The article kinda touched on how modern anime is a little colder, but didnt get into any specifics.
"reborn/reincarnated/transported to another world as a _____" has matured and gotten popular to the point of being its own genre with associated tropes, rather than just being a trope that would sometimes appear in fantasy stories.
It's very rare that this is a good literary device. In my opinion, we have it because authors feel the need to turn the dial up on escapism, and what's more escapist than getting a fresh start in, literally, a new life.
Dont think of this as me whinging. "reborn as a vending machine" is my most anticipated show this season, I love the weird promises and read this one when it was just a machine translated webnovel :)
Dont think of this as me whinging. "reborn as a vending machine" is my most anticipated show this season, I love the weird promises and read this one when it was just a machine translated webnovel :)
I'd wager about 90% of any mass-produced form of media is crap, and anime is no exception. The isekai stuff is just a big part of the latest 90% for anime.
There can be hidden gems or interesting deconstructions of the genre, and sometimes crap can just be mindlessly entertaining.
I've started getting tired of the sheer amount of it, but I got tired of the 9 million mecha anime when I was younger, etc., as well.
I'd also like to offer a meta explanation in addition to escapism being popular. With so much anime having been produced and made available on-demand to consumers there is a need to stand out and be novel - in both a creative and a business sense. Alternate world storylines seem perfectly suited for this.
Anime produced today needs to compete with all the anime produced over the last ~50 years. Whereas anime produced in the 90's only had to compete with ~30 years worth of anime before it. And even then, much less was produced by the industry as a whole back then.
Maybe. But I'm not convinced. Isekai is so widrspread these days it may as well be the default genre, it can't be called novel anymore. Any novelty would have to be found in the particular way they do it, e.g. reborn as a virus or reborn as a vending machine.
And I disagree that it competes with 50 years old anime. Most people don't tend to watch old stuff, which they feel is stuffy and outdated. The story and writing could be great, but the pacing is different from modern standards, and the visuals can sometimes feel awful. I argue that only a very select group of people is interested in watching and revering old stuff.
Understandable. When I say compete with I mostly mean "be distinct from", or at the very least "not the same as" rather than viewership numbers. Unless they are specifically rebooting something, as you mentioned.
I think this explanation is a bit of a stretch. Isekais just recycle the same ideas ad nauseam. If it were about creativity, they could do a lot more. You're given a blank slate to create a whole new world and mythology surrounding it, but your protagonist barely leaves the town to explore the world.
Which series does this describe? Guy gets hit by a truck, reborn in a medieval-european-esque world where he joins a guild and does menial tasks like collect plants and kill goblins to level up, but this happens rapidly due to superpower which took no effort to gain.
It's kind of like the MMORPG grind but without the grind. Instead of playing 20 hours/day, you see the character progress in 20 mins/week. The side-characters are as bland as NPCs.
MMORPGs suffer a similar problem: There's so many of them and there's not a whole lot of difference from one to the next.
The mangaka are typically young men who grew up playing these games and not getting out much, so it's no surprise their limited experience of the outside world also limits their ideas.
Perhaps a source of the problem is the business side of things: The studios are basically forced to fit a story into 13 episodes which leaves little room for actually creating a memorable experience. 24-26 episodes used to be the norm but is now the rare exception. The studios don't want to take risks so they'll only adapt popular manga.
Or maybe the consumers just have shorter attention spans, so you make the character go from level 1 to 1000 in the first few episodes to try and hook the audience, then revert to slow-pace.
The iseakais that are genuinely creative (cough 12 Kingdoms) get dropped.
> "reborn/reincarnated/transported to another world as a _____" has matured and gotten popular to the point of being its own genre with associated tropes, rather than just being a trope that would sometimes appear in fantasy stories.
I think of it this way: As the current world everyone lives in is devoid of meaning - you have to escape inside or to fantasy in order to find meaning. Disenchantment is the mood of the day. With the internet competition among local people becomes a bit moot. Economically everything is irreversibly and increasingly owned by the investor class and its likely that everyone will have more modest goods than their parents had.
Where and how do you find a purpose, a meaning against such a backdrop? This is the question that artists and writers are trying to answer. Defeating inner demons, finding connection and community, fighting an uncaring out of touch older class.. all sorts of theories are there.
I'd agree - there's a reason that the protagonists in these are almost always unemployed shutins or people that are half-dead from overwork even before they have their unfortunate encounter with a truck.
Either you can't find work, or it's a soul crushing march towards death while performing meaningless work to make someone else rich while receiving no appreciation for it.
Japan has been facing a lot of these issues for longer than a lot of the rest of the developed world, but it increasingly seems like they were just a bit ahead of the curve in it happening.
The other part of it is - there is no hope of things changing any time soon. There is no generational change happening, the old people are still in charge and will be for a long time. Until they start to actually go away nothing will change.
At a mechanical level isekai in webnovel form lets you introduce the reader to a new world much more quickly and easily than if the MC were in that world with no reference to our own.
It's why I think it's so popular, especially when coupled with a "System" as in litrpg which accelerates that even more.
And don't forget how easy it is to explain your book's premise. Most stories have trouble marketing what makes them special. "It's a young adult action adventure that gets very into describing food, with teens going on big journeys and discovering secrets, with a whole lot of lore and stuff, and we see multiple generations over the course of the books, with characters going on to becoming the myths that later characters learn about in other books, and also it's all animals" is hard to explain in five words. Then take something like "Isekai but it's a Roomba." There, I told you what it's about, and you already know with near 100% accuracy whether or not it's for you.
