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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5146 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Last week anime culture war news was rather unwelcome here, so it is time for another.

The topic of last week xitter storm was anime.

Is anime weird? If so, what should parents do to make sure their kids never watch anime and become normal members of the crowd?

Fitting with the crowd as end in itself was always seen as moral duty in small c conservative tradition, nothing unusual with it.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother", but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non- smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

It is clear who the bad people are and why they are bad.

Nevertheless, massive arguments for and against torn xitter asunder and joined with even bigger arguments whether normie existence in 2020's North America is really something you should strive for or whether much better, happier, nobler and more fulfilling life can be found elsewhere.

If you examine all parts of normie life, from such basics as school, regular employnment, transportation or house building and find this is worthwhile prize, and then find out that your kid is not normie, you should indeed tell them:

"For your whole life, you will live as undercover agent in enemy territory. As Otto von Stierlitz had to pass as Nazi, you must learn how to pass as normie."

(using Eastern archetype here, in Western culture heroes are men of action facing adversity directly and challenging enemy in honorable combat, not sus characters skulking in shadows)

But parents are usually extremely bad judges what is "weird" and what isn't. They remember what was normal and what wasn't in high school in early 1980's, and are unable to comprehend that times are changing. And this is the problem barely noticed, the problem that makes this whole discourse waste of time.

My concern is that anime leads to anime porn leads to degenerately building your sexual excitement pathways around bodily configurations and standards of appearance that a human body cannot compete with. When I'm with someone I want them to be excited about me, not wishing I had tentacles or was 10 feet tall.

I suppose I'm on team "let kids have interests." Probably because that's the kind of attitude my parents took towards me and it seems to have worked out fine. Some of my interest in nerdier things came from my parents! I played Everquest with my father, step-mother, and brother back in the day. I watched anime on "normie" television like Toonami and Adult Swim. I read a lot of big fantasy door stoppers when I was young.

I think "anime" is the wrong level of abstraction for useful analysis. Like saying "books" or "fantasy." Are there works in any genre or medium it would be inappropriate to expose children to? Yea certainly. Are there works in any genre or medium it would be fine to expose children to? I think mostly yes. Certainly, there are child-appropriate anime. People in this thread have mentioned some. There's a certain kind of obsessive fandom that it is probably unhealthy to develop but you don't need anime for that (c.f. Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek).

On the more general question of "fitting in" as something abstractly desirable or that parent's ought to enforce I think it also depends. What are they being asked to fit in to? If it were normal to watch anime would the anti-anime crowd force their kids to watch anime so that they fit in? At least when I was growing up it was common for my parents to denigrate the idea of following what was popular just because it was popular. "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?" was a common rhetorical question.

"For your whole life, you will live as undercover agent in enemy territory. As Otto von Stierlitz had to pass as Nazi, you must learn how to pass as normie."

I guess two points.

1. I am confident it is easier today than ever in history to find and make friends who happen to share your niche interests. Indeed, it seems like part of the anxiety about having "weird" kids is that they will have friends who are also "weird."

2. I am also confident everyone does this sometimes. I find it extremely unlikely any significant fraction of people spend all their time around people who have all the same hobbies and interests.

If we're talking about anime, I'd like to spin-off in a tangent and note the increasing "Furry-ification" of anime conventions. I can't claim this idea as my own, as I saw it somewhere online, but I can't find the post now. It seems that in recent years (especially after COVID, for obvious reasons) anime conventions have become less about anime, and more about degenerate sex. This is just one example of the phenomenon. In fact, It feels that many cons that are internet adjacent (anime, comics, streaming, board games, video games, etc.) have just become places for people to practice their barely disguised sexual fetishes. In the case of furrys, this was always the point, but I've been noticing more and more that this is happening to almost every con. I'm not going to pretend that this didn't happen before (I've heard about the nasty Klingon orgies that used to happen in the 80s and 90s) but the fact that it's now so in the open bothers me.

I don't think this is merely a result of the lack of socialization for zoomers during COVID (although It's definitely a large factor) as the process started back with the millennials. I personally think that it's a result of a few factors:

  1. The type of people who go to these types of cons are generally more predisposed to being sexual deviants in the first place (see nasty Klingon orgies from before). There's that meme of people you think have orgies vs people who actually have orgies. The people who you think have orgies are the Chads and Stacies while the people who actually have orgies look more like the It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia bit.

  2. Society is now more lax regarding to weird sex shit in general. It's not really a controversial point to say that the sexual norms have changed even within the last 10 years. Especially nowadays, I notice that everyone online is extremely open about their weird sex shit, and it seems that they're just bringing that same energy to real life.

  3. What seemed extreme before is just the norm now. I still remember when being into feet was some weird sex thing that only degenerates and communists were into, but nowadays, everyone is into some weird shit that wouldn't even have imagined 20 years ago. I'll stop right there.

Regarding anime, what I would suggest is that even if you do let your kids watch anime, absolutely do not ever let them go to conventions, even with supervision, until they're adults. I don't think it's anime itself that's causing the weirdness. Anime is just a medium. Just like every medium, there are differences in quality. I don't think that even the most anti-anime person would be opposed to watching Spirited Away or Ghost in the Shell. It's the community. The community, while ostensibly being about anime, is much more about the community itself, so that actually watching anime or being a fan of anime is less important than being "a part of the anime community." Going back to the Feet Juice example, what exactly is the anime that they're fans of? What show are they showing appreciation for? Do the people that are buying the juice even watch anime? You don't know because anime is not the point.

All I can say is keep that nasty shit away from me.

I don't think that even the most anti-anime person would be opposed to watching Spirited Away or Ghost in the Shell

I know a person who disliked GitS purely because the Major’s clothes were too skimpy…

I mean there is a lot of nudity in that film, only some of it justified by the story.

There's that meme of people you think have orgies vs people who actually have orgies. The people who you think have orgies are the Chads and Stacies while the people who actually have orgies look more like the It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia bit.

It's never who you want to be polyamorous who is polyamorous.

Theory: kinkiness and attractiveness are inversely correlated. Attractive people mostly have sex with each other, and having sex with attractive people is very satisfying, so attractive people tend to be fine with your basic make out/oral sex/vaginal sex, and don't need anything beyond that. Uglier people don't find it very satisfying to have sex with ugly people, and their ugliness makes it harder for them to find sex at all which drives them to online porn, both of which leads them to be kinkier.

I would love to investigate this formally. Ask people about their sexual appetites, then take photos of them and ask strangers to rate their attractiveness on a scale from 1-10.

Might have also meant this meme.

Painfully accurate, except the woman on the right is too slim.

Perhaps this lovely polyamorous and pregnant (at the time) Woman of Size will more align with your mental image. Nothing like a mixed-weight polycule to raise a child.

Oh God, bro do you know the ending?

On the flip side, I show my kids the original Pokemon cartoons. They teach the values of hard work, caring for those under you while still maintaining a strict hierarchy, respect, and other values which are harder to find in modern day TV Programming but are essential for a child. Trainers are in charge, Pokemon have to listen to them, so eat your veggies. Don't try to trouble the parental norm. Fighting authority is not a virtue. Things can be hard, do your best and you'll get better.

Trainers are in charge, Pokemon have to listen to them

Do your children identity more with the mostly non-sapient Pokemon rather than the human trainers?

Younger kids identify with Pokemon more, weirdly enough. The oldest plays a trainer, the younger three like being Pokemon.

But also it's more just the concept of natural hierarchy existing and being good. I find most recent kids shows avoid this topic entirely or portray natural hierarchy as bad.

But also it's more just the concept of natural hierarchy existing and being good. I find most recent kids shows avoid this topic entirely or portray natural hierarchy as bad.

It's an interesting question. On one hand kids really should listen to their parents. On the other hand a pokemon can never become a trainer and I think it's important for kids to realize, at least on some level depending on their age, that they are not going to be kids forever and the role of their parents is to prepare them for shouldering the responsibilities of a full member of society. I am reminded of Johnson's absurd defense of the British class system:

Mr. Dempster having endeavoured to maintain that intrinsick merit ought to make the only distinction amongst mankind. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, mankind have found that this cannot be. How shall we determine the proportion of intrinsick merit? Were that to be the only distinction amongst mankind, we should soon quarrel about the degrees of it. Were all distinctions abolished, the strongest would not long acquiesce, but would endeavour to obtain a superiority by their bodily strength. But, Sir, as subordination is very necessary for society, and contensions for superiority very dangerous, mankind, that is to say, all civilized nations, have settled it upon a plain invariable principle. A man is born to hereditary rank; or his being appointed to certain offices, gives him a certain rank. Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure[1307].'

