The anime is Genshiken (2004), I picked it up on a whim. It's alright so far. Very "by weebs, for weebs". The manga is from 2002.
The 80s and 90s being a pass of the baton from veterans of the early days to more modern staff, which already grew up with anime, and the success of Evangelion and merchandising had some awful long-term consequences even if it was probably unavoidable under capitalism.
I was there, Gandalf, in 2004 watching Genshiken as it aired. There's a degree of leering but the show does have a bit of a critical eye at least.
Rambly thoughts on anime and the infinite sexualization of the medium.
I feel like the thing about anime that gets exceptionally icky is a product of its animated nature. I can watch Olivia Newton John in the tight leather pants in Grease without feeling like a total creep (though I feel bad because getting into them must have been torture) because she was 30 at the time. Just because the show says she's 17 or 18 does not change the fact she's an adult woman playing a high schooler (same goes for Travolta and the others). The camera's connection to the reality where she's 30 reduces the creepy nature of it all.
Anime though, you can have Yoko from Gurren Lagann who is 14 at the beginning of the show even as she's the object of
constantly. And if she were being played by a 23 year old, it would be gross but not gross in the same way where there's just the choice of the show. And the character designers aren't constrained by "reality" and still choose to sexualize a character they've made underage by fiat. It would be hilarious if it weren't so dark sometimes (Yoko's design is very 'mature' after all - you could have said she was 18 and no one would have questioned it). The reverse is, of course, even worse (2000 year old dragon), but it cuts both ways and I just think its interesting that until Euphoria I feel this kind of grossness was confined to anime. That show, with the age of its cast, feels like it's trying to do the kind of gross service that anime does all the time.
I've said before that a lot of it does feel like Hollywood casting late-20s/early-30s actors for teenage characters, because you get characters that scan as like 20 something and act like adults, but then the narrative makes them like 14 for no reason. You also get characters that scan as 30-40 being assigned ages like 20, too. It's weird, like artists are compressing a multi-decade-wide range of adult character designs down into a range of six years and labeling all of them as teens for no story-related reason.
Someone else pointed out that at least some of it is adult writers basically writing a story with adult characters and then aging them all down to make them more relatable to an intended teen audience, but without actually changing their appearances or behavior.
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