Triggerhappy: Schrodinger’s anime fan
If you’re into anime, and especially anitwitter, you know the kind of people i’m talking about. They’re those who say they like anime, but then every line they dedicate to it is to bash it as a whole. Be it that “anime is sexist” or “anime girls are pedophilia” (and i don’t mean lolis, the trend now is to claim that the adult design characters are pedophilia too), or “anime plots touch problematic topics”, or “anime is militaristic” or “anime is transphobic” or “anime is racist” or “anime is homophobic” or “anime is fascist”, or “anime should pander to westerners instead of japanese fans” or complains that an anime adaptation is not tracing the drawings from the manga (this really happened) and a whole lot of complains that seem to always come from the same people in the same sectors of the internet, to the point that you have to ask yourself, if they hate so many things about anime, why the fuck they still watch it instead of consuming a different product akin to their tastes? They don’t even have to stop watching anime, they can just change genre or target demographic. Why keep insisting on watching “shonen”, the type of anime targeted at young males, to then complain the content was pandering to young males?
Well, if you want to know why i think this happens, you can read my Theory of the Three steps of decadence of a hobby and see steps from 2 to 3.
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But why Schrodinger’s?
Schrodinger’s cat is supposed to be (alive OR dead). This one is brain dead, no fancy wave functions.
And me and my fellow Sword Art Online fans just look up briefly before returning to our books, saying “Eh. Same old shit.”
About anime characters being paedophilia. This depends on your definition of the word. If you mean paedophilia as defined by the DSM as an attraction to prepubescent girls, then no—anime is not paedophilia. However, if you define paedophilia by its colloquial definition, where any attraction to someone who is underage or has neotenic traits is paedophilia, then most anime that you’ve watched and enjoyed is paedophilia in Japan; they just call it Lolicon.
Something a lot of westerners don’t know is the origin and definitions of words like Lolicon and Otaku. In Japan, the 1980s are known as the Lolicon Boom (ロリコンブーム), and it’s not called the Lolicon Boom because of media pandering to paedophiles as defined by the DSM, but rather it’s the name of the period a certain art-style where characters with large heads and big eyes exploded into popularity and was making everyone who partook in it rich. This includes game companies like Square, Enix, and Koei, and artists like Toriyama Akira and Takahashi Rumiko. If you liked fantasy, science-fiction, mecha, or whatever that feature attractive anime-style girls with large heads and big eyes, then this would be called Lolicon in Japan.
Patrick W. Galbraith, an academic, has done extensive work to convey the history of anime and manga, whose roots are deeply tied to this Lolicon Boom. He has even done a 3 part video series with Pause and Select on Youtube about Moe and Lolicon that has good production values and includes art from the magazines that spawned the anime and manga you currently enjoy. There were several ‘Lolicon’ magazines published during this period and one magazine ‘Manga Burikko’ was where the word Otaku originated in articles written by Nakamori Akio to belittle the magazine’s 2D-Complex Lolicon readers after he took a trip to their precious Comiket. Akio wrote several columns before he was banned from using the word ‘Otaku’ and then had his column cancelled altogether by the editor. It wasn’t until 1989 when Akio wrote a book about a serial killer called Miyazaki that the mass media were introduced to the word ‘Otaku’ and used it to define those they believe are bombs ticking to become another Miyazaki. Westerners misinterpret Otaku to mean something like a nerd, but in Japan, it’s associated with perceived mental illness and deviancy.
Essentially:
Lolicon≒2D-Complex≒Otaku
So the people on Twitter saying that anime is Lolicon are technically correct. However, their concerns that it is ‘problematic’ are mostly factually, ethically, and scientifically unfounded. Japan has been dealing with Lolicon for much, much longer, and their reasons for disliking Otaku are much more nuanced and reasonable. The basic idea that still persists over there is that people who develop a 2D-Complex are less likely to get married, have children, and contribute to the economy by passionately working overtime to support their families. Instead the perception is that the average 2D-Complex Lolicon Otaku’s going to live with their parents and work a low-effort part-time job to help support their parents with the rest of the paycheck going to their anime, manga, game-related hobbies. It wasn’t until the ‘Moe Boom’ (Lolicon 2.0) when anime and manga blew up in the west that the negative perception of Otaku starting relaxing slightly, since western companies wanting to import and localise this ‘degenerate 2D-Complex-Lolicon-Otaku garbage’ was now helping the Japanese economy.
A problem with western anime fans is that they’re either ignorant or intellectually dishonest about what they like about these anime characters. Trying to weasel your way into saying something completely wrong, like ‘x’ character is an adult and isn’t Lolicon isn’t going to help. Normal people looking at an anime character for the first time are going to see the large heads and big eyes, and this will instantly translate to their normal person brains that they’re looking at a child as defined by their government (in the United States, a child is anyone under 18 years old). What people need to do is study neural science and understand the concept of Neoteny in humans, our attraction to certain neotenic features, and Supernormal Stimulus. Once these things are properly understood, it suddenly makes anime and manga drawings less frightening or disturbing.
I’ve stop reading the moment i saw “underage girls are pedophilia”