I'm pretty sure the short answer is: "Well, 4chan, right?". But it goes a bit beyond that.
If there's something that I have learned is that your standard :le-pol-face: is nearly IDENTICAL to ISIS, it's just a matter of whether they want to be a Christian CHUD or a Muslim CHUD. Osama Bin Laden was found to be a fan of anime too, among many other ISIS/al Quaeda members. Hell, ISIS members are frogposters just as much as "defend the west" CHUDs. There's a joke online about how fashy a lot of weebs are and I really don't understand it.
Anime is Japanese and Japan fought on the side of the axis is the only connection I can think of, but it's not like Japanese people are considered white in the US, the country that these hogs apparently love so much. Hell, hogs demonized the FUCK out of Japan in the 70s and 80s too despite being a fellow capitalist nation. Now they're coming around?
Also, look at two of the most popular anime: Pokemon is pretty pro-environment and Dragon Ball Z: where Frieza talks almost identically to your average chanbrain and was inspired by real estate speculators because of how evil they are.
Is there a deeper connection besides "4chan lol"?
Most anime has by far the most baby-brained story telling elements. Like, it is to the point where I can literally just see a show once and more or less predict how it is going to go for the first season. Later seasons might get weird, but they only get weird in incredibly formulaic ways that you can predict after the first two episodes.
That isn't to say all anime is bad, it's just most of the anime chuds like is trash.
Edit: this also shouldn't be surprising as most of it is made for Japanese children. Other audiences are mostly an after thought.
Once you start doing research on imperial-era Japanese fascism, you start seeing tidbits of that Era's philosophy in anime. IMO, the messaging tends to speak to the fears that privileged classes of people have in relation to their colonized surroundings. Shonen anime especially makes frequent appeals to strength and self-sacrifice against an alien extremism, usually in opposition to civilized society. Example: the author of Attack on Titan when it was found out he's racist against Koreans for nationalistic reasons.
But also, incels love anime tiddies. :hentai-free:
Continuing from my original post, I'm kinda surprised that 4chan didn't reject dragon ball because Frieza is a picture perfect portrayal of them. Arrogant to a fault but is deeply terrified of a "super saiyan" that will fight back against them and disprove their delusions of grandeur.
I mean it's also because they can conveniently hide with the normies. Imo JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is the best of battle anime these days. Dragon Ball Super is pretty bad. That being said, at this point I literally am more likely to listen to a podcast about an anime, than actually watch an anime.
They can ignore that because fan fave Vegeta is a Machiavellian fash himself.
Not really? They're kind of barbarians, like in the D&D sense. They're not "good" or anything to aspire to, they're just slightly above-average fighters. If they feel enough righteous fury they can access a form which makes them very above-average fighters, at the cost of even more of their already fragile emotional state. And if they get enough D&D good-aligned saiyans together and believe hard enough they can perform a religious ritual to turn one of them into a ... god? Demigod? What is even a god in Dragon Ball is kind of unclear.
But yeah saiyans were never supposed to be some kind of ideal. For most of the known history of Dragon Ball they were going around committing genocides, not even for some fucked up cause they believed in, but for money.
There is an episode where a german general tries to recruit them because they are blonde haired blue eyed super soldiers
That is absolutely my read on it. I was just telling a friend like two days ago that all of Japan is incredibly myopic, even if the Japanese Communist Party is pretty great sometimes.
Anime was a leftist medium first and has only moved more right with the decades. Somebody made an article about it that I didn't read, but yeah.
I mean, imagine being so isolated from the world that you spend your time posting the N word and cuck porn on an image board to piss people off. That’s the level of outcast we’re talking about. It doesn’t help that a lot of anime glorify this kind of behavior.
Almost every single anime portrayal of otaku is done with the negative stereotypes of Japanese society. We had tons of straight up "you are fucking disgusting and sick" anime like Welcome to the NHK and Re:life. That anime glorifies the 4chan western types is a pretty big exaggeration. Nobody hates Japanese otaku more than Japanese themselves lol.
You can't mistake pandering for glorifying. There is no argument that anime panders to the worst type of otaku since historically they were the ones funding most of the industry but outright positive portrayal of the 2ch types is quite rare.
The stereotypical "acceptable" otaku that you'll find is the anime/manga club in high school, maybe a manga artist here or there, maybe the salaryman otaku that goes to comiket and is lonely. Actual 2ch netizens/lolicons are almost exclusively portrayed negatively as hikikomori/NEETs. In fact I don't think I know of a positive hikkomori portrayal, maybe 1/20 references? I know a few hikikomoris that are downplayed as jokes so that is certainly not positive.
