pedo scene
"funny" rapey scene
offensive scene with a trans character
offensive scene with a gay character
oh
Only 1 offensive scene with a trans character? Those are rookie numbers
cw transphobia
Theres an episode of naruto shippuden like 350 episodes in, and it's just sudden full blown transphobia and I just, fuckin, CMON, WHY YOU GOTTA DO THIS I WAS HAVIN FUN
naruto just bullies and shames this cute giant armadillo girl and makes her cry and exposes her genitals in public and misgenders her. And this is all framed with her being a fully intelligent being, and is supposed to be funny
even the wiki misgenders her and plays into this https://naruto.fandom.com/wiki/Armadiko
Not to even mention the rampant misogeny in this show like holy fuck, every single main female character has a speech where they say "I may just be a woman, but I'm still cool!"
It's a really bad trope that I hope becomes less and less of a thing. I swear there is a checklist for every anime/manga that has all these awful tropes and only certain creators seem to be able to defy "the list".
Me: Oh boy, I sure love how this game is sincere about its themes of exclusion, discrimination and marginalization! Surely they won't put an off-color homophobic joke here somewhere!
Persona 5:
I'd actually recommend reading the manga adaptation since you can enjoy the otherwise interesting story without the hassle of the gameplay. Plus, there are some references in P2 to P1, aside from Yukino.
Me, high af browsing Netflix: food wars? I sure do like looking at anime food, let's go.
(Underage girl tentacle molestation joke like immediately)
Me: anime was a mistake
Studio Ghibli movies are the most important wholesome food appreciation movies.
Spirited Away is the only movie to correctly represent the chapo.chat person -> hog pipeline in action.
Technically the octopus can’t be charged with pedophilia because it’s not a person and doesn’t have rights.
The girl will be charged with bestiality, however.
recommend some anime that isn't for children and/or coomers
edit: thank you I am actively taking notes
I had heard somewhere that NGE is like, the reason late-night anime is a thing, due to the backlash that happened after it ran in an after-school time slot.
It's not but Anno is a troll and made it seem like a normal mecha for the first 8 episodes or so.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica is incredible, it uses the magical girl genre as an allegory for the military industrial complex.
Oh shit, I love that show and never clicked on the allegory. This makes so much sense.
What kind of shows do you like?
Monster - psychological crime thriller
Planetes - sci-fi drama about space garbage people
Usagi Drop - wholesome slice of life drama about parenthood
In This Corner of the World - slice of life war drama
Mushishi - episodic fantasy drama surrounding interactions between humans and spirit-like natural organisms
Legend of the Galactic Heroes - epic space opera
Nodame Cantabile - classical music romcom
Ghibli movies have universal appeal and are all pretty good (except Tales from Earthsea). A lesser known one that is more for adults is Only Yesterday
spoiler
Usagi Drop ends with the daughter and parent marrying, so theres some child grooming there and I wouldn't recommend watching it without letting people know to ignore the ending at least.
That does not happen in the anime which only adapted the first part of the manga. Also spoilers.
"There's weird weeaboo incest shit" is the kind of thing that should be spoiled in big block text on the front of the packaging.
The anime doesn't have any of that. Also I've actually read the second part of the manga and while it wasn't especially good, it wasn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
Whoa, you’re my anime taste twin; those are all my faves! What else do you recommend to someone who bailed on anime in like 2011?
Ayyy. I went with the critically acclaimed or at least generally well-regarded ones that are geared towards adults and have no fanservice.
For recs after 2011 in the same vein:
SoL/Comedy - Barakamon, Rilakkuma and Kaoru (not typical anime style but it's good and definitely geared more towards adults than kids)
Psychological Thriller - Death Parade
Historical Drama - Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu
Sports - Run with the Wind (haven't seen it but folks whose opinions I trust tell me it's good)
Action/Adventure - Golden Kamuy, Dorohedoro, Legend of Hei (donghua technically)
The good animes from what I've gathered are, in no particular order: Akira, everything Ghibli, FLCL, psychopass, Cowboy Bebop, and Samurai Champloo
I still listen to the intro song from time to time and I haven't watched Bubblegum Crisis since the late 90s.
