As of summer 2019, anime has become my primary entertainment medium. The thing that pushed me deep into it was I watched "A Place Further than the Universe", an anime about 4 high school girls who go to Antarctica. The thing that blew me away about it was that one of the girls had basically dropped out of high school and was working at a convenience store because she had been bullied by her seniors on the track team for outshining them. My sister went through the exact same experience (substitute Choir for Track), and her response to it was basically the same as this characters (get the hell out and explore the world). I was floored to see something so relatable and cathartic in anime of all places, when the only kind of anime I'd watched until then was the kind of shonen stuff that made it to Cartoon Network in the early 2000s.
>Objectively, anime/manga better than American alternatives. So why the need to justify?
Right off the bat, what? How far into this text do I need to read to understand what those two sentences mean to imply?
> It seems to be a fact that anime is overrepresented in the American market compared to moving picture products of other countries. How many British productions does one see in America, despite England being one of the closest culture to America, despite all their productions being in English by default, despite 70 years of television excellence by the BBC, etc. etc.? Not very many. Or how about Bollywood, one of the most prolific cinemas in the world, active since the 1930s? Or the aforementioned Korean films?
I gotta challenge on the British one. PBS is not only a thing, it's a thing a lot of people watch, just a different age demographic (mostly). I grew up on old reruns of Monty Python's Flying Circus and Are You Being Served as much as I grew up on Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh.
Don't even get me started about Downton Abbey.
I agree. My friend group watches a lot of British media. Peep Show, Would I Lie To You, Pointless, etc. Even shows like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire had their start in England.
Thanks for the quote. I still don’t understand how this addresses anime being “objectively better” (or not) than American media. I genuinely don’t understand what that means. I also don’t understand how anime being over represented is a justification of... anything?