In fact hikikomori is such a problem in Japan that glorifying it in any context is pretty much taboo.
The western 4chan guy would never actualy pay for shit(piracy is essential to western fandom) or unironically go to a yearly convention more than once for the novelty of it.
Right but if you mock yourself you run the risk of being misinterpreted as self-deprecation for comedy and people missing the message.
Also, Japan is a hegemonic country. Chuds see their country as a model white people should copy, ignoring the pedophilia, sexual harassment, loneliness, and overwork. Or perhaps this is also what they want to copy to their white ethnostate.
Fair enough, but this begs the question on why they fearmonger so much about Muslims? If anything, Muslims are MORE "white" than Japan, they worship the same God, both think we all need moar Jesus, and arabs are more "western" than Japan. Hell, there's also the anti-semitism that Muslim hogs like to drum up. Just like them. Even in William Pierce's book, he tolerates Muslim extremists before Japan.
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The arab world is full of plenty of hogs just like /pol/. Young men who feel emasculated: Bin Laden and Baghdadi took advantage of that by being their Jordan Peterson. If you showed one of them a stonetoss comic, even one that was demonizing Muslims, they'd probably laugh.
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Charlie Hebdo studios are one of the closest things I'd say to a leftist stonetoss. They were French comrades who literally got attacked by :le-pol-face: types, you'd think 4chan would be nutting on how "those based Muslims DESTROYED those SJW soyboys!" (Oh yeah, point to Charlie Hebdo as an example on how the right REALLY feels about free speech).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to pull a Marine Le Pen or a Modi here, I'm just pointing out that I am surprised that it's interesting that they claim to oppose ISIS.
i think you're muddling ISIS and chan terrorists a bit too far. ISIS is a religious fundamentalist organisation, but was also founded in the milieu of resistance against american occupation. its membership outside the odd euro larper was experienced guerillas & former army. materially and organisationally they're leagues ahead of chan terrorists, who still aren't mostly affiliated with real groups
that's because ISIS mainly exists because Saddam Hussein's army was laid off with no pensions and found themselves unemployed
Charlie hebdo have always been just shockingly racist and generally awful. I'm not saying them being bombed was a good thing but it doesn't make them good people.
Most young chuds tend to be edgy new athiests
Fair enough, but this begs the question on why they fearmonger so much about Muslims?
Because the Japanese are almost all "over there" whereas Muslims are very much "over here" in most western countries.
Also there's the stereotype that the Japanese follow rules and try to adapt to host cultures when they do immigrate, whereas Muslims are seen as demanding the host culture change.
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Sexist tropes + power fantasy + sexualisation of underage girls, these are quite common elements in anime and they all appeal to far right
Lots of people like anime. I feel like that's all there is to it, really.
Anime often comforts/takes advantage of lonely young men. Most anime and manga is for teenagr boys, so this makes sense. Privileged but unfulfilled members of society usually turn fash. The fash, due to privilege, get to have priority and set the tone of whatever community they are in. Lots of the people your average Chad wants dead also likes anime, but they have to actually work and struggle to stay alive or for offline communities. Take the animemes community on :reddit-logo: : when the word tr*p was banned, everyone who wasn't good on trans issues(ranging from chuds to libs) had a reaction. The loudest were the chan heads. Now, the mods were already on the trans side of the issue, but imagining they weren't, the people who have no lives and don't have to worry about getting their injections or actually feel under attack from the words being said can keep up an offensive forever, people with actual problems cannot. So, the community seems more chuddy than it might be in reality. Also, chuds are swarm animals. If some of them do something, they all do it.
I think anime plays into right-Weebs ideology of Japan being this perfect utopia of a trad values, a polite homogenous population free of minorities and the "ills" of western society. Anime is a way to connect to that fantasy world.
And with media, it's easy to pick and choose narratives that fit your worldview. Also, a lot of people just take media at face value without understanding what it's actually trying to convey.
Also, a lot of people just take media at face value without understanding what it’s actually trying to convey.
tHe CuRtAiNs WeRe FuCkInG bLuE :reddit-logo:
There is a strong trend of anti-intellectualism among right-wingers. Anime tends to be unchallenging compared to other forms of storytelling entertainment that are aesthetically for adults.
Okay but hear me out. I would pay good money to see Bin Laden's commentary tracks for anime.
