It’s possible to hate anime: here are five reasons not to watch anime in this upbeat installment of our Anime Breakfast column
Anime is part of any television schedule and/or streaming platform. They are of unrivaled interest to fans, and the myriad episodes are often voraciously followed by large numbers of spectators. Yet there is someone (like myself) who probably he has never seen even one episode complete with a series. Hence the thesis: anime is trash. And the reasons for not seeing anime are many when you think about it: here we will list five of them, let us know (politely, please) if you agree, even partially, or if there are others you would like to suggest.
What is anime? A commercial entertainment product, a mass cultural phenomenon, a technological art form, certainly an animated program. The word anime itself comes from the transliteration of the lemma “animation” in the Japanese language, and indeed it is it is precisely in the land of the rising sun that anime have found their fertile ground, despite now having a global success. The greater diffusion of Japanese cartoons in Italy begins dto the 80s through the Mediaset channels, with Grendizer, Mazinger Z, Ken the Warrior and then Dragon Ball, Naruto, Yu-gi-oh!. Contrary to popular belief, many anime deal with mature themes that only an adult can understand, yet… Let’s see what are the reasons for not seeing anime.
5. The representation of the characters | Anime Breakfast: five reasons not to watch anime
We are in 2023, yet the depiction of anime seems to have stood still for fifty years, particularly when it comes to drawing men and women. The women are all attractive and sensual, too much. Exaggeration is always at home and the waistline of the girls is practically non-existent, compared to breasts and buttocks with their own gravitational field. The clothes, needless to say, skimpy and sexualization practically a constant. Men, on the other hand, have perfect and muscular physiquesaccompanied by a twelve-year-old brain.
The relationship between good and evil? Also represented in a striking way. Dark villains and almost angelic good guys. Ultimately all the characters look created with the stencil and the stories are naturally negatively affected. In short, a little more imagination would not hurt.
4. Non-existent plots and endless stories | Anime Breakfast: five reasons not to watch anime
It is not uncommon for there to be souls of a thousand or more episodes. What does this mean? That the story evolves over many years with gripping and tightly packed plots and subplots? Absolutely not. The stories are always the same, the plots never seem to move forward, sometimes a single episode seems to start and finish without progressing in any way. The premise of an anime series, sometimes even interesting, stagnates in the endless turns of the protagonists who get lost in improbable adventures and misadventures.
It is true that a good part of the series has a fixed duration, being very long manga adaptations. A characteristic of anime series is that they usually have a continuous storyline that winds through the different episodes and ends with the end of the story. unlike western animated productions which typically have an episodic format in which each episode tells a self-contained story. When does the end come? Sometimes never.
3. Subliminal Messages Everywhere | Anime Breakfast: five reasons not to watch anime
We have already anticipated it and we can reiterate it: explicit sexual messages are found in almost all Japanese cartoons. In large part this happens through the exasperated exploitation of the woman as an object of male desire which must be in line with the more or less perverse dreams of young (and unfortunately not only) Japanese people.
Example the classic helpless girl who attends high school, shy and dodgy but who gives herself to the first man who knows how to conquer her. Why all this importance to sex even in cartoons? We said it in the introduction, the anime target is not exactly childish…
2. Quantity always comes first | Anime Breakfast: five reasons not to watch anime
A thousand episodes for one series? No problem producing them even in a very short time. This inevitably means a very low attention to quality. Not in the drawings, mind you, but in the stories. On the other hand, anime are mere products of an industry that aims to make money in every wayabove all by creating countless products with infinite development. About 90% of the episodes of the endless series are mere fillers that add nothing to the plot or the characters.
By transforming an icon or a unique object into a mass-produced product, it is inevitable that quality will be lost and that everything will become consumer goods. Quantity is separate from quantity, and indeed they are two roads that go in opposite directions. This is inevitably one of the reasons not to watch anime.
1. Zero originality | Anime Breakfast: five reasons not to watch anime
Let’s try to summarize the plot of Dragon Ball, One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Naruto, Fairytail, Sampei, Pokemon, Digimon, Beyblade, Kill la Kill, Detective Conan, Bleach, Sailor Moon, Mermaid Melody, whoever has more put more. The likeable but also incredibly strong protagonist must defeat the evil in stages, from the henchmen, to the bosses up to the final boss making a path of growth and training together with his travel companions never really changing as everything will stay the same in the end.
Infinite laps to get nowhere but above all always the same laps. And we are not even analyzing the Darwinian overflows behind the Pokemon or ai Digimon. Plagi continued and noia, noia, noia…
Conclusions
If you have come this far without writing insults in the comments, you deserve all our respect. What do you think of Japanese cartoons? Let us know in the comments!
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