I used to dig that explanation, but even outside of the ultra-pulp areas, every fantasy world is ultra samey and does not really need to be introduced to the reader at all. It's either a tolkien derivative or... whatever the most influential xianxia novel is. I'm not as good with those, but this one could not help but notice that all the cultivation books are cut from the same cloth.
It's easy on the creators primarily, they get to skip a lot of steps and don't have to explain away things like cell phones.
For consumers, they get quantity.
Although it shouldn't be impossible, it seems really hard to get any kind of real quality out of isekai stories. Usually the stakes are low and the setting is surprisingly similar (even though having a different setting is ostensibly the entire reason for the genre). All you end up with is variety in characters, and even then there are common tropes.
As you said, the readers get quantity and honestly above all else that's what they want.
They already enjoy the stories enough to buy them or support patreons for them, I don't think trying to up the quality would be wise for the authors assuming it slowed down how quickly they wrote.
Maybe not specifically a rebirth, but I recently watched Chainsaw Man and My Hero Academia. Both of these shows are kind of like a bildungsroman crossed with having one's virtuous deeds rewarded with a great gift.
When I first started watching anime, it felt very new and fresh, as if Japanese studios really truly cared about making well-written stories, and didn’t rely on lazy stereotypes or prudish Western conventions.
I very quickly realized that it felt new because it was new to me. Anime is chock full of stereotypes, cliches, re-hashed plot lines, and lazy unimaginative plots. Maybe even more so than Western media. 90% of anime absolutely is crap, just like 90% of everything else
I’m not sure if I agree with the articles thesis. There have always been bleak anime.
There’s so much more out there now. Some of it is whimsical and hopeful. Some that come to mind from the last decade:
- Yuri on Ice
- A Place Further than the Universe
- Your Name
- Sasaki and Miyano
- Given
- The last Evangelion movie (which was a real holy shit moment for me)
- Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet
- This one is an odd pick but the Cyberpunk anime Netflix came out with last year was so so good. I know it undercuts my point given how it’s set in a dystopia but I felt like humanizing these characters that are criminals in a broken world and showing how they still have hopes and dreams and love… I found it very touching.
- The Stranger by the Shore
Also Chainsaw Man is really really good, though it is dark and gory.
My theory was that the isekai concept justifies a lot of storytelling framework:
* You can have a main character with modern sensibilities and attitudes, and yet fit him in a fantasy- or historical world. You can and often do get away with asking Nobunaga Oda if he's considered using the blockchain to enhance his military presence.
* The MC having to come to terms with his new world provides a lore-sane way to soft-launch the worldbuilding.
This “new apocalypse” really started with Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime about a young man being coerced by his uncaring father into defending a world the prior generation had effectively already destroyed. I expect its drowned cities and alienated youth will only gain more poignancy with time.
Anno was a far better (if perhaps not as innovative) artist than Matsumoto because of his refusal to retreat into the recuperated fascism that dominated much of postwar culture, instead choosing to show its true social and psychological impacts.
Far before that, although it may be the first work to introduce those themes into the pop culture of Japan.
See in Christianity with the parable of the garden of eden and it's destruction, in Islamic literature with the catastrophe of the sack of Baghdad causing a several hundred year cultural dark ages, in republican Chinese literature with the ideal classical civilization being replaced with mindless roving warlords, albeit with superior Western technology, etc...
Though perhaps anime has become less unusually ambitious in rendering elite thought into lower brow entertainment, a sort of regression to the mean of the world cultural millieu.
>To Japanese millennials and zillenials, wartime defeat and economic triumph are both ancient history. Their futures are far less bright, marked by threats of recession, political gridlock, and a hyper-aging society, not to mention the traumas of the covid era. They’re living through another apocalypse, of the socioeconomic variety. Is it any wonder that their animated dreams are more down to earth?
Forget about anime, look at the YA movies in the last decade. Gone are the traditional awe-inspiring scifi, in are the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class.
> the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class
I don't think this is a Last Decade thing... This describes Evangelion quite well, and evangelion is way older than a decade. Wolf's Rain is literally a bunch of teenagers (who are also wolves) remaking the world in the post apocalypse, also older than a decade. Arguably this is also full metal alchemist.
It's definitely a long recurring theme, and will likely continue to be one as long as there are young people feeling frustrated and powerless to change the ossified broken systems they have to live with.
>and will likely continue to be one as long as there are young people
every generation feels this way. not sure why it needs the qualifier you attached. each generation has to have it's own ________. can't listen to the same music as the prior generation, as that's lame. can't use the same social platforms, because you're parents are on it. can't use the same lingo as that's not hip and gotta talk in ways they parental units won't understand
I am talking about the western society. In the 80s and 90s, you don't really see movies about an entire generation of teenagers being oppressed. The main characters are likely to be teenagers but most adventure stories have teenage main characters.
In the 2000s, you started seeing popular sci-fi books (then movies in 2010s) like The Hunger Games and Maze Runner that depict teenagers as the opposed class.
Personally I think the 2000 Japanese classic Battle Royale started it all.