It goes beyond the Pokemon/trainer dynamic - there are gym leaders and the whole thing leads up to massive arena tournaments with winners. But I see your point.

Whenever I start to worry that I'm not a very successful or well-adjusted person, I just attend an anime screening at my local cinema and I'm like "actually, you know what? I'm fine."

Last night they were showing Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg, which neither I nor my fiancée had seen, but she wanted to go. The movie was incomprehensible nonsense (disappointing as I thoroughly enjoyed both Ghost in the Shell films), but the real validation came from seeing the other people in attendance. The obese; the gender-confused male attending solo, with breasts that I honestly couldn't tell if they were the product of HRT, gynaecomastia, or both; the man wearing makeup and a headscarf like fucking Professor Quirrell; the couple who smelled so bad we moved a few seats further down the aisle; and of course a gender-confused female (I think?) with a cane she obviously didn't need and which she wasn't even pretending to rely on for support.* These people truly are the dregs of society: even the junkies I walked past on my way home seemed to be having more fun. At least none of these nerds literally yelled at the screen, as I had the displeasure of witnessing during a screening of Akira some years back.

I know, I know: "'Get a load of this weeaboo,' says man also attending anime screening". "Local man who posts on Mongolian basket weaving forum every day has the audacity to call others nerds". But believe me when I say that there is no way I could possibly be mistaken for one of these individuals, if for no better reason than because I haven't needed to be reminded to bathe since secondary school. (Seriously, what is it with nerds and smelling bad? Why is it such a universal thing in any country where nerds are to be found? Do they just not notice?)

In late prepubescence and early adolescence I dabbled in anime and manga, watching the aforementioned Ghost in the Shell and Akira and reading their respective source comics. Watching this parade of overweight smelly malcontents, congenitally incapable, to a man, of making eye contact for more than a second at a time – it made me feel enormously grateful that my interest in these things never progressed beyond mere curiosity. Some of the people in attendance even looked like they could have turned out perfectly normally (not to mention more successful and subjectively happier) had they not allowed their interest in nerdy things to become an entire lifestyle, had their parents not indulged their every idiosyncrasy and passing whim, had they been bullied a little more rather than less (s/o to @100ProofTollBooth). There but for the grace of God go I.

*This was the second female person carrying a meticulously decorated cane as a fashion statement I saw that day. Yet another thing I do not understand about the woke: they'll be the first to tell you that a white girl putting her hair in cornrows is cultural appropriation and utterly inexcusable, but trying to pass oneself off as physically disabled is A-OK?

Seriously, what is it with nerds and smelling bad? Why is it such a universal thing in any country where nerds are to be found? Do they just not notice?

Over a long period of time, you get used to your own smell and don't notice it unless it changes. These people's hygiene have been nonexistent for so long, the only recourse is for somebody to tell them they stink. Unfortunately, doing so is considered a rude gesture, so this never happens in polite society.

Unfortunately, doing so is considered a rude gesture, so this never happens in polite society.

Certainly not in the West. I understand that people in Asia have no such compunctions, and will tell you that smell bad to your face. (And that you've gained weight.)

Last night they were showing Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg, which neither I nor my fiancée had seen, but she wanted to go. The movie was incomprehensible nonsense

It's a solid film. Not my favorite or anything, but worth seeing.

the real validation came from seeing the other people in attendance. The obese; the gender-confused male attending solo, with breasts that I honestly couldn't tell if they were the product of HRT, gynaecomastia, or both; the man wearing makeup and a headscarf like fucking Professor Quirrell; the couple who smelled so bad we moved a few seats further down the aisle; and of course a gender-confused female (I think?) with a cane she obviously didn't need and which she wasn't even pretending to rely on for support.* These people truly are the dregs of society

Let's hear a few words of wisdom from the man himself:

224: Ennoblement through degeneration. - History teaches that the branch of a nation that preserves itself best is the one in which most men have, as a consequence of sharing habitual and undiscussable principles, that is to say as a consequence of their common belief, a living sense of community. Here good, sound custom grows strong, here the subordination of the individual is learned and firmness imparted to character as a gift at birth and subsequently augmented. The danger facing these strong communities founded on similarly constituted, firm-charactered individuals is that of the gradually increasing inherited stupidity such as haunts all stability like its shadow. It is the more unfettered, uncertain and morally weaker individuals upon whom spiritual progress depends in such communities: it is the men who attempt new things and, in general, many things. Countless numbers of this kind perish on account of their weakness without producing any very visible effect; but in general, and especially when they leave posterity, they effect a loosening up and from time to time inflict an injury on the stable element of a community. It is precisely at this injured and weakened spot that the whole body is as it were innoculated with something new; its strength must, however, be as a whole sufficient to receive this new thing into its blood and to assimilate it. Degenerate natures are of the highest significance wherever progress is to be effected. [emphasis mine] Every progress of the whole has to be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures preserve the type, the weaker help it to evolve. - Something similar occurs in the case of the individual human being; rarely is a degeneration, a mutilation, even a vice and physical or moral damage in general without an advantage in some other direction. The more sickly man, for example, will if he belongs to a warlike and restless race perhaps have more inducement to stay by himself and thereby acquire more repose and wisdom, the one-eyed will have one stronger eye, the blind will see more deeply within themselves and in any event possess sharper hearing. To this extent the celebrated struggle for existence does not seem to me to be the only theory by which the progress or strengthening of a man or a race can be explained. Two things, rather, must come together: firstly the augmentation of the stabilizing force through the union of minds in belief and communal feeling; then the possibility of the attainment of higher goals through the occurrence of degenerate natures and, as a consequence of them, partial weakenings and injurings of the stabilizing force; it is precisely the weaker nature, as the tenderer and more refined, that makes any progress possible at all.

I know, I know: "'Get a load of this weeaboo,' says man also attending anime screening". "Local man who posts on Mongolian basket weaving forum every day has the audacity to call others nerds".

There's something really funny to me about us mottizens, weirdoes on the internet who argue about weird shit with our resident weirdoes, objecting that anime won't make the kids weird and in fact it is the lamestream that is weird.

Yeah, it's us guys. She doesn't want her kids to be like us.

... it is the lamestream that is weird.

It is not really normal versus weird. normal covers both solid-normal and cozy-weird. If you grow up with something you treat it as normal, as do the people around you, and some of them work for main-stream-media, so you see it on TV too, treated as normal. And some of the stuff that falls into that category really is weird, you just cannot see it.

For example, I was reading an article in The Economist about food distribution in India. Back in the early 1950's there was a famine and hoarding. Disapproving of horading they banned ware-houses and cold-storage to stop it. Not completely, but enough to cause trouble. Obviously that is a bit of a disaster. Agriculture is notorious for having good years and bad years and you need plenty storage to smooth things out and make sure people don't starve.

Here is where it gets weird. You'd think I was going through the archive, reading a story from the late 1950's about the repeal of the anti-storage laws (complete with little box explaining about how such a totally whacked out law got passed in the first place). No, the article was from June 27th 2015 and was lamenting that the law was still in place. So it is not just weird. It is cozy-weird. People are trying to combat the volatility of agricultural production with laws against warehousing and cold-storage and it has become normal, just the way you do it.

Second example: Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome were born to a virgin, Rhea Silvia, who had been forced join a virgin priesthood. Her wicked uncle Amulius had stolen the throne from her father Numitor, and didn't want any grandsons turning up to reclaim their grandfather's throne. So no sex for Rhea Silvia. The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.

I'd always imagined that when Christianity was getting popular in 300 A.D. it was a case of "virgin birth, wow, like man, that is so totally amazing, nothing like that ever happened before. That is sooo cool, count me in, I'm a believer!". Now I've learned a little more history. The Christian Virgin birth is looking like a me-too story. "Our hero-founder was also born of a virgin, so there!" In 300 AD virgin births are cozy-weird not out-there-weird.

Example three: People believe that if a scientific result is statistically significant at the p=0.05 level, then the probability that it is true is 95%. This weird belief is so cozy that some readers will not know what is wrong with it. Which brings up a deep problem: I shouldn't be able to give any examples of cozy-weird at all. I say "X is cozy-weird" and every-one dog piles on top of me insisting that X is normal and every-one agrees that X is normal.

Having renamed weird to be out-there-weird and divided normal into solid-normal and cozy-weird I can now state my thesis succinctly: the lamestream is mostly cozy-weird.

The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.

