The Great Debate: Is Anime Cursed? (Patreon)

CW: Some really racist shit, various spoilers

Section 1: The meme, the legend

I should probably start this essay by greeting all my new subscribers. I see that nearly a thousand of you subscribed because of my BPD video discussing my personal experiences with mental illness and the effects of stigma and media representation. So today we’re talking about anime.

So I wanted to do a little video on Yu Gi Oh and cultural appropriation. I was considering using it as like, a fun, mostly harmless example of one culture using the aesthetics of another with some degree of insensitivity without it being as clear cut as like, white americans abusing the imagery of indigenous american religion. I thought it could be an interesting case study that way, and I thought I could use a Yu Gi Oh battle as a framing device, so I ordered some cards, and among the cards that arrived was… this one…

Like… Yup...

So now we’re going to have a little chat instead, about why anime is so fucking racist.

Let’s examine this idea: Anime is cursed.

There are several compounding factors here on what is essentially a popular internet meme. 

First off, creepy bullshit: as well as the racism, the casual misogyny, the use of bizarre homophobic stereotypes of queer coded effeminate men, and other tropes that hurt minoritised communities, there is a well recognised trend of the sexualisation of underage characters in anime. There are not insignificant genres of anime that are essentially defined by the use of hypersexualised young girls, for example the “shota” genre. There is also a defined term “loli” referring to a very young girl seen as a sexual object. It’s a thing anime fans have a word for. And this is only my first reason for why anime is cursed.

I want to avoid an accusation here that Japanese culture is inherently more biased towards bigoted bullshit and creepy media sexualising young girls, even if we acknowledge that there is a prevalence of those things, and that that prevalence will continue to normalised those things and result in more of it being made. However, it’s not like western media isn’t full of creepy or bigoted elements we would all rather do without, and it doesn’t do to talk like fetishisation of youth is unique to Japan, and not just a feature of hetero-patriarchy.

Not to mention, these genres of anime do have white western fanbases too. Quite passionate fans at that. A whole bunch of western fans expressed their fury after Funimation recently subtitled one of their properties and translated the word “lolicon” (a person who is attracted to underage characters in the show) to “pedophile”, clearly a horrible mistake based on biased Social Justice Warrior sources such as the dictionary and how words work.

Even beyond the sexualisation of specifically underage characters, there is a lot of hypersexualisation of women in anime, usually described with the term “fanservice”. Real talk I hate this term. I deeply dislike the implication that the fans of a show have these needs that must be serviced and I’d say people should be able to make their art without having to capitulate to horny weirdos, even if the horny weirdos weren’t just a tiny minority of the audience, to which you might say yes but including fanservice is a way of getting some viewers to come back and so the only situation in which someone could make art without needing to appeal to what the fans want and expect is if they never had to think about profits, to which I’d say Now you’re speaking my language comrade.

Next, right wing influence: for a long time, anime online has been co-opted by the absolute worst conceivable people. The use of anime imagery in memes and general posting trends has been a mainstay of parts of the internet like 4chan, the famous hive of far right “memeing", deliberate brutalising and desensitising practices, and straight up neo nazi bullshit. 4chan was actually started as an anime board originally, in fact. There is a good chance that if you are an outsider to anime generally, your main interaction with anime online was, for a time, seeing a meme of an uncomfortably sexualised very young looking girl saying something like “uwu the holocaust never happened don't believe the zionist lies".

It isn't still the case that anime fandom online is entirely dominated by white guys who love to debate one very specific free speech issue, but there is still a bias in the community that way, and nazis certainly never stopped gatekeeping anime as a pure, SJW free space, posting waifu memes and claiming that Japan is an ideal conservative ethnostate paradise.

Which brings us nicely onto the next compounding factor: japanese conservatism. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, currently in his fourth term as prime minister, is a right-wing nationalist, and Japan’s political history does include a long standing empire, an alliance with the Nazis in World War II, and horrifying war crimes. That alliance with the Nazis, by the way, feeds into the representation of Nazis in japanese period media which is a lot more friendly than we are used to in the west, which has to be a compounding factor on this meme because we can all agree that representing Nazis as okay people is inherently cursed as hell. 