I disagree. "Adults are stupid and we have to fix everything for them, sometimes with them even working against us" is an old trope. It was common in the 90s, like with rugrats and pretty much every made for kids movie, but I'd argue it even goes back to movies like Goonies and matilda and Little Rascals.
The mid 2000s dystopia fest in young adult stuff is just follow the leader with Hunger Games. The oppression is used not for it's own sake, but because its an easy excuse for your teens to be more "mature" and more in control of their own lives. It's escapism for teens who think parents "just don't get us"
Teenage rebellion goes back to James Dean, arguably, with baby-boomers reacting to a calcification of postwar societies they inherited.
I think the difference now is that happy endings used to be the norm, whereas now they are not necessarily there, or the protagonists are pushed through such extreme losses that the win ends up looking pyrrhic.
This might simply be a function of the amount of productions - in the history of mankind, we've never seen so many new stories circulating so widely on so many different media. Smart authors want to look different and "real", so they might veer dark more liberally than they used (or rather were allowed, by public and editors) to.
I mean, we can look all the way back to romeo and juliet, where rebelious teens were being unfairly oppressed by adults who just don't get it and they have to figure things out for themselves and in the end everyone dies.
Evangelion is Anno deconstructing the insanity that was the mecha anime genre of teenagers being forced to go to war and become killing machines with little to no impact on their mental health, showing his general distaste for the "otaku" lifestyle, and also using it as an outlet for his own struggles with depression.
The biblical stuff was added just because they thought it looked cool.
> Gone are the traditional awe-inspiring scifi, in are the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class.
Luke was supposed to be, I believe, 19 during A New Hope, which was a movie about young rebels throwing off the almost literal corpses running the Empire.
A lot of the books that preceded the movies are from more than a decade ago. And there are even more YA books/movies that have themes of teens being oppressed from longer ago than that. As far as I'm aware, teens always feel oppressed, so a lot of media aimed at them is based on that, and always has been.
> Gone are the traditional awe-inspiring scifi, in are the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class.
There have been two Gundam series and two Gundam movies in the past year alone. Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Yamato and Macross have all had movies come out within the past two years. Just because they disappear within the flood of content doesn't mean that they don't exist.
> the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class.
That is so hyper-specific that it applies to a tiny handful of shows, at most elements of which are indicative of trends. It probably applies to one show this season. There's 157 other things coming out this season according to MyAnimeList.
But what is The Witch of Mercury really about, other than some amazing mechas, which make for cheap, amazing looking merchandising? It's about a bunch of teenagers trying to live a good life in an apparently sensible high school/military academy, and having all kinds of positive dreams... while the reality is much different. Basically every parent is a manipulative monster. Everything that appears remotely positive gets crushed 2 episodes later. It's not a series about the wonders of the future. It's all about how the world is horrible, and no matter how much you want to pretend, the adult's horror has infected your world too. So even the the Gundam series you talked about is really about a dystopia where teenagers are turned into weapons by old people, and they will, predictably, have to overturn the old ruling class.
Not that Gundam was ever all that optimistic: Good old Amuro was the poster boy for the disasters of war back in the very first series. The fact that there's cool robots is just sweetener for stories that are mostly about dealing with betrayal and despair. It's not quite Grave of the Fireflies, but it's not any less grim than, say, Evangelion.
You're right, I don't know what he meant by "awe-inspiring scifi" in the first place. Like I put in my other comment:
> "It’s also a lot bleaker than it was in Matsumoto’s heyday." is also something that can't be corroborated. Ashita no Joe predates it and it got dark and was the first really big serious anime. Gundam would follow it soon afterwards and that starts out with galactic war. Ideon anyone?
Not that it's much better outside anime:
> Basically every parent is a manipulative monster.
Anakin Skywalker anyone?
I'm just happy that the original Mangaka behind Planetes has recently stated his intention that he's intending to return to sci-fi after finishing Vinland Saga. It might not necessarily be optimistic, but it'll be worth following.
10 of the 158 new things this season on MyAnimeList are classified with a theme of Isekai. Last season, 12 out of 225. Fall 2022 had 7 out of 230. The season prior to that, 9 out of 252. That's quite a few things, but not an overwhelming wave.
The main change in anime is that there's more out there than there has ever been before. Yes, there's some things that are quite popular, like Attack on Titan, but they are just a drop in the ocean now. Even the "chart-topper" Chainsaw Man just disappeared. Not because it was bad but because there's so other anime... like Bocchi The Rock.
The same season Bocchi The Rock premiered, and it was an anime that made introverts feel represented like nothing before it. How Bocchi The Rock is supposed to be the portent of an apocalypse flummoxes me.
"It’s also a lot bleaker than it was in Matsumoto’s heyday." is also something that can't be corroborated. Ashita no Joe predates it and it got dark and was the first really big serious anime. Gundam would follow it soon afterwards and that starts out with galactic war. Ideon anyone?
Well I wanted to dispute your Bocchi comments but it turns out Watamote came out ten years ago.... plenty of time for newer anime enjoyers to have never heard of it.
Watamote hit me a lot harder than Bocchi did, but I guess it had the advantage of getting me in a more vulnerable time of my life.
> "It’s also a lot bleaker than it was in Matsumoto’s heyday." is also something that can't be corroborated. Ashita no Joe predates it and it got dark and was the first really big serious anime. Gundam would follow it soon afterwards and that starts out with galactic war. Ideon anyone?