Do you have a source interpreting the story this way, or attesting to its being interpreted this way in the 300s? I don't get the impression from just a quick look that your account of how the story would have been interpreted in the 300s is correct - for instance, Livy says the following:

But the Fates had, I believe, already decreed the origin of this great city and the foundation of the mightiest empire under heaven. The Vestal was forcibly violated and gave birth to twins. She named Mars as their father, either because she really believed it, or because the fault might appear less heinous if a deity were the cause of it.

This seems quite different from a virgin birth.

But what distinguishes solid-normal from cozy-weird?

Your examples seem to imply that normal is rational in some way (benefiting society, believing facts), but there are society-benefitting behaviors not considered normal, like (successful) Effective Altruism, and opinions most consider normal or weird, like Christianity or Pastafarianism.

My impression is that normal only means something with context. For example, carrying a mobile phone may be considered normal today, because everyone does. But in a different way it's not normal: we're the only animal to carry them, we've only done so for a short amount of our species' existence, and they seem to have negative social effects so we may be better off without them.

A long time ago, I was telling my brother about one of our resident incel posters (I think it was the Hock guy), and he sardonically noted that incel posters must be a real rarity around here. He seemed genuinely surprised when I said that, to my mind, the modal poster here is closer to "married homeowner with multiple children".

I mean, look at you: married with a baby on the way, good job, own a house, physically active. What kind of mother wouldn't want her son to turn out like you? I bet if my mother met you, she'd be thinking "oh, why couldn't FtttG be more like FiveHour?"

Sure, I can put on the dog-and-pony show for mothers everywhere. But I'd have a hard time explaining the private hobby where I argue on the internet with pedofascists and incels and holocaust-deniers.

Hey, Xitter's been around for like, twenty years now.

On the other hand, the early 2010s, when I just entered grad school, seemed to be the exact watershed moment in the US where some part of anime culture went irrevocably mainstream. I remember being taken aback at the undergraduates (including a large well-adjusted Greek Life chad/stacy contingent) constantly spamming JoJo memes in office hours and homework, trying to square it with the previous generation of JoJo memes that were the province of fat 2ch otaku who are paranoid about Korean conspiracies to steal their pure Yamato seed and their fat Western VHS sub otaku admirers.

Whenever I start to worry that I'm not a very successful or well-adjusted person, I just attend an anime screening at my local cinema and I'm like "actually, you know what? I'm fine."

Me attending any major fandom convention.

I was/am a nerd, but then I run into the nerd nerds and I feel the need to shove them into a locker and then go wash my hands afterwards.

Part of me is like "well don't deny a person their escapism" but there's also another thinking "you need to be cut off from the internet for about six months during which you're put through boot camp training designed to get you into decent shape and have a healthy routine in life and THEN you can have some anime, as a treat."

Ultimately it makes me do some self-assessment: "Do I want to walk down a path that could end up being THAT type of person?" And often has me actively deciding to limit my intake of the media in question. Kinda like seeing an alcoholic passed out on a bench, his pants soaked with urine, and deciding "I'll just skip the bar tonight."

It goes towards my other theory that many subcultures (even outside explicit 'nerd' hobbies) end up driving away 'attractive' and 'normal' people because they are usually governed by the most obsessive types, who have the most time on their hands, and often have NOTHING ELSE TO DO but gatekeep and bully and since this is the one tiny bit of power they have, they will drive away any possible competitors.

I was/am a nerd, but then I run into the nerd nerds and I feel the need to shove them into a locker and then go wash my hands afterwards.

I never did understand why people engaged in the American stereotypical nerd culture when I was growing up in Finland in the 80s and 90s. Sure, I also had nerdy interests like programming, reading fantasy books and the occasional RPG session but I never felt like they defined who I was. They were just things I was interested in or liked to do, the same way some other kids liked to play sports without making that their whole identity.

I see "anime culture" as like that cliche nerd culture: A bunch of people who fail to distinguish between their interest and their identity (quite possibly because they don't much have one) and that leads to all sorts of issues.

As far as I can tell, teenage subcultures are about psychological need to fit in. Be a member of a tribe. Nerdy subcultures are so because the nerdy kids and teenagers have some kind of trouble adjusting to the society of fellow non-nerdy teenagers and start building self-image out of imaginary simulacra found in internet.

Titular characters in Rebel Without A Cause would be weeaboos these days.

Nerdy subcultures are so because a small section of the nerdy kids and teenagers have some kind of trouble adjusting to the society of fellow non-nerdy teenagers and start building self-image out of imaginary simulacra found in internet.

(bolded addition mine)

Even with that addition I'm not convinced of that explanation, not least because as far as I can tell, back in my teenager days (ie. the 90s) the only "subcultures" I witnessed were the occasional guys wearing metal band shirts and a bit later some friends of a friend being into hiphop music and clothes. Even for those people it seemed to be limited purely to music and fashion and as far as I could tell, they didn't fraternize among the group any more than random friends did.

It's possible that (unlike here in Finland) in the US such subcultural cliques really were / are common but this would point towards this not being any inherent aspect of being a western teenager and more something learned via local / national cultural examples (possibly imported ones, in the case of anime nerds). Certainly there were a few "castouts" (in the sense that they were weird in various ways and seemed to keep themselves aloof of the rest of the students) but they didn't hang together either and seemed to be content with being weird loners (the very notion of a clique based on being castout / loner would have been absurd).

As Freddie deBoer would say, you aren't the shit you like. It actually explains a lot about modern culture. Sending death threats to a film critic who gives an insufficiently fawning review to the latest Star Wars film is only really explicable if an attack on Star Wars feels like an attack on you, personally. Not that nerds are alone in this regard, as critics of Taylor Swift or BTS can well attest.

"you need to be cut off from the internet for about six months during which you're put through boot camp training designed to get you into decent shape and have a healthy routine in life and THEN you can have some anime, as a treat."

Unironically, I think many ills could be cured with a year on a Wyoming ranch with lots of physical activity, healthy same-sex role models, and no internet.

I keep hearing about how people are totally sure grass-touching can cure many ills, but never the accounts of it actually curing them.

Your mileage may vary on whether I qualify as "cured", but two months ago I discussed how I've been prescribed a laundry list of varying antidepressants and antipsychotics in varying combinations, but didn't find any of them half as effective as simply doing a lot of intense outdoor cardio.

How would you hear such accounts? They certainly wouldn't be posting them on the internet. They'd be too busy living happy, fulfilling lives.

I've heard anecdotes of people who were isolated and socially awkward, they moved (usually by choice) to positions that required them to interact with others, and suddenly they had a large friend group and could socialize. (Also heard the opposite, people moved to a new area and felt like they lost social skills.) I'm sure it would normalize some people.

But others are autistic.

Weight lifting and distance hiking cured me. Now it's the rest of society that's the problem.

Well yeah, presumably good and properly cured people log off.

Throw in some physical combat training and you have my endorsement.

I'm kinda heartened when I see that a lot of nerds are getting into MMA. For many, training jiu jitsu seems to scratch that particular itch for a mental challenge.

Part of me is like "well don't deny a person their escapism" but there's also another thinking "you need to be cut off from the internet for about six months during which you're put through boot camp training designed to get you into decent shape and have a healthy routine in life and THEN you can have some anime, as a treat."

I've previously mentioned a colleague of mine who's extremely nerdy and who refuses to eat proper food. Unsurprisingly, he's thin to the point of emaciation and his teeth are revolting to look at. I often fantasise about locking him in a cell and telling him "you can have brown rice, broccoli and pork chops, or you can starve". We'll see how "insurmountable" his eating disorder dietary preferences really are.

Less facetiously, I genuinely think mandatory military service upon reaching the age of majority would have done wonders for many of these people. It certainly would have done wonders for me.

I often fantasise about locking him in a cell and telling him "you can have brown rice, broccoli and pork chops, or you can starve". We'll see how "insurmountable" his eating disorder dietary preferences really are.

Unfortunately I'm sure ED people would literally starve in that scenario.

I think society should encourage healthy activities, and extend school to include them (longer hours with more (mandatory) social and physical activities). But there are some people who don't fit in normal society, act weird like obsess over anime, and some of them have niche talents that lead to great advancements.

I don't think he literally has an eating disorder. I just think his parents indulged him as a child and refused to make him eat proper food, and he never learned on his own.

ARFID, where severely autistic children will only eat food of a particular colour and so on, is a real thing. This dude is just a manchild who wants his chicky nug-nugs. It's contemptible, and borders on outright neglect when he wants his children to follow the same diet he does.

