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Anime: Living the Stereotype

A few years ago you could argue that Anime was different, that it was a more mature form of entertainment and not “a Chinese cartoon”. The old days had the classic lines of “It’s nothing but perverted misogynistic crap” or “It’s a bunch of spiky haired teenagers with super powers.” Truth be told a bit of a light could be held up towards those stereotypes, now said light has become a damn search light.

It wasn’t always this way

Back before the big anime craze of the 90’s that sparked worldwide thanks to titles such as Dragon Ball, and the general concept of globalization put into application, anime used to be underground. Sure, there were few titles airing on mainstream TV or late night “adult” programming, but most of it was rather obscure. This all began to chance with the internet, allowing fans and even non fans to have a constant exposure to anime. Massive distribution and exposure brought forth the “Japanimotion” era, when TV channels began dedicating blocks of their programming to cater to otakus.

This all sounds good until you remember the one thing that sucks about all this. Main stream media meant that not only fans would get a glimpse but also the throngs of haters, people who would seemingly dedicate their entire free time to watching anime out of context and pulling bits and pieces to use to complain about it later.

So sure, we had our fan-servicy animes back in the day and pretty much all shows had a moment or two for either comedy relief or a peek of skin. But it was really far away from the “Nothing but panties and school girls being molested by tentacles” stereotype that most would give to anime. At least until recent times…

The evolution of a downward spiral

The jokes and hate went from “spiky haired and repetitive character designs” to “unnecessarily perverted”. Many of anime’s greatest detractors began to construct a skewed view of Japan’s customs and arts throughout the internet’s life-span, ultimately culminating on it being based entirely around perverse acts. A narrow minded view that bottled up everything like an underpaid writer about to go postal, waiting for the moment to strike. Said moment was generally the sight of a scene from Hentai film or an erotic anime.

Years of the anime industry churning out fan service laden anime served to cement this tired cliché. It’s hard to even find a single anime now a days that won’t fall into fan service episodes (Oh let’s all go to the beach for some reason!), this was a common occurrence back in the day when anime was new and some stories needed to be patted out and add a little spice to get new fans or keep the old ones. The problem now a days is that almost every damn anime out there gets drowned in a sea of fan service, there are so many titles of the genre that they come up from the murky depths of the medium to reminds us that there’s some truth to even the lamest stereotype.

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