Also, it's probably been about 20 years since I've watched it, so maybe my memory is failing me here, but isn't Matsumoto's own Galaxy Express 999 pretty bleak? The article mentions it a few times, but pretty much only in aesthetic terms. I seem to remember it being a barely-subtext running theme that traveling to a different place won't let you escape societal corruption, it will just change the particular flavor of it that you encounter.
It's still so bizarre to me to see articles about anime and manga in staid American institutions like the New Yorker. It was not that long ago that "elite" publications like this would dismiss anime as the lowest of trash.
Could write an entire essay about how things previously understood as niche nerd interests have now formed the core of the mainstream of entertainment culture yet still manage to maintain an inward-focused self regard as niche, marginalized, besieged and belittled.
They still would dismiss them if they could. But since the internet destroyed their media gatekeeping power and anime became too popular, they're now trying to control and put their own spin on it.
When I was younger, liking cute things as a dude felt like pedalling drugs in a Conservative household, but it's significantly more acceptable now than ever, so, net win?
But I don't feel like it was a net win—even as only an infrequent pervayor of the animes, I loved the old nerd counter culture of the internet, "weebs", video game fans, and it got absolutely blown apart, decontextualized, dismantled. It's great that some mostly-shounen anime has achieved mainstream success outside of Japan, but it's such a small section of a rich medium. Even considering that most anime is pretty bad, what I love about it is how it's often eccentric and weird, pushing boundaries, stunningly shameless. The stuff I liked mostly didn't gain mainstream success at all, what really became mainstream was "shows like Dragon Ball Z." That's cool and everything, but people in that corner massively outnumber the old communities of nerd losers that I once occupied, leaving me yet again out of place.
Obviously I can either accept reality or die mad, so I try not to spend too much time dwelling on it anymore. But wow, what a monkey's paw seeing some of the things I liked going more mainstream has been. Be careful what you wish for.
>The stuff I liked mostly didn't gain mainstream success at all, what really became mainstream was "shows like Dragon Ball Z."
I mean, it's stuff like DBZ and One Piece that has mainstream success in Japan, too. The weird stuff is/was relatively niche there too compared to the big names, it's just the total slice of the pie relative to the overall Japanese population was bigger.
But lots of the weird stuff that is questionable by mainstream Western standards has also gotten significantly larger here, too. I've been watching anime since the early 90s, and feel like I'm more or less used to it's weirdness, but Monogatari for example still has stuff that makes me uncomfortable - but it was quite popular in the west, far bigger than similarly strange stuff was when DBZ was airing.
It's not necessarily that there's anything wrong with shounen anime, but it's actually quite common that I will see anime criticized for how much of it targets adolescent boys, which is, well, probably a misunderstanding. I think shounen is disproportionately popular outside of Japan vs other genre of anime. Contrast shounen that is wildly popular, like My Hero Academia, with something like Akira, a breakout success decidedly outside of that genre and arguably very influential in how anime managed to break into the global market to begin with. Exactly why things shifted since then is unclear, though I do think that modern media in America at least is wildly focused on being more child friendly/focusrd compared to how things were going in the 90's, for one reason or another.
I think it's a "perversion to the norm" taking place: everything becomes subjected to Kirk Drift[0] over time. As much as we'd like to communicate something nuanced and specific to a pop culture audience, they eventually want to be told that the good guys win and that they are the good guys. Battle shonen stories do that by assembling together an unending series of soap operatic character arcs and pro wrestling matchups. There's inherent "pulpiness" to that kind of writing, and what manga has been strong at historically is producing products adhering to the formulas of Jump and other manga magazines: stories that are unique in their subject matter, but similar in their tropes.
What made Akira interesting to foreign audiences at the time wasn't exactly the thematic content - though it got critical praise - but the more adult subjects and violence. What you found in Western animation at the time was vastly weighted towards children's toy sales and Disney general-audiences content - there was nothing like the OVA boom. So Akira existed as "the anime with nukes, biker gangs and mutants", alongside Hokuto no Ken's "atomic wasteland where muscle men punch each other and their heads explode". And that was what defined imported anime throughout the 90's - if it wasn't violent, it was sexy. Or it was Ghibli. Interest in series like Evangelion took some time to catch up with that, as more of a fan culture arose and tastes became discerning.
> expressed concern about how “cold and cynical many recent anime seem to be.” But is this a criticism of the current crop of animators and fans—or a reflection of Japanese society itself?
its just the studios churning out procedurally generated cookie cutter nonsense, just like the rest of TV
> “Attack on Titan,” one of the biggest hits of the twenty-tens, captures the hopelessness of a dying city circumscribed by walls, under constant siege from zombie-like giants; it won prestigious awards around the world
I am currently watching The kingdom of Dreams and Madness, a documentary of Studio Ghibli, in there the director / producer tell how they feel like they are the lasts of a creative era of animation.
It does seem that even though anime is more popular than ever, there is not so many modern anime classics.
> It does seem that even though anime is more popular than ever, there is not so many modern anime classics.
Isn't "modern anime classics" a bit of a oxymoron? Things generally don't become classics until a while after. Lots of examples of things not really being in the mind of the mainstream until it long died.
At most only because there's so much more out there.
The general consensus is that Oshi no Ko is as good as any classic (and is by the same author as the already classic Kaguya-sama) and that only aired one episode a week ago so far. A new season of Demon Slayer started ten days ago and that's the manga with the most per-volume sales ever, surpassing even Dragon Ball. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm talking about things that happened within the past two weeks alone.