The last factor to consider is that anime is somewhat of a pulp medium: There exists a mainstream in publishing and outside of that an enormous variety of relatively independent, pretty low-scrutiny works. In a situation where there is little scrutiny, there is simultaneously more room for experimentation and pushing the boundaries of the medium, and also room for… well, frankly, lots of awful garbage. As Dan Olson has pointed out, anime can be considered a pulp format, as can indie games and webcomics. This is exactly why, in my opinion, you can observe a lot of the same crowd shared between the audiences of video games, comics, and anime.

I think there's very little value in saying things like "Japanese media is usually bigoted" rather than saying this piece of media has these problems OR saying here are the ways bigotry creeps into media and causes problems

it's unhelpful and divisive to say Japanese media as if Japan is the problem and we're better than them.

It lets us off the hook.

If you were to make an observation that was along the lines of The problematic nature of American media centers around tacitly supporting modern white supremacy whereas the nature of British media propagates racism though historical revisionism around the empire and colonial history then I'd be like hell yeah! that's a useful comparison!

However, the other half of the sentence Japanese media is usually sexist is and western media is not. Worse than that, realistically the sentence is Japanese media is usually sexist and normal media is not.

Going back to my America/Britain comparison, one of the ways that Britain gets away with shit is by erasing colonial history and simultaneously pointing to America as the more racist example and I think it's a useless thing to say America is really racist without comparison, even if we'd all agree, and to be honest I think we would, that America is really racist.

Contact your representatives. They’re running concentration camps. For the love of god, contact your representatives.

We look at anime in this way from a western perspective, and honestly I find it a little hypocritical to point to the worst examples of anime when we, as a culture, produced Gotham.

It turns out you can't criticise it because it's a different culture is actually a very thin veil for things from other cultures are stupid and dumb and contain no artistic meaning and so I get to enjoy all the racism and homophobia and big tiddy I like as long as it’s from Japan.

So I guess… I have to make an argument for why anime should be taken seriously in order to look at this problem... To persuade you that there’s a problem I’m first going to have to actually persuade you that anime is good?

I've decided the best approach I have is to tell you about some animes I found that I really like.

Section 2: some animes I found that I really like

I knew I needed to make this video so for the last couple of months I’ve been watching a lot of anime. I've already got some hot takes I'm bursting to share, so I guess that means we're going to have more videos about anime on here from now on. Well, it's okay, that happens. You can never know for sure what your channel is going to look like in the future.

I also think it’s a good idea to explicitly examine my perspective as an outsider to anime because that's what I am. I watched anime when I was younger and some bits and pieces here and there but I've never been hardcore into it, partly due to some of the ideas I'm discussing here - the impression that anime is cursed. I have friends who stopped watching anime altogether because it was so full of weird bigoted bullshit, and when I was a very casual viewer I would check out a show now and then that everybody was talking about, like One Punch Man, and be going along enjoying it well enough and then suddenly there would be a black character - the only one in the show - who has thick pink lips and bulging eyes and only ever appears to remind everyone how dim witted he is, and then a gay character who is essentially just one long prison rape joke. And then… I would stop watching anime for a few months.

It's important to acknowledge this outsider perspective because as much as I think the perspective is created by the Anime Is Cursed meme, I think the perspective also creates it. If the medium you were trying to break into was western film and TV instead and you tried watching Game of Thrones or the Transformers films there is a wealth of misogyny, racism creepy bullshit and what we could pretty easily call fanservice that might drive you to firstly stop watching, and secondly draw exactly the same conclusion, western TV and film is cursed.

Frankly, I actually got my first new console in years only a little while before starting my channel. I wasn't much of a gamer for a long time because I didn't have time or money… and then I conveniently neglected to mention that for a while because there's a pretty unpleasant attitude towards Fake Gamers and Casuals.

I don't mind coming into a medium as a relative outsider because I'm confident that there will be a lot of engaging fun stuff to encounter. What I do mind is when the people who call themselves the real fans of that medium virulently deny that their medium is actual art.

So let's look at some anime I encountered in the last couple of months and what I liked about them.

Neon Genesis: Evangelion is a pretty seminal piece, and as you watch anime that was created after Eva you will see its influence everywhere. It's about a teenager called Shinji who gets a job at his dad's compa--uhhhh is expected to pilot an enormous biomechanical fighter robot called an Evangelion or Eva. Shinji has to do it because apparently only he can sync with the Eva and also because his dad says so and he runs the compan-- uhhh government organisation.

