Cruel Angel Theses

Props to Impz and his band of merry men for sparking off the discussion. Demian in his response, however, overlooked what I believe is a key angle of how anime wouldn’t make it to mainstream, and that’s what I’m going to address in this post. Will also be commenting closely on drmchsr0’s, uh, “character-driven” response that, while being theoretically valid, has critical flaws in terms of practical implementation.

I agree with Demian that anime will never make it to mainstream, but for different reasons altogether — the medium itself is what makes it an inherent impossiblity. I don’t know how many of you might have experienced this, but I personally have difficulty getting my friends to watch anime, even after I tell them that the DVD of Honey and Clover does not contain porn.

“You’re doing it wrong!”

The problem with the assumption that anime will become mainstream is this: that they will eventually have the accessibility (in terms of viewer engagement and availability) and comfort that television series have. Let’s face it — we’re essentially watching what the world at large perceives as cartoons from Japan, with an average viewing time that’s half, even a quarter of your average cartoon series. To break it down a little, what I mean by that is the reason behind the success of anime like Naruto, for example, is due to the fact that it shares core characteristics with the successful television dramas and sitcoms out there.

Because I can’t, and don’t want to go into a rundown of worldwide media consumption habits, let’s take American television as an example. The Sopranos is currently in its sixth and final run; Nip/Tuck in its fourth season; Lost in its third, with a fourth already scheduled. Then we have Seinfield, which spanned a massive nine seasons, and Friends a gigantic ten. What does this all point to? Aside from accessibility and comfort, we also have quantity. Allow me to elaborate on each of them in turn.

For sitcoms like Seinfield and Friends, the pull factor came mainly from how easy it was to watch a single episode even if you weren’t a faithful viewer — there is no meta-narrative that binds the series together as a whole; neither is there a need for the casual viewer to be aware of what happened previously in order for them to “get it” and enjoy the current episode. In other words, accessibility, which means more viewers tuning in as time goes on, as opposed to a fixed set of loyal viewers who’ve been there since season one.

On the other hand, what dramas like Nip/Tuck, The Sopranos, and Lost might lack in terms of accessibility, they make up for in terms of comfort. As I mentioned earlier, comfort is a pull factor, discounting other basic requirements like good script-writing, an interesting plot, and decent character development. Why comfort? While a sitcom is usually marketed as casual viewing for the man on the street, a drama would be the opposite — a long-term investment in the makers of the series, where the viewer invests their time in watching the show and, in the long-term, is subsequently rewarded with a quality experience (e.g character and plot developments) that can only be derived from a work of such quantity.

And now we return to Naruto. If we accept the statement that Naruto is mainstream, we can now begin to correlate Naruto’s success with the viewing trends of the American market. Aside from a huge demographic which hits the sweet spot in terms of marketing, the reason for Naruto’s arguably phenomenal success (I heard they’re now selling ninja headbands in Wal-Mart?) would be due to the many characteristics it shares with American television habits. It has sustained, light humour and numerous, idiosyncratic side characters, which means it caters partly to the casual viewer; at the same time, however, the loyal viewer is not forgotten — the overarching plot and perpetual conflicts, in addition to development of the main characters, ensure that following the series is a rewarding experience.

Now look at anime through these goggles for a moment. The average anime series spans a meagre 26 episodes. Character development is usually present in every episode, and the story is concluded by the last with an air of finality that renders future seasons impossible to implement. Each episode doesn’t stand on its own — you’ll have to watch each and every one in sequence in order to understand the story fully. I know of two anime that break this mould — GITS:SAC and their “stand-alone” episodes, along with Haruhi’s intentional out-of-order sequencing that come to mind — but they’re in the minority to say the least.

This is why marketing anime out of Japan is a nightmare, and also why a lot of them haven’t been licensed, even aired out of Japan. Would the average teenager want to invest their time in what seems like an animated high-school love drama with supernatural elements thrown in if they knew that the story would end within 24 episodes, and one of the heroines die within eight? I’ve just described Kanon for you. Damn, how about trying to watch a couple of prepubescent girls in an almost all-female cast trying to save the world while they fire massive laser beams and beat the shit out of each other in revealing outfits? That’s what Nanoha sounds like, a psychedelic paedophile’s animated wet dream (for the first two seasons, anyway).

It’s pretty unfair, I can hear you say. The millions spent on a single season of a successful sitcom or drama way can’t be compared to the low production costs and profits that an anime produces? But that’s mainstream for you! I’m pretty well aware of my comparison — in fact, I deliberately chose to not compare them to cartoons for that reason alone. If you want your pipe dreams about anime being talked about as much as CSI to come true, that’s the reality they’ll have to face, sadly.