It goes towards my other theory that many subcultures (even outside explicit 'nerd' hobbies) end up driving away 'attractive' and 'normal' people because they are usually governed by the most obsessive types, who have the most time on their hands, and often have NOTHING ELSE TO DO but gatekeep and bully and since this is the one tiny bit of power they have, they will drive away any possible competitors.

I increasingly think "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" is one of the most perceptive things Eliezer ever put his name to. Of course there must be people with nerdy interests who still maintain normal standards of grooming and bodily hygiene, but once the people who don't reach a critical mass within a club/DnD group/whatever, then sooner or later the people who do will start to drift away, either from finding the smelly dudes personally repulsive or simply not wanting to be seen with them. The process is recursive and accelerative, as with every non-smelly dude who leaves, the smelliness of the average member increases, making the group increasingly unattractive to prospective members: you might join a club with ten clean-cut guys and one smelly one, but the only people who'll join a club in which the smelly outnumber the non-smelly are – you guessed it! – smelly people. Before long, the only people left in this group are smelly unemployable losers who've never felt a woman's touch, while the high-functioning nerds have long since departed for greener pastures. See also Scott's Living by the Sword and Neutral vs. Conservative, which describe a similar dynamic. Any community which conspicuously advertises that its members aren't expected to adhere to the standards of behaviour expected of society in general will inevitably find itself overrun and colonised by some of the most dysfunctional people society has to offer.

Weirdly enough, this seems like a great argument in favour of broken windows policing. You might think that it isn't fair to throw someone in jail over a relatively minor crime, and if you're doing that across the board, maybe it's better to simply not bothering enforcing these "minor" laws. But every time you fail to enforce a "minor" law, you're making the environment in question less attractive to the law-abiding citizens, who will eventually get fed up and leave. And once word gets round that $Jurisdiction isn't seriously enforcing minor laws, inevitably it'll start to attract people who habitually violate said laws: and people who habitually violate minor laws tend also to violate major ones, on a long enough timescale.

Take it one step further, and it's a great argument against immigration (or granting asylum) from dysfunctional countries.

I increasingly think "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" is one of the most perceptive things Eliezer ever put his name to.

The trouble is, the one study it was based on was fraudulent. https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/cognitive-bias/#kelly-2025-section

In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that: the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had “precipitated” the climactic events of the study.

Yeah, I've been meaning to take on the (LLM-assisted) project of reviewing every citation in The Sequences to see which ones are bunk. The Sequences were written before the replication crisis (was named/noted) and so much of EW's work is based on cognitive and other social science. I'm starting to suspect that a majority of the science behind his arguments is just BS.

I'm tempted to say "But the core of what he wrote is still so true and valuable!" It sounds like special pleading. If it works just as well with all the science, then why was all the science there in the first place?

It's a modus ponens/modus tollens thing. In the conclusion to the book Opening Skinner's Box, which I mentioned downthread, the author observes that, a hundred years in, psychologists still struggle to define what psychology is exactly, and if it's even meaningfully distinct from philosophy in any way. Sometimes when you ask psychologists to name discoveries their field has given us, they'll list off a handful that will sound quite impressive and which haven't fallen afoul of the replication crisis. But you quickly realise that when they say "we discovered X", they really mean "we gave a fancy scientific-sounding name to an observation about human nature which long predates our field". People had been talking about the concept of confirmation bias millennia before some academic slapped that label on it (Ctrl-F "Thucydides"). They didn't "discover" shit. To paraphrase Franklin, the findings of psychology are both true and original to it – but the parts that are true are not original to it, and the parts that are original to it are not true.

Eliezer wanted STEMlords to get onboard with his project, so he had to present the Sequences like they were a work of science, with lots of citations and superscript numbers and so on. But really, they're philosophy, and philosophers by their very nature does not demean themselves by justifying their opinions with sources and citations, the way that commoners have to. It would be cool to see a new edition of the Sequences, but purged of any pretension of being anything other than philosophy.

I was a psych major (well, double-major, I also did pre-law) and I ultimately think I want a refund on the psych part.

Psych really does have an identity crisis insofar as it tries to present as this grand theory of how the structure of the human brain maps to all the observed behaviors from the individual level all the way up to the, arguably, nation-state level, and thus someone who has mastered the science of psychology should be pretty good at predicting human behavior (not perfect!) in the same way someone who has mastered meteorology should be pretty good at predicting the weather.

But there's gaping holes in said theory at the very core, and it gets rattier and more tattered as the scale increases. "Social Psychology" regarding groups of people is like 90% woo.

Some areas like developmental psych (which has done a pretty good job at categorizing human development stages) and cognitive psych (which actually does succeed at mapping the human brain to human behaviors) are actually useful at understanding the world, so I argue work as 'sciences.'

And then you can plug in some neuroscience and it FEELS like you're gaining a deep understanding of how human decisionmaking and actions work. But what can you DO with that purported understanding?

The big condemnation of the field, leaving aside the replication crisis, is the failure to show results from applied clinical psychology. Most forms of therapy and 'mental illness' treatment just don't really work, at least not at effecting permanent 'fixes.' Scott used to talk about this quite a bit. Psychiatrists/therapists might be able to help a patient address one area of their dysfunction for a short period of time. True 'healing' is almost nonexistent.

If the application of your science to real life doesn't produce tangible results, its a sign that its been built on foundations of questionable value.

One exception: Exposure therapy. Despite being counterintutive, it works! If someone is afraid of a thing, and the thing isn't really all that scary/dangerous, then 'forcing' them to be in the presence of that thing, repeatedly and at increasingly high intensity, they will acclimate to become less afraid of it, which is exhibited as a tangible change in behavior.

Operant conditioning also works, although perhaps less effectively in humans than you'd expect. Its good to have some study of the unsurprising fact that "humans respond to incentives!"

But you have to be very exacting and apply some serious skepticism to pull out the useful parts of psych from the whole edifice, which is why the field as a whole is rotten. It hasn't reckoned with its own shortcomings and expelled the failed ideas.

And, of course, it likes to cover up one of its most patently useful and robust findings of the field: IQ testing.

You wanna know what happens to psychology discoveries that actually work at changing behavior? They become marketing.

Ironically, while we were unable to replicate the result of people persisting their beliefs when they encounter crushing counterevidence among the classically religious, we may succeed in doing so among Rationalists.

Shit. I guess I got Gladwell'd.

When I was a child I read a book called Opening Skinner's Box about the most important experiments in the history of psychology. Now I'm wondering if any of them haven't been exposed as fraudulent or survived the replication crisis.

Thankfully one of my favorite experiments of all time has withstood the test of time.

The Asch Conformity Experiment.

And that one actually fits here too. If the social norms of the group don't nudge people to 'conform' with healthy hygiene and cleanliness, then you start letting those norms be defined by the worst offenders.

Milgram held up reasonably well too, but a lot of people mistakenly believe that it didn’t because it pattern matches well to a lot of studies that didn't, and also they're misremembering whining about how it was unethically emotionally disturbing for the subjects.

I'm pretty sure Milgram didn't hold up at all. Loads of people said afterwards that it was really fake, and there's also just the glaring confound that nobody actually expects a university psych department to be torturing people to death so they don't take the scenario seriously.

(Now you might say that guilty participants would say this, and that's not provably wrong. It's one reason why deception in experiments just isn't a good idea. I've volunteered myself for one of those economic fairness experiments and I remember getting halfway through before saying to the poor student, "It's just a computer on the other side, isn't it?")

...I'm questioning my own memory, but my recollection is that Scott wrote extensively on the cultural implications of the Robber's cave experiment and what it tells us about tribalism in his classic posting era, and then a couple years later someone pointed out that Robber's Cave was likewise faked.

At some point, there actually has to be a feedback mechanism between pernicious behavior and resource and status distribution.

At some point, there actually has to be a feedback mechanism between pernicious behavior and resource and status distribution.

AGREED.

Ultimately it makes me do some self-assessment: "Do I want to walk down a path that could end up being THAT type of person?" And often has me actively deciding to limit my intake of the media in question. Kinda like seeing an alcoholic passed out on a bench, his pants soaked with urine, and deciding "I'll just skip the bar tonight."

Back when I was going to anime conventions in my 20's, a friend of mine was super into Anime more than all the rest of us. Worked his ass off bussing tables all summer to save up as much money as he could to buy shit at that years Otakon we were all planning on going to. He gets there, sees some morbidly obese 40 year old anime fan, nobody to talk to, suspenders covered in pins of cute anime girls, and he decides "You know what... maybe I should take up drinking instead".

