Anime - yay or nay?

[Mu]

Loooove it. But I've cut down on it recently. I just finished Akatsuki no Yona, which is beautiful, except it has a terrible ending and I want to cry and break into a million pieces. I have a lot of favourites, Angel Beats!, Magi and the Magic of the Labyrinth, Fairy Tail, Code Geass, Durarara!! and Samurai Champloo. Probably a bunch I don't remember as well.

 

[dragonesper]

@Sen, only the story arch has ended on Akatsuki no Yona. There's more so you better hope they keep on serializing it. I do.

 

[Mu]

@dragonesper I've been told the series is good, but I'm not really a manga person ^^". The anime ending was disappointing, it felt crammed.

 

[BrattyCommissar]

I've seen people use the terms moonrunes and moonspeak for a long time, probably going on a decade now. It's the best derogatory way to refer to written and spoken Asian languages, though mainly Japanese for whatever reason. :D

 

[Diana]

I USED TO BE ANIME WEEABOO OTAKU! BAKA DESU YOOOOOOO!

But then I grew out of it. >:[

I still enjoy anime, but I don't watch it often any more and I don't get in to it as much as I used to. All of the fan servicing and boobs n' tits of squeaky childlike teenage girls got really old and annoying. >< It overshadowed all of the things I started watching anime for in the first place, which was the complex storylines and the character development.

 

[Novis]

I USED TO BE ANIME WEEABOO OTAKU! BAKA DESU YOOOOOOO!

But then I grew out of it. >:[

I still enjoy anime, but I don't watch it often any more and I don't get in to it as much as I used to. All of the fan servicing and boobs n' tits of squeaky childlike teenage girls got really old and annoying. >< It overshadowed all of the things I started watching anime for in the first place, which was the complex storylines and the character development.

This. You explained this perfectly.

 

[Dervish]

Growing up, I watched DBZ and Pokemon and Digimon and those other Saturday Morning Cartoons without realizing they were supposed to be different than other cartoons. I was aware they were Japanese, but that didn't make them any more or less special.

However, by the time I hit high school and started running into the turbo weebs, I pretty much wrote off watching anything else because the more I saw the fanbase and how they started treating it like the only good thing in the world, I avoided anything to do with it purely because of the culture surrounding it. Seriously, hardcore fans and people who unflinchingly threw in random Japanese words in sentences while using the honourifics with their friends basically scorched earth Japanime for me. A lot of those people were in my close circle of friends.

Fast forward to now where I'm away from that shit and ran into a few people who are fans and collectors of certain shows and Jamangas that suggested I read or watch a series because it related to my other interests. Surprise surprise, it's been a much better experience and I enjoy some of the stuff quite a lot now, but I kind of have to sift through the minefield of the goofy shit with screechy voiced female characters and the cartoonish over exaggerated reactions where suddenly everyone turned into a Looney Toons caricature for a few moments for comedic effect.

So ultimately, Japanime isn't anything special to me and isn't worth idolizing and obsessing over. I just pick stuff I like from it and enjoy it alongside everything else I enjoy.

Edit: Thanks, Owl Lady! You reminded me of a huge reason I find a lot of Japanime awful and it's the excessive and childish fan service. Know what's hotter than throwing female anatomy at the screen like an 8th grader who stole his dad's porn mags and is showing his friends? The badass female characters who aren't sexualized and are believable characters that can hold their own while winning you over with their deeds and personality.

I also hate the fucking over the top action sequences where a lone character can kill dozens of bad guys without being in any peril and not even showing any signs of exertion and coming through completely unscathed. Negative infinity points if they're a swordsman or woman killing supposedly armoured and trained soldiers with guns.

 

[Sairen]

Anime is something I seriously love. I've watched it since I was a kid with my mom and dad. He would sit up at night and watch cowboy bebop and would let me sit with him if I woke up at night. When it came to my mom it was early morning anime like digimon and pokemon. I think there was another but can't remember.

As time went on I branched out into other anime like FMA, Gintama, DBZ, Ouran and many many more. Though there was an unforeseen problem. My older brother is the type of anime fan you get annoyed of fast. You just have an urge to punch him in the throat some times. He just gets over hyped about certain animes then ruins it by talking about it for days. Soon talking isn't an issue it's when he comes and shows you clips of the episode. I couldn't get into lucky star, SAO, Attack on Titan, and a few other animes. It didn't stop there especially when he found out I like to draw and write. You could probably imagine what he wanted.

 

[☆Luna☆]

Funny, considering Japan is called the land of the rising sun. xD

Maybe that is why I've been praising the sun...

Anime for me has been good for a lot of reasons. I really prefer the look of anime to that of most cartoon styles, and even to real actors. I also really just love the sound of Japanese. I don't want to speak it myself, but the words sound really pretty, and I enjoy hearing them said that way.

