Anime Confronts a New Apocalypse
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"reborn/reincarnated/transported to another world as a _____" has matured and gotten popular to the point of being its own genre with associated tropes, rather than just being a trope that would sometimes appear in fantasy stories.
It's very rare that this is a good literary device. In my opinion, we have it because authors feel the need to turn the dial up on escapism, and what's more escapist than getting a fresh start in, literally, a new life.
Dont think of this as me whinging. "reborn as a vending machine" is my most anticipated show this season, I love the weird promises and read this one when it was just a machine translated webnovel :)
Didn't the Simpsons do that one first?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons_Spin-Off_Showcase
There can be hidden gems or interesting deconstructions of the genre, and sometimes crap can just be mindlessly entertaining.
I've started getting tired of the sheer amount of it, but I got tired of the 9 million mecha anime when I was younger, etc., as well.
Anime produced today needs to compete with all the anime produced over the last ~50 years. Whereas anime produced in the 90's only had to compete with ~30 years worth of anime before it. And even then, much less was produced by the industry as a whole back then.
And I disagree that it competes with 50 years old anime. Most people don't tend to watch old stuff, which they feel is stuffy and outdated. The story and writing could be great, but the pacing is different from modern standards, and the visuals can sometimes feel awful. I argue that only a very select group of people is interested in watching and revering old stuff.
This is why reboots work.
Which series does this describe? Guy gets hit by a truck, reborn in a medieval-european-esque world where he joins a guild and does menial tasks like collect plants and kill goblins to level up, but this happens rapidly due to superpower which took no effort to gain.
It's kind of like the MMORPG grind but without the grind. Instead of playing 20 hours/day, you see the character progress in 20 mins/week. The side-characters are as bland as NPCs.
MMORPGs suffer a similar problem: There's so many of them and there's not a whole lot of difference from one to the next.
The mangaka are typically young men who grew up playing these games and not getting out much, so it's no surprise their limited experience of the outside world also limits their ideas.
Perhaps a source of the problem is the business side of things: The studios are basically forced to fit a story into 13 episodes which leaves little room for actually creating a memorable experience. 24-26 episodes used to be the norm but is now the rare exception. The studios don't want to take risks so they'll only adapt popular manga.
Or maybe the consumers just have shorter attention spans, so you make the character go from level 1 to 1000 in the first few episodes to try and hook the audience, then revert to slow-pace.
The iseakais that are genuinely creative (cough 12 Kingdoms) get dropped.
I think of it this way: As the current world everyone lives in is devoid of meaning - you have to escape inside or to fantasy in order to find meaning. Disenchantment is the mood of the day. With the internet competition among local people becomes a bit moot. Economically everything is irreversibly and increasingly owned by the investor class and its likely that everyone will have more modest goods than their parents had.
Where and how do you find a purpose, a meaning against such a backdrop? This is the question that artists and writers are trying to answer. Defeating inner demons, finding connection and community, fighting an uncaring out of touch older class.. all sorts of theories are there.
Either you can't find work, or it's a soul crushing march towards death while performing meaningless work to make someone else rich while receiving no appreciation for it.
Japan has been facing a lot of these issues for longer than a lot of the rest of the developed world, but it increasingly seems like they were just a bit ahead of the curve in it happening.
It's why I think it's so popular, especially when coupled with a "System" as in litrpg which accelerates that even more.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/60292/all-the-dust-that-fa...
For consumers, they get quantity.
Although it shouldn't be impossible, it seems really hard to get any kind of real quality out of isekai stories. Usually the stakes are low and the setting is surprisingly similar (even though having a different setting is ostensibly the entire reason for the genre). All you end up with is variety in characters, and even then there are common tropes.
They already enjoy the stories enough to buy them or support patreons for them, I don't think trying to up the quality would be wise for the authors assuming it slowed down how quickly they wrote.
...yet, I think you're right about the parallel world escapism.
I very quickly realized that it felt new because it was new to me. Anime is chock full of stereotypes, cliches, re-hashed plot lines, and lazy unimaginative plots. Maybe even more so than Western media. 90% of anime absolutely is crap, just like 90% of everything else
The ones with good plot are usually way better than most tv shows I watched (yes this is a 1-person point of view).
