistically, I should be, which is why this concerns me.

I'm not actually very literate in anime so I probably should be reading more than writing (I'll check those recommendations out, thanks!).

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I had always assumed the whole Moe stylisation was nothing to do with titillation but about making the character non threatening, now obviously it gets used more on female characters than males but i think the purpose is the same. 

 

Though when i think about more, it feels to me the western trope Moe makes me think of most is quite a misogynistic one, the "Girl/Guy next door" that the character is designed to be visually attractive, often quirky, but flawed and often vulnerable in a way where they could be seen as either "attainable" (in the case of a girl) or "relatable" but non threatening in the case of a man.

 

Think of it this way how many show's can you think of which used Moe stylisation but had a "threatening" character feature prominently (i can think of perhaps 2-3 off the top of my head max

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That's an interesting point. I wonder if that component of it is avoided if the character design itself is explicitly desexualized. But the protectiveness instinct still exists and might water down the character.

God the attraction of moe is a many headed beast.

Edit: that reminded me of an interpretation of the lucky star theme song that it teases a fat, male, otaku audience, and that the adorable girls are unreachable.

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That's an interesting point. I wonder if that component of it is avoided if the character design itself is explicitly desexualized. But the protectiveness instinct still exists and might water down the character.

God the attraction of moe is a many headed beast.

 

Yeah, the purview of moe is very broad. You can feel it towards an inanimate object like a coffee maker, so there's an argument to be made that it's objectifying even if it isn't necessarily sexual. Still, I feel that argument only applies consistently at the term's highest and most unspecific level of interpretation. It has so many different applications, even within a single subgenre, and many of those applications definitely give their characters more agency, not less. That's really what I meant when invoking the Bechdel Test for K-On!, I think, but a better example is Girls und Panzer, whose characters live in a childlike world, free of mature interpersonal pressures like sexuality and hatred, but are still extremely competent tank commanders willing and able to take care of themselves. The feelings of protectiveness and support that the aesthetic of moe, as an offshoot of more generic "cuteness," is meant to excite from the audience is separate from an analytical inventory of the characters themselves. I guess that's why it's complicated, because it cultivates an affection for a character that is definitely gendered, but more paternal than sexual. It's a very different category of fandom, although now that I'm aware of it and accustomed to it by the anime I watch, I can definitely say that I feel more moe than attraction to, say... Emily Blunt.

 

Anyway, I really should say that if these shows don't appeal to you at all, they don't appeal to you, and that's okay. They're something I only came to enjoy with half a decade of anime watching behind me, which had largely eliminated the entirely reasonable shame about which dium talks. I watched K-On! when I moved to a new city where I knew no one because I needed to watch people be friends with each other, and by the time I had my own friends here, I didn't give a fuck if they thought I was watching high school girls start a rock band for perverted reasons.

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Maybe I'm laboring under a weird understanding of objectification, but I've always thought that acknowledging competency/agency doesn't imply that you respect or humanize a character or person, and reducing that competency to a stereotype makes it worse. It's where the femme fatale trope comes from, and what the girl next door trope manipulates (an otherwise perfect girl EXCEPT has some flaws/prior history that make her approachable).

I feel nervous to bring up Girl und Panzer again but from what I gather from your description, it's as easy to view the girls as moe with the peculiar perk of being good shots as it is to view them as formidable killing machines with girly demeanors. Again I feel that the arrangement allows the audience to split characters into types and ideas, which is probably just a feature of a lot of anime in general. This was kind of why I feel odd about using the bechdel test.

To me it doesn't matter if characters have agency or are moe or not, as long as they're somewhat undeveloped or not able to in some way identify with a living human being (which doesn't seem to be an impossible task), they're liable to be objectified.

Princess Jellyfish has characters that are neither conventionally moe (well, maybe) nor sexualized, nor completely helpless. But they're all ridiculous caricatures that don't command understanding or human understanding.

I just think that it requires a lot of media literacy to take it in a way that results in as nuanced a mindset as you have. I guess moe isn't really the whole issue but also how the conventional style of characterization in anime affects the presentation of females to a male audience.

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I think I will always have problems with Moe just because it's sometimes feels like it's applied almost blanket like across anime regardless of the suitability of it in a particular character or show.