> It does seem that even though anime is more popular than ever, there is not so many modern anime classics.
Are you comparing to 1995-2005 or are you comparing to the lifetime of anime from about 1970 onwards?
1) I'm not sure anime is all that popular anymore. For example, I see FAR less anime merch than I did back in the early 2000s. Cyberpunk:Edgerunners is one of the few recently that seemed to spawn merch.
2) It doesn't help that a cour is now 13 episodes, at best, by default. It's pretty hard to make a "classic" anime in just 13 episodes on a super tight deadline. You can see the drop in quality around 2005 right about when things are switching to 13 episodes. By the time you reach 2010, practically nothing that isn't promoting toys is longer than 13 episodes.
3) Up through about the mid-90s, anime was mostly meant to promote buying toys and the quality reflects this (really--take a look at the anime released from about 1980-1990).
4) There were never that many "classic" anime after you remove Studio Ghibli.
5) 1995-2005 just had a remarkable run of producing some stupidly good anime along with all the standard dreck. It was a combination of decent enough funding, decent enough technology, and a sudden market opening (US demand).
6) The Japanese anime business leaders were complete and total dolts for a very long time. After about 2005, they sold increasingly expensive box sets to their whales and that completely warped things. Consquently, you get increasing amounts of junk hyper-tailored to the anime faithful (See: Zero no Tsukaima getting 48 episodes(!)--actually, please don't see it, it's total garbage).
I really don't know if I'd say that, even as a mid-2000s m-muh soul obsessive (big fan of stuff like Kuuchuu Buranko, Gankutsuou, Haibane Renmei, Texhnolyze, Hidamari, Paranoia Agent, Aria, Standalone Complex, YKK) who's frequently down on new stuff. The interesting part is that I think I can come up with things in basically every subgenre, so it's not as if output is 100% isekai or something.
Just off the top of my head, since 2020-ish, things that'll almost definitely be remembered at least among enthusiasts:
Oddtaxi feels like Satoshi Kon reborn, maybe with some Yuasa on the side
Summertime Render is basically Higurashi x Shiki
Bocchi is powerfully in the tradition of Watamote/NHK
Eizouken fits right in with the other Yuasa shows
Kakushigoto is classic Kumeta and will be remembered alongside Joshiraku/SZS
Chihayafuru was already classic alt-sports, so S3 is more of the same
Dorohedoro was already a classic manga and the adaptation so far has been surprisingly soulful
Jahy and Machikazo Mazoku are up there in comedic SoL with YrYr/Yuyushiki/etc
Ousama Ranking is so thoroughly well-produced I have a hard time seeing it not being remembered
Akiba Maid War and Paripi Koumei were sufficiently novel to be inherently memorable
Honestly, the entire isekai genre shows a disturbing trend towards fatalism.
The fact that no matter how hard you work, or how good you are, you have to die or go to another world before you'll see anything you might want to do because there is nothing for you here.
Its sad that the world we've made for our younger generation is such an unlivable place for so many that this is seen as one of the only escapes.
Sure its not entirely our fault since the boomer generation is largely to blame for this, the cohort generally chose to enriching themselves over their kids, and maintained that through political pull for far longer than they should have largely as a result of better medical technology.
It's nice to learn more about Leiji Matsumoto, but it's also a little annoying that only the last four paragraphs of the article touch on what the headline suggests, and only half-heartedly.
Part of what made Anime and Manga so "exotic" back in the day was just how different it was to anything you'd find in the West.
A lot of early Anime has sci-fi/post-apocalyptic vibes because Japan was essentially a post-apocalyptic society. Japan is the only nation to have nuclear weapons used against it. It was so devastating, the entire world decided to just not do that sort of thing again.
But the level of national trauma Japan faced must have been something else. It affected their creative output for decades. Kaiju movies are essentially a response to the event. And elements of nuclear desolation is present in a lot of Anime. Akira, Vampire Hunter D, the earlier works of Miyazaki.
It's a huge fucking cultural touchstone for at least a couple of generations of Japanese people.
But we're also about 80 years from the event. Things are different in Japan. People have been born, lived full lives, and died between the time the bombs fell and today. There likely are children of children of people who were born after the bombs.
Japan today does have a lot more in common with the world at large. Their contemporary cultural touchstones are much the same ones around the world. So it makes sense that their art would reflect this.
It's not homogenization of culture as much as we are all actually humans, with mostly the same wants and needs and troubles, so of course our media will reflect that.
We are really similar in reality, both across the physical world and across time.
How can you talk about post-apocalyptic wastelands in anime without mentioning Hokuto no Ken (Fist of the North Star) or Barefoot Gen?!? The basis, man, the basis...
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] thread"reborn/reincarnated/transported to another world as a _____" has matured and gotten popular to the point of being its own genre with associated tropes, rather than just being a trope that would sometimes appear in fantasy stories.
It's very rare that this is a good literary device. In my opinion, we have it because authors feel the need to turn the dial up on escapism, and what's more escapist than getting a fresh start in, literally, a new life.
Dont think of this as me whinging. "reborn as a vending machine" is my most anticipated show this season, I love the weird promises and read this one when it was just a machine translated webnovel :)
Didn't the Simpsons do that one first?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons_Spin-Off_Showcase
There can be hidden gems or interesting deconstructions of the genre, and sometimes crap can just be mindlessly entertaining.
