@sun@icedquinn Children’s animation should instill a sense of national virtue and valor I think. They should make children’s anime about the country’s history and triumphs.
@anemone@sun I guess what makes me assume so much of it is for children or at least teenagers predominantly is that the characters are overwhelmingly children or teenagers with some exceptions, and even in those exceptions there’s usually a youth character that I presume is intended to act as the audience stand in
@icedquinn@sun It’s still a form of propaganda, pretty much everything is. Entertainment is good, but it showing historical elements is important, too much young children don’t know their own history. One of the best children’s TV shows in the UK when I was a teenager was Horrible Histories which was great at showing a bunch of British history.
@arcana@icedquinn it's not propaganda if there's not intent to propagandize, one of the things that make anime good compared to western animation is it clearly started with "this idea would be cool" rather than "what decoration will beautify this message" I am oversimplifying a bit
@arcana@sun they actually passed some dumb law in the USA to mandate all childrens cartoons be edutainment and it resulted in the networks dropping the saturday morning cartoon culture because nobody wants to watch that shit
turns out its just better to strategically sponsor things.
@icedquinn@arcana even during saturday morning heyday the educational message was mandatory for animation so they would at the very minimum inject a short "hey kids do/don't do this" at the end of the show. For example GI Joe was famous for these. My favorite was for He Man and the Masters of the Universe. There was a good guy character called "Ram Man" whose gimmick was he defeated enemies by ramming things with his head. Tons of kids started imitating Ram Man and getting injured so they finally introduced an education segment with Ram Man telling kids "ramming things with your head is just stupid!"
@anemone@arcana@sun i wanna know what episode it was and what the reason was. its well known they changed the vibe and direction midway, so did they preemptively change the timeslot before doing more adult themes or did they push the broadcasting regulations?
@why@anemone@arcana it is true that the threshold for what is acceptable in entertainment for minors is much more permissive in japan than the USA (but becoming less so, remakes are missing incidental nudity that aired on television in original runs)
@sun@arcana there's been similar argumentation in the christian-* media productions. you have a small corner of people like Skillet who approach it like just being a rock band and making good music that has a positive spin on it, and then you have the slop factories that put out drivel where everything is a constant sermon because ❓
surprising nobody, the result is people listen to Skillet and almost nobody listens to sermon_guitar.mp3
i'm not sure if Sabaton is sponsored but they also do a big deal of using historical events as a base but then building the song around it.
Caziviel mentioned something like this in an interview. he didn't like how much of a "crutch" it was/is to silo media like that; the skillet model reaches more people.
or summed up by david allen greer, "it has to be funny first." when asked how he managed a comedy show with a [black] political crew
@icedquinn@arcana it is extremely satisfying that many anime shows clearly have not only no message, but nobody checking them for accidentally having "bad" ones.
@sun@arcana i refer back to my prior statement on whenever someone proposes a law for children, send directly to paper shredder and flog the proponents.
@sun@icedquinn It's still a form of propaganda even if it's subconscious propaganda. There's different categories of it. You're still sending a message whether you consciously acknowledge it or not.
@arcana@icedquinn this is a variation on "everything is political" which is just a justification for making things explicitly political. it's technically true but the difference is between organized and unorganized fun, both of which are needed for psychological health. or you could say, the emotional experience of trying to enjoy something when there's a cop watching you. there is a qualitative difference between deliberately transmitting a message and normal expression that implicitly contains a message.
@thendrix@icedquinn@arcana even I can admit that there is anime that by presenting something without analyzing it implicitly promotes an awful message. but I think there is still a tradeoff where you have to have that freedom and be allowed to be exposed to entertainment that has the possibility to do that
@sun@arcana i think what you are looking for here is the difference between an unconscious bias that everyone inevitably has and expicit ideological enforcement.
which, the latter just swings back and forth constantly. the theocrats resulted in the hayes code, the ESG cult results in velma.
@icedquinn@arcana I don't even know what was going on with Velma because it was _so_ bad that not only was it disowned, some of its target audience was seriously trying to claim it was a right wing psyop to discredit them. It wasn't a right wing psyop, which basically proves that the right wing is right that the ideological extremism runs deep and institutional.