There's a meme around the show which is basically to joke about Shinji refusing to pilot the Eva. What's odd about this meme is that Shinji basically never actually refuses, he just complains and puts up resistance to it and generally clearly doesn't want to, and furthermore, every time he pilots the Eva things go really badly. Arguably not as badly as if he hadn't, but never well.

But what's really odd about this meme is that is actually plays directly into the central conflict of the show. The driving conflict isn't humanity vs big space monsters, it's simply whether Shinji will or will not pilot the Eva.

And that's because the show is about depression.

Well, it's about other things too, but let's take a second here to look at the basic conceit of this story: the government has the resources to make 100ft mechanical monstrosities and huge laser guns and all sorts of things and decides to put the responsibility of saving the entire world using the most expensive weapons ever created by science on the shoulders of several 14 year olds. That might be like, a metaphor or something.

The show is all about the conflict around Shinji being expected to take on this incredible responsibility, to pilot this big body and do incredible things.

The Evas themselves can be seen as metaphors for the expectations of society, the weight of living up to your parents’ legacy, the day-to-day ability or inability of a depressed person to just get up and face the day, and more.

There is also, in case you don't know, a pretty incredible story about the creator of the show Hideaki Anno, and his response to the poor response from fans who didn't care about the subtext or thematic meaning of the show. So the story goes, Anno created the followup film as a deliberate revenge on the fans, going as far as including actual hatemail from fans in the movie and essentially ending the film with an alternate ending where instead of growing up and overcoming his depression, Shinji never progresses, never becomes whole. Incidentally, this is the one instance in which Shinji actually refuses to pilot the Eva and when he does, the world ends and he winds up trapped in a cold uncaring world unable to affect any change at all.

If you want the full details and some discussion of the validity of this story Dan Olson has an excellent video on this, but for my money this story, true or untrue, brings out something fantastic about the meme, Shinji refusing to pilot the Eva. 

Our memory of Shinji, collectively, is such that to call someone Shinji would be an insult. He is a half-formed person, his abusive environment has left him unprepared and incapable, he hates himself and everyone around him…. Until he grows beyond that… which he does in the show, but not the movie. The fans who hated the ending of the show are Shinji not just in the sense that Shinji is an audience insert but in the sense that if Shinji refuses to pilot the Eva, and doesn't grow and learn to take responsibility, he becomes this person trapped in a ruined world unable to do anything but hate himself and everyone else. Mocking Shinji for not piloting the Eva, even though he does, paints a picture of a person who never grew and learned to understand the struggles of others.

In short, if you liked the themes of responsibility and expectations in Spider-Man Homecoming but wanted a deeper dive into those feelings, there's a solid chance you'd really enjoy Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Devilman Crybaby is a bold show. That's the best way to start in describing it. The animation style is at once consistent and continually novel, the characters are deep and intriguing and thoroughly human and believable and the story doesn't flinch in going to places that others wouldn't.

It also needs to be said, this show is a wild ride. As the series unfolds you find yourself deeply invested in these characters and you really hope nothing bad will happen to them and then lots of bad things happen to everyone and then, in the final act you realise… it was about fascism.

Okay wait wait wait don't go away, I know this is coming from me, but this is actually what the show is about, and I don't just mean because an explicitly authoritarian regime rises to power in the final episodes of the show. Fascism isn't something that just happens in Devilman Crybaby, it's what the show is about. The story is a careful study of the way that the toxic elements of human socialization creep into our beliefs, our relationships, our politics and become fascism.

The final line of the show, a moment where a character who has been cold and unfeeling finally expresses grief and distress, reframes the whole story retrospectively as a beautifully apt metaphor for the way that fascism measures every person against a perfect ideal and closes in in a tightening circle, eliminating everyone wrong and bad until there is nobody left.

I shouldn’t go by without noting that the end of Devilman is also incredibly clearly influenced by The End of Evangelion, the film released by Hideaki Anno after the series of Evangelion concluded.

Mob Psycho 100 is… poorly named. It's about a boy who you can very plainly read as being autistic, called Mob, who also has psychic powers, and he's always on a percent scale 0-100 towards an emotional outburst where his psychic powers reach new levels. I'm very sure given the context that Mob’s psyche 100 was closer to the intended wordplay, but as it is we've just got to go along with this anime about a precious and gentle boy having a title that suggests the show is about gang violence instead…

Mob works for Reigen Arataka, a fraud psychic with no actual powers who tells Mob that he is a very powerful psychic in order to get him to do real actual exorcisms as Reigen’s “apprentice". Reigen isn't just exploiting Mob though, he's also taking care of him and looking out for him out of sincere concern because he knows Mob is sometimes confused by the world around him and needs a lot of guidance.