Hell yeah I'm clicking that link and listening to it right now. Anytime is a good time for Konya Wa Hurricane.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
Patlabor 2: The Movie
Ghost in the Shell
Mob Psycho 100
FMA: B irks me. They really do up that mechanic girl as a sexual prospect and it's weird.
Just because she wears a tube top? There's a lot more to her character. Her behavior is not lewd. The creator is a woman.
Winry is sexualized a little, but it's not that bad. The one scene I can remember is when she takes off her shirt, but that actually has a funny conclusion, with all the people who didn't know the others were in the house pulling guns on each other before she throws them out.
Demon Slayer is fun and scary and heartfelt.
Just started watching Fruits Baskets, it looks sweet.
Misfit of Demon Academy is “overpowered protagonist with heart of gold”, and yeah he’s got a harem but it’s not all girls and he seems asexual. Also he’s the reincarnation of the King of Demons, and can kill and reanimate his enemies instantly, but he’s a nice boy.
Tanaka-kun is Always Listless is a high school slice of life anime. Main guy and his best buddy are cute and affectionate, and the show does a casual lesbian love reveal in like the fourth episode.
BNA on Netflix is very pretty to look at, has a strong female lead who doesn’t get lewded or sexually assaulted, actually gets more powerful as the show progresses.
Case Closed is a serial anime with like a thousand episodes. It’s about a kid detective who solves gruesome murders.
Daily Lives of Highschool Boys is another slice of life show, with three dudes being dudes.
Cromartie High School is Bevis and Butthead meets Fist of the North Star.
The Disasterous Life of Saiki K is another Netflix show that is funny and charming.
That’s all I got for now. Check em out!
Seconded on Demon Slayer and BNA. They're both pretty recent animes but are now some of my all time favs.
Revolutionary Girl Utena
(Lots of content warnings but it handles them very well and is the best anime I’ve ever seen)
Revolutionary Girl Utena is a masterpiece. There are maybe 2 heterosexual characters in the show. Part of the reason it was made was that the last show Ikuhara worked on (Sailor Moon) had a creepy relationship between the middle school main character and her college boyfriend and he kept trying to get permission to kill him and he wasn't allowed to. It's got some of great villains, and some very subtle symbolism. (In one episode a hand shows up pointing to things that are happening in the background. Ironically, this is one of the harder to parse parts of the show and could just be meaningless making fun of the rest of the show. )You can watch it here, because the english publisher put it up for free on youtube.
Death Note is dumb, but a lot of fun. It's amazing to watch the hilariously overcomplicated plans the characters come up with to throw at each other. Fair warning, its creators have some issues with women that became clear in their second series together, but they mostly avoid that in Death Note by virtue of only having one female character.
Evangelion is great, though it's hornier than I'd like. It criticizes the horniness of anime, but also has a lot of horny stuff itself. It has some great characters, some fantastic moments, and provides a fascinating window into Hideaki Anno's mind. If you watch the movie, that gets into some real fucked up shit, but is still worth watching.
CW
The movie has the main character masturbating over his comatose friends body. It doesn't show it, nor does it really show the girl he's doing it to, but it's there. He immediately says "I'm so fucked up," and spends the rest of the movie sort of in shock about what he did till the end.
You can't go wrong with Satoshi Kon. Everything he did was pretty great. I'd put him up there with Miyazaki in terms of being necessary viewing.
The 2006 Higurashi Anime isn't great, but the Sound Novel is (if you ignore the goddamn pedophile doctor who's introduced in the middle of an otherwise well handled child abuse plotline.) To watch the excellent currently airing anime, you should probably watch or read it, though. CW for gore, various types of violence (with some stuff involving fingernails that made me feel sick to my stomach), and child abuse primarily. It has some good stuff politically. The backstory involves a small town coming together to protest a dam that would displace them, and more than one main character fondly reminisces about throwing bricks at cops. There are 2 cops in Higurashi. One is basically Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks and only appears to get a bunch of exposition and do karate, and the other is an asshole who makes every situation worse and thinks porn is an appropriate gift to give a teenager who's just been hospitalized. In addition,
spoiler
the villain of the original is a neo-nazi who wears an Iron Cross pin trying to orchestrate a right-wing military coup to protect the legacy of her war criminal grandfather. She's sort of redeemed, but only in the timeline where she didn't get the chance to try her plan.
Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun is a really fun comedy about a manga artist and his assistants, all of whom are in high school. It has some of my favorite characters in anything ever, and I think about some of the jokes every day of my life. I might never play a videogame with a friendly npc again without thinking about "TOMODAAA!"
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is a fun anime about the wonders of animation, with a female cast that isn't moe and isn't sexualized, which is sadly a rarity. It's just fun to watch.
If you don't mind currently airing stuff, Wonder Egg Priority is looking great. It had a character make some questionable comments about gender in the last episode without pushback, but the director clarified on twitter that it was supposed to be clear that the comments weren't to be agreed with. It's a beautiful anime that deals with varying forms of bullying and abuse extremely well. CW for bullying, abuse, sexual harrasment, and suicide, with potentially more to come.
Holy shit, are you me?!?!?
Was going to recommend Utena, started Wonder Egg yesterday and i'm in the middle of a Higurashi frenzy because i finished the VN last month. (Also watching Hou).
I would have also recommended Otherside Picnic as a currently running anime, but figured I should stick to my favorite, especially since I also recommended Higurashi. Did you watch anything last year that you liked? I really enjoyed Talentless Nana and Hamefura, along with Eizouken which I recommended above.
Also, if I can recommend a manga that will probably become an anime soon, read Spy x Family. It's a very cute found family story with some great gags and a fantastic premise. Loid being a proud father to his handler in the latest chapter was adorable.
I've seen Eizouken and Evangelion and some of Miyazaki's stuff like Mononoke and Spirited Away. Will check out Utena, thank you.
The Made in Abyss anime is mostly fine, but the manga has definitely ruined it for me because the author is a literal, unironic pedophile lol
personal fav is mob psycho 100, though it kinda lends into the children side
I will always suggest people watch Revue Starlight. Probably my favorite shows and it's soundtrack is amazing. Give it a blind go tho, definitely makes it really cool.
It's the closest an anime has got to Ikuhara without being Ikuhara, so that's pretty cool.
Yeah, Revue's director, Furakawa, worked with Ikuhara quite a bit. (Penguindrum comes to mind and I think there was one more) So it makes sense that Revue kind of resembles some of his work.
Kaiji is an anime about how the rich exploit the working class and leave them to fight eachother for scraps... also, extremely tense gambling I guess. Could count as coomer if you're into big, angular noses.
Shinsekai Yori is hard to explain without going into spoilers, but it features probably the best depiction of class struggle you can find in anime.
Berserk (the 1997 version) is a gay romance about dudes being bros in the middle ages. 10/10 would recommend
Kino no Tabi is a collection of philosophical parables of sorts, some of which definitely dip into leftist themes and interpretations.
Shiki is an anime about spooky vampires in rural japan, which can also be read as an allegory for
spoiler
the October Revolution
Does the 1997 version of Beserk end with THAT scene? Because uh. I would never recommend it because that scene is traumatizing
Oops, yeah it does end with that lol. Content warning for Berserk: everything
There's a lot of content warnings in Berserk. Just... over the top gratiutous violence at all times, but that scene, young Guts being sexually assaulted, god knows what else that I've just frogotten about. It is a bleak, bleak, bleak series.
Haikyu! Watch Haikyu! It's very very good.
Someone else recommended Mushishi and I want to recommend that as well. Very chill and interesting show.
Devil Man Crybaby - Nudity/sex stuff... and with the general tone of violence I'm pretty sure there was at least one scene of SV (but its been quite awhile since I've watched it. Requiem for the Darkness - creepy folklore spooky stories in a feudal Japan era with some stylized art that can be pretty intense.
Unironically, everything I've watched with an Adult Swim dub was really good. Dunno if I can recommend Space Dandy when they go to Space Hooters in the first episode, but some of the weirder episodes are the best I've ever watched.
