Triumph In Blog

The official TRIUMPH IN BLACK stance on Japanese animation!

Every day, I see via instagram reels at least 10,000 people individually develop some of the most remarkable, beautiful modular synth sounds known to man, often without even using expensive or complicated tricks. Then, around 9,998 or so–margin of error of 2 on that estimate–destroy it by smothering it to death in horrible noisy drums and sidechained bass and anime girls, until it’s just more digicore or breakcore or whatevercore for the culture, like anything else. I find this irritating enough, and a number of those reasons I think I’ve already discussed: I think genre purists are tedious, I think needing to have some kind of “-core” to worship is bad for your understanding of art, and I think I’m also subconsciously jealous that some people can go viral at random by making what I think of as tripe.

But there’s another factor to this equation that I thought about today, and I think it makes me a little hypocritical to decry. The anime component of annoying online electronic music (not mine, the normal kind,) is by now completely irremovable from the actual music component. The aesthetic language of nearly every kind of electronic music remaining popular since we all decided to stop saying “hyperpop” is anime or one of its derivatives, whether the creators really know that or not. It’s my belief that this is indicative of a massive, imperceptible cultural shift, and music is usually where those start so I’m kind of confident in that assumption.

As Americans, we’ve come to understand in the last 25 or so years that hip-hop in all its many forms has becoming the defining feature of most of our pop culture, but that’s no longer as novel as it was to the white masses in 2000. Now, that feels normal, and something else underground must come up to take its place (I have described this vague process before.) Anime appears to be the most likely to take the throne, and judging by my description of it as entirely integrated into at least one thing that I find annoying, I could say that I find this transfer of cultural power to be a net negative.

That’s not really believable though, is it? I think if you know me or anything I have made, you could guess that I actually do like a lot of anime, and I have gone to bat for it a lot. Some of my favorite movies are anime, I reference anime frequently in critique and even in conversation, and I obviously have a fascination with the Japanese culture and language, including but not limited to dogshit video games. So, as someone who has been around it for a very long time and who is also known to frequently use it for jacking off, I feel like I would do well to clarify my position on anime for the culture. How do I rationalize finding something annoying but at the same time meaningful and unique?

My thinking here is really no different from anything I’ve said a million times before. The way I reckon anime is the way I reckon any other genre: I believe that most of it sucks because it can’t get past relying on tropes and fanservice, but some things transcend when the people who make them have some respect for the form. This is kind of a boring answer because it demands elaboration, but I really do believe this is the only way to curate art meaningfully. The status of anime as a “genre” is sort of disputed being that it is very old, and encompasses a lot of things, but this is really more fuel for my argument; calling something “anime” is almost like calling music “prog” or “pop,” in that it refers to very little of the actual content of what you’re discussing without further denotation. There’s no way the cel-animated superhero cartoons of the 70s are in the same weight class as the CGI horse girls of today, right?

The answer to this is almost always the same–an arms race of subgenre terms that are all 5 words long and last for 10 seconds, or apply to like 3 things. No. This is a waste of time, and I don’t believe in it, not unless I’m trying to describe something to someone that I think has very little frame of reference. So, let me rephrase my characterization a little bit, keeping that in mind: I think that most anime sucks because it’s “genre fare,” but there are some that are good because they have real vision. That sounds more succinct, right? And I think it’s more helpful too, because I can draw more apt analogies from there.

There are a lot of things I dislike for being infested with “genre fare,” because I think that’s a lazy way to make something. You expect that people will go along with what you’re giving them just because it’s intentionally similar to something they already have? That’s insanely cynical to me, and it defeats the purpose of really making anything at all. The best covers, remakes, and tributes all include new ideas unique to the person making them, as a sort of proof that art can have the power to inspire, grow, and change people. I like when things break the mold, for better or for worse, and I really have no respect for things that are made to check boxes, or appeal to a market.