There is a fairly common pattern in animated shows where antagonists who are sympathetic and then get defeated slowly adjust to the side of the good guys, but Mob explicitly ends as many conflicts as possible by befriending people. In season 1 he resolves the season-arc-conflict by trusting an adult and not giving in to expectations that he, a child, has to handle everything, and in season 2 he defeats the big bad by explaining that friendship is good and it’s a good thing to have people around you who mutually trust and support you.

I have a hot take here; if you like the show Better Call Saul there is a 100% chance you will also enjoy Mob Psycho 100, and not just because Reigen Arataka and Jimmy McGill are the same character (which they are) but because both shows center around characters in a dog eat dog world who have hearts of gold, and just want to help people.

Mob Psycho 100 became easily my favourite anime, and is contesting the spot for my favourite show of any kind. It’s about a gentle and sweet boy who doesn’t want to fight anyone and just wants to help, and has trouble keeping all his big feelings inside. Mob is very plainly autistic, and as I pointed out in my last essay, the stereotypical portrayal of autistic people is as cold emotionless robots, whereas Mob’s constant struggle is to rein in his emotions and learn to deal with them. The show also paints him as sweet and curious, and because of this Mob Psycho 100 is powerfully uplifting to watch.

What more could you want? If your answer was for the show to be deeply beautiful then you’re in luck because it’s also one of the best drawn animes I’ve ever seen. The show plays with different styles in a way that really elevates the animated format in my opinion - it’s normal in anime to sometimes mess around with the levels of detail on a face or body when illustrating different emotions, but Mob Psycho 100 uses entirely different art styles and levels of construction for this effect, sometimes using fully painted shots, sometimes using photo-graphics, sometimes reducing the drawing down to only pencil, and occasionally mixing the styles within shots while somehow maintaining one cohesive aesthetic. 

So what can we learn looking at these examples? Well, firstly that my favourite genre of anime is clearly screaming crying boy anime. Secondly, these are all pieces of art with fantastic portrayals of the human condition, and mature themes not in the sense of being an edgyboi and showing big tiddy sometimes, but in the sense of asking questions that might make you uncomfortable, or presenting ideas about the way the world is that they unflinchingly stand by.

But here’s the thing: I can’t just list anime pieces, it isn’t a sensible way to tackle this discussion, or I’d have to individually weigh and judge every anime in existence. So let’s talk about some high level important ideas instead.

Section 3: Rambling bullshit about art

I think it’s worth taking a second to consider the dimensions of media. What I mean by that is the different elements that make up a medium, for example in video the visual and audial elements, as well as what designers call affordances - the relationship between the properties of a product and the abilities of the user or consumer of the product. For example, books have words and we can read, therefore books afford being read, but something that differentiates books from blogs is that books have pages and we can turn pages, therefore printed books as opposed to digital media afford having their pages turned.

Let’s take a look at two different media executing almost exactly the same concept. In the famous ending of the prestige drama The Sopranos, Tony Soprano is dining with his family and then the show cuts sharply to black, leaving a possible interpretation that Tony has died. In Saga Volume 7, the final pages directly following a death are entirely black save for the words “...and then…” on the first page. Six A4 pages of total pitch blackness.

When you are watching The Sopranos, the TV show has audio and visuals and you have eyes and ears, and so the show affords watching, and watching is such a different act to turning pages that the experience, executing this near identical concept, is something else entirely. When The Sopranos cut to black, many people reported thinking their TV had broken. When you read the end of Saga Volume 7, you know from that first of six pages - “...and then…” - that this is all there is going to be. Blackness. However, you have to make the choice to keep turning the page to show the rest of those empty pages to yourself.

I wanted to consider the dimensions of a medium to point out that essentially this is all a medium is. There can be implicit biases in a medium, for example in terms of accessibility for disabled people - this is an ongoing discourse around video games - but animation as a medium doesn’t have implicit political or cultural biases. 

