Well I thought I could add my grain of salt here :P
The problem I have with the japanime today isn't really the product themselves but the fanbase they target. On one hand you'll have the so-called elitists saying "otakus are shit blablabla, anime was a mistake blablabla" and on the other, these so-called otakus saying stuff like "I love Japan blablabla, I'm an otaku and proud of it ! blablabla". What's interesting to note is that for the "elistis" part, when it comes to anime like Gundam wich is a great serie but has obvisouly a lot of fan service with it, it's less likely that they would recognize it, in fact they would just be hypocrites. Talking about hypocrisy, in the "otaku sphere of influence", a fancy word to describe the otaku fanbase, there seems to be less and less difference between the otaku, the guy who has interior hobbies, and the weaboo, the guy who basically has no life outside of manga and animes, you can see that when it comes of japanime itself, due to the fact that most of the fanbase, generally speaking is young, they've never heard of the old school generation of animes and the worst part is that a lot of the time they won't bother trying to watch them for the sake of culture and education (Tezuka, Oshii, Matsumoto, etc...), I've even seen some people who would just reject the existence of old school animes out of pure ignorance. When it comes to japanese culture in a much larger sense and Japan in general, they have a very biased opinion due to marketing around mainstream animes and a continuation of clichés around Japan, at some point you could even talk of indoctrination. what I mean by "indoctrination" is that because the "eltitist" part of the community will have a more aggressive attitude towards the "otakus", those so-called otakus would adopt a more radical position and respond on the defensive, this would be feeded by the industry on a regular basis bringing more and more generic animes that are specifically targeting a niche hearing (Yaoi, Yuri, Nekketsu) wich would definitely watch them. In fact, we went from an authentic form of art, and even here I know this expression is very ambigous as Gundam existed since the mid 1980s, to a more consumer oriented market, in other words, we do not watch animes but rather consume them. Finally, in Japan the word otaku derived from a literal translation (interior hobby) to an insult, but the worst part of it I think is that in the western world, we like to manipulate the figurate meaning of the word into a more positive sense at first with the objective of giving a more positive perspective of the otaku but in reality it still fails to do that as it amplify more and more their radicalism. |