My Life In Fandom: When Your Beloved Turns Pale

Friend of the Retreat Brian Niemeier has a post today about SJW infiltration into anime production, taking the approach we all suspected: getting on the production committees. Head over there and read that before continuing.

I'm not mad about this as such. They'd already been executing a containment strategy, but actual pozzing was always the goal and this is the means to do it. The problem I see is that it may be too little and too late, for them and us, as forces beyond anyone's control have made this development moot.

No, not just Corona-chan, though that will play a role. No, not just the ChiComs, though they are exerting pressure. The problem is what's coming out.

Since the high-water mark of the late 90s--there's that marker again--the entire field crashed creatively and technically. 2000-2010 was a decade more or less lost to both the changeover to CGI-dominated production, with its own learning curves and growing pains as well as talent turnover. The genres that made anime popular worldwide fell into disuse overnight, with so few good original works coming out that when one finally hit like the old days (Gurren Lagann) it was treated like the Second Coming. The majority of the embarassing output that marks typical production today began here, but there's another trend to address.

Like Western pop culture, Japanese pop culture stagnated. More and more reliance on fewer and fewer franchises. More and more remakes, retreads, side-stories, and nostalgia works--more plays into the Nostalgia Trap--and fewer original works outside of a couple of commercially viable genres. More of the works that do get made focus more and more on childhood and high school life and not on adult life or feature adult protagonists; more works are contemporary in setting and not exhibiting imagination or speculation. The fanfic phenomenon afflicting the West is abundant in the East also, with all of the consequences to go with it.

In short, what we're now seeing here is that--as with the Western experience--the SJW push into anime is no different a chase of corpse-eating grubs finding more to eat than it was previously. The anime business is over-reliant on so few genres that you can count on one hand and have digits left over, and about as many remain present enough to retain an overall illusion of variety; the result is an increasingly freakish audience, and freakish r-selected audiences are breeding grounds for SJW pozzing.

As much as I enjoy the remakes and revisits of late--they are very well done--you can't rely on them forever. As much as the anime industry have finally recovered in technical competency from the CGI turnover 20 years ago, they remain creatively bankrupt and the practices are not conducive to making the healthy cultural works of the previous heyday; it's no surprise that few new works compare favorably to those of that past era anymore than Mouse Wars compares favorably to Uncle George's films.

In short, consider the possibility that this is necessary to fix a persistent problem, and it is unlikely that anything within the present context will solve it.

And if you get the idea that I'm fine with this, you haven't been paying attention. It may be necessary, but that doesn't mean I want the pain to happen. I just want there to be an anime industry clean of this poz once this is over.