Wanted: anime sans anime.

Dimitri commented on my last post about my view on anime and I thought I'd reply and expand a little bit on it. However, the reply kept getting longer and longer so in the end I decided to turn it into it's own post. I hope you're fine with reading some ramblings. :)

Basically, what I said was that I have a hard time watching anime since I moved to Japan.

When it comes to anime, I think it was a combination of only being generally familiar with the culture and missing a lot of contextual stuff and being interested in Japan and wanting to learn more about it through means that was available to me back then.

The latter reason probably made me less critical towards anime simply because it helped me learn about Japan (although in a extremely slanted way) so I put up with watching stuff I'd dismissed if it was made in the west. The former reason is a bit more complicated. A lot of things that seemed cute or funny when watching anime back then just makes me cringe after living almost five years in Japan. It's difficult to explain to someone who has not lived here without sounding elitist, but it's kind of like... anime has become 500% more nerdier/geekier since I started living here. And I don't mean that in a positive way, I mean it in the really bad Japanese otaku way.

A good example might be the way they talk in (most) anime. When you don't speak Japanese it's just Japanese, but when you do speak it it sounds extremely, for want of a better word, "lame". No one talks like that! The expressions, the intonation, the weird grunts. When I first came here I met some other people when studying and several of them were really big anime fans. They used to use different expressions they'd learnt from anime when talking to Japanese people because they thought that's "how people spoke", and it always got the same reaction: a nervous laugh, some weird looks and the Japanese person asking where they'd heart that expression.

What I think most westerners don't realize is how much more stigmatized anime is here than in the west. It might sound backwards, but while in Europe or the US people who watch anime can be seen as nerds it's still "Anime!". It's still from Japan and things from Japan still retains an extra level of  cool. Westerners has the image of anime being wildly popular among all Japanese and thinks that Akihabara is a popular place to go for most people. However, non-otaku avoid Akihabara like the plague and watching anything other than kid's shows like Doraemon, Ghibli movies or maybe One Piece will brand you as a huuuge nerd/geek (again, in the bad way).

Like I said, I don't want to come off as an elitist, but fact is that spending time in this country has changed my view of anime drastically. Of course, there are exceptions. For me now a days anime shows that doesn't have those tiring anime tropes I can watch no problem. A good example is Cowboy Bebop but there are naturally others as well.

What bothers me is when the anime tropes ruins an otherwise interesting series or movie. For example, I was getting back into Jovian Chronicles a couple of years ago and read the overarching plot to different Gundam series. I watched half of Gundam Wing years ago and thought it was pretty bad, but reading about all kinds of cool sounding plots I decided to give the giant robots another try. People were talking up Gundam Seed so I tried that, but could hardly get through the first episode because of the horrible, taxing anime tropes. I'm sure there's actually a really cool story at the bottom of it, but I just can't stand to have to showel through all that crap to have to get to it. It might be my loss, but that's how I feel about it.

Like I said, it's kind of hard to explain, but I hope you can understand a bit about my point of view. Or at least that it was an intersting read. :)