Horror movies are like this. I think I use them as a punching bag a lot, but this is a really strong comparison in my eyes. Just like with horror, anime is treated like something that you’re just supposed to just keep asking for seconds with. The pool of ideas is pretty shallow, and everything “new” is generally just a single gimmick stretched very thin. In fact, both in horror and in anime there’s come to be a sort of orthodoxy, and trying to deviate too far from the established hallmarks is met with derision. It’s never about a vision, or a meaning, or even a certain mood so much as its about ticking the boxes and giving people what they want, which I think is sick.

“Horror movie people” will go out and watch anything that espouses to be horror, and how much they like it has absolutely nothing to do with the style or the form, more just whether or not the content meets expectations they already had. Sometimes the established tropes are so old, they’ve already been met with criticism from the outside and that criticism was already parried by a new generation of people doubling down on the tropes, but acting smug or treating them as irony. Those Terrifier movies, the M3gan thing whatever that is, Jordan Peele: in the words of Peter Griffin, these things insist upon themselves, and sort of just expect the audience to like it before they walk in. Because they do!

Anime is exactly the same. There’s any number of reasons why people get into anime in the first place, and they’re sort of inscrutable. It’s pretty “other” compared to what we have had in the west because those tropes it loves so much are often sexually explicit, unique to Japanese culture, or based around wordplay that doesn’t translate so it seems really alien to us. I suppose that gets people interested if they don’t know much about Japan? Regardless of how it caught on (I’m going to restrain myself from digressing for once,) what we can observe now is that we’re pretty well past the point of know-nothings stumbling into Naruto, or crude jokes about “tentacle porn” in sitcoms. Things have understandably gotten to a point where people have been exposed to anime enough that they can comfortably “get into it,” and become tranquilized by its repetitiveness, which is somehow what people want. Why do people sit down and watch 2000 episodes of One Piece, if not because they liked the first episode and thought “I would watch that 1,999 more times!”

This is what I really resent, and it’s not unique to anime at all. How can something so vast be reduced to something so cheap? Anime is no simple genre, so we shouldn’t expect crap like that…and yet the crap ends up getting so popular! It’s no secret that the lowest common denominator is often the biggest one in anime. The most popular things going are almost always the Solo Levelings, the One Pieces, the Jujutsu Kaisens–things that follow a formula to a T, and have no interest in doing a whole lot other than massage the character archetypes people want to see, or do the same jokes they’ve been doing since chapter one of their source material comic that also sucks. It’s not that thoughtful or unique things don’t exist, it’s just that they often get overshadowed, and that shadow keeps getting bigger and bigger now that anime’s had time to go mainstream.

For me personally, I love a lot of the anime of the 80s and 90s, even some from the 2000s. I even think some of the anime in the last few years have been good, even some of the popular ones! A broken clock is right twice a day, and sometimes things are recognized popularly for being funny or different. I don’t think it’s nearly often enough, though, and in general I believe that anime has lost a lot of its luster over the years as a form of art or cinema. The insane popularity of things with zero edge whatsoever has spent a good 15 years now snowballing into something large enough to eventually explode into an avalanche, which I believe we are currently witnessing, and have been since the pandemic at least. The anime music I referenced in the beginning is only one small piece of the puzzle. We also have to contend now with the dreaded “Vtubers,” the gacha games, the hatsune miku crossover events, the dandadan movies at the AMC.

It’s so bad now that your parents might even be exposed to it, which is wild. The likelihood that a normal person on the street knows what “yaoi” is has increased by at least 4000%, and there are real human people out there with the gamersupps hentai tits on their gear at the gym. I don’t think any of this stuff warrants a Tipper Gore style moral panic, but I can certainly say that it’s confusing and annoying, if nothing else, and it’s hard to believe that anyone could consider some of the old anime giants to be in the same ballpark as this sort of cultural pablum. To get closer to the original topic at hand, what sticks in my craw about shit like this becoming a regular fixture of everyday life is that it’s washing out a lot of the anime I consider special. Those lowest common denominators have become what we think of as anime, and in turn defined everything anime has become a part of as being thoughtless, vapid, and/or cravenly pornographic.