I've started getting tired of the sheer amount of it, but I got tired of the 9 million mecha anime when I was younger, etc., as well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
Anime produced today needs to compete with all the anime produced over the last ~50 years. Whereas anime produced in the 90's only had to compete with ~30 years worth of anime before it. And even then, much less was produced by the industry as a whole back then.
And I disagree that it competes with 50 years old anime. Most people don't tend to watch old stuff, which they feel is stuffy and outdated. The story and writing could be great, but the pacing is different from modern standards, and the visuals can sometimes feel awful. I argue that only a very select group of people is interested in watching and revering old stuff.
This is why reboots work.
Which series does this describe? Guy gets hit by a truck, reborn in a medieval-european-esque world where he joins a guild and does menial tasks like collect plants and kill goblins to level up, but this happens rapidly due to superpower which took no effort to gain.
It's kind of like the MMORPG grind but without the grind. Instead of playing 20 hours/day, you see the character progress in 20 mins/week. The side-characters are as bland as NPCs.
MMORPGs suffer a similar problem: There's so many of them and there's not a whole lot of difference from one to the next.
The mangaka are typically young men who grew up playing these games and not getting out much, so it's no surprise their limited experience of the outside world also limits their ideas.
Perhaps a source of the problem is the business side of things: The studios are basically forced to fit a story into 13 episodes which leaves little room for actually creating a memorable experience. 24-26 episodes used to be the norm but is now the rare exception. The studios don't want to take risks so they'll only adapt popular manga.
Or maybe the consumers just have shorter attention spans, so you make the character go from level 1 to 1000 in the first few episodes to try and hook the audience, then revert to slow-pace.
The iseakais that are genuinely creative (cough 12 Kingdoms) get dropped.
I think of it this way: As the current world everyone lives in is devoid of meaning - you have to escape inside or to fantasy in order to find meaning. Disenchantment is the mood of the day. With the internet competition among local people becomes a bit moot. Economically everything is irreversibly and increasingly owned by the investor class and its likely that everyone will have more modest goods than their parents had.
Where and how do you find a purpose, a meaning against such a backdrop? This is the question that artists and writers are trying to answer. Defeating inner demons, finding connection and community, fighting an uncaring out of touch older class.. all sorts of theories are there.
Either you can't find work, or it's a soul crushing march towards death while performing meaningless work to make someone else rich while receiving no appreciation for it.
Japan has been facing a lot of these issues for longer than a lot of the rest of the developed world, but it increasingly seems like they were just a bit ahead of the curve in it happening.
It's why I think it's so popular, especially when coupled with a "System" as in litrpg which accelerates that even more.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/60292/all-the-dust-that-fa...
For consumers, they get quantity.
Although it shouldn't be impossible, it seems really hard to get any kind of real quality out of isekai stories. Usually the stakes are low and the setting is surprisingly similar (even though having a different setting is ostensibly the entire reason for the genre). All you end up with is variety in characters, and even then there are common tropes.
They already enjoy the stories enough to buy them or support patreons for them, I don't think trying to up the quality would be wise for the authors assuming it slowed down how quickly they wrote.
...yet, I think you're right about the parallel world escapism.
I very quickly realized that it felt new because it was new to me. Anime is chock full of stereotypes, cliches, re-hashed plot lines, and lazy unimaginative plots. Maybe even more so than Western media. 90% of anime absolutely is crap, just like 90% of everything else
The ones with good plot are usually way better than most tv shows I watched (yes this is a 1-person point of view).
And every epic anime beats tv shows that try to be epic, for some reason!
There’s so much more out there now. Some of it is whimsical and hopeful. Some that come to mind from the last decade:
- Yuri on Ice - A Place Further than the Universe - Your Name - Sasaki and Miyano - Given - The last Evangelion movie (which was a real holy shit moment for me) - Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet - This one is an odd pick but the Cyberpunk anime Netflix came out with last year was so so good. I know it undercuts my point given how it’s set in a dystopia but I felt like humanizing these characters that are criminals in a broken world and showing how they still have hopes and dreams and love… I found it very touching. - The Stranger by the Shore
Also Chainsaw Man is really really good, though it is dark and gory.
* You can have a main character with modern sensibilities and attitudes, and yet fit him in a fantasy- or historical world. You can and often do get away with asking Nobunaga Oda if he's considered using the blockchain to enhance his military presence.
* The MC having to come to terms with his new world provides a lore-sane way to soft-launch the worldbuilding.
Anno was a far better (if perhaps not as innovative) artist than Matsumoto because of his refusal to retreat into the recuperated fascism that dominated much of postwar culture, instead choosing to show its true social and psychological impacts.
See in Christianity with the parable of the garden of eden and it's destruction, in Islamic literature with the catastrophe of the sack of Baghdad causing a several hundred year cultural dark ages, in republican Chinese literature with the ideal classical civilization being replaced with mindless roving warlords, albeit with superior Western technology, etc...
Though perhaps anime has become less unusually ambitious in rendering elite thought into lower brow entertainment, a sort of regression to the mean of the world cultural millieu.
Forget about anime, look at the YA movies in the last decade. Gone are the traditional awe-inspiring scifi, in are the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class.
