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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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I hope someone here can answer this for me.

What are some good anime shows for someone who likes Dragonball Z, Death Note, YuYu Hakusho, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, etc.? When I was in high school I was into anime like that but was never a complete die hard fanatic. Also, is there anime that leans on the somewhat conservative end of things?

Specifically for the issues you cite is why I could never get into anime as a subject in its totality.

Not mentioned yet is Black Clover. It has a really rough slow and boring start, but is good once it gets going. This is one of the few fighting animes my wife also enjoys, unlike Demon Slayer which is too bloody for her.

The Seven Deadly Sins is also a good action/comedy/sprinkle of romance with minimal blood and gore. Despite the name the setting is medieval european fantasy with arthurian flavor.

Well Dragonball Super is somewhat new to you. HunterxHunter, Naruto (make sure to look up and skip filler episodes), and Demonslayer are all adventure battle shonen as well. One Piece has too many episodes, and they stretched a lot of the content out too much for me to recommend the anime.

Dragon Ball Z and YuYu Hakusho are standard battle shonen shows (men beating the tar out of each other, training to become stronger, tournament arcs, etc.). If you liked them, you will probably enjoy similar titles like Naruto and My Hero Academia. MHA in particular has two notable advantages over older works; modern animation techniques (the fight scenes are gorgeous) and a seasonal episode structure (meaning less filler), so I'd start with that one.

Death Note is a very unique show; there is nothing else quite like it. Still, if you enjoy watching characters solve their problems by thinking, I'd recommend The Promised Neverland. Season 1 only; the second season is legendary for how bad it was, and the first season stops at a nice spot and gives enough closure. I wrote a longer review on /r/rational.

You don't have to worry about looking for specifically conservative anime, because anime as a whole is inherently conservative, especially compared with woke Hollywood; there is a reason why men fall in love with anime girls and Demon Slayer can outsell the entire American comic book industry. As AntiDem put it:

The appeal of anime is simple: It depicts a world with intact families, high trust, feminine women, politeness and good manners, public order, low crime, and a sense of mutual obligation between neighbors in a community - a world not slathered in gratuitous degeneracy and consumerism, peopled by unmarriageable women and increasingly angry men, which is in the process of careening toward disaster because a corrupt, ineffectual government is helpless in containing an uprising by violent lunatics hopped up on a fanatical ideology.

In the 20th century, people longed for a galaxy full of advanced technology which would take us to unknown worlds beyond the stars, and were inspired by television which showed it to us. In the 21st century, people long only for home and family, for peace and stability, for connection and friendship. To hell with the stars - just give us back the hearth and the dinner table. That is all we dream of now.

I encountered anime in the first year of my adulthood. It taught me that there was another path available - that people could behave differently than they had in my shattered family and the cold, brutal place where I grew up. That there were other ways to go through life than being selfish and angry all the time. That not every love between a man and a woman was doomed to end in bitterness and hatred. That people could be your friend for reasons other than wanting something out of you. That behaving honorably and sacrificing for the good of people around you isn’t just a thing that suckers do for ingrates. That not everybody breaks promises whenever they become inconvenient. That there are other approaches to the world than cynicism and irony. That not everything is a scam, and not everybody is out to hustle you.

Nothing in my life up to then had taught me any of that.

Still, if you are looking for something pastoral, try Princess Mononoke or Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

anime as a whole is inherently conservative, especially compared with woke Hollywood

That link is anti-Jew and anti-black, and justifies itself using Hitler positively.

Also, black people actually like anime a lot.

Woke Hollywood is very jewish and black, and hates on Hitler.

Perhaps the emergence of anime as an alternate mainstream media is helping pacify the 20th century hostile proclivities of the urban blacks. It wouldn't be surprising if depicting your media antagonists as space monsters or goblins got better results on impressionable, young minds than literally the pillars of your society. As an added bonus literally any story is better than "there is nothing you can do, society is controlled by hostile forces that cannot be overwhelmed, all of these successful people you could look up to are actually oppressed and your only acceptable role in life is to forever complain".

And uh do you know who was allied with Hitler in WW2?

Hugely appreciate your contribution. Thank you.

The appeal of anime is simple: It depicts a world with intact families, high trust, feminine women, politeness and good manners, public order, low crime, and a sense of mutual obligation between neighbors in a community

This reminds me of how—to the extent Japan is Wakanda for white people—it’s because Japan is generally free of people who look like Wakandans.

It taught me that there was another path available

Taught, or gave hope for?

That behaving honorably and sacrificing for the good of people around you isn’t just a thing that suckers do for ingrates.

If only he knew how bad things really were/are.

If you’re a white male or an East Asian male in a non-Asian country (sometimes South Asian male too, depending on country), there’s a staunch contingent of people who insist that you should not only sacrifice yourself for ingrates around you, but also ingrates far away from you. A semblance of both of these is reflected non-consensually through taxes and transfers.

This reminds me of how—to the extent Japan is Wakanda for white people—it’s because Japan is generally free of people who look like Wakandans.