And every epic anime beats tv shows that try to be epic, for some reason!
There’s so much more out there now. Some of it is whimsical and hopeful. Some that come to mind from the last decade:
- Yuri on Ice - A Place Further than the Universe - Your Name - Sasaki and Miyano - Given - The last Evangelion movie (which was a real holy shit moment for me) - Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet - This one is an odd pick but the Cyberpunk anime Netflix came out with last year was so so good. I know it undercuts my point given how it’s set in a dystopia but I felt like humanizing these characters that are criminals in a broken world and showing how they still have hopes and dreams and love… I found it very touching. - The Stranger by the Shore
Also Chainsaw Man is really really good, though it is dark and gory.
* You can have a main character with modern sensibilities and attitudes, and yet fit him in a fantasy- or historical world. You can and often do get away with asking Nobunaga Oda if he's considered using the blockchain to enhance his military presence.
* The MC having to come to terms with his new world provides a lore-sane way to soft-launch the worldbuilding.
Forget about anime, look at the YA movies in the last decade. Gone are the traditional awe-inspiring scifi, in are the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class.
I don't think this is a Last Decade thing... This describes Evangelion quite well, and evangelion is way older than a decade. Wolf's Rain is literally a bunch of teenagers (who are also wolves) remaking the world in the post apocalypse, also older than a decade. Arguably this is also full metal alchemist.
every generation feels this way. not sure why it needs the qualifier you attached. each generation has to have it's own ________. can't listen to the same music as the prior generation, as that's lame. can't use the same social platforms, because you're parents are on it. can't use the same lingo as that's not hip and gotta talk in ways they parental units won't understand
In the 2000s, you started seeing popular sci-fi books (then movies in 2010s) like The Hunger Games and Maze Runner that depict teenagers as the opposed class.
Personally I think the 2000 Japanese classic Battle Royale started it all.
The mid 2000s dystopia fest in young adult stuff is just follow the leader with Hunger Games. The oppression is used not for it's own sake, but because its an easy excuse for your teens to be more "mature" and more in control of their own lives. It's escapism for teens who think parents "just don't get us"
I think the difference now is that happy endings used to be the norm, whereas now they are not necessarily there, or the protagonists are pushed through such extreme losses that the win ends up looking pyrrhic.
This might simply be a function of the amount of productions - in the history of mankind, we've never seen so many new stories circulating so widely on so many different media. Smart authors want to look different and "real", so they might veer dark more liberally than they used (or rather were allowed, by public and editors) to.
The biblical stuff was added just because they thought it looked cool.
... but enough about Fritz Lang's Metropolis
(produced 1927)
Luke was supposed to be, I believe, 19 during A New Hope, which was a movie about young rebels throwing off the almost literal corpses running the Empire.
(Same as it ever was…)
There have been two Gundam series and two Gundam movies in the past year alone. Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Yamato and Macross have all had movies come out within the past two years. Just because they disappear within the flood of content doesn't mean that they don't exist.
> the post-apocalyptical dystopia where teenagers are being oppressed by old people and the teenagers have to overturn the old ruling class.
That is so hyper-specific that it applies to a tiny handful of shows, at most elements of which are indicative of trends. It probably applies to one show this season. There's 157 other things coming out this season according to MyAnimeList.
Not that Gundam was ever all that optimistic: Good old Amuro was the poster boy for the disasters of war back in the very first series. The fact that there's cool robots is just sweetener for stories that are mostly about dealing with betrayal and despair. It's not quite Grave of the Fireflies, but it's not any less grim than, say, Evangelion.
> "It’s also a lot bleaker than it was in Matsumoto’s heyday." is also something that can't be corroborated. Ashita no Joe predates it and it got dark and was the first really big serious anime. Gundam would follow it soon afterwards and that starts out with galactic war. Ideon anyone?
Not that it's much better outside anime:
> Basically every parent is a manipulative monster.
Anakin Skywalker anyone?
I'm just happy that the original Mangaka behind Planetes has recently stated his intention that he's intending to return to sci-fi after finishing Vinland Saga. It might not necessarily be optimistic, but it'll be worth following.