This image which was posted a few pages back to me is a near perfect example, I mean is there ANY, I mean ANY artistic reason to not treat the female characters with the same realism they do their male equivalents.

5R9mH2R.png

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In other news I watched the fourth Dragon Ball movie, which is actually the 17th movie in the whole franchise but the fourth movie specifically taking place during Young Goku's time. (We were planning to watch in order but fucked up. Oops.)

 

So the first three movies are weird alternate-universe retellings of the first few arcs in Dragon Ball. And then this 17th movie is then again another alternate-universe retelling of Goku's origin, except this time they skip everything up to the Red Ribbon Army and so there's no Krillin or Tien or Chaozu who knows why they did this but whatever. Oddly enough, this was probably the best animated Dragon Ball content I've seen to date. Possibly because they did it as like an anniversary celebration and so put a lot of work into it, and since it's just a movie, they decided it's okay to put more money into it than they otherwise would.

 

So that's my current Dragon Ball status. Soon we'll watch the first Dragon Ball Z movie. Oh boy!

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I like that there's this platonic ideal of goku that manifests himself in different folktales like he's Paul Bunyan

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Maybe I'm laboring under a weird understanding of objectification, but I've always thought that acknowledging competency/agency doesn't imply that you respect or humanize a character or person, and reducing that competency to a stereotype makes it worse. It's where the femme fatale trope comes from, and what the girl next door trope manipulates (an otherwise perfect girl EXCEPT has some flaws/prior history that make her approachable).

I feel nervous to bring up Girl und Panzer again but from what I gather from your description, it's as easy to view the girls as moe with the peculiar perk of being good shots as it is to view them as formidable killing machines with girly demeanors. Again I feel that the arrangement allows the audience to split characters into types and ideas, which is probably just a feature of a lot of anime in general. This was kind of why I feel odd about using the bechdel test.

To me it doesn't matter if characters have agency or are moe or not, as long as they're somewhat undeveloped or not able to in some way identify with a living human being (which doesn't seem to be an impossible task), they're liable to be objectified.

Princess Jellyfish has characters that are neither conventionally moe (well, maybe) nor sexualized, nor completely helpless. But they're all ridiculous caricatures that don't command understanding or human understanding.

I just think that it requires a lot of media literacy to take it in a way that results in as nuanced a mindset as you have. I guess moe isn't really the whole issue but also how the conventional style of characterization in anime affects the presentation of females to a male audience.

 

I don't think that competency is a function of the stereotype unless the anime itself is not very good. Even though it sounds like I was defending Chuunibyou earlier, I actually despise it for a lot of what it sounds like you dislike in more moe-oriented shows. There are one or two characters who actually have inner lives and can get shit done, one of which is invariably male, and the rest of the characters are useless blobs. I think that that anime, the moe-blob anime, is inferior to the moe anime, which just uses those aesthetic principles to achieve a certain effect. Girls und Panzer invites you to make assumptions about the characters owing to their simplistic and cutesy design, but every character has their own skills and competencies, some expected and some unexpected, that are developed and given full play throughout the show. For instance, there's the mature and motherly ojou-sama who gradually abandons her hobby of flower-arranging to become a gunner, even though she abhors violence, because she enjoys the need for patience and a good eye, but likes the impact (literally) of a tank cannon more than a flower arrangement. And then, later in the show, that feeds back into her flower arranging. It's a moe character arc. Really, for a good show like that, moe is more just a means of giving the audience a non-threatening entrypoint into the fictional universe and a means of disrupting audience expectations once they're in.

 

And yeah, I know that I've got a very conditioned palate for this stuff. I don't expect anyone else to like it. I just don't think moe is the thing killing anime these days. The thing killing anime, if anything's "killing anime" in an age when I can buy a full-length series on Blu-ray for sixty bucks, is a glut of lazy and underwritten half-cour shows, usually adaptations of the latest manga and light novel properties, exploiting moe to sell themselves to a contracting market that somehow still doesn't have much discernment. Even without moe, that exploitation would still happen, through some other facet of the otaku fandom.

 

I know you're not saying that moe is killing anime. I guess I'm having a different argument, mostly with myself.

 

I think I will always have problems with Moe just because it's sometimes feels like it's applied almost blanket like across anime regardless of the suitability of it in a particular character or show.

This image which was posted a few pages back to me is a near perfect example, I mean is there ANY, I mean ANY artistic reason to not treat the female characters with the same realism they do their male equivalents.