Man, I think that was the same year most of decided we needed to tone down our anime enthusiasm. I recall sitting in one panel for a publisher that happened after ADV's panel. ADV had announced licenses for nearly everything, then the room changed hands. People circulated. Some people stayed. So next panel starts, might have been Media Vision or whatever. So people are asking, as they do "Have you licensed X anime yet?" And some guy in the front seat who'd spend the last two hours rocking back and forth aggressively in his chair just kept interrupting the panel shouting "ADV ALREADY HAS IT! ADV ALREADY HAS IT!"

I just... like going through some of the twitter threads links in the OP, I hear it. Don't deprive your child of their special obsession. Let them spend their years where their time is cheap going deep on something that strikes their fancy. I'd be a much worse person if my parents cracked down on my love of computers as a kid. Certainly wouldn't be bringing home mid 6 figures like I am now.

But, all the same, maybe try to make sure your kid's special obsession isn't toaster fucking. Even in the unlikely event fucking toasters somehow brings in 7 figures for the top toaster fucker.

Ultimately I think it comes down to being a little selective in your consumption. I don't eschew anime in general, but I've learned what I like and what I do not. Unfortunately the larger anime culture has shifted more towards the stuff I'm ambivalent to negative about. Of course I have my preferences for classics like Cowboy Bebop and GiTS, and the most recent series I really got a kick out of was Vinland Saga. I would love another season or two of Black Lagoon but that seems vanishing unlikely now.

Turns out I enjoy animes that DON'T lean into the most notorious anime tropes. I don't need some overpowered protagonist, tons of fanservice, ridiculously cute side characters, or a harem romance subplot to get into it. The series' I mentioned above also really scratch an itch for stuff you cannot find in Western Animation.

So by sticking with the stuff I actually like, I don't get bogged down in the most obsessive, anti-social, degenerate elements of the culture.

If you find yourself suffering though a series you despise just so you can be up to date on the current trends, or you're debating the finer points of various waifus with an obese NEET then something has probably gone wrong. I enjoyed the hell out of One Punch Man Season 1, found Season 2 lacklustre but good, and then I heard how horrendous Season 3 was so... I just didn't watch it. I don't need to waste time on it to stay informed on debates and memes and drama, because this is not what I care most about in life.

Its the element of self-control, discipline, and, call it 'maturity' that seems to be lacking for many of these folks. In many (most?) cases its probably down to autism or something. But parents aren't WRONG to notice when so many of the 'weird' kids are into anime and this tends to put anime nerds in social circles that will potentially stunt them or otherwise keep them from acquiring the useful discipline and self-control they'll need to succeed in life.

As a counter example: I saw the chainsaw man movie when it came out with a weeb friend. People were maybe a little more overweight than average. Other than cosplayers it was pretty normal. Most people were clearly there with their friends. My friend made a comment that the audience was "gentrifying".

I attended an anime movie premiere once. It's a mistake I won't make again.

My wife and I make it a point to try and go to movies near the end of their theater run, especially for anime movies. We had the theater all to ourselves for the latest Demon Slayer movie since we saw it in the last week of its run (though we had to drive to a theater almost an hour away to see it since the theater closest to us had stopped showing it a week early).

The one anime film I've seen in theaters (it was Chainsaw Man Reze Arc), there were people shouting at the screen on multiple occasions. I relate to your experience. However bad Hollywood is, these things aren't accepted in showings of western movies.

I thought that making noise in movie theatres is an American thing. I noticed it with a healthy amount of dismay the one time I watched a movie in a US cinema (the first Star Wars sequel, at the SO's urging; some very central location in Boston next to a park, I could probably pinpoint the exact cinema if necessary), and was told that this is normal.

Kinda depends on the movie in my experience. Most movies I've been to, people were quiet. When I saw the first Star Wars sequel people kept applauding at all the nostalgia callbacks and it got super annoying. Then at the extreme end you have stuff like Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is notorious for being an audience participation event. But I would say the vast majority of the time, when I go to see a movie people are quiet except for laughter at any jokes.

When I saw the first Star Wars sequel people kept applauding at all the nostalgia callbacks and it got super annoying.

"DUDE, PRIDE ROCK!"

You've never been to a theater with a predominantly black clientele, then. In 1990, I made the mistake of watching Necessary Roughness at the Union Station theater in DC. During the climactic scene, the whole audience SCREAMED so loud, my ears genuinely hurt and I was afraid my hearing might be damaged forever.

I've heard of this stereotype before. Part of me really wants to go to a cinema in Baltimore or Detroit just to see it firsthand.

However bad Hollywood is, these things aren't accepted in showings of western movies.

This is just not true. My wife and I stopped going to theaters years ago due to people's behavior. Simple shouting at the screen is nothing compared to the shenanigans of some screenings we went to--eg, people were throwing toy snakes around the theater when Snakes on a Plane came out.

Screenings of The Room tend to have an audience participation element, with people yelling "because you're a woman!" and throwing plastic spoons at the screen. I found it good clean fun, although I've heard that there are some purists who think that these antics detract from the so-bad-it's-good experience of the film. I wouldn't recommend one of these screenings for someone watching the film for the first time.

You're lucky you missed the "bring a live chicken to the theater for when Jack Black says 'chicken jockey' in the Minecraft movie" trend

I feel bad for those theater employees. They do NOT get paid enough to deal with literal manchildren.

There but for the grace of God go I.

A statement I find myself saying far too often. I'm thankful I've never felt the slightest interest to watch anime or read manga or go anywhere near that subculture.

I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some anime is well worth checking out. Perfect Blue is one of the most disturbing psychological horror films I've ever seen, and the direct inspiration for Black Swan with Natalie Portman (to the point where it might as well be called a live-action remake). Tokyo Godfathers by the same director is, by contrast, sweet, funny and touching, and my current favourite Christmas film. Akira is a masterpiece of action cinema and dystopian sci-fi, and casts a long shadow in both genres. Without Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix wouldn't exist: in their pitch to producer Joel Silver, the directors literally showed him the film and said they wanted to do something similar but in live-action. Several Miyazaki films are charming light entertainment, suitable for children but that their parents would enjoy just as much: the phrase "fun for the whole family" gets bandied about a lot, but that's a perfectly accurate description of My Neighbour Totoro, even more so than just about any Pixar film. Your Name is a funny and moving slice of emo teen drama, as is The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes.

Aside from the source material for Akira and GitS, I never really read much manga: I recall the former being pretty good, but thought the latter's film adaptations were superior to the source material. The only anime video game I've ever played was Valkyria Chronicles, which was fun, gorgeous to look at and told an engaging story, but inferior to the XCOM reboot as far as turn-based tactics games go.

But yeah. There's always the worry that you're going to get too deep into it. It's probably safe to fuck one or two toasters a year, but any more than that I can't recommend.

A cane for the blind, or just a cane? The latter have been fashion accessories for centuries, albeit now out-of-date.

A cane as a support for someone suffering from mobility problems. The first woman I saw carrying one yesterday was carrying one that was unambiguously a piece of medical equipment (similar to a crutch), probably made from aluminium, albeit decorated with Hello Kitty stickers.

I'm aware that canes have been fashion accessories for a long time, but most young women I see carrying them claim to need them for medical reasons and yet clearly do not. And it surely cannot be a coincidence that all such women meeting this description are nerdy girls who know what their preferred pronouns are and often have their hair dyed an unnatural shade. Apparently this is a common occurrence in the Anglosphere (Ctrl-F "canes").

Interesting, never heard of it before. I did nearly buy the other kind of cane but decided even I could only go so pretentious without consequences.

When I see an otherwise casually dressed person carrying a cane, it triggers my cringe alert in the same way as seeing someone wearing a fedora with jeans and a hoodie. Go the whole hog (three-piece suit, greatcoat, top hat) or don't go at all.

Man, if I knew a place to find a decent greatcoat for a reasonable price, I absolutely would. (Hats are no concern -- I used to drink near a very good hat factory).

This one looks decent. Not as cheap as milsurp, but I guess the US has gotten rid of its army overcoats a long time ago.

You still see that at army surplus places quite a bit...

Go the whole hog

There’s a reason I thought the addition of a cane might bump me up from pretentious and funny to pretentious and a twat. I had a much more fun wardrobe in those days but enough social nous to recognise that half a hog is a welcome addition to barbecues everywhere, but a great big squealing hog is a hunting accident waiting to happen.

At least none of these nerds literally yelled at the screen, as I had the displeasure of witnessing during a screening of Akira some years back.

TETSUUUOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! KANEDAAAAAAAA!!!!!

Hopefully I retriggered some of your PTSD there.