I don't think this is a Last Decade thing... This describes Evangelion quite well, and evangelion is way older than a decade. Wolf's Rain is literally a bunch of teenagers (who are also wolves) remaking the world in the post apocalypse, also older than a decade. Arguably this is also full metal alchemist.
every generation feels this way. not sure why it needs the qualifier you attached. each generation has to have it's own ________. can't listen to the same music as the prior generation, as that's lame. can't use the same social platforms, because you're parents are on it. can't use the same lingo as that's not hip and gotta talk in ways they parental units won't understand
In the 2000s, you started seeing popular sci-fi books (then movies in 2010s) like The Hunger Games and Maze Runner that depict teenagers as the opposed class.
Personally I think the 2000 Japanese classic Battle Royale started it all.
The mid 2000s dystopia fest in young adult stuff is just follow the leader with Hunger Games. The oppression is used not for it's own sake, but because its an easy excuse for your teens to be more "mature" and more in control of their own lives. It's escapism for teens who think parents "just don't get us"
I think the difference now is that happy endings used to be the norm, whereas now they are not necessarily there, or the protagonists are pushed through such extreme losses that the win ends up looking pyrrhic.
This might simply be a function of the amount of productions - in the history of mankind, we've never seen so many new stories circulating so widely on so many different media. Smart authors want to look different and "real", so they might veer dark more liberally than they used (or rather were allowed, by public and editors) to.
The biblical stuff was added just because they thought it looked cool.
... but enough about Fritz Lang's Metropolis
(produced 1927)
Luke was supposed to be, I believe, 19 during A New Hope, which was a movie about young rebels throwing off the almost literal corpses running the Empire.
(Same as it ever was…)
There have been two Gundam series and two Gundam movies in the past year alone. Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Yamato and Macross have all had movies come out within the past two years. Just because they disappear within the flood of content doesn't mean that they don't exist.
> the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class.
That is so hyper-specific that it applies to a tiny handful of shows, at most elements of which are indicative of trends. It probably applies to one show this season. There's 157 other things coming out this season according to MyAnimeList.
Not that Gundam was ever all that optimistic: Good old Amuro was the poster boy for the disasters of war back in the very first series. The fact that there's cool robots is just sweetener for stories that are mostly about dealing with betrayal and despair. It's not quite Grave of the Fireflies, but it's not any less grim than, say, Evangelion.
> "It’s also a lot bleaker than it was in Matsumoto’s heyday." is also something that can't be corroborated. Ashita no Joe predates it and it got dark and was the first really big serious anime. Gundam would follow it soon afterwards and that starts out with galactic war. Ideon anyone?
Not that it's much better outside anime:
> Basically every parent is a manipulative monster.
Anakin Skywalker anyone?
I'm just happy that the original Mangaka behind Planetes has recently stated his intention that he's intending to return to sci-fi after finishing Vinland Saga. It might not necessarily be optimistic, but it'll be worth following.
The main change in anime is that there's more out there than there has ever been before. Yes, there's some things that are quite popular, like Attack on Titan, but they are just a drop in the ocean now. Even the "chart-topper" Chainsaw Man just disappeared. Not because it was bad but because there's so other anime... like Bocchi The Rock.
The same season Bocchi The Rock premiered, and it was an anime that made introverts feel represented like nothing before it. How Bocchi The Rock is supposed to be the portent of an apocalypse flummoxes me.
"It’s also a lot bleaker than it was in Matsumoto’s heyday." is also something that can't be corroborated. Ashita no Joe predates it and it got dark and was the first really big serious anime. Gundam would follow it soon afterwards and that starts out with galactic war. Ideon anyone?
Watamote hit me a lot harder than Bocchi did, but I guess it had the advantage of getting me in a more vulnerable time of my life.
Also, it's probably been about 20 years since I've watched it, so maybe my memory is failing me here, but isn't Matsumoto's own Galaxy Express 999 pretty bleak? The article mentions it a few times, but pretty much only in aesthetic terms. I seem to remember it being a barely-subtext running theme that traveling to a different place won't let you escape societal corruption, it will just change the particular flavor of it that you encounter.
Cultural poverty and ignorance are often dressed as elitism.
But I don't feel like it was a net win—even as only an infrequent pervayor of the animes, I loved the old nerd counter culture of the internet, "weebs", video game fans, and it got absolutely blown apart, decontextualized, dismantled. It's great that some mostly-shounen anime has achieved mainstream success outside of Japan, but it's such a small section of a rich medium. Even considering that most anime is pretty bad, what I love about it is how it's often eccentric and weird, pushing boundaries, stunningly shameless. The stuff I liked mostly didn't gain mainstream success at all, what really became mainstream was "shows like Dragon Ball Z." That's cool and everything, but people in that corner massively outnumber the old communities of nerd losers that I once occupied, leaving me yet again out of place.
Obviously I can either accept reality or die mad, so I try not to spend too much time dwelling on it anymore. But wow, what a monkey's paw seeing some of the things I liked going more mainstream has been. Be careful what you wish for.
I mean, it's stuff like DBZ and One Piece that has mainstream success in Japan, too. The weird stuff is/was relatively niche there too compared to the big names, it's just the total slice of the pie relative to the overall Japanese population was bigger.
