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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5922 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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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&.

to the point the characters don't even have names but are only known by the archetypes they represent.

I'd like to point out (once again) that Goblin Slayer is far from the only fantasy-genre anime or manga to do this (the treatise on medieval economics that is Hero and Demon King comes to mind), and it's more than just "they've been boiled down to pure archetypes," because there's an element of Japanese culture at play that Westerners tend to miss.

Read The Tale of Genji:

Almost none of the characters in the original text are given an explicit name. They are instead referred to by their function or role (e.g. Minister of the Left), an honorific (e.g. His Excellency), or their relation to other characters (e.g. Heir Apparent), which changes as the novel progresses. This lack of names stems from Heian-era court manners that would have made it unacceptably familiar and blunt to freely mention a person's given name. Modern readers and translators have used various nicknames to keep track of the many characters.

…

Because it was written to entertain the Japanese court of the 11th century, the work presents many difficulties to modern readers. First and foremost, Murasaki's language, Heian-period court Japanese, was highly inflected and had very complex grammar.[11][12] Another problem is that almost none of the characters are named within the work. Instead, the narrator refers to men often by their rank or their station in life, and to women often by the color of their clothing, or by the words used at a meeting, or by the rank of a prominent male relative. This results in different appellations for the same character, depending on the chapter.

Thanks to the enduring cultural resonance of Genji, and centuries of later works referring back to it, it has left an enduring sense of these sorts of Heian-era manners as a distinctively "old-timey" characteristic. Referring to characters entirely by job or rank or station or trademark attire — like "Purple Lady-in-Waiting" — is a deliberate attempt at aping this style. Like pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue in an English-language work, it's a cheap and easy trick for quickly creating an archaic "long, long ago" feel.

I'm familiar enough with the general idea of Genji, and I don't buy the claim of lineage here. If you want to go for straight up similarity, you will find that Goblin Slayer and Maoyuu are closer to the Canterbury Tales than to it; after all, the fantasy stories are neither trying to be a roman à clef nor are they encoding a setting in which social etiquette is implied to demand that the characters relate to each other in a formally prescribed way (unless you want to go as far as making the thesis that every particularly tropey Japanese story is just reflecting a Confucian ritualistic view of the world, which I guess would be a hit as a Japanese Studies undergrad course-paper).

Of course, if you write a story in Japanese where the characters are referred to as Minister of the Left and Consort soandso and what-not, you will get an old-timey feeling, because the roles are stock old-timey roles. You can also write a story in which all characters are only referred to by monikers like section chief and sub-chief and senpai; this will not give you a "long, long ago" feel, but a Dilbertian cubicle life feel. If you write a story in which the characters are Hero and Monk and Guild Receptionist, it will evoke the setting in which those are the roles, which is every piece of post-1989 Japanese fantasy schlock.

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.

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