Edit: On a more serious note, I can't help but agree with your point. I spend way too much time on /pol/ and have no problem dropping the normie killing word that starts with an N, but I was playing Meccha Chameleon with my wife and some friends the other day on a public server and there was some rando who just kept saying it over and over nonstop in voice chat and not even in a remotely funny way. It's like a certain subset of people find something edgy/cool but don't understand the core of what makes it cool and imitate it in a way that just doesn't make sense.

Yes, anime villain #345647 with long hair, a trench coat, and a big sword is cool. No, you imitating it with your obese body and your dandruff and grease and your katana from the mall ninja shop isn't, and I really don't understand how you can't see that.

I was playing Meccha Chameleon with my wife and some friends the other day on a public server and there was some rando who just kept saying it over and over nonstop in voice chat and not even in a remotely funny way.

It's good to see that the youth are carrying on the old traditions from Counter-Strike and Halo.

shudders Someone literally walked over to them and told them to shut the fuck up.

And that is why I'm not one of those people.

I'm sure there are plenty of fakers but I always have to caution against the "I don't see them using it right now so they must not need it" argument. There are plenty of potential issues that can allow for seemingly normal behavior. My aunt is in her 80s and needs a cane, and yet most of the time you were to watch her she isn't really using it, because she's not going a distance or up a hill or whatever else where pain and balancing becomes a meaningful issue. She can walk perfectly fine most of the time. Most of the time. Still needs a cane for the moments where she can't or it's acting up. Likewise you'll see videos online of people in wheelchairs who stand up or even walk for a distance. Not everyone who benefits from a wheelchair is completely crippled below the belt, some have pain issues/heart issues/muscular conditions/problems balancing without something to hold/etc.

That doesn't mean there isn't fakers, just "I don't see an issue" shouldn't be taken as immediate proof of fakery.

I was once given a pair of crutches by a doctor for a stress fracture and told to minimize weight on one leg for a couple weeks. The pain was never that bad, but it was persistent, and the crutches actually did help it heal. I was perfectly capable of walking almost normally without them, and it felt weird (and probably looked weird) to just set them down and walk from time to time when I needed two hands.

Crutches also suck to use and I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemies.

Unfortunately, you've just outed yourself as otaku-who-thinks-he's-better-than-other-otaku, the missing archetype in your observations. As a fellow patrician in this category, you have my sympathies. I refer you to Roger Ebert's observation on fandom as an explainer for the poor hygiene: knowledge on obscure anime is used in replacement of social normality.

I'm well-acquainted with said archetype:

I know, I know: "'Get a load of this weeaboo,' says man also attending anime screening". Local man who posts on Mongolian basket weaving forum every day has the audacity to call others nerds.

But I sincerely don't think I'm an example of it. But then, I suppose no one ever does.

It's a consequence of living in a liberal, progressive society. There is an overwhelming pressure to not judge people for their individual choices and it is honestly suffocating. It is a very low bar that they are refusing or unable to meet. Or, in other words, to classify you as 'think you are better' is politeness. You are better, straight up, then people who cannot shower or who dress like freaks or who pretend disabilities they do not possess.

Relevant: The Rush from Judgment

“It’s over. C.S. Lewis has already depicted you as the wojak, and me as the Chad.”

Alternately: Twitter delenda est. Seriously, I think this whole “storm” can be explained by an extremely online generation which is starting to actually raise kids. They’re getting parenting advice filtered through the attention economy. This was probably true for, like, parenting magazines. But anons randos strangers on Twitter have different incentives than magazine contributors.

Giving advice to parents about letting their children be weird falls under what Scott said about advice: some people need the advice more, some people need it less, and it's really hard to aim the advice at only the former group.

I think the problem is that you're going to try to aim normal, and probably be a few degrees off and ostracize your kid in other ways.

If your kid goes to a public school, their peers are going to be able to tell that their media diet has been restricted in some way. I knew kids who were Jehovah's Witnesses, and even though I was casual acquaintances with them, all the restrictions their parents made them live under (no Pokemon, no holidays, etc.) made them stand out like a sore thumb, and made it hard to form the easy, breezy friendships typical of K-12 education.

My parents weren't too strict, but I wasn't allowed to watch "violent" media growing up, as decided by my dad, so I never got into the Lord of the Rings movies in elementary school like all of my other friends (though I did read the book around that time), and I still feel as an adult that I was denied something I can never really get back as a result. Of course I've been able to watch the movies since leaving my parents' house, but I can never have a nostalgic connection to them, and I'll never be as into them as some of my same age peers are.

I also think a lot of what made people "weird" was just autism or ADHD, and trying to guide your child into normie interests won't change whether they have those conditions or not. If your child doesn't become "that kid" obsessed with anime and manga, they're just going to be the kid who's way too into some other random thing you happened to let them interact with in their youth like every other ADHD/autism child. And things that are "okay" to be casually into like Greek mythology or Arthurian legends or even certain video games, are still really weird if you're obsessive over them around your peers.

I knew kids who were Jehovah's Witnesses, and even though I was casual acquaintances with them, all the restrictions their parents made them live under (no Pokemon, no holidays, etc.) made them stand out like a sore thumb, and made it hard to form the easy, breezy friendships typical of K-12 education.

As an opposite experience, I also had a guy who was a JW in my class in junior high in the 90s. Apart from refusing to eat Blodplättar (which TBF weren't that popular with other people either), separate religious education and allegedly preparing to do the door-to-door thing Jehovah's Witnesses do, he seemed like a regular guy. Knew all the typical pop culture stuff, wore Helloween band shirts, had normal sounding plans for future. He even wanted me to print him a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook I had on my computer.

I knew kids who were Jehovah's Witnesses, and even though I was casual acquaintances with them, all the restrictions their parents made them live under (no Pokemon, no holidays, etc.) made them stand out like a sore thumb, and made it hard to form the easy, breezy friendships typical of K-12 education.

Having also gone to school with JWs and now working with a few as a middle-aged person, it's the "no holidays" thing that kills casual socializing more than the media restrictions. It doesn't matter if the only media they consume is reading the Bible each night because there will never be a discussion about it because they never attend any kind of social occasion if there is the slightest whiff it could possibly be associated with a holiday (religious or secular).

What is normal in today's world?

That women looks like she's wearing makeup and hair dye, is that normal? Are celebrities who get lip filler surgery or anorexia normal? Is reality TV normal? Is obesity normal? Sometimes I look at my weird interests, then I look at modern trends and realize I'm not so weird after all. I think Akira and Serial Experiments Lain are far, far less cringe than Twilight or Cops.

Maybe trad culture like the Amish is "normal" in that, out of all ways to live we've tried, it's maximizes some "ideal normal" metric like median person's happiness divided by resource usage. Unfortunately it's outcompeted, and even trad influencers tend to not practice what they preach, and/or preach "norms" that never existed.

Yes on all points, but Cops is great and it is a travesty they took it off air. There's so many great situations that keep coming up: prostitute turns out to be a guy, guy with no shirt on is drunk or high and thinks he can fight the cops, any time they get out the police dogs, etc, etc, I could go on. Did you know that a German shepherd can outswim an adult man, grab ahold of his leg and drag him back to shore where the cops are waiting for him? I do, and I've seen it on Cops.

Our culture is poorer for losing Cops.

My brother, there are youtube channels that do this now. Some are just raw footage, some are trashy and will have really unpleasant stuff like seeing a recently deceased's family being informed of the death of their loved ones. My favorite is Midwest Safety; straddles the line nicely between putting enough contextual information and keeping things relatively classy for the genre.

Lost 3 hours of my life to this yesterday. I think the pattern that is emerging for me is that many peoples brain breaks when they are arrested (especially women). They just refuse to believe this could be happening to them in this moment. These are people who have been (we find at the end) arrested multiple times before! Yet the hysteria and confusion are genuine (attempts to fake a medical emergency less so).

I think Akira and Serial Experiments Lain are far, far less cringe than Twilight or Cops.

I'd like to slightly hijack this thread.

What is going on with Attack on Titan? It was basically everywhere for a while so I decided to read the plot summary. I haven't watched a single second of the actual show and I haven't read the manga.

Eren Yeager is a boy who lives in the town of Shiganshina, located on the outermost of three circular walls which protect their inhabitants from Titans. In the year 845, the first wall, Wall Maria, is breached by two new types of Titans, the Colossal Titan and the Armored Titan. During the incident, Eren's mother is eaten by a grinning Titan while Eren escapes. He swears revenge on all Titans and enlists in the military along with his childhood friends Mikasa Ackerman and Armin Arlert.

