Not understanding the anime VS Reading too much into the anime.

SilverDio said:
The biggest anime problem is not enjoying a hobby and just watch series to complain and cry about it.

SilverDio said:
The biggest anime problem is not enjoying a hobby and just watch series to complain and cry about it.

flannan said:
Reading too much into anime while not understanding it.
SAO isn't something you need to write an academic work about. It's exactly what it seems.
Yet people fail to see basic battle anime tropes applied to MMO environment, and complain about MC's overpoweredness when he does ordinary battle protagonist stuff, like continuing to fight after receiving wounds what would have killed 10 lesser men.

merryfistmas said:
The problem is that the world has pre-established rules the MC consistently breaks, seemingly for the purpose of emphasizing how strong he is, but what's the point of those rules if the show doesn't follow them? It's setting is opposed to the tropes it is attempting to apply, which destroys any tension. In another battle shonen, a nakama power up or similar trope might give the MC a short burst of strength or perhaps more when they sacrifice something for it like when Gon goes super saiyan, or their might be a loop hole or different way of thinking about the rules. Battle shonen are as much about puzzle solving as they are about cool fights, and SAO has neither of those, it's blatant rule breaking. "It's not meant to have an academic work written about it" is a poor defense when many other shows that aren't "meant" to have academic works written about them handle these tropes so much better.

BRB-kun said:
The newfags who complain that not every anime is like SAO, SnK, OPman, F/Z and the like. This decade has been getting them yearly for the poll question.

alinet86 said:

Ermmm... It's not that complicated actually. We're talking about the misunderstanding of the simple one. Like blaming ecchi anime for excessive amount of fanservices etc... Well there's the harder part like you said but let save it for another discussion. :)

alinet86 said:
Not enjoying a hobby and just watch series to complain and cry about it.
- As it is. ^^
- Credits to SilverDio for this.

BRB-kun said:
The newfags who complain that not every anime is like SAO, SnK, OPman, F/Z and the like. This decade has been getting them yearly for the poll question.

Jonouchi-Katsuya said:
:/ Well, I say you can have both a good plot and good fanservice.

Jonouchi-Katsuya said:
In otherwords, skip the tripping and accidental perverts (shinji but this was kinda redeemed by Rei's reaction). I kinda like... real perverts in my ecchi, harem, fanservice anime.

Yudina said:
The most common issue I think is when people expend all their effort on things that don't have much to say, and are bored by things that have a lot to say.

alinet86 said:
The title say it all. Unless you didn't quite get it, here's a brief of it >>>

Not understanding the anime.
- Examp. ecchi anime and people would go stupid with their ridiculous comment on the fanservices. It's an ecchi anime what would you expect. Of course there's tons of fanservice.

Reading too much into the anime.
- Gag anime and expecting a serious storyline. Hmmm... If there's that kind of idiot. Oh wait... that is who I am. Joke on me I guess. XD

TheBrainintheJar said:
I'd take 'not understanding', or more correctly 'not trying to understand'.

Someone who reads too much at least tries to analyze. They may be misguided, but their brains are working. They construct arguments you can respond to.

People who don't try to understand and write off anime as 'just ecchi' or 'just edgy' don't leave room for discussion.

merryfistmas said:
Pretty much, you can't talk to those people, they have nothing interesting to say, and often come up with silly rhetoric like "you're watching the show the wrong way". Bitch, I'll watch your favorite show however I damn well please.

ashfrliebert said:

Isn't reading too much into an anime the same thing as not understanding it? What's the difference between complaining about ecchi in ecchi anime and complaining about gags in gag anime?

Edit: That is to say, if you're reading into something more beyond a necessary and reasonable point..you're not understanding it.

grakara said:
The biggest problem is definitely thate people read way too much into anime. Sometimes even trying to call shows masterpieces without knowing if the show was even intended to be this deep.

Touniouk said:
And how is that a problem exactly?

The real problem is the character limit.

TheBrainintheJar said:


I don't mind being told I watch a show the wrong way - I think most people watch Future Diary the wrong way. I missed a big point about Evangelion. The problem is, when someone doesn't even try to analyze the anime and just says 'lol ridiculous'. See also: Anime YouTubers.

You can even analyze ecchi anime. Shocking!

jal90 said:
I'm not going to say that there's not such thing as "reading too much", there may be some example here or there, but that it's definitely one of the most excruciating expressions I've come across, no doubt. Seeing that each spectator is an individual who legitimately reacts to a work in their own way, the phrase "reading too much" sounds condescending and self-centered. It assumes that just because you couldn't find complex meanings in your viewing anybody who did are lying to themselves. It's an awful and unnecessary replacement for discussion.