This will probably get me in trouble with some people, but I also really like the use of honorifics. I'm a bit more respectful, and know not to call strangers or people I'm just getting to know by them, because that would just be an obnoxious culture shock, but even still, having words to describe your relationship to people that you get to say every time you see them is nice. It would be weird to say something like, "My male friend Steven, isn't today nice?" But it wouldn't be awkward to say, "Steven-kun, isn't today nice?" Plus then, when I suddenly stop using them for a statement, it is like shifting to a more intimate tone without doing anything else. There really isn't anything in English that does this, so even if some people find it obnoxious, it is something I want to do between friends, if that is something they are ok with.

But, as everyone has said, anime does have some stylistic qualities I don't like as well. Fanservice is all well and good, but it doesn't belong everywhere. Plus, I really hate the overuse of the powerful but helpless female hero character, or even worse, the completely helpless female hero. There are more than enough weak female protagonists, I want more Shana's. I'm also totally done with the "clueless never heard of sex but somehow always finds himself in sexual circumstances" male protagonist.

If I don't stop myself here, I could go on talking about anime for a really long time. Anime is something that is a big part of my life, and I connect with it in a way that is different from how I interact with other mediums. Watching it makes me smile, and there are a lot of characters I can connect to. Anime influences my music tastes and it probably influenced me in a lot of other ways too. I know it is probably more special to me than it will be to a lot of people, and I express it in ways some people resent even when I avoid involving them. I just wanted them to know, it isn't like these feelings exist without context.

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

It would be weird to say something like, "My male friend Steven, isn't today nice?" But it wouldn't be awkward to say, "Steven-kun, isn't today nice?" Plus then, when I suddenly stop using them for a statement, it is like shifting to a more intimate tone without doing anything else. There really isn't anything in English that does this, so even if some people find it obnoxious, it is something I want to do between friends, if that is something they are ok with.

Huh, I never thought of it that way. :/

Now you have me wanting to try it with some friends as well.

 

[Jorick]

This is only tangentially related to the thread topic, but Diana's post made me feel like sharing the story about how I avoided becoming a weeaboo.

So young Jorick got into anime in middle school, and he thought it was the coolest shit around. He was initiated into the world of anime as so many American children were at the time: a few anime that were shoved on Saturday morning cartoon lineups, plus the Toonami and Adult Swim programming blocks on the Cartoon Network channel. Dragon Ball Z, InuYasha, YuYu Hakusho, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Rouroni Kenshin, Tenchi Muyo, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, and Digimon made up almost the entirety the young Jorick's anime record through middle school. He would stay up late to watch his favorites on Adult Swim despite parental disapproval and punishments, and when he did this on Friday nights he also got up early on Saturday mornings to watch the anime stuff that was to be had at that time. It caused much sleep deprivation and lots of groundings for staying up past bed time, but young Jorick was a committed little anime fan, so he kept on doing what he was doing.

Then, come 8th grade (in this school district it was the last grade of middle school, which was 6th through 8th grade), young Jorick encountered someone who was far more into anime than he had ever dreamed of being. This young man, let's call him Steve (because I can't remember his actual name), transferred into the school district in 8th grade due to his family moving across the country for parental career reasons, and he was a completely new entity in that school. Where before young Jorick had been known for being the nerd who was way more into Japanese cartoons than anyone else, Steve quickly displaced him as the king of anime in the school. Steve had the luxury of both being an anime fan and having actual money to spend on merchandise to show it. Poor young Jorick grew up below the poverty line, so he was quite envious of Steve and his anime shirts and his Goku backpack and his Dragon Ball Z action figures and DVD sets of various series. A lot of those DVD sets came with the option of watching the anime with their original Japanese voice actors and English subtitles, and of course Steve availed himself of this feature because he was a truly elite anime fan. He learned a lot of the Japanese words and used them in causal conversation, which of course set him apart from his classmates.

At first young Jorick envied Steve's possessions and apparently far superior knowledge and love of anime. He wished to emulate Steve and thus become a better anime fan himself. He tried to befriend Steve.. until a couple weeks into the 8th grade school year it became very apparent that these distinguishing factors made Steve a target of bullying from most other students rather than an object of envy as he had been to young Jorick. This was enough to cause him to keep his distance from Steve, because he didn't care to mess with any of that nonsense. Young Jorick had befriended the stoner/skater group of kids in his 6th grade class, using his wit and humor to mesh with the group despite not being a stoner or skater himself, and that had afforded him a nice amount of protection from the bullying that loner nerd kids got hit with. He stayed back and observed Steve and the growing spite of the other kids, but young Jorick remained an avid anime fan and retained a level of envy for Steve's wealth and aspired to one day be able to own such goods for himself, though he kept that on the down low once it became clear that the school had become an anime-hater zone. Steve was not deterred from his weeaboo path despite the abuse, so he remained the main target for bullying for most of the school year.

