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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5923 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.

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&.

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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