 

It's not a good thing, but that's the same director and studio as Girls und Panzer and Another (and the director's done Shinryaku! Ika MusumeBokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan, and xxxHOLiC at other studios). I'm tempted to say that's just his style, particularly with respect to the five female protagonists, and sadly it's one that sells even if it doesn't match the genre of the anime. I'm not even the biggest fan of the aesthetics of the P.A. Works brand of moe when used well, but what are you going to do?

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I've never watched a single episode of Dragon Ball.... Is this something I should try to fix? Or with something do labyrinth plot wise am I better off staying well clear.

Utter sidenote: Death Parade from it gimmicky beginnings has been quietly winning me over this season, it's pretty uniformly excellently animated as you would expect but its done a very intresting job building up our understanding of the central mysteries from the way the characters interact with each other and the world rather than any big lore dumps.

Also I love the energy & verve of the opening sequence

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Also I love the energy & verve of the opening sequence

 

I love the Madhouse touch. I'm not even watching that show, but damn.

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I don't think that competency is a function of the stereotype unless the anime itself is not very good. Even though it sounds like I was defending Chuunibyou earlier, I actually despise it for a lot of what it sounds like you dislike in more moe-oriented shows. There are one or two characters who actually have inner lives and can get shit done, one of which is invariably male, and the rest of the characters are useless blobs. I think that that anime, the moe-blob anime, is inferior to the moe anime, which just uses those aesthetic principles to achieve a certain effect. Girls und Panzer invites you to make assumptions about the characters owing to their simplistic and cutesy design, but every character has their own skills and competencies, some expected and some unexpected, that are developed and given full play throughout the show. For instance, there's the mature and motherly ojou-sama who gradually abandons her hobby of flower-arranging to become a gunner, even though she abhors violence, because she enjoys the need for patience and a good eye, but likes the impact (literally) of a tank cannon more than a flower arrangement. And then, later in the show, that feeds back into her flower arranging. It's a moe character arc. Really, for a good show like that, moe is more just a means of giving the audience a non-threatening entrypoint into the fictional universe and a means of disrupting audience expectations once they're in.

 

And yeah, I know that I've got a very conditioned palate for this stuff. I don't expect anyone else to like it. I just don't think moe is the thing killing anime these days. The thing killing anime, if anything's "killing anime" in an age when I can buy a full-length series on Blu-ray for sixty bucks, is a glut of lazy and underwritten half-cour shows, usually adaptations of the latest manga and light novel properties, exploiting moe to sell themselves to a contracting market that somehow still doesn't have much discernment. Even without moe, that exploitation would still happen, through some other facet of the otaku fandom.

 

I know you're not saying that moe is killing anime. I guess I'm having a different argument, mostly with myself.

 

 

It's not a good thing, but that's the same director and studio as Girls und Panzer and Another (and the director's done Shinryaku! Ika MusumeBokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan, and xxxHOLiC at other studios). I'm tempted to say that's just his style, particularly with respect to the five female protagonists, and sadly it's one that sells even if it doesn't match the genre of the anime. I'm not even the biggest fan of the aesthetics of the P.A. Works brand of moe when used well, but what are you going to do?

 

That example you gave from Girl und Panzer just gives me the impression that the character is "the one who likes flowers and is motherly". Maybe I'm overly negative, but I can't see that being appealing as a character anymore.

 

I watched some of Chuunibyou and yeah I see that. The issue I have with stuff like it has been that these eye-catcher characters have been consistently female, and that doesn't fit the goal of creating humans-that-are-also-girls in media. I dunno, maybe it's a function of needing to create immediately appealing characters to sell an otherwise interesting story or something, as you pointed out.

 

So HA. Moe is complicit in killing anime.

 

At this point I'm thinking that my extreme aversion to moe is me trying to legitimize my liking anime at all. Truth be told if I really couldn't stand it I wouldn't have watched any of the stuff I'm complaining about, but I did watch non non biyori and fuck it I'm gonna watch the next season when it comes out.

 

I watched Lucky Star as well, which seems to poke fun at this kind of thing but still indulge in it wholeheartedly, which is a kind of relief-of-cognitive-dissonance that allowed me to trudge through it but feel like a traitor at the end.

 

Anime is weird.