Yudina said:
Because reading too deeply into something often means you either:

1. Overestimated how much the work in question is actually saying
2. Similar to point 1, that the interpretation likely made a claim that went way beyond either the intention or details in the anime

Both of these I would say are not great, because it shows someone is thinking too hard about something that doesn't say much or it shows that they are adding something additional to the show that shouldn't be there.

merryfistmas said:
And the same applies to you as well. How do you know their claim goes beyond what the show intended? Are you the arbiter of thematic depth in cartoons? and why does the intention matter in the first place? If they watched a show and felt it was about something, then there were things in that show that made them feel that way, unless they went into the show trying to interpret it as a metaphor due to what they've read online or something weird like that.

Yudina said:
Because reading too deeply into something often means you either:

1. Overestimated how much the work in question is actually saying
2. Similar to point 1, that the interpretation likely made a claim that went way beyond either the intention or details in the anime

Both of these I would say are not great, because it shows someone is thinking too hard about something that doesn't say much or it shows that they are adding something additional to the show that shouldn't be there.

Touniouk said:
You just repeated yourself.
So what if someone got more out of an anime than you did or than what the anime was saying? Why is it a bad thing?

jal90 said:
@Yudina I say that the phrase is condescending and self-centered because it observes reality under a single perspective you are assuming to be true without further explanation and contextualization. Arguments need to be answered with arguments, if I tell you that this porn movie has a meaning as a work of social commentary you will tell me that it doesn't and if I give you arguments for you'll give counterarguments. That's how discussions work. «You are reading too much» is not an argument. It is a conclusion. And answering a more or less elaborate text with a conclusion you could very well bring out of thin air is cheap, and if you expect the other person to acknowledge your point, futile and dishonest. Not to mention that what you refer to is more of «reading things that are not there» than «reading too much», but well, the same applies for both.

jal90 said:
The talk about intentionality is fine, but the thing is that, unless specifically stated by the author, intentionality is left for interpretation because the audience does not get exposed directly to the author's idea but through their work. And many authors refuse to give a clear meaning to the works they make in order to, precisely, reinforce this aspect of personal interpretation. I said that spectators are individuals and each of them reads the work in a way or another. «You can have any interpretation you want» is picking what I said and dumbing it down to a level of absurd, considering that I never discussed the rightness of wrongness of such conclusions. Whether they are right or wrong should be discussed in the form of arguments and counterarguments, not taken for granted.

Yudina said:
My argument concerns not what people feel from a show, but whether they read deeply into it or not. I won't deny it's subjective, but I think in general it's fairly easy to ascertain what's the purpose of something and use that to determine how far you should read into it. I don't deny that intentionality is always clear, but intention exists within the essence of a work itself, and often times it is not particularly difficult for us to evaluate.

And above all, I think intention is way more important than what people make it out to be.

I'll just work from the ground up as to sort of clarify what I mean. Note that the genres that I use do not reflect my beliefs in what can or cannot be "read deeply" in these genres but rather illustrate a sort of steady rise in the ladder based on what I see are some common place things in said genres.

Let's start with something completely base. Pornography. Why does porn exist? It's a sexual fantasy, designed to get people horny, so they jack off. Sounds simple enough. In that case, I would argue the vast majority of people who watch a porn scene should not be watching it for intellectual purposes, that is to say, looking at the size of the man's dick and trying to showcase how that represents male dominance, and the woman's submissiveness and ultimate powerlessness to control her body's feelings are representative of the patriarchy and its domination over the world of woman.

Clearly, there's no social commentary in most porn. It's essentially there for eroticism and self-indulgence.

Let's move up a notch. Let's look at ecchi anime, and I want to say that let's look at an anime that is likely clearly designed to be ecchi. In other words, let's not look at anime where there are obviously ecchi qualities. TTGL, KLK, Monogatari. These all have ecchi qualities, but I wouldn't say that they are representative of the type, but rather use elements for some other purpose. If we take an ecchi anime or manga off the street like....Love Hina.

I have nothing against the show. I'm sure it's fun, entertaining, whatever.

Here, I think the purpose of Love Hina seems relatively simple. You have a main protagonist, with a bunch of girls, and they find themselves in comedic situations and there's a nice romance and drama that plays around it.

Okay, that's great, but is this an instance where you want to be analyzing the particular colors of the girl's clothing to a crazy degree? Is there some sort of motif of depth that emerges of some great insignificance, such as important reoccurring dreams, the importance of a particular object, the intentional fixture of a particular setting, repeated words that have weighed significance?