What a piece can do within a medium, regarding that medium, is push the boundaries between media, or play with that medium’s dimensions. When Charlie Brooker released a choose-your-own-adventure episode of Black Mirror with a story centering around video games, there was a discussion around whether the episode was, itself, a video game (for my money, yes, it is). When Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy released a novel featuring many of his own illustrations for scenes, my teenage mind suffered a small crisis over the true differences between a comic book and an illustrated novel. When, in the later episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gainax had to cut funding, the animators reused a lot of content and even stripped back the animation to simpler styles, matching the stripped back animation with the themes of the reduction of the ego and loss of the sense of self, which worked incredibly well.

There is a media aspect to anime that needs considering, and there is also a cultural one.

Anime, of course, is the subset of the animated media specifically relating to Japan. Therefore Japanese culture and anime will always play off each other and influence one another, so I think we should look at a little more about the comparison between Japanese and western culture in the way I was discussing earlier.

The comparison between western media and anime is fairly clear to see through the Netflix adaptation of Death Note, an anime series about a high-achieving student with a strict moral compass who is granted the ability to kill people simply by writing their name in a book while picturing their face. In the Netflix version, Light Yagami the high-achieving student who is successful at everything and a flawless god-child becomes Light Turner, the low-achieving loner loser kid who everyone hates and who hates everyone right back. In his introductory sequence he sees a bully picking on a girl and steps in, citing the fact that he is a minor as a logical proof that the bully can’t hit him or he’ll go on a list. The bully, of course, just hits him anyway. The psychology of this character is pretty interesting because he believes in an absolute system of morality, just like Light Yagami does, but he can also see that the system he believes in isn’t being upheld. And then he is granted the power to kill anyone he wants. What might this story, surrounding an American high school student, have to say about loner loser kids who suddenly gain the power to kill anyone they want?

And at the end of the story L the genius detective deviates from the version of L in the anime in one crucial way: he finds a page of the death note and he’s very clearly going to write Light’s name in it. This character who seemed to be just as dedicated to bringing killers to justice as he was in the anime, now has access to the same weapon as the killer and is probably going to use it to enact vengeance and enforce the system of morals that he believes in. What does this tell us about the access to highly effective lethal weapons in American society?
The thing about this adaptation is that while it doesn’t really stay true to the source material very much it doesn’t seemingly aim to do that. It’s a cultural translation, rewriting the story to make it work better as an American version of the same core concepts.

So that’s why the Netflix adaptation is good actually! Okay, fine you don’t have to like it, but if you understand what they were actually trying to do maybe you’ll look at it a bit more kindly. Also, Lakeith Stanfield is in there and he’s fantastic in everything so if you talk shit about live-action L I’m just deleting your comment.

The live action adaptation is essentially a cultural translation, but the fact that a live action adaptation is considered a necessary thing at all is itself a cultural translation, and reflects the attitude that animated media is inherently less artistically valid and should be for children that we have in the west.

Lots of anime has been shown to children in America and Europe because it was only considered marketable to children. In many cases anime has been re-edited or censored to make it appropriate for a younger audience than it was originally made for, and this is because our assumption culturally is that animated media is silly, and unimportant, and just for kids, which I have to feel is part of why anime is seen as beyond criticism and serious analysis.

Which brings us, in a way that you’ll have to bear with me for, to How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. This book is a close examination of the ways in which Donald Duck and other Disney comic strips spread pro-American, pro-capitalist propaganda to the rest of the world, and most specifically South America, which was, at the time of writing experiencing various struggles between capitalist and socialist movements.

The early critics of the book took this exact stance: you can’t criticise Disney, it’s for children. If you’re criticising Disney you just hate joy. 

From the book’s “INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO EXPEL SOMEONE FROM THE DISNEYLAND CLUB”:

“The authors of this book are to be defined as follows: indecent and immoral (while Disney’s world is pure); hyper-complicated and hyper-sophisticated (while Walt is simple, open and sincere); members of a sinister elite (while Disney is the most popular man in the world); political agitators (while Disney is non-partisan, above politics); calculating and embittered (while Walt D. is spontaneous, emotional, loves to laugh and make laughter); subverters of youth and domestic peace (while W.D. teaches respect for parents, love of one’s fellows, and protection of the weak); unpatriotic and antagonistic to the national spirit (while Mr. Disney, being international, represents the best and dearest of our native traditions); and finally, cultivators of “Marxism-fiction,” a theory imported abroad by “wicked foreigners” (while Unca Walt is against exploitation and promotes the classless society of the future).”

