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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5548 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.

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.

I remember playing ”Cops” as a kid in the very early 90s. It involved one guy being designated as the bad guy and the rest being cops who would then run after him and tackle him on the ground as a group. Not surprisingly nobosy wanted to be the first to play the bad guy. Ah, to be young again…

>when no one brought a ball, but you and the bros want to play Smear the Queer anyway

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 for a lot of people, the thinking is that if they let the arrest happen quickly and without drama, they are accepting an L, but if they drag it on and make it as hard as possible, maybe something, anything will happen that can turn this into a W; they think maybe if they make it as excrutiating as possible the cops will in frustration do something they can spin into brutality or racism and they can use that as leverage. Usually in the end the leverage ends up going the other way, as in the description of the sentencing in the videos you often hear they end up pleading guilty at the initial charges to have the kicking and spitting and biting at the cops charges go away. You end up wondering how lenient the sentences could have been if they had just gone quietly.

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!

Eh. Drawing is extremely hard and requires insane levels of dedication to reach a professional level. I'll bet a lot of artists start off by being motivated to draw lewd stuff or porn, and realistically, probably a lot of out-there fetish stuff. If you're normal, it'd be much easier to put a tiny fraction of that time into getting laid.

In the west, skill at drawing is pretty rare, and I wonder how much the puritan impulse in media contributes to that. I wonder how many of the remaining westerners who can draw well are furries, or other weirdos who make a living drawing fetish stuff.

Reminds me of the quote about Gwynevere in Dark Souls.

Miyazaki: ... Talking of glamour, her breasts have nothing to do with me, they happened without my knowledge. It's all the artist's fault. I think I mentioned it earlier but I always seek a certain refinement in all my designs.

Waragai: Really?

Miyazaki: Yes, but the artist had such a happy look on his face, I didn't have the heart to stop him.

Sometimes you have to let your artists craft the huge bazonkers. I'd rather have work made with passion even if it has some suspiciously huge chests or overly detailed bare feet in it.

There can be extreme cases, of course, like Made in Abyss which is filled with very thinly veiled pedo stuff, but it's so gorgeous that I still think it's better off being made than not. If the perverts have the skills to back it up, let 'em cook.

My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit.

Renoir, master of French impressionism, was notorious for his fixation with the naked female form.

Unfortunately for him, he was simply born into the wrong era, and never got to live out a life fulfilling online porn commissions.

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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