A lot of early Anime has sci-fi/post-apocalyptic vibes because Japan was essentially a post-apocalyptic society. Japan is the only nation to have nuclear weapons used against it. It was so devastating, the entire world decided to just not do that sort of thing again.
But the level of national trauma Japan faced must have been something else. It affected their creative output for decades. Kaiju movies are essentially a response to the event. And elements of nuclear desolation is present in a lot of Anime. Akira, Vampire Hunter D, the earlier works of Miyazaki.
It's a huge fucking cultural touchstone for at least a couple of generations of Japanese people.
But we're also about 80 years from the event. Things are different in Japan. People have been born, lived full lives, and died between the time the bombs fell and today. There likely are children of children of people who were born after the bombs.
Japan today does have a lot more in common with the world at large. Their contemporary cultural touchstones are much the same ones around the world. So it makes sense that their art would reflect this.
I find this homogenization of culture incredibly sad.
We are really similar in reality, both across the physical world and across time.
Anno was a far better (if perhaps not as innovative) artist than Matsumoto because of his refusal to retreat into the recuperated fascism that dominated much of postwar culture, instead choosing to show its true social and psychological impacts.
See in Christianity with the parable of the garden of eden and it's destruction, in Islamic literature with the catastrophe of the sack of Baghdad causing a several hundred year cultural dark ages, in republican Chinese literature with the ideal classical civilization being replaced with mindless roving warlords, albeit with superior Western technology, etc...
Though perhaps anime has become less unusually ambitious in rendering elite thought into lower brow entertainment, a sort of regression to the mean of the world cultural millieu.
The main change in anime is that there's more out there than there has ever been before. Yes, there's some things that are quite popular, like Attack on Titan, but they are just a drop in the ocean now. Even the "chart-topper" Chainsaw Man just disappeared. Not because it was bad but because there's so other anime... like Bocchi The Rock.
The same season Bocchi The Rock premiered, and it was an anime that made introverts feel represented like nothing before it. How Bocchi The Rock is supposed to be the portent of an apocalypse flummoxes me.
"It’s also a lot bleaker than it was in Matsumoto’s heyday." is also something that can't be corroborated. Ashita no Joe predates it and it got dark and was the first really big serious anime. Gundam would follow it soon afterwards and that starts out with galactic war. Ideon anyone?
Watamote hit me a lot harder than Bocchi did, but I guess it had the advantage of getting me in a more vulnerable time of my life.
Also, it's probably been about 20 years since I've watched it, so maybe my memory is failing me here, but isn't Matsumoto's own Galaxy Express 999 pretty bleak? The article mentions it a few times, but pretty much only in aesthetic terms. I seem to remember it being a barely-subtext running theme that traveling to a different place won't let you escape societal corruption, it will just change the particular flavor of it that you encounter.
its just the studios churning out procedurally generated cookie cutter nonsense, just like the rest of TV
Its not that deep
> “Attack on Titan,” one of the biggest hits of the twenty-tens, captures the hopelessness of a dying city circumscribed by walls, under constant siege from zombie-like giants; it won prestigious awards around the world
And thought, "yeah, it's fucking awesome."
Cultural poverty and ignorance are often dressed as elitism.
But I don't feel like it was a net win—even as only an infrequent pervayor of the animes, I loved the old nerd counter culture of the internet, "weebs", video game fans, and it got absolutely blown apart, decontextualized, dismantled. It's great that some mostly-shounen anime has achieved mainstream success outside of Japan, but it's such a small section of a rich medium. Even considering that most anime is pretty bad, what I love about it is how it's often eccentric and weird, pushing boundaries, stunningly shameless. The stuff I liked mostly didn't gain mainstream success at all, what really became mainstream was "shows like Dragon Ball Z." That's cool and everything, but people in that corner massively outnumber the old communities of nerd losers that I once occupied, leaving me yet again out of place.
Obviously I can either accept reality or die mad, so I try not to spend too much time dwelling on it anymore. But wow, what a monkey's paw seeing some of the things I liked going more mainstream has been. Be careful what you wish for.
I mean, it's stuff like DBZ and One Piece that has mainstream success in Japan, too. The weird stuff is/was relatively niche there too compared to the big names, it's just the total slice of the pie relative to the overall Japanese population was bigger.