Also seconding Ghost in the Shell. Older anime that are still remembered/popular tend to be really good and also have good dubs if you're into that.Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Read the manga (it's only 7 volumes), then maybe watch the film. The film was released when only 2 volumes of the manga were done so it's completely different and not nearly as based as the manga.
Wonder Egg Priority: Currently airing surreal anime. Every episode is CW, but the show takes the issues seriously.
Akudama Drive: Recent heist anime. Based.
Are there all-female studios or at least ones that only have women in decision-making positions?
not to my knowledge but mangaka who are women tend to be good, and that extends to the animes, such as FMA
Fullmetal Alchemist doesn't have any creepy pedo shit I can remember, it just has a storyline that is about how actually there were lots of good Nazis and IJA officers who got caught up in the whole genocide thing and are actually very sorry and just want a chance to set things right.
To be fair the war criminals (Except Oliver Armstrong) explicitly stated goal is to move the country to a place where they are tried and executed for war crimes. That's not to say it's good, but I think it is more nuanced than that.
Of course it's more nuanced than that, that's how you get away with making a thirty hour long story on the premise of "The Nazis are very contrite actually."
It's a great anime, but it's also a great example of how we're locked in to a worldwide culture of imperialist violence.
I've been watching Dorohedoro lately. Never would have guessed the manga was written by a woman and not a fifteen-year-old boy.
The women being beefy and sexualized (in a good way) should have clued you in.
Kyoto Animation is the most famous one.
Maybe something more useful would be to look for shows made by women directors and writers e.g. Naoko Yamada or Mari Okada
in my mind the only anime that exists is this one where some people are trying to make animals for god
Watched one punch man cuz my friend wanted me to and there was an obvious anti socialism/communism thing in it and it just annoyed me. The paradisers or something
The Paradisers were made out as a joke for not wanting to participate in salaryman life, but they are undeniably cool and good for robbing an armory and destroying a billionaire's property.
Well thankfully the Monogatari series is completely unproblematic wait no please come back
It's horny and hates itself for it. (As long as you pretend they didn't make any merch.)
It's time for the annual anime struggle session! Refer to my previous post for a brief breakdown of the history of anime and why it is shit.
So now's as good a time as any to continue that story. I'm not drunk this time, but hell if I'm going to fact check everything I say so tpppppppppppbbbbbbbbbt.
Let's talk about Narou-kei, Isekai and Sword Art Online.
So um, I'm not sure if you guys noticed this, but Japan hasn't reeeeeeally been able to recover from the Asian Financial Crisis of the 90's and the resulting Lost Decade (more like Lost Three Decades, amirite?). Its affect on the animation industry have been particularly pronounced- a lot of studios which did a lot of experimental/boundary pushing stuff with all the bubble money from the 80's were forced to close down or transition to a gig-economy lite model where a skeleton crew of key permanent staff are kept on hand while freelancers are hired on an ad-hoc per-project basis. Unable to fund their own productions, animation studios had to depend on larger companies to foot the production costs- hence the formation of so-called production committees.
So, by an large animation isn't really a profitable endeavour. It is labour intensive (you need huge teams of highly trained people), capital intensive (mostly to pay those people, but also for computers etc.) and time consuming to produce. As an entertainment product, it just can't keep up with the volume demanded by it's audience- comics and books, while just as time consuming to produce, can be made by small teams for dirt cheap. So the Japanese animation industry has more-or-less shifted its entire business model to serve as glorified advertising for popular known properties/franchises. Something sells well in Weekly Shonen Jump? Bam, anime! But no one company is willing to take the financial risk of an anime doing poorly, so instead several large companies divide up the bill in exchange for exclusive rights- for example, the tv anime must use a particular singer for the opening theme from the music company that footed the bill, or this company gets exclusive rights to make toys and merchandise of the characters, etc. Capitalism at work, basically. So yeah the animators, the people whose labour creates the product.... they hardly see any of the profits, and their work is mostly used as promotional material for the original manga/light novels in order to drive sales for the franchise.... which benefits someone sure, but it basically means that these studios are stuck making crappy adaptations until they can save up enough dough to maaaaaybe do an original anime once every few years- cause artists are artists and they want to make art, but they don't want to starve.
