It's funny to me that the majority of hexbear users in this thread can't just say this. There's some defensiveness in here that you wouldn't typically see about other topics and it's 100% bc anime lmao.
it's always the things closest to your heart that are hardest to analyze honestly. i didn't grow up on anime other than pokemon, which i was into for the games, so my general introduction to the medium was having a very neurodivergent friend infodumping the plots of like fma. my first actual journey into anime started with watching eva before moving on to aot and then jojo's. i'm still pretty picky about what i watch, and even in some of the better shows (aot in particular) there's a lot to analyze in terms of political content that is genuinely fash leaning. i think the quality of the best anime story arcs is that the character development and material interaction with the world are usually much more in depth than you tend to get in western entertainment mediums. representation of trauma is often explored incredibly deeply, which is an obvious byproduct of japan's longstanding internal contradictions and relatively recent titanic shifts in its cultural and social structures. weebs that grow up on anime have a mostly idealized mental conception of japanese society built off of the society depicted in anime (which washes away most of the problematics in much the same way that western media does, but not being a japanese native appears to make a difference here for people) that does not stand up to material scrutiny.
It's funny to me that the majority of hexbear users in this thread can't just say this. There's some defensiveness in here that you wouldn't typically see about other topics and it's 100% bc anime lmao.
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it's always the things closest to your heart that are hardest to analyze honestly. i didn't grow up on anime other than pokemon, which i was into for the games, so my general introduction to the medium was having a very neurodivergent friend infodumping the plots of like fma. my first actual journey into anime started with watching eva before moving on to aot and then jojo's. i'm still pretty picky about what i watch, and even in some of the better shows (aot in particular) there's a lot to analyze in terms of political content that is genuinely fash leaning. i think the quality of the best anime story arcs is that the character development and material interaction with the world are usually much more in depth than you tend to get in western entertainment mediums. representation of trauma is often explored incredibly deeply, which is an obvious byproduct of japan's longstanding internal contradictions and relatively recent titanic shifts in its cultural and social structures. weebs that grow up on anime have a mostly idealized mental conception of japanese society built off of the society depicted in anime (which washes away most of the problematics in much the same way that western media does, but not being a japanese native appears to make a difference here for people) that does not stand up to material scrutiny.