Something that got me thinking about all this, actually, was one such perfect example I witnessed on X, the everything app, fka Blaze Your Glory! fka Twitter.com about a week ago. In a bit of a convoluted way I won’t confuse myself by trying to explain, a post I saw was equating the work of Mamoru Oshii with the existence of the Vtuber usada pekora by placing both things under the umbrella of “Otaku” culture. Does that seem like a fair comparison at all? Oshii was one of the old masters of anime and started doing it in the 80s, and his work is so unique, inspired, and influential, that it’s still considered a standard for most anime today both in terms of animation style and aesthetic (even if nobody has the stones anymore to write things as lofty and Old Hollywood as he used to). Meanwhile, usada pekora is an influencer who wears articulated softcore loli porn as a mask to livestream video games. Just because both of these things involve animation designed by Japanese people, they’re considered related somehow?

I’m worrying that the falcon lost track of the falconer a long fuckin time ago, and whatever was slouching towards Bethlehem has already been born. People like me can whine about the prestige of old cartoons all we want, but the popular perception of anime, the perception that has already informed a few generations of people, is that it’s all any one of a handful of easily-digestible things that are endlessly copied. I don’t think in the anime industry’s current state that we’re ever gonna get another Ninja Scroll or another Midori. Interesting things can’t stay afloat when all the funds are going toward forced labor camps in South Korea where MAPPA chains people to turnstiles for 72 hours at a time to ensure that Nobara’s shirt can grip her luscious, 17 year old F cups just the right way. Whatever we’ve been getting is what people know now, and that’s the legacy I think we’re gonna be stuck with. I thought I was gonna end up being one of those old SomethingAwful goons who gets to be 40 years old, still whining about how anime sucks, but I think I’m gonna be more like the comic books guy from the simpsons. Still trying to keep up with stuff, hating most of it, prattling on about how much better it was when I was a kid.

For a final point, I’ll say this: I think anime can be good, but is usually bad, just not on principle. I don’t know if I think anything is bad or good on principle, and we’re all better off adjudicating things one-by-one as they come, from an auteurist perspective. I think anime was cooler when it was invested in developing characters and aesthetics, and borrowing from old movies, but sometimes we still that today too, don’t we? It stings that most anime with prestige now is either weepy, fake hallmark-movie slice of life Your Name shit, that or the same dark fantasy crap we’ve been seeing for 30 years, but I don’t know. A lot of anime out there right now are still pretty funny, and some of them look good, and there are fun ideas sometimes. Dungeon Meshi was a great comic and the anime has been pretty fun too, kind of a redemption run for studio TRIGGER in the last few years, and AoT finally ended so we can all be free from that. Things look up sometimes, but usually down.

Anime is a large and complicated beast that I haven’t described very well because I’m not a historian, nor do I want to write 2.3 million words just to say “remember good anime?” a few times. It’s not even so much that I miss a certain cultural moment of anime or that I think there’s something wrong with it wholesale–I think I’ve made the latter point abundantly clear so far. I just find it so irksome that we are where we are with anime, and that nobody on any side of the equation has much interest in or ability to pop this bubble of expensive slop and find a way to make cool shit again. In the end, that’s how I really feel about anime: it can be the coolest thing in the world, and it was born from some of the wildest ideas of some of the most talented visual artists in the history of the world. Is there any way we could stop making zenless zone zeroes, and start making some more Mononokes? Kinda asking for trouble there because I think they actually are still making more mononoke movies, which I’ve been too nervous to watch because I’m afraid they’ll be shite. You all know I was asking that metaphorically, right?

So my official stance, my TRIUMPH IN BLACK statement to the public on anime, is this: Sometimes it’s good, usually it’s bad, crunchyroll sucks, and shonen makes me sad.