The Anime Question

OI OI OI... BAAAKA!!!!!!!!!!!

George Washington if he was in Anime

When I first drafted this post, over a year ago, I considered myself a reluctant Anime viewer. It was intended to be a response to

Layne A. Jackson

’s Anime is a Disease post. I opened it, typed a paragraph, and then forgot about it for a year. Nowadays, I just consider myself an Anime viewer, not reluctant. I might be what Weaboos call a “tourist”, I was part of the post-covid Anime boom. However, I did not want to become an Anime fan. I tried to resist the poison sting of the yellow menace, but it was very hard when everyone I knew in college was a Weeb. This was also during the nadir of Western TV and film. No good movies were coming out, and TV was awful. I honestly wish I had gotten into Anime sooner, when I was in high school, as I think a lot of it would have been more relatable to me then.

Anime has always been a very important part of Internet culture. Even anti-Anime people like Layne have watched a good deal of it. Both the chan and the booru framework of imageboards originated for hosting Anime images. Half of Old YouTube was AMVs. Early Anime fans and early Internet users had something in common: they felt that the mundane real world left something to be desired. They were often “nerds”, ranging from mere awkward introverts to full-blown autistic outcasts. Normal people didn’t feel any compulsion to go make memes with strangers on some random forum or online community, they would just hang out with their real-life friends in the real 3-D world. The main complaint I hear from people who don’t watch Anime is that they just can’t get immersed into it, because it is so obviously not real. It’s just a cartoon, a series of drawings. Being an Anime fan requires some spirit of escapism, maybe even a restlessness and anxiety about the world as it is. Most of the cringe that Weaboos display is not due to them watching Anime, it is because they are just annoying by nature. It is because outcasts who don’t like the real world are drawn to Anime, and some of these people are outcasts because they’re just not very likeable. If they never watched any Anime, they would just be autistic faggots about something else. I don’t mind the weaboo cringe anymore. Maybe I’ve just become immune to it from exposure, though. I remember finding it extremely annoying in High School. Nowadays, I just can’t help but laugh at it. When I see a cringey Anime post I can’t help but imagine this is what is going on behind the screen:

The case that Anime leads to people becoming gooners is stronger, because it serves as a sort of gateway drug. In the 2014 OkCupid dataset, bisexuals and kinky people were more likely to enjoy Anime than the general population, but less homosexual men were less into Anime than heterosexual men. People who are probably predisposed to bisexuality get into it through “femboys” that look/talk like anime girls and all that shit, at a point where they would never be aroused by a real life man. It’s like getting a dog to take a pill by wrapping it in cheese. Speaking of cheese, I suspect the relationship between Lolicon and Pedophilia is roughly the same.

Anime had to develop in Japan, in my opinion, because the aforementioned anxiety about being grounded in this world was endemic to the Far East. It was the source of Buddhism and Taoism. It played a subtler role in Tengrism, Confucianism, and Shintoism, because these earlier religions had an immanent relationship with higher worlds. To the Mahayana Buddhist, one would have to be reborn to experience the Pure Land of the Buddha. To the Shinto or the Tengrist, one existed simultaneously in the corporeal world and in the spirit world, and simply had to realize it. You could even argue it is a bit of a Gnostic impulse, a religion which surprisingly did have a brief but powerful presence in Southern China and the Eastern Steppe (in the form of Manichaeism). As I have discussed before, there is a strange amount of Gnostic references in Japanese media in my experience. It is a natural consequence of power creep in RPGs and action Anime, for the final villain to be God or a god. This has resulted in a lot of Japanese games and Anime taking direct cues from Gnosticism. Sometimes, the villain is Gnostic. Other times, the villain is the Demiurge. Mostly, it is just Japanese writers adding something foreign and exotic to their work for the same reasons we in the West add oriental woo to our work, but that question of escapism and pessimism about the “real world” will always resonate more with Anime viewers than with the general population.

A few months ago, I saw a discussion on the nature of Anime Girls, on why people like them. The message of the post was basically, “because they are actually guys in girls bodies, so guys relate to them more”. Someone commented that they actually transcended this, that they were beings of pure goodness that people of every gender ought to aspire to be like. It was a very weird thing to say, especially for a straight man. I don’t want to be an Anime girl. You know who does? Autistic transbians. Pretty much all of them are into Anime and dress like Anime girls rather than real women. They do not realize that anime characters are simply not human… They don’t look human, do they? They are roughly shaped like humans, but they have these giant eyes, and very simple faces. In the real world, our faces have to be kind of detailed, so that subtle movements of facial muscles can express emotion, but in animation it is easier to just have simple faces that exaggerate emotional expressions. Anime faces are based both on earlier Western cartoons, and the big-eyed exaggerated masks of Kabuki theater. The purpose of theater masks and makeup around the world was to create the same impression watching a play as one gets from a work of literature with third-person omnipresent narration. It allows you to gain knowledge about the invisible inner experience of the characters through exaggerated outward cues.