However, there's a problem with this model; there are only so many well-known franchises around at any given time, and companies want to make money.
So let's talk about the miracle of the internet! Introducing Syosetsuka ni Narou, a website where any aspiring author can post up their work. You get enough people reading your stuff, an editor from a publishing house looking for the next Haruhi will pick you up and get your stuff published for real. Hurray! We've democratized media production! Hurray!
You may have heard about this small show called Sword Art Online, about some dweeb g*mer who gets stuck in a VR game where if he dies in the game, he dies in real life. Somehow he manages to become the bestest most special-est person to ever get his game on, and he somehow manages to get a girlfriend and even get laid before he frees everyone from the death game. (Oh, and there's a lot of uh.... rapey stuff in it. Like every other villian is basically a rapist.)
The guy who wrote SAO was 17 at the time.
We could go into the whole story of how SAO got published, but basically- story written by horny 17 year old finds an audience of horny 17 year olds on the internet. Big surprise. Big publisher notices this story is popular with horny 17 year olds on this website, picks up the rights. Story gets published as a book. Gets an anime adaptation. Anime adaptation get streamed worldwide, so said story is now exposed to every horny 17 year old on the planet.
SAO makes a ton of money, basically.
Now you could make the argument that SAO, while egregious in its depiction of women and SV, wasn't particularly out of the ordinary- shows from the 80's and 90's like Ranma 1/2 or Oh my Goddess! aren't exactly feminist masterpieces (Sailor Moon, however, is). The problem isn't whether or not SAO was continuing a trend or being more egregious or whatnot-
The problem is that SAO made a ton of money.
Now everyone wants a piece of that isekai pie in the sky. (For reference, an isekai is a story about being transported to another world, and Narou-kei is a type of sub-genre of story of the kind published on the website Syosetsuka ni Narou, featuring a gamified setting with a main character who get stronger in a gamified way etc.) So Syosetsuka ni Narou and sites like it explode in popularity, and publishers ever hungry for the Next Big Thing (TM) lap up whatever rises to the top, which theoretically would be only the best, right? After all, isn't that how democracy and the free market should work?
Heh.
So, Syosetsuka ni Narou has two problems. One, there are no editors, so literally anything goes, as after all it's really just a glorified fanfiction site- and two, its audience is already self-selected to be a majority of horny 17 year old males. Except it's worse than that- like the entire internet, it's an audience of horny 17 y.o. men who've lived their entire lives alienated and brainwashed by neoliberal capitalism and 30 years of austerity, and are so desperate for an escape they are willing to relive playing videogames ad nauseum even in their fantasies. So even as the mainstream Weekly Shonen Jump titles like My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer or Jujetsu Kaisen have become more progressive (or at least more liberal), Narou-kei have become progressively more reactionary- Goblin Slayer, Rising of Shield Hero, Re-do of Healer... the ideology (sniiiif) they're peddling isn't exactly sympathetic to a leftist worldview, even if their core themes are about exploring and pointing out the decay of living under neoliberalism. They just blame women or minorities for all their problems, rather than capitalists.
Which isn't to say that every narou-kei is reactionary (Japan is fighting the Culture War too) or that WSJ has suddenly become some bastion of progressive Japanese thought, but the lack of editorial oversight and standards combined with the ease of access the internet brings has allowed dark things to fester.
Oh and of course, all those stories that prominently feature rape, slavery and torture just for the shock value got published, then got anime adaptations. Because reaction sells.
TL;DR There won't be proper representation and un-problematic material in anime until we overthrow Capitalism. Get on it, Chapos.
If anyone wants a better look at Isekai and Narou-kei than what I outlined here I strongly urge you to check out Pause and Select's youtube channel .
Oh you mfers don't know how Japan is, huh? That's why we stan Daddy Kim. You want to watch cartoon? You watch squirrel and hedgehog or Chinese Karl Marx anime. Ethical consumption.
China is making a lot more anime lately and I think they've actually taken a lot of artists from Japan because they offer better pay and hours.