I think by far the biggest factor is that both the far right and anime attract social outcasts. The far right are just as infested in other hobbies with no social capital, it's just that liking anime leads you to having anime avatars so it's more noticible.
it’s just a matter of whether they want to be a Christian CHUD or a Muslim CHUD
There are a staggering number of so-called "New Atheist" reactionaries that came back to fundamentalist Christianity or at least call themselves "Cultural Christians" like Richard Dawkins did. It's fucked.
As for the (likely controversial, because the treats must be defended) take that anime has more than its fair share of right wing consumers, here's what I came up with.
"Purity" obsessions. A significant amount of anime has feeemale characters that are specifically designed for fanservice, not only visually but in attitude, beliefs, and behavior. The "I fight for senpai" and "please don't die, senpai, I love you too much!" cliches are a part of that but not the whole of it. It sets a grossly selfish standard for what feeemales are supposed to be and act like when it comes to impressionable minds consuming that stuff before they date or have relationships of their own. It isnt just sexual virginity that is hypocritically obsessed over in such anime: it is mental "purity" where the feeemale characters know next to nothing and have no upsetting opinions and have their heads filled with naivete for otaku to get off to.
Youth obsessions. Anime characters skew young and skew younger (with "1000 year old half angel half vampire that looks like a child" excuses where applicable) over time to pander to a self-selecting normalization of sexualizing minors because of market pressures and companies doing what is most profitable, which is to pander to big spender pedophiles. Chuds are also obsessed with young victims because those victims lack the life experience or adult mental faculties to fight back or know when they're being creeped on.
A lot of right-wing politics are baked right into the stories. The most glaring modern examples include "Gate" and "Attack on Titan" at a nationalistic "the master race is being attacked by inferior evil weaklings that must be put in their place" level, and at an individual politics level, "The Rising of the Shield Hero" the provides plot-contrived moral justifications for slavery as well as chud rage against rape accusations and even (in the light novel version) vivid and gory rape/murder revenge fantasies against false rape accusers that might make Jordan Peterson blush. :jordan-eboy-peterson:
"Cultural Christians" or in other words:
"I think Christians are dogmatic and unscientific zealots who only want to control people....and that's FINE BY ME!" It insults Christians and "heretics" at the same time.
That's the part they like, though they are more than happy to say how "scientific" they believe their bigotry and climate/covid denialism is. :expert-shapiro:
I've been fond of the medium since it was called "Japanese Animation" or even "Japanimation" and was a weird thing you had to buy on VHS tapes from booths at swap meets and conventions. Yes, I'm aware of just how different and varied older stuff was, not just compared to more modern tendencies to pander to otaku but also compared to different competing franchies. Even if they had their own problematic elements, New Dominion Tank Police was very different from Akira which was very different from Super Atragon which was very different from Nausica of the Wind which was very different from Record of Lodoss War, and so much more never had official releases in the west at all.
The medium was more experimental back then and didn't quite have its cliches and troupes pre-loaded and ready to go over and over again. It wasn't yet possible for a studio to simply sit down and say "let's make yet another maid harem isekai, and all we have to do is move the personality cliches and the hair colors and styles around" and expect it to print money.
Let me stress that I said "tendency" before I likely receive hostile replies from treat defenders. Yes, I know that even now there are good recently-produced anime out there. I'm talking about market trends and specifically the inescapable capitalist mandate to pander to the big spending creepy people that buy the majority of the discs and the figurines and the posters, where much of the money is made.
Osama Bin Laden was found to be a fan of anime too, among many other ISIS/al Quaeda members.
Wasn't that just a computer on his cave or something? More likely one of his younger family members or officers than a boomer islamic reactionary. Mostly the boomer part.
It was a compound of buildings where several families lived, it's more likely that the computer and the content belonged to one of his sons, or bodyguards
Although OBL watching Bible Black, Tom & Jerry and playing porn tetris clones is very funny
https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index.html
mostly the same reasons leftists latch onto anime, perhaps with the exception of a certain fascist sentimentality, but most leftists aren't immune to that either
Because it's popular? Anime and video games have a large segment of chud enthusiasts but it could be due to their general popularity (large population of fans = large segment of chuds because of the numbers/stats)
Also, look at two of the most popular anime: Pokemon is pretty pro-environment and Dragon Ball Z: where Frieza talks almost identically to your average chanbrain and was inspired by real estate speculators because of how evil they are.
You're forgetting that there's what they consider anime for "normies" and then there's for want of a better word "d*generate" anime that they self-label and hold up as a good thing. A large quantity of trash fits in this category.