Anime seems, therefore, to take place in the pneumatic or daemonic world (in the Greek sense, not in the Judeo-Christian sense), not the corporeal world. Or perhaps, it takes place in a sort of antediluvian golden age between myth and history, a “Satya Yuga” if you will. What makes people so captivated by Anime girls is a little bit more unclear, but this is not the first time they have arisen. When researching the Islamic Houris, the women that pious men are given as wives in heaven, I was quite shocked by the similarities to Anime girls. They are consistently described as pale and with big, beautiful eyes.

Could this be why Indonesians love Blue Archive so much? They believe that their favorite Blue Archive characters are waiting for them in Jinnah? Perhaps… It is certainly not a concept unique to Islam, though. The Norse, of course, had the Valkyries who would guide the glorious dead to Valhalla and serve them there until the final battle. More pertinent to Islam is the Daena of Zoroastrianism, a beautiful maiden who accompanied the virtuous to the afterlife. The Daena is not the soul of any human woman, but of one’s own conscience, their deeds in life. For the wicked, the Daena is likewise wicked and takes the form of an ugly toothless hag. In the Divine Comedy, Beatrice serves as the Daena of Dante¹, despite being the soul of a real person. She is, according to Dante, “in heaven with the angels and on earth with my soul”, simultaneously. The introduction of Beatrice is strangely familiar to the introduction of the Daena described by Zoroastrian oneiromancers, and both serve Psychopompic roles. Pallas Athena’s guidance of Odysseus and other warriors may also roughly fall into this archetype, especially if you believe in the Proclan interpretation of the Odyssey as aligning with the journey of the soul back to the Monad…

Strange and unnerving Sumerian statues of beings from Anime World

Autists trooning out into Anime Girls can therefore be considered a case of mistaken identity. They recognize the Houri in the Anime Girl, who is in fact the Daena, the maiden trapped in their soul and shaped by their actions. However, they accidentally come to the conclusion that this is their soul itself… Many people see the face of the Houri, and they can’t take it. Perhaps it wasn’t something meant to be exposed to through the senses, especially not on a day-to-day basis. Another symptom of Anime radiation poisoning, as Layne points out, is a sort of lethargy that discourages Weaboos from pursuing goals in the real world. And by goals, I mean vagina. It’s a very hit-or-miss kind of thing, in my experience. Some guys are super into Anime but don’t really see it as an alternative of the real world, while others get one-tapped by it. I know a guy who is really into the Waifu Vtuber stuff, and I have a sort of gut feeling that he’s a diddy ahh goonblud, but he has much more romantic success than me and is “normal” and “cool”. It’s probably something similar to the relationship between weed and schizophrenia. Smoking weed isn’t going to make you a Schizo ex nihilo, but if you are predisposed to Schizophrenia it might bring it out in you. I’ve just unleashed a total brapstorm on Anime, accusing it of basically making people go insane and causing their faces to melt off like the Ark did in Indiana Jones. so you’re probably wondering why I still like it and watch it.

Simply put, I don’t enjoy anything new that is coming out of Western film and TV. There are more good Anime than there are good Western TV shows, but there are probably also more bad Anime than there are bad Western TV shows. Nobody is forcing you to watch shitty Anime, you can just avoid them. There is such a variety in Anime that lumping it all together is very reductive. I will admit, even a lot of the good ones have the bad tropes, but tell me this: What is worse? The occasional jiggle physics and beach episode? Or constant sex scenes and full-blown nudity? Because the latter is what Western television feels like in the age of streaming. Pretty much every show coming out today is some combination of superfluous sex, DEI, and shitlib themes. The message, if there is one, is usually some sort of critique of society or the government or the family. Even the best American TV shows, the chosen few which I consider better than any Anime, are pessimistic in tone. Americans have an obsession with crime, and most American TV is about criminals and how cool they are. It’s pretty bad, especially since it is so incredibly misleading about what criminals are actually like.

American children’s cartoons aren’t any better. As far as corrupting the youth goes, authors inserting their fetishes into kids cartoons has created way more paraphiliacs than Anime. They also just kind of suck now, and are