Five years after Shiganshina's fall, the Colossal Titan attacks the city of Trost, located in the second innermost wall, Wall Rose. Eren helps to successfully defend the city after he discovers a mysterious ability to turn himself into a sentient Attack Titan [??]. Additionally, he regains memories of his father Grisha Yeager giving him this ability shortly after the fall of Wall Maria, and telling him that the truth about their world can be found in their basement in Shiganshina.

[...]

Shortly thereafter, Pure Titans mysteriously appear within Wall Rose with no evidence of how they got in, accompanied by the sentient Beast Titan. Ymir, one of the new Survey Corps graduates, reveals that she can transform into the sentient Jaw Titan [???], while Ymir's close friend Krista Lenz reveals herself as Historia Reiss, a member of the royal family [?]. Two other members of the Survey Corps, Reiner Braun and Bertholt Hoover, reveal themselves as the Armored and Colossal Titan respectively [???]. They attempt to kidnap Eren and Ymir, but fail. In the ensuing battle, Eren discovers another power within himself called "the Coordinate", that allows him to control other Titans, which he uses to kill the grinning Titan and send a horde of Pure Titans to attack Reiner and Bertholt. [????]

Isn't this... Kind of retarded? Isn't anyone here a normal human? It just seems like endless rule of cool coincidences like you might hear on a playground. "Dude, what if Ymir was also a titan?" "Yeah dude, like a Jaw Titan!" "And then Reiner and Bertholt are also titans!" "Hell yeah! But they're bad titans!" "And then they try to kidnap Eren and Ymir!"

This continues for 40 volumes. I haven't checked the anime but I presume it's basically the same. Who reads this stuff?

Attack on Titan got popular for two big reasons:

  1. Strikingly good art, in both the manga and the anime versions. Picture a zoomed-out rendering of the literally gigantic Titans towering over a (detailed!) cityscape, followed by kinetic action scenes where humans fight the Titans by using grappling hooks to zip from rooftop to rooftop, dodging attacks like a commando team of Spider-Man clones fighting a giant robot. If Marvel actually made that as a movie scene, would it be dumb? Yes. Would it possibly be awesome? Also yes, especially if it came out when you weren't already jaded by similar fight scenes from other movies.
  2. A brutal, dystopian world where named characters frequently die. Unlike the Marvel version where heroes get punched into a wall and just pick themselves back up, in Attack on Titan, people die, often gruesomely; the Titans swat humans like flies and eat them like grapes. In a famous scene, human forces launch a large and utterly doomed cavalry charge across an open field, because mass suicide is the only diversion tactic available to let someone else fight effectively. The series includes a number of mass graves and Pyrrhic victories.

Once it was popular, it hit the problems intrinsic in a long-running series that has both a high death count and a horrifying, faceless threat: If you keep killing off named characters, you run out of characters important to the plot. If the threat is a mindless horror that refuses to negotiate, you can't have a good villain monologue. On top of that, you have to escalate somehow, i.e. make a Titan that's even worse than the ones that came before. Say, maybe it's a super-special Titan that could ruin everything, but this one is also a guy who used to be Eren's friend - treachery! Unless Eren can talk him out of it...? Now you have a villain monologue, you're getting as much mileage as possible out of a newly-important character, and the situation for Our Hero is both worse than, and interestingly different from, the last 13 times he fought a big monster in this week's episode of Big Monster Fighting Team.

So it eventually got bogged down in this kind of nonsense, obviously because the author was a victim of his own success and didn't expect to still be writing the thing years later (IIRC, he's admitted as much). The Wikipedia summary cuts out the parts that made it successful in the first place, so if you just look at the summary of each character's biggest plot beat, it's a mystery why anyone would have ever liked it.

I'd say 'endless rule of cool' ramping like that can be rather entertaining, at least while you're into it, before falling off the train at some point when you decide you're bored or it's not leading anywhere.

It can’t be worse than the median soap opera.

Sure. But you rarely see people claim that the median soap opera is a tremendous artistic coup.

I think Akira and Serial Experiments Lain are far, far less cringe than Twilight or Cops.

In Twilight's defense, its target demographic is tween and teenage girls, unlike Akira which is meant for adults. I don't think it's really a like for like comparison. Certain media might strike an adult as cringe but be exactly what the target demographic needs at that point in their lives. It would be easy for me to find an anime meant for children (e.g. Cardcaptor Sakura) and point out that it's silly in comparison to, say, The Godfather, but that would hardly be fair.

I've never seen Cops, but isn't it just bodycam footage of criminal interactions? What's cringe about that?

I get the impression that people who watch "reality TV" shows like Cops do to see idiots (people who get arrested), to laugh at them and feel better about themselves. I get why someone would want to see a couple real arrests, but why else would anyone watch enough that there are 37 seasons? And my understanding is they're more or less staged, even if it's just only showing the "interesting" arrests, it creates an expectation or "norm" that people being arrested are crazy.

Cops is not staged. There's enough drunk and high people acting poorly to 'candid camera' make 37 solid seasons.

‘People’ don’t watch 37 seasons of cops. People watch cops when they’re bored, they don’t follow the franchise.

People watched Cops and now watch body cam footage online because it's one of the few ways we have left to sneer at lower class people.

it creates an expectation or "norm" that people being arrested are crazy.

Do you think most people getting arrested aren't crazy?

As far as I know, most people arrested aren't (much) crazier than everyone else. Sure, they're more impulsive and don't have the best life skills on average but that's a far cry from most having schizophrenia or similar mental condition.

They're also disproportionately likely to be drunk and/or high, which induces behaviour similar to what one would expect from a crazy person.

True. Still, I'm sure it creates an expectation they're crazier than reality, because I doubt they show boring arrests anywhere near proportional to wild ones.

Interestingly, I've heard the opposite claim: that the increased use of bodycams by police officers has backfired horribly for the BLM crowd, as the footage produced demonstrates that underclass black Americans are, if anything, even more irrational, unreasonable and short-tempered than the race realists claimed – really, Cops was underselling the scale of the problem. The claim that all disparities in offending rates (and types of offense) can be explained by socioeconomic factors alone grows more untenable with every passing day.

The creator of Cops is on record that they intentionally selected footage with an eye to avoid aggravating racial prejudice against blacks.

From my fond memories of Cops: "white guy with no shirt on" is a reoccurring character. Usually in a trailer park, sometimes a crappy apartment. He never makes it to the end free of cuffs.

I remember seeing one of Michael Moore's (ugh) films as a child, in which he directly accused the creator of fomenting prejudice against blacks by overrepresenting them in his show, and that he ought to have included more footage of white-collar criminals of European descent getting arrested, to even things out. At the time, I accepted this claim at face value. It never seems to have occurred to Moore that the reason blacks are overrepresented in Cops might be because they're overrepresented among criminals.

The creator defended himself by saying that, when white-collar criminals get arrested, they almost invariably come quietly. While that must come as a relief for the arresting officers, it hardly makes for good television.

I think Akira and Serial Experiments Lain are far, far less cringe than Twilight or Cops.

Yeah, but those series were from back when the line between Anime and fetish porn still existed.

Fetish content is so central to modern anime, and so normal and ubiquitous to the gooners that watch it, that they barely even realize how bad it is. I think the last series I made an honest attempt at following, which seemed popular and people said was good, was Goblin Slayer. It was fine, I enjoyed it, the monthly chapters were fun. I never watched the anime, but the manga was fun. It's central bit of world building is that goblins are rape monsters then endlessly impregnate the women they capture. And naturally this is explored ad nauseam and in great detail by fans drawing doujins for it. It feels like every anime I've watched from the last 10 years (which has been fewer and fewer) is just a prompt for fetish artist to have a field day. If the original artist doesn't beat them to it.

I fucking love old school anime. I managed to successfully drag my poor wife through Berserk, Last Exile, Akira and a handful of others. But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there. The sexposition in Game of Thrones was gratuitous (and kind of fun sometimes), but at least they were adults. Also you kind of knew what you were getting into with an HBO show at the time.

It actually reminds me of how increasingly raunchy going to Otakon in Baltimore was near the turn of the century. I think the first year I went was 2000 ish, and it was fine. A year or two later, you saw some girls with "Free Hugs" signs. A few years later it was 14 year olds in thongs, loudly shouting "Don't tell my parents I'm here!" with signs that read "Slap my ass, don't be shy".

That was the last year I went. I was definitely aging out of the cohort that can be around that without ending up on a government list. And I was still in my early twenties!