I will grant you, maybe? Maybe if you look really hard, you can formulate an argument. But on the whole, I'm going to argue that you can't do this with shows of this nature precisely because they aren't designed for that purpose, and that's okay.

Let's talk about something else. Purely action/adventure stories. Let's use Code Geass as an example, because it's such a popular anime, everyone should likely have an understanding of it. Code Geass is entertaining, action packed, filled with a great ensemble of characters, and it's got the explosions necessary to set your pants on fire. Great.

But again, let's talk about reading deeply into it. Note that in this case we have sets of characters that we might deem to be "intelligent" actors, that is to say that they have agency and seem to make actions of significance so that we may identify nuances and particularities about them that might give us more insight.

How much can you read into a particular match, where Lelouche makes an infamously illegal move? How far can you read into the ending of the first season? Now here's where you can draw some sort of a theme, that is to say Lelouche's inability to control his power, the sort of preeminence of a greater power unable to be properly understood by man. Okay, I'll give you that there's something to be had there, but is there a great sort of build up and development of that theme? Is it a recurring factor that isn't necessarily just used for the sake of convenience and twisting the plot to ensure the maximum entertaining outcome?

This is something a bit more worth discussing, but for me it's clear here that even if there's an obvious theme, the exposition, development, and aspects of that theme are not at a point where I can say that it fulfills a great depth to it. For that reason alone, I'd say there's no need to read into it way too deeply.

Let's then talk about one of the Miyazaki movies. Spirited Away. Here's where we start seeing some more meat, some more nuance that I think is likely missing from the others whereas Miyazaki attempts a much more subtler approach that requires a sort of "deeper" reading if you will. There's great deal more symbolism, albeit fairly obvious ones. Pigs for gluttony. Water as cleansing but also as a representation of memory, longing, and distance (hence the Sixth Station). The scene at the end, a flash of Chihiro's band, is of a much subtler detail that allows us to read more deeply into why Miyazaki emphasized that scene at a moment that is otherwise not particularly filled with substance.

So at this point, I think it's clear that we've approached a film that is much more open to interpretation and likely gives a much better platform to a deeper reading than others.

But I don't think we're done. Let's look at Ergo Proxy.

I'm going to use Ophelia as an example, because it demonstrates the difference in deep readings and cursory ones. Here we have an episode that's essentially almost all representational, and almost certainly requires a deep reading in order to understand. Re-Il's posture in the center of the episode recalls the famous painting of Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais. Ophelia represents many things in Shakespeare's Hamlet, but for the purposes of the episode, we remember her loneliness, rejection, and abandonment by Hamlet, a man, which corresponds to the doppelganger's isolation, rejection, and abandonment by not a man, but man himself.

The water is not just a simple representation of purity, cleansing, and nostalgia, but more deeply (in my opinion), a mirror which reflects a representation of ourselves: hence Vincent's constant inability to recognize the real from the surreal, as his placement within the pool of water forces him to confront the mirror, the representational, and himself, much like how he is initially incapable of seeing the real Re-il, but mistakes the doppelganger for her.

There's so much more I can talk about this episode (in fact I'm quite certain a ten page paper could easily be written on just how good Ophelia is), but I hope I've made my point.

I don't think I'm being too crazy here when I say that there is a very clear hierarchy, where certain series, precisely because of how they are made, lend themselves to deeper reading and deeper interpretations. That does not mean that one series is better than another because it affords itself to deeper reading. It could mean that, since I sort of think that, but that's not necessarily the case.

The point is that I do think people read too much into things. I don't as @jal90 seems to think, that it's condescending at all, but rather a rational decision that people make when they watch something. It doesn't have to be consistent across everybody, but nobody looks at every series and says "you can literally interpret all of this however you want." If that was actually the case, there'd be no meaning behind postmodernism, no meaning behind surrealism, no meaning behind romanticism, and no meaning behind the bizarre, which are all designed to stretch our interpretative forces beyond what is normal, and beyond what we normally understand, and to create from the classical understanding of the story as being very delineated, orderly, and properly sign posted, to something that is much more interpretative, difficult to grasp, and not entirely comprehensible.

And people may disagree. Maybe they'll look at this and say that Ergo Proxy is no deeper than Love Hina is. And you know what? I might think they're bollocks, but that doesn't mean we can't have a discussion on why he thinks Love Hina offers much more on a level of interpretation and deeper reading than something like EP does.

I'm right in the end, obviously (:P), but that's besides the point.