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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6120 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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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.

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