Evangelion is older than SE Lain by several years. I would not recommend Goblin Slayer to anyone not immersed in genre conventions; even ignoring the edgy premise, the whole thing is just deliberately made of a specific set of tropes (the Japanese riff on DnD high fantasy, codified perhaps by Record of RhodosLodoss War back in 198X and then iteratively reinforced over the decades) to the point the characters don't even have names but are only known by the archetypes they represent.

There are decent respectable normie-compatible anime series coming out with fair regularity even now. Sousou no Frieren should resonate with everyone in the melancholic set that was watching YKK back when I was an undergraduate. Spy x Family is probably the best pro-natalist comedy fluff since Yotsuba&.

Evangelion is about a cast of weirdos undergoing their own personal mental breakdowns. You know, on account of the impending apocalypse. Uncomfortable sexual tension is one of many, many ways it turns up the pressure. That has artistic value!

Doubly so if you’re young enough that all the show’s uncritical gooner bait doesn’t trigger the same “ick.” But that window is limited, and at some point it gets awfully hard to recommend rather than just defend. So it goes.

I agree with some of the others that you’re seeing a wider distribution. Actually, I suspect Goblin Slayer came at a bit of a low point; the fantasy LN market was pretty saturated by 2016. Whenever you get a glut of genre-chasers, some of them compete on edginess.

Point is, lots of modern anime avoids the worst excesses.

Go Nagai published the first ecchi manga in 1968 (set in a high school, because Japan). Miyazaki is a lolicon who once discussed Nausicca's breasts in an interview. Rumiko Takahashi is a total pervert who likes to look at the "naughty bits" of nude sculptures and "feels like a teenager" when she draws. I don't even know where to start with Takeuchi, or Ikuhara for that matter. Just explaining CLAMP's fetishes would get me to the word limit. YAS likes his girls (and boys too?) in tight white leggings. Tomino is typically trolling in interviews, but the "volume" quote nonetheless lives in infamy.

Since anime and manga creators have always been like this and have produced great works of art anyway, I think what you are seeing is the lower end of the over-saturated, increasingly volume-based market. There are more anime viewers than ever, so there are more anime than ever, so there are more explicitly fetishistic or sexual anime than ever. And there are a lot more fans who only watch those kinds of shows. (Only watches TikTok clips, possibly one or two well-known modern battle shonen, is even more common).

Some manga that aren't fetish porn that I recognize from the same year as Goblin Slayer (2016): the second 3x3 Eyes sequel (fantasy), ACCA 13 (detective story), Blue Giant (music), Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card (children's fantasy), City (comedy), Fire Punch (action), Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (slice-of-life), Kiznaiver (science fiction)...

But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there

In a straightforward mecha anime, like the ones Evangelion is working off of - Combattler V for instance - there would be a shower scene and we would see the girl in the shower. Or maybe the guy would walk in and it would be awkward (ex. Mobile Suit Gundam). And in a low effort harem show he might even grope the girl by accident (ex. so many shows). In Eva, all these things happen and they are off-putting and bizarre. The girl, who lives in a cold, filthy apartment by herself, does not even respond to his hand on her breast. Earlier, she slaps the guy for talking badly of his father, so it's not that she isn't down for slapping someone who offends her. So what is it?

It actually reminds me of how increasingly raunchy going to Otakon in Baltimore was near the turn of the century. I think the first year I went was 2000 ish, and it was fine. A year or two later, you saw some girls with "Free Hugs" signs. A few years later it was 14 year olds in thongs, loudly shouting "Don't tell my parents I'm here!" with signs that read "Slap my ass, don't be shy".

A few years ago I attended a Comic-Con, and noticed a prominently displayed sign reading "Cosplay is not Consent" and instructing people that just because someone is dressed as your favourite character, doesn't mean you're entitled to touch them.

I was appalled the organisers considered such a sign necessary. Yes, I get that a lot of people attending these things are teenagers, autistic, or both, but still.

"Cosplay is not Consent" was a common phrase in cons since at least early 2010s, which was around when I was going to cons. As best as I can tell, like many things happening around harassment around that time, it seemed that the sign wasn't necessary, but was rather deemed so by people who found it useful to do so.

To be fair, I think that kind of thing is a result of a simultaneous and toxoplasmically self-reinforcing infestation of habitual sex offenders and feminists eager to make a dubious harassment complaint.

Early anime convention norms were weird: a lot of their institutional genealogy derived from watch parties and the movie equivalent of tailgating. Some of the awkward spots were people taking online mannerisms to reality, but there's also a lot of places where a norm developed organically in smaller and intimate settings, then melted when it went super-Dunbar.

Man, that reminds me when I went to a west coast anime convention while visiting friends circa 2003. Man Faye was there and the (a?) Yaoi Paddle. Walking along we saw Man Faye going one direction, a little while later we saw the Yaoi Paddle going the other. Then a sound like a thunder rumbled through the hall as the two met. Man Faye might have gotten more than he asked for in that exchange from the sound of it.

I was into anime back when a lot of anime viewing was literally bootleg tapes from Japan.

It has gotten a lot more mainstream now, but I assure you, the freaks, gooners, and fetishists have always been part of the scene (both on screen and off). But they've been part of every fannish community. Comics, SF, RPGs, etc.

I haven't been to Otakon but from the pics I've seen (and people I know who go), it's really no worse than most fan cons. 14-year-olds in thongs saying "Slap my ass" would likely be escorted out.

Goblin Slayer's fair, but it's a little noncentral. Even stuff like Brand New Animal that screams furry and ended up with a small gooner-focused fandom (6k images on e621) is a lot cleaner as an actual work.

The sexposition in Game of Thrones was gratuitous (and kind of fun sometimes), but at least they were adults.

Cersei Lannister is 15 at the start of the series, and Daenerys Targaryen is 16 or 17. At least it's an improvement over the books: Daenerys is 13 there when she's 'married' to Drago, but still made the feminist crowing pretty awkward back when Season 1 first came out.

Cersei Lannister

The sister of Jamie, the Queen, mother of a ~12 year old Joffrey? Cersei was a teenager during Robert's Rebellion, more or less.

I thought the show played the long-standing incest side up? Or did they only run the 'get caught and shoved kid out window' incident from her adulthood? At least in the books, it's pretty explicit that Jaime and Cersei screwed disturbingly early.

If so, fair, will focus the complaint on Daenerys

Oh yes, incest, and from basically childhood, but that's all before the first book. It's backstory. Pushing Bran from a window was beat for beat from the opening of book 1, too, but that's Queen Cersei and Kingsguard Jamie, fully adult.

I think you're confusing Cersei with Sansa Stark, who is both 14 and in Winterfell when Bran gets pushed from the window.

Fair. I'll admit I lost interest in the books pretty early, so probably munging some stuff.

I agree that most anime, especially modern, is gooner slop. Even the old animes Evangelion and Lain have weird parts, but I excuse them for being high art via their other parts.

But people who criticize anime in general are doing a motte-and-bailey. For a creative individual, real actors and special effects are too expensive, anime and especially manga are a viable way for them to express themselves. Hence there are plenty of anime even in modern times without fanservice, e.g. Frieren.

But I think you're defending with a bit of a motte and bailey as well. Animation being a more freeing and accessible medium for personal expression is the motte, and wanting to draw/view degenerate fetish art is the bailey. You're defending animation in general, not all the rest of anime's baggage, which is the stuff people actually object to. Parents aren't worried about their kids watching Bluey or X-Men, because they're not an immediate gateway to weird pseudo child porn the way even the innocent animes are. The ratio of disgusting goonbait to wholesome entertainment is simply too high for a normie to be comfortable with, especially when the two are not particularly easy to distinguish at first glance.

For a creative individual, real actors and special effects are too expensive, anime and especially manga are a viable way for them to express themselves.

I never got the impression that animation is cheaper than live-action.

I think it's cheaper than complex special effects, sitcoms are cheaper if there's little to no extreme action or unrealistic art.

Really manga is the viable medium for individuals. Then usually when a manga becomes popular it gets adapted into an anime.

No, but animating a house on mars isn't really more expensive than animating one on earth, whereas doing CGI for it would be expensive. Likewise for drawing manga. So I think you can still say anime fosters creativity. It's one of the reasons I got into it back in the day.

What is normal in today's world?

In the US: being obese, wearing pajamas in public, spending 4 hours per day watching tiktok reels, binge watching streaming content, eating HFCS-laden hyper-palatable slop at most meals, avoiding exercise, drowning in CC debt, and probably a few things I'm forgetting.

Exhaustive and accurate. I’d add: Being uneducated and generally as uninteresting as possible

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