A lot of people identify with anime more than western media today, and we're trying to understand why. I think I understand from a philosophical standpoint. It centers around the nihilism many people struggle with.
Western media is wildly postmodern, rejecting grand narratives and using tools such as deconstruction and subversion in a perpetual quest to tear down existing superstructures. By contrast, eastern culture remains significantly earnest.
If you watch a movie about superheroes in the west, it's actually about many things other than good guys and bad guys. The latest MCU is about using the power of superhero franchises to deconstruct the archetypes and push neomarxism.
By contrast, eastern work in general and anime in particular is quite earnest. The incredibly popular my hero academia is a different take on the superhero genre, but fundamentally is played very straight -- deku may have questions of faith in good at times but he is fundamentally an honorable, brave, and selfless heroic archetype.
When you're fighting nihilism, a nihilistic outlook like pop post-modernism is not attractive. You want to see stories that suggest a grand narrative that uplifts mankind into something better, and a vision we can aspire to.
Going back to the master and his emissary, it seems that anime asks questions from an emotional side whereas western postmodern literature asks questions from a logical side, or from a right brained perspective or a left brained perspective. The emissary thinks its logical perspective is always correct but it lacks the capacity to answer most questions whereas the master actually can answer questions holistically giving it greater ability to answer big questions with certainty.
Western media is wildly postmodern, rejecting grand narratives and using tools such as deconstruction and subversion in a perpetual quest to tear down existing superstructures. By contrast, eastern culture remains significantly earnest.
If you watch a movie about superheroes in the west, it's actually about many things other than good guys and bad guys. The latest MCU is about using the power of superhero franchises to deconstruct the archetypes and push neomarxism.
By contrast, eastern work in general and anime in particular is quite earnest. The incredibly popular my hero academia is a different take on the superhero genre, but fundamentally is played very straight -- deku may have questions of faith in good at times but he is fundamentally an honorable, brave, and selfless heroic archetype.
When you're fighting nihilism, a nihilistic outlook like pop post-modernism is not attractive. You want to see stories that suggest a grand narrative that uplifts mankind into something better, and a vision we can aspire to.
Going back to the master and his emissary, it seems that anime asks questions from an emotional side whereas western postmodern literature asks questions from a logical side, or from a right brained perspective or a left brained perspective. The emissary thinks its logical perspective is always correct but it lacks the capacity to answer most questions whereas the master actually can answer questions holistically giving it greater ability to answer big questions with certainty.
@sj_zero What do you think about neowesterns? I enjoyed #JoePickett a lot. It's dark, but it's not nihilist.
I think you've got it backwards.
Western postmodernism creates all of these grand theories.
Anime is about the basics of life: fighting bad guys, getting good guys and nice girls together, racing motorcyles.
It's not neurotic like Hollywood and Madison Avenue.
I think ultimately it depends on the work and the person who made it.
The archetype of the western story can have grey characters but it was made by a world that still believed in good and evil so if someone is following the tropes it can be a non-postmodern story, but it really comes down to "it depends"
The archetype of the western story can have grey characters but it was made by a world that still believed in good and evil so if someone is following the tropes it can be a non-postmodern story, but it really comes down to "it depends"
Pretty much definitionally, postmodernism seeks to tear down old structures and grand narratives and question cultural assumptions -- some extreme postmodernism even asks if reality even exists and isn't willing to cede that point.
In my view, the history of postmodernism starts in world war 1 where the strong feeling of cultural superiority in Europe justified in many ways by the high quality of life, tremendous wealth, and overwhelmingly advanced technology, and thought they would continue seeing peace and prosperity. The killing fields of world war 1 massively fractured this myth. The people of Europe and in particular the people of Germany in the Weimar republic who saw their wealth fade into useless paper (I have a 500 million mark bill on my wall), thought they could have won the war and were betrayed and sent into suffering unjustly eventually changed into Nazi Germany. The fact that the Germans, considered the intellectual and cultural juggernaut within Europe, home of many famous scientists and philosophers and artists and musicians, could partake in such a horrible atrocity as first the war and then the Holocaust took the seed of postmodernism and sowed it throughout western civilization. Since then it has grown and all the narratives that existed before world war 1 have been extinguished, and the boomers who grew up under postmodernism and also grew up rich from the postwar boom in America (which is relevant since Hollywood was a hegemon in media production for a long time and it's fall has marked the fall of western media's establishment) thought the worst thing you could do is judge someone and raised their kids the millennials that way.
In the process because it's really pop post-modernism it fails and just creates new grand narratives because human beings mentally function in narratives and you can't create a vacuum of meaning and not have anything else fill the vacuum without tremendous effort.
Philosophers themselves gave up on postmodernism a long time ago, looking at other philosophies and even producing a reaction in metamodernism which tries to rationalize modernism and postmodernism into a cohesive whole, but other studies are still working through their postmodern phase, unfortunately potentially to the death of civilization.
In my view, the history of postmodernism starts in world war 1 where the strong feeling of cultural superiority in Europe justified in many ways by the high quality of life, tremendous wealth, and overwhelmingly advanced technology, and thought they would continue seeing peace and prosperity. The killing fields of world war 1 massively fractured this myth. The people of Europe and in particular the people of Germany in the Weimar republic who saw their wealth fade into useless paper (I have a 500 million mark bill on my wall), thought they could have won the war and were betrayed and sent into suffering unjustly eventually changed into Nazi Germany. The fact that the Germans, considered the intellectual and cultural juggernaut within Europe, home of many famous scientists and philosophers and artists and musicians, could partake in such a horrible atrocity as first the war and then the Holocaust took the seed of postmodernism and sowed it throughout western civilization. Since then it has grown and all the narratives that existed before world war 1 have been extinguished, and the boomers who grew up under postmodernism and also grew up rich from the postwar boom in America (which is relevant since Hollywood was a hegemon in media production for a long time and it's fall has marked the fall of western media's establishment) thought the worst thing you could do is judge someone and raised their kids the millennials that way.
In the process because it's really pop post-modernism it fails and just creates new grand narratives because human beings mentally function in narratives and you can't create a vacuum of meaning and not have anything else fill the vacuum without tremendous effort.
Philosophers themselves gave up on postmodernism a long time ago, looking at other philosophies and even producing a reaction in metamodernism which tries to rationalize modernism and postmodernism into a cohesive whole, but other studies are still working through their postmodern phase, unfortunately potentially to the death of civilization.
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