But lots of the weird stuff that is questionable by mainstream Western standards has also gotten significantly larger here, too. I've been watching anime since the early 90s, and feel like I'm more or less used to it's weirdness, but Monogatari for example still has stuff that makes me uncomfortable - but it was quite popular in the west, far bigger than similarly strange stuff was when DBZ was airing.
What made Akira interesting to foreign audiences at the time wasn't exactly the thematic content - though it got critical praise - but the more adult subjects and violence. What you found in Western animation at the time was vastly weighted towards children's toy sales and Disney general-audiences content - there was nothing like the OVA boom. So Akira existed as "the anime with nukes, biker gangs and mutants", alongside Hokuto no Ken's "atomic wasteland where muscle men punch each other and their heads explode". And that was what defined imported anime throughout the 90's - if it wasn't violent, it was sexy. Or it was Ghibli. Interest in series like Evangelion took some time to catch up with that, as more of a fan culture arose and tastes became discerning.
[0] http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-remem...
It does seem that even though anime is more popular than ever, there is not so many modern anime classics.
Isn't "modern anime classics" a bit of a oxymoron? Things generally don't become classics until a while after. Lots of examples of things not really being in the mind of the mainstream until it long died.
At most only because there's so much more out there.
The general consensus is that Oshi no Ko is as good as any classic (and is by the same author as the already classic Kaguya-sama) and that only aired one episode a week ago so far. A new season of Demon Slayer started ten days ago and that's the manga with the most per-volume sales ever, surpassing even Dragon Ball. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm talking about things that happened within the past two weeks alone.
Are you comparing to 1995-2005 or are you comparing to the lifetime of anime from about 1970 onwards?
1) I'm not sure anime is all that popular anymore. For example, I see FAR less anime merch than I did back in the early 2000s. Cyberpunk:Edgerunners is one of the few recently that seemed to spawn merch.
2) It doesn't help that a cour is now 13 episodes, at best, by default. It's pretty hard to make a "classic" anime in just 13 episodes on a super tight deadline. You can see the drop in quality around 2005 right about when things are switching to 13 episodes. By the time you reach 2010, practically nothing that isn't promoting toys is longer than 13 episodes.
3) Up through about the mid-90s, anime was mostly meant to promote buying toys and the quality reflects this (really--take a look at the anime released from about 1980-1990).
4) There were never that many "classic" anime after you remove Studio Ghibli.
5) 1995-2005 just had a remarkable run of producing some stupidly good anime along with all the standard dreck. It was a combination of decent enough funding, decent enough technology, and a sudden market opening (US demand).
6) The Japanese anime business leaders were complete and total dolts for a very long time. After about 2005, they sold increasingly expensive box sets to their whales and that completely warped things. Consquently, you get increasing amounts of junk hyper-tailored to the anime faithful (See: Zero no Tsukaima getting 48 episodes(!)--actually, please don't see it, it's total garbage).
Just off the top of my head, since 2020-ish, things that'll almost definitely be remembered at least among enthusiasts:
Oddtaxi feels like Satoshi Kon reborn, maybe with some Yuasa on the side
Summertime Render is basically Higurashi x Shiki
Bocchi is powerfully in the tradition of Watamote/NHK
Eizouken fits right in with the other Yuasa shows
Kakushigoto is classic Kumeta and will be remembered alongside Joshiraku/SZS
Chihayafuru was already classic alt-sports, so S3 is more of the same
Dorohedoro was already a classic manga and the adaptation so far has been surprisingly soulful
Jahy and Machikazo Mazoku are up there in comedic SoL with YrYr/Yuyushiki/etc
Ousama Ranking is so thoroughly well-produced I have a hard time seeing it not being remembered
Akiba Maid War and Paripi Koumei were sufficiently novel to be inherently memorable
The fact that no matter how hard you work, or how good you are, you have to die or go to another world before you'll see anything you might want to do because there is nothing for you here.
Its sad that the world we've made for our younger generation is such an unlivable place for so many that this is seen as one of the only escapes.
Sure its not entirely our fault since the boomer generation is largely to blame for this, the cohort generally chose to enriching themselves over their kids, and maintained that through political pull for far longer than they should have largely as a result of better medical technology.