This passage fits spookily well onto the defenders of anime from serious media analysis (and for that matter GamerGate). But anime isn’t literally propaganda by an imperialist regime, whereas Goofy is and I will destroy him if it takes my last breath. Gawrsh!

Wait, where was I going with all this?

Section 4: Where I was going with all that

“One” is the pseudonym of the manga artist behind both One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100. They were originally created by the same person, and where I was put off watching One Punch Man altogether by the bigoted bullshit, Mob Psycho nearly escapes without it, except that again, there is one side character who is just drawn as a minstrel-style blackface cartoon. I really don’t know what to say about this, besides hey man please stop.

It seems really bizarre that a story so focused on empathy and compassion and understanding people would contain this, and it seems even weirder considering that these two stories come from the same person and they’re both clever and careful explorations of mental health - One Punch Man is about the futility and boredom of exceeding at a job you’re overqualified for. The protagonist is a superhero who can defeat any opponent in one punch.

The best reason I can see for why this would be this way is the normalisation of bigotry through tropes. Japan is among the most homogeneous societies in the world, and with that comes the possibility - likelihood even - that many artists will have had more exposure to racist cartoons of black people than actual black people in real life.

Besides, there are tropes that exist in Japanese media that we wouldn’t necessarily immediately recognise as normal, and therefore would stick out to us as odd, while tropes in media that we are used to would easily fly right over our heads because we don’t see anything unusual about them.

For example in anime, Screaming Boy is a recognisable trope. That’s not a thing in western media, or where it is, it’s isolated instances instead of a repeated and copied element. That’s a pretty harmless example, but some of the tropes that probably stand out a lot more to first-time viewers, contributing to the idea that anime is thoroughly cursed are: inappropriate touching or groping of female characters as a funny-awkward moment; Men dressing as women and the whole joke is that the man is dressed as a woman; and as I’ve been pointing out, absolutely horrific drawings of black people, usually paired with stereotypical behaviour such as stupidity or laziness.

These stereotypes and forms of bigotry are fairly cross-cultural, so yeah, the blackface cartoons realistically probably originated with Jim Crow era racist cartoons from America, and men dressing as women for a joke is a fairly common thing here too, with no consideration for how this spreads really toxic ideas about gender.

There is an instance of this trope in Mob Psycho, and also in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, so let’s look at them for a second. In Mob Psycho, Reigen dresses as a woman in order to get into a private girl’s school to meet a client. In Jojo, Jojo dresses as a woman in order to get past military guards. In both cases the setup is the same - a character disguises themselves to gain entry to somewhere.

In Mob Psycho, Reigen is rejected by the guard who calls him a disgusting pervert, and it’s later on the news much to Reigen’s chagrin. In Jojo however, the guards see through Jojo’s disguise and call him out, but Jojo is genuinely insulted that they saw through his disguise because he wanted them to think he was beautiful as a lady. This version of events is a subversion of the trope, genuinely funny and quite endearing to the character. And then he knocks them out with magic coconuts.

The point is, there are tropes, but the fact that those things are tropes doesn’t excuse them from being bad writing. There are examples where people write something that falls in line with recogniseable trope and it’s still enjoyable and good writing, and doesn’t hurt anyone.

But look, why do I want to talk about problematic elements in media I like? If I like Mob Psycho so much that I just put up with the shitty parts, why even bother talking about it right? Why do we do SJW woke-policing? What do we as media analysts hope to gain from pointing out when things are problematic? 

Well, the simple and obvious answer is that bigotry in media hurts people and makes life genuinely harder for them, but I suspect there are going to be charming individuals in my comments section who won’t fall for such subjective nonsense so try this one:

Racism is poor writing. Any kind of stereotyping, any writing that lazily relies on a trope instead of building believable characters who feel rounded and real is bad writing, and we are more than valid in calling it out from a media standpoint alone.

So guess what: Anime isn’t going to be SJW free any more! I’m coming and I’m taking away your waifus and your weird racist bullshit! By which I mean no, anime is not cursed, as long as we’re all on the same page about all the terrible racist garbage, it’s okay to enjoy anime. But if you’re not on the same page about all the racist garbage...