But lots of the weird stuff that is questionable by mainstream Western standards has also gotten significantly larger here, too. I've been watching anime since the early 90s, and feel like I'm more or less used to it's weirdness, but Monogatari for example still has stuff that makes me uncomfortable - but it was quite popular in the west, far bigger than similarly strange stuff was when DBZ was airing.
What made Akira interesting to foreign audiences at the time wasn't exactly the thematic content - though it got critical praise - but the more adult subjects and violence. What you found in Western animation at the time was vastly weighted towards children's toy sales and Disney general-audiences content - there was nothing like the OVA boom. So Akira existed as "the anime with nukes, biker gangs and mutants", alongside Hokuto no Ken's "atomic wasteland where muscle men punch each other and their heads explode". And that was what defined imported anime throughout the 90's - if it wasn't violent, it was sexy. Or it was Ghibli. Interest in series like Evangelion took some time to catch up with that, as more of a fan culture arose and tastes became discerning.
[0] http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-remem...
its just the studios churning out procedurally generated cookie cutter nonsense, just like the rest of TV
Its not that deep
> “Attack on Titan,” one of the biggest hits of the twenty-tens, captures the hopelessness of a dying city circumscribed by walls, under constant siege from zombie-like giants; it won prestigious awards around the world
And thought, "yeah, it's fucking awesome."
It does seem that even though anime is more popular than ever, there is not so many modern anime classics.
Isn't "modern anime classics" a bit of a oxymoron? Things generally don't become classics until a while after. Lots of examples of things not really being in the mind of the mainstream until it long died.
At most only because there's so much more out there.
The general consensus is that Oshi no Ko is as good as any classic (and is by the same author as the already classic Kaguya-sama) and that only aired one episode a week ago so far. A new season of Demon Slayer started ten days ago and that's the manga with the most per-volume sales ever, surpassing even Dragon Ball. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm talking about things that happened within the past two weeks alone.
Are you comparing to 1995-2005 or are you comparing to the lifetime of anime from about 1970 onwards?
1) I'm not sure anime is all that popular anymore. For example, I see FAR less anime merch than I did back in the early 2000s. Cyberpunk:Edgerunners is one of the few recently that seemed to spawn merch.
2) It doesn't help that a cour is now 13 episodes, at best, by default. It's pretty hard to make a "classic" anime in just 13 episodes on a super tight deadline. You can see the drop in quality around 2005 right about when things are switching to 13 episodes. By the time you reach 2010, practically nothing that isn't promoting toys is longer than 13 episodes.
3) Up through about the mid-90s, anime was mostly meant to promote buying toys and the quality reflects this (really--take a look at the anime released from about 1980-1990).
4) There were never that many "classic" anime after you remove Studio Ghibli.
5) 1995-2005 just had a remarkable run of producing some stupidly good anime along with all the standard dreck. It was a combination of decent enough funding, decent enough technology, and a sudden market opening (US demand).
6) The Japanese anime business leaders were complete and total dolts for a very long time. After about 2005, they sold increasingly expensive box sets to their whales and that completely warped things. Consquently, you get increasing amounts of junk hyper-tailored to the anime faithful (See: Zero no Tsukaima getting 48 episodes(!)--actually, please don't see it, it's total garbage).
Just off the top of my head, since 2020-ish, things that'll almost definitely be remembered at least among enthusiasts:
Oddtaxi feels like Satoshi Kon reborn, maybe with some Yuasa on the side
Summertime Render is basically Higurashi x Shiki
Bocchi is powerfully in the tradition of Watamote/NHK
Eizouken fits right in with the other Yuasa shows
Kakushigoto is classic Kumeta and will be remembered alongside Joshiraku/SZS
Chihayafuru was already classic alt-sports, so S3 is more of the same
Dorohedoro was already a classic manga and the adaptation so far has been surprisingly soulful
Jahy and Machikazo Mazoku are up there in comedic SoL with YrYr/Yuyushiki/etc
Ousama Ranking is so thoroughly well-produced I have a hard time seeing it not being remembered
Akiba Maid War and Paripi Koumei were sufficiently novel to be inherently memorable
The fact that no matter how hard you work, or how good you are, you have to die or go to another world before you'll see anything you might want to do because there is nothing for you here.
Its sad that the world we've made for our younger generation is such an unlivable place for so many that this is seen as one of the only escapes.
Sure its not entirely our fault since the boomer generation is largely to blame for this, the cohort generally chose to enriching themselves over their kids, and maintained that through political pull for far longer than they should have largely as a result of better medical technology.
A lot of early Anime has sci-fi/post-apocalyptic vibes because Japan was essentially a post-apocalyptic society. Japan is the only nation to have nuclear weapons used against it. It was so devastating, the entire world decided to just not do that sort of thing again.
But the level of national trauma Japan faced must have been something else. It affected their creative output for decades. Kaiju movies are essentially a response to the event. And elements of nuclear desolation is present in a lot of Anime. Akira, Vampire Hunter D, the earlier works of Miyazaki.
It's a huge fucking cultural touchstone for at least a couple of generations of Japanese people.
But we're also about 80 years from the event. Things are different in Japan. People have been born, lived full lives, and died between the time the bombs fell and today. There likely are children of children of people who were born after the bombs.
Japan today does have a lot more in common with the world at large. Their contemporary cultural touchstones are much the same ones around the world. So it makes sense that their art would reflect this.
I find this homogenization of culture incredibly sad.
We are really similar in reality, both across the physical world and across time.