What about movies? Anime movies are a lot of shit. I’ll be honest here: each and every time someone brings up Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli when the topic turns to anime, it’s like taking a nail to chalkboard under my ears because they act as if that was all there is to anime, Akira and GITS notwithstanding. I don’t care how many awards they’ve won or their contributions to the anime industry — you can’t beat the character development, plot, pacing, and basically everything the 26-episode anime stands for. Anime movies pale in comparison, and fresh talent has been sorely lacking — even Makoto Shinkai seems to be in a sophomore slump the last time I checked. In other words, shit.

this was my face when otakus were compared to Christians

drmchsr0, I found your analogy rather offensive since I happen to be a professing Christian, but that’s not what my argument’s about. While your rant had a lot of merit for clearly illustrating the current perception of otakus everywhere, you started swimming in rhetoric halfway and failed to bring up the other side of the coin, and that’s what I’m going to explain in this second part of the post.

The reason why I think your rant was overtly imbalanced is this — the values and norms that the anime community and its peripherals (i.e manga, doujinshi, visual novels, Touhou) create are centred around introverted behaviour. Let’s take anime at its most basic form of community interaction: people spend anywhere from four, to eight, maybe twice that amount watching an anime series. Then they go and talk about it on the internet — but the ratio of time spent watching an anime blatantly exceeds the time spent discussing about it. So let’s assume you’re passionate about Honey and Clover. And that you’ve spent more time discussing its merits, talking about the themes and symbolism, and indulging in intellectual wankery (like this post) than you have watching the entire first and second seasons combined.

What next? No one watches just one season of anime and leaves it at that — they go on and proceed to watching more anime. So the time spend alone watching anime increases, and that time spent forms a habit, becomes part of the nature of the otaku as it were, to feel comfortable in the presence of no one but themselves. This sounds like a strawman, but this leads on to my second point about, so bear with me. This is not totally representative of everyone who watches anime, of course, but it is undeniable that a lot of us indulge in this kind of behaviour — myself included.

The habits formed by the otaku, of seclusion and introverted behaviour, carry on into the real world, where community interaction comes in. Just look around at your average anime blog. Everyone has an opinion about an anime, and having read quite a number of anime blogs long before I started Cruel Angel Theses, I’ve noticed this trend — everyone’s entitled to their opinion, no matter how irrational or inadequately justified their opinion might be. Lucky Star would be a good example, to beat a dead horse.

This isn’t a question on the rights of everyone to have an opinion, but a question of what it means to have an opinion — so, drmchsr0, you’re asking otakus everywhere to not be anti-social? That’s going against the innate nature I’ve seen everywhere, and in the anime blogosphere — apparently the time spent watching something entitles you to be an ass with your opinion about it, since it’s your time that was spent watching what you think is a “shit” series that was too “moe”. The terms “shit” and “moe” are replaceable with any other labels, like “dumb” and “shounen”, or “stupid” and “shoujo”.

In other words, opinions are that, just opinions. We are anti-social, as it were, for refusing to accept anyone’s opinions other than our own, and that in turn fosters no proper discussion on why someone hates a series, or loves it. Why do the haters hate Lucky Star? “Because it’s a moe anime”. Why do the fanboys love it? “Because the girls are so moe”. Same difference? This is where it resembles a circlejerk — everyone’s allowed their own opinion and no one’s allowed to question it, which results in the community becoming a farce. Watching an anime’s not all there is to it, at least for me — half the fun comes out of talking about it with other fans, getting to know their take on things, and how it is that they arrived at a love for the same thing that I do — not listening to a salivating freak shouting “MOE”, who also gets a boner from girls drawn to look underage.

I’m guessing this is the source of your “arrogant louts” that you mentioned at the end of your post, but do feel free to clarify if you had anything else you meant that I misinterpreted. In my opinion it all stems from the individualistic nature of the community to glorify their own opinions and scorn others without giving room for proper, civil discourse. Notice how this fits the nature of the *chans as anonymous discussion boards — those who have baseless, immature opinions are generally shot down and/or ignored, and proper discussion paid attention to (well, most of the time anyway…). The problem here with anime blogs and forums is that everyone’s a tripfag, and everyone wants their opinion to be heard without question. Pretty awful if you ask me, but that’s reality for you.

Can an otaku’s degree of normalcy be linked to how accepting they are of other people’s opinions? It sounds pretty absurd, I know, but that’s my hypothesis on the whole thing. Feel free to disagree but be sure to tell me why — it’d be damn ironic to have my theory proved in the first comment.