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Problems with Anime

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Anime, the distinctively Japanese variety of animation. I don't really like it, and I have quite a few problems with it. But this wasn't always the case: I used to love the anime culture, the cutesy saccharine drawings of anime girls all over Photobucket and Flickr and Deviantart that I collected religiously, the cheesy J-pop stylings of one Hatsune Miku, the total anarchy that was a regular part of Nico Nico Douga's most prominent memes. I was even a part of my college's anime club, where I found solidarity with some other resident geeks. But eventually, I stopped liking it. For one thing, the club members stopped watching anime and just played Yu-Gi-Oh, and something changed with my personality as well. And it started around the time I started watching Strike Witches, an anime about teenage girls during the World War II era who fight aliens with guns and magic and have propeller legs, and also they don't wear pants. I don't know what I was thinking either.

I first heard of this anime from a favorable review from Otaku USA, a magazine I once read all the time, when I would go to Barnes and Noble to read the magazines. So I found this anime on the Funimation website and started watching.

My reaction to the first episode was something like this:

"That was awesome! It had guns and magic and ALIENS! That is so cool!"

Then came episode 2:

"Okay, more fighting, but I'm starting to wonder why they don't wear pants. Couldn't they just wear tights or short shorts or something? Also, why is this taking place in the WWII era? This has nothing to do with WWII. Also, why is Japan called Fuso, France called Gallia, etc? Yes, the Gauls were some of the earlier inhabitants of France, but this isn't explained. Also, why do they have this magic and technology during WWII in a world map that seems to be near identical to ours? Also, why do they grow animal ears and tails when they use magic?"

Then came episode 3:

"I sure wish more was explained about the aliens. Why are they attacking the world anyway? Also, I checked Wikipedia, and apparently, theystrike witches grow animal ears because they're channeling animal spirits called Familiars. Why are they called Familiars? Who knows. Why should I care? I'm not enjoying myself anyway. Despite the action and fanservice, it's getting very boring."

Finally, episode 4:

"I give up. Why am I sitting through this just to get an explanation? It's not fun to watch. Screw it. I'm watching Futurama."

This is what I like to call "The four episode test." If I can watch an anime for more than four episodes, I'll probably like it and watch more if not the entire series. Some anime that didn't pass this test are Chobits, Elfen Lied, and Hellsing. Somehow, Bleach and Yu Yu Hakusho passed this test, but I stopped watching Bleach after episode 30 because the fight scenes dragged on forever, and I stopped Yu Yu Hakusho after episode 9 because Funimation took down all the episodes of it on the fansub site I was using, and I didn't bother to find it again.

So what anime do I like? Off the top of my head, I can name these: Panty and Stocking with Garter Belt, Sayonara Zetsubo-Sensei, FLCL, Paranoia Agent, Azumanga Daioh, Crayon Shin Chan, Afro Samurai, Urusei Yatsua, Trigun, and Gunsmith Cats. I might be missing some, but that is pretty much it in terms of series that I like. In terms of movies, I like Akira, every Miyazaki film except for Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, Paprika (which is my favorite so far), and Memories. That's all I can think of right now, though there are some anime movies I would like to see, such as 5 cm Per Second, Steamboy, Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and at least some stuff by Studio 4 degrees Celsius besides Memories.

But the point is that I have found few anime that continues to keep my interest mainly because I find most of it quite boring. At first, I thought I only liked anime with lots of violence or cute girls, but I found out what it is after watching some episodes of an American serial show, The Wire. The Wire is a serial show originally broadcast on HBO, but I watched it via Netflix. The story, at least for the first season, is about a group of police officers in Baltimore pursuing a drug kingpin and his protectors. In the very beginning, the cops were portrayed as righteous and the criminals as scum of the earth. But then, we see a level of humanity in the criminals, especially one scene where Wee-Bay, one of the gang members, teaches his friends how to play chess by comparing it to a drug dealing operation, using a lot of gangsta slang. It's somehow both funny and touching. I loved the first episode so much that I watched all of the other episodes on the disc one after another, for a few hours.

The Wire does have some violence and scenes in strip clubs, but those are just secondary to the plot and character development. The point I'm trying to make is that the reason I didn't like the anime I watched was not because I wanted more violence and sex. Rather it was that I thought the anime was badly written, and that the characters were bland or just one dimensional. The problem is especially in the characters.

A lot of the characters I have found in anime fall into some sort of cliché character archetype. Some include the Trap, the big-breasted innocent moe girl, the psychotic lesbian, the pervert, the lovable loser, and that's just the main characters of Baka to Test to Shokangaku. I guess I could also include the ever-so-popular spiky-haired angst-ridden teenage boy, the bishonen or Bishie, and of course, the one-dimensional badass of near Gary-Stu proportions. I do wonder why I find so few 3-dimensional characters in anime.

The best example I can think of when it comes to 3-dimensional characters in anime is Haruhara Haruko from FLCL. She's neither cutsey like a moe girl or harsh like an ice queen. She acts in a highly sexual manner a lot of the time, such as in episode 5 where she dresses up as a Playboy bunny and rides on her Rickenbacker bass guitar to defeat a giant robot, but she's not really drawn sexually in the way that other female anime characters are. She most certainly doesn't look moe, and to me, that's a plus. She's sort of a villain, sort of a hero, I can't really tell which. She's a bit of both. And she's quite crazy and eccentric,  like I said before, very anti-moe. Personally, I would like to see more female anime characters like Haruko, since those kinds of characters are very few and far between from what I've seen.

        So this brings me to one of things I dislike the most about anime, moe. I used to be a fan. I used to collect photos of cute moe anime girls. But I just stopped liking the moe aesthetic. I think it's kind of creepy. For instance, the girls in Lucky Star are supposed to be in upper high school, but they look like they're in elementary school. I'm creeped out by that, and I wonder what was going through the director's and animators' minds. I'm creeped out by the combination of infantilism and sexuality that is apparent in moe. That's why I praise Miyazaki for creating female characters that are basically anti-moe. To quote Miyazaki in an interview in the November 1988 issue of Animage:

"It's difficult. They immediately become the subjects of lolicon fetishism. In a sense, if we want to depict someone who is affirmative to us, we have no choice but to make them as lovely as possible. But now, there are too many people who shamelessly depict (such heroines) as if they just want (such girls) as pets, and things are escalating more and more."


        I don't know much about the anime from 1988 or earlier, but I can say that the moe aesthetic is very prominent in anime today, at least from what I've seen. And that's about it. Those are the primary problems I have with most anime. If you've felt I missed one, please tell me, leave a comment telling me what you thought, etc. I'll see you all whenever.
I have quite a few problems with this type of animation.
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Mega-hax's avatar
Funny you mention, the guys in Strike witches look more realistic than the so-called "fighter girls". They even gave Erwin Rommel a cameo, not even close to the style of the girls in the anime, LOOL.