@icedquinn@arcana yes I believe that unconscious bias is not as offensive to artistic sensibility than a commie art bureau approving messages for public consumption
@sun@arcana anyway my whole point is if your goal is to educate children on historical things the way to do it is to sponsor people to do that and remember that the show has to be fun first. this may require sacrificing some of the name-date fetishism of history teachers but w/e.
* i know that this is actually more forced on them by management than how history professors actually feel.
@sun@icedquinn Oh sure, and often times the message is "I'm an old man who gets turned into a little girl after being hit by a bus... don't psycho analyze me please"
I think there's lots of room for just mindless classic fun, but there is of course a message in everything.
@arcana@icedquinn I am not opposed to criticism in a vacuum but I know good and well that it is part of a cultural movement that wants to gatekeep such content out of existence.
@sun@arcana i don't think they are genuinely concerned. i think it's the usual shit-op where you pick a target that people won't or can't defend to get your initial consent decree to install yourself as the gatekeeper, and then end run your actual objective.
this has pretty much been the case about 100% of the time it comes to child predator discourse
@icedquinn@arcana So what I mean is, you have people calling themselves "the anime feminist" where, it is compeltely legitimate to analyze anime from a feminist perspective but are doing the weird "I like anime but hate EVERYTHING about it, and that is why it needs to change" like seriously get back in your crypt and shut the lid
@sun@arcana its some protestant/pseudo christian thing.
you are not supposed to lust after everyone it doesn't say to be ashamed of the human form. we do literally the opposite of what god said to do. we still lust but we go "oh but see i hid the shameful girl nipple so its OK"
@sun@arcana i should probably eat dinner and return to sorting this link pile. its fun to muse about things but i have to acquire actual power to be able to make any of it matter
@sun@icedquinn I don't want to gatekeep it out of existence, my main concern with it honestly is how pervasive it seems to be in anime making it very difficult to watch a lot of the time. I have watched some and enjoyed it but there's always those scenes where it's like "oh... that's a 14 year old character behaving inappropriately" ruining an otherwise entertaining experience.
I think I've said it before as, we don't put every genre in every genre. It's not like every comedy film or romance movie has a 10 minute segment where it turns into a supernatural slasher film, so I don't really get why the opposite isn't true.
Why if I'm watching a show about historical events or some magical setting, does a teenager have to start screaming "oppa gangnam style senpai chan" and turning red randomly.
BTW if you missed the news nearly an entire studio with Sweet Baby Inc oversight got laid off yesterday. This was a promising new studio, and it's been documented how good the game was before they 'rebooted' it halfway into development.
Also more Bungie layoffs with notable supporters of Sweet Baby Inc.
The problem is that it takes a while to define bad actors, and by the time you do they already have made the core of the business rotten to the core as they start with HR and bring in more cancer.
@coolboymew@sun@icedquinn@arcanapeople always claiming to like a hobby but they don't like anything about it, it's really weird, its almost like these people just wanna ruin someone elses space that's all
@givenup@icedquinn@arcana@coolboymew obsession with critique is a mental illness. I personally struggle with keeping it in check but some people are privileged by power to let their mental illness run wild and extrapolate their critique into real world changes in how business and government work. We decided that people with entire constellations of mental illness should be the ones deciding for everyone what is normal
I think there's value in this too. exploitative, violent, erotic schlock can be entertaining and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Sometimes we even got them on dvd in America!
@arcana@icedquinn@mischievoustomato to some extent "just don't watch it" applies. there is something to be said when a thing becomes pervasive and you can't get away from it
@sun@icedquinn@mischievoustomato Oh sure it does yes, but as I said, it really does feel like every anime includes at least one scene like that and often more egregious. Sure there's the "just don't watch it" but then people saying that wouldn't like it said to them about their anime being toned down or something.
It does seem incredibly pervasive which is the very unfortunate element really. It's also bizarrely difficult to find actual good anime on historical stories it seems, a lot of them are extremely anachronistic, outright wrong, or they turn all the characters into effeminate caricatures.