You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, “Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life.” If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it.
Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!
:miyazaki-laugh:
To take things even further I think that the objectification, flanderization, comodification and "othering "of female characters in anime has resulted in it almost exclusively catering incels and otaku that see women (and disturbingly, underage girls) as dolls to fetishise.
Which is frustrating because there is good anime out there that isn't like this, but I can't really say I'm an anime fan without people thinking I'm into moe crap or otakus gatekeeping me because I don't like their moe crap.
I just wanna talk about how cool Full Metal Alchemist is...
Over half of all anime only came out since 2009. (at least according to this guys accounting). If you have been really keen on anime and kept up with every yearly season and mixed in old stuff, you will have watched probably about half of all anime or more.
The creation of that amount of content in the last 13 years - if that guy is even sort of right, there has been more anime produced in the previous 12 years than in it's first 45 - cannot be managed in any sort of human way. It's going to be stripped down, xeroxed, meta-referential and it's going to have shitty themes because a) society was already sexist and already objectified women so the people that make culture will likely be as well and b) the "algorithm" (short-hand for capital directing production for profit but increasingly actually governed by literal computerized algorithms) optimizes for profit and not decency or the elevation of the human spirit.
It's a total industrialized ford-style process, it's like a weird mix of the YouTube Elsa-Spiderman algorithms inventing the weirdest CGI shit with actual humans still animating. The thing has a creepy mind of its own and all it cares about is getting eyeballs and watch time and repeat customers, not producing something worth watching and it doesn't care about "objectification" or "fetishization" - all it cares about is attention but especially profit. The humans at each level of power that are still able to direct the flow of this industrialization are increasingly lobotomized by the capital-profit machine (your soulless ghoul MBAs), so indebted they can only say "yes," or have lost touch with common humanity by the intense atomization of late stage capitalism - which arguably hit Japan first with its lost decade, so we're really only glimpsing into a dark mirror tinged ever-so slightly by the particularities of Japanese culture - and because of that atomization cannot recognize that what they're making isn't imitating life because they haven't lived one in a long time, it's all been the simulacra and signifiers without a signified.
I always add to this that for most people here there's a second layer of algorithm at play, being that Western anime discussions are often dominated by a certain type of horny weeb who is disproportionately loud about their preferences for raunchy sexualized anime.
If you look at Japan anime movie box offices, or just general viewership and general cultural recognition, the most popular animes are either family friendly or not hyper-sexualized for no reason.
https://www.tvfandomlounge.com/2021/12/30/best-anime-movies-2021-japan-evangelion-gintama-jujutsu-kaisen/
These numbers aren't wholly accurate, because way more ovas used to get made, and should probably be counted, but the general point still stands.
Otaku: Japan's Database Animals by Hiroki Azuma is an excellent book on this subject. He's a postmodernist philosopher, so his analysis is more concerned with the processes of production rather than said productions relations to capital, but he bang on identifies what you're calling an "algorithm", and how it creates a feedback loop where consumers want familiar, easily identifiable characters in familiar stories- familiar enough for the nostalgia, but with just enough variation to feel "fresh"- but not actual challenging narratives that break free from familiar tropes. Consumers want databases, not stories.
Honestly, post Marvel Cinematic Universe all of us have basically been living in the database for a good long while now.