Things changed one day when Steve arrived to school very late, showing up just in time for the lunch period for 8th grade. He came into the lunch room and made a big show of pulling off a long sleeved shirt to reveal a T-shirt underneath, one which was too large for him (it was likely only offered in adult male sizes and he was a scrawny kid) and that he appeared to be very proud of. It had an image of a very sexually suggestive anime girl on it. This girl was very young, the type of character often called a loli. Young Jorick guessed her to be roughly 8 years old, and it was rather shocking and disturbing. It didn't take long for school staff in the lunch room to recognize the cause of the wave of derisive remarks (some of the more advanced kids in the room called him a pedophile and child molester, others just threw out generic homosexual slurs and the like) that were hurled at Steve, and they swooped in to take him away. The mortified look on Steve's face changed the course of young Jorick's life, because the extreme second-hand embarrassment was enough to turn all his previous envy into alternating parts pity and disgust. That shirt and the extreme awkwardness of the situation seemed to be the end path of hardcore anime fandom, and young Jorick wanted no part of that. He kept on watching anime sometimes, but that incident dulled all his eagerness to get anime merchandise and learn Japanese and so forth, and so he was led away from the path of the weeaboo by seeing the harm it wrought on another.

So now instead of being an insufferable weeaboo piece of shit I'm just a guy who happens to watch anime now and then. Thanks Steve for giving me my first object lesson in why extreme obsession with something tends to end poorly. :D

 

[King]

Bro, Steve sounds like he saved your butt from obsession.

The only reason I avoided becoming a weeaboo was because my friends were going through a major weeb phase and tried to get me into anime (they're the ones who got me into the animes I have watched!!), but I was in my ultimate Emo phase.

Even though my Emo-phase makes me cringe so hard, at least it saved me from going through the weeb stage o.o

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

No one I know from anime club even is as anime obsessed as the one's people on Iwaku are describing. :/
I'm wondering if Iwaku's exaggerating, or if I just got lucky.

 

[Hellis]

Most my favorite animes are like 10+ years old now. Every now and then, a gem appear though.

 

[King]

No one I know from anime club even is as anime obsessed as the one's people on Iwaku are describing. :/
I'm wondering if Iwaku's exaggerating, or if I just got lucky.

Idk, my friends weren't even that obsessed. I have only encountered scary-obsessed at some cons, but I got lucky with anime friends c:

 

[K3l]

...All ya'll nerds.

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

Idk, my friends weren't even that obsessed. I have only encountered scary-obsessed at some cons, but I got lucky with anime friends c:

Even Cons I don't usually. But then again I don't tend to just strike conversations with random people there either.
Though the anime club I go to did mention one insane weeaboo person that was around the year before I joined.
So I could be just narrowly missing these extremists.

 

[Brovo]

I watch anime sometimes. I'm stuck in an awkward relationship with anime though, in that it can achieve great things, and often... Doesn't. You've got stuff like Studio Ghibli films which are some of the most touching stories to come out of anime, or stuff like Fullmetal Alchemist, Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Hellsing, Gurren Lagann, Ghost in the Shell, et cetera. Then you've got the endless sea of trashy Ecchi/Moe idiocy coat tailing/spiraling off from Haruhi that has essentially assimilated the majority of anime being released today. You've still got occasional gems here and there, but when the fan base is comparing Attack on Titan to Game of Thrones because they cannot think of any other anime even remotely decent enough to be comparable, you've got a problem. Not to say that Attack on Titan is bad, it's just extremely formulaic and lost any sort of tension it had the moment it deus ex machina'd the main protagonist into GodMan: King of the Meat Sandwiches.

Modern anime has a problem it needs to resolve. No, the recent wave of man porn is not a resolution. Actual storylines are a resolution. Gigguk explains it well. "Oh, well if it sells, that's okay then, right??" No, because the anime industry is actually getting fucked. To the point that some anime creators are turning to kickstarter to fund projects.

Which depresses me, because anime is perhaps the cheapest and most efficient manner in which to create interesting, epic stories with varied characters of all shapes and sizes. Except, I have a hard time recommending most new anime to any friends or family, because how can I recommend an anime that has a loli grinding into someone's lap? I'll be accused (arguably rightfully so) of being a goddamn pedophile. So. Yeah.

tl;dr: I like anime, I don't like the direction the industry has gone over the past few years, the fans are not helping when they happily consume mountains of garbage.

 

[Skyswimsky]

I had to google moonrunes I: When did that become a thing?

Since when was it not a thing?

 

[Dervish]

GodMan: King of the Meat Sandwiches.

This sentence just made me uber hungry.