Japan is generally free of white people too.

Whites aren’t the ones whose increasing numbers make a place quickly unWakanda like with regard to “politeness and good manners, public order, low crime,” or at least not nearly at the same rate.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes, besides being the greatest anime ever made, is explicitly about conservative-inflected questions of political philosophy. If you like Death Note and Jojo the space battles (plenty of just as keikaku) should entice you enough to fall in love with the rest of it.

I've been meaning to write an effortpost reviewing LotGH for years now, still haven't gotten around to it. But I would highly recommend the original anime adaptation over the remake. The remake was fine (only watched the first season) but the original is a masterpiece.

Ah yes, I tend to forget the remake exists. Testament to the uglification of modern animation.

Sounds like you enjoy shonens, mostly. It means "young man" but is often used more broadly to describe shows where fighting is the main appeal. You should look into One Punch Man, Jujutsu Kaisen (not conservative but it's similar to the ones you mentioned), Chainsaw Man, Attack on Titan (this one is pretty conservative, at least for the first three seasons). I'll also second Frieren and Demon Slayer.

Shonen is a demographic, not a genre. There are plenty of shonens that aren't about fighting, from sportsball shows like Haikyu!! to romcoms like Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro. The specific subset of shonen that focuses on combat is properly called battle shonen.

The five demographics of anime are shonen (young men), shoujo (young women), seninen (grown men), josei (grown women), and kodomomuke (little kids). "Young" here is used in the same sense that "Young Adult" is used for novels in the West; middle and high schoolers.

Try Hunter x Hunter. Kurapika's arc is a minor masterpiece. Gets very dark later on.

anime that leans on the somewhat conservative end

The early episodes of The Irregular at Magic High School do this very well.

Demon Slayer is a good one that I would highly recommend. Despite some of the extreme violence in the series, it is wholesome in a way that is hard to describe without watching it. And even though the main character often sympathizes with the plights of the various demons he is fighting, he never lets that blind him to the fact that they are horrifically monstrous creatures that need to be put down in order to protect the innocent.

Edit: Frieren is also a great one, and one that many people would consider "conservative". There was a moderate amount of screeching from the usual suspects on the left about how the demons in Frieren are portrayed.

I guess Gunsmith Cats has aspects that appeal to Red Tribe men.

The sub-genre you seem to like most is called Shonen. Some recommendations are here: https://gamerant.com/best-shonen-anime-to-watch/

Personally I highly recommend Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I thought it had a fairly conservative message all around, but not obnoxiously so. I mean, it does follow the law of conservation at least, (haha).

Dragonball Z had a lot of sexual stuff in it, but it might have gone over your head if you were a child. There were dramatic nosebleeds, an old man who was a pervert, etc.

No Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?

Gurren Lagann is my favorite counter to feminist complaints about media. Most pieces of media I hear their complaints about don't really fit the bill. Gurren Lagann, on the other hand, fully embraces a masculine worldview and is full of blatant examples of the "male gaze", thinly veiled phallic references, etc. And it shows you that all that stuff is actually totally super awesome and not the horrific evil feminists claim it is.

In fact if anything, feminism kind of maps on to the anti-spirals in the series decently well. And the ending of the series basically amounts to "Yeah maybe our capacity to continually grow and improve through our masculine strength and efforts is destined to inevitably destroy the entire universe, but we're going to make it not-inevitable through sheer force of masculine will".

Thank you for this. Your link hits the mark pretty well. Hell’s Paradise sounds like an awesome anime they describe. Full Metal Alchemist seems so-so. I tend to like linear plots that focus less on character development (Death Note did this well, though I found myself bored of the dialogue at times and liked the exchange of trickery between the characters) and more-so interesting ideas or power interactions between people or systems.

I fully got the references and innuendo in DBZ when I was younger, but it was nowhere near as extreme as much of the other anime you could find.

Fullmetal Alchemist had some really cool ideas. The story begins with a difficult problem and as the plot continues the problem seems to get more and more impossible and maybe not as important as some other things, but then main characters get out of the problem at the very end. The way they get out of the problem seems "correct" in hindsight but was also very cathartic and hard to guess ahead of time. There's one big magic system that everyone uses differently, along with some competent muggles who make things interesting.

I wouldn't write it off based on a blurb. I persist in recommending it, if only because it's fairly short for a shonen and you can probably figure out if you like it or not by the 5th episode or so.

I second the recommendation. FMA:B is one of the best anime series I've ever seen, bar none.

Dragonball Z was instrumental in teaching kids how the real world works. The guy who beat everyone up gets best girl, the autist is stuck with his childhood sweetheart, the short guy has to marry a robot, and the old guy that owns his own island is a giant perv.

Your girl will happily monkeybranch to and get knocked up by a stronger, more powerful man—even though he and his buddy just brutally assaulted and murdered you and a bunch of her lifelong friends, from which you were revived shortly thereafter through supernatural means. And that perhaps “even though” in the previous sentence can be replaced by “especially if.”

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