 

EDIT: I just remembered what I was going to say about using moe to ease someone into a world of characters. Isn't that also part of the culture that exploits the tendencies of a small market to expand a franchise, and is more of a business move than an actual artistic device? Doesn't it make the medium homogeneous?

 

I might actually check out Girl und Panzer to see what you mean though.

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I love the Madhouse touch. I'm not even watching that show, but damn.

Give it a shot, individual episodes are nicely self contained whioe providing just enough titbits of info about the ongoing situation of their world to keep things intresting.

I know you're not saying that moe is killing anime.

I actually think there's a proper case to be made that Moe is a symptom of what is killing anime, and that indeed in someways anime may already be dead and in need of shocking back into life,

But its 2:00 & I have to at least to try & damn sleep but give me the benefit of the doubt and I'll try to flesh out that rather inflammatory statement

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So what we're saying here is that all anime should be Tatami Galaxy and every anime studio must be given a Murakami book.

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On 3/6/2015 at 7:59 PM, Blambo said:

That example you gave from Girl und Panzer just gives me the impression that the character is "the one who likes flowers and is motherly". Maybe I'm overly negative, but I can't see that being appealing as a character anymore.

 

Well, the idea is that she appears just to be that stereotype, but there's depth beyond that, running counter to the stereotype. If it weren't possible to stereotype her, her character's arc wouldn't be half as effective, because there'd be no buy-in. That's why I'm saying, the reason Girls und Panzer is good is because it uses its moe to create dissonance in the minds of the audience that is then resolved through the functioning of the plot. Without the moe aesthetic, it'd just be some weirdly downbeat show about a group of girls who drive tanks competitively. Not that I'm complaining, but I love military hardware a bit too much.

 

You know what does bother me like moe seems to bother you? The similar archetype of the Potato-kun in harem-type anime. The male protagonist who's carefully crafted to have no personality besides being vaguely loyal and protective, so that nothing can get in the way of them being identifiable to a male viewer, is incredibly gross to watch a cast of female characters fall in love with, especially if there's a fantastical element that makes them the savior of the universe in addition to every girl's dream husband. It's bizarre that anime's developed this male character who's so oblivious and hesitant that they're functionally a mobile point-of-view for other characters to interact in front of, but it's everywhere now. It ruined A Certain Magical Index for me, which makes me happy that A Certain Scientific Railgun includes almost no Mr. Being-Normal-Is-A-Superpower-Too, and I barely got through Witch Craft Works despite Takamiya being just as bad.

 

And you know, I've seen shows that do the "passive audience surrogate" protagonist fine, but just like a lot of shows with moe aesthetics, it's become a cheat that makes the shows that use it but don't understand it noticeably worse. Speaking of...

 

On 3/6/2015 at 8:07 PM, Codicier said:

I actually think there's a proper case to be made that Moe is a symptom of what is killing anime, and that indeed in someways anime may already be dead and in need of shocking back into life,

But its 2:00 & I have to at least to try & damn sleep but give me the benefit of the doubt and I'll try to flesh out that rather inflammatory statement

 

We probably agree, so long as your argument isn't that getting rid of moe is what'll shock anime back to life. There's a lot of lazy writing and art in the world of anime, relying on iteration, franchise, and shortcuts to sustain itself. With publishers becoming increasingly risk-adverse, it probably can't last forever.

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I feel like the comedy equivalent of Potato-kun is the voice of reason guy. Again I didn't watch enough of Haruhi Suzumiya no Yuutsu to make this claim universally (this is becoming a trend. I just don't have enough time to watch anime I feel like I wouldn't like), but the main character is reacting to the crazy antics of haruhi and co. in a way that seems to be what the audience should be thinking, and for some reason he's always present no matter what to conveniently provide tsukkomi in a way that makes it seem like he has the only legitimate, reliable perception among a mostly female cast, who each have some kind of personality infliction. He (invariably he) is always present, no matter how much he complains, to act as a floating perspective point. This is also what I found appalling about Chuunibyou (the first two or three episodes have exactly that plot).

 

This isn't haruhi but...

 

 

It's probably a symptom of the bigger trope of "the only rational guy in the room" but that's been done in a way that isn't gendered, like in Arakawa Under the Bridge.

 

But again, I need to watch more. Girl und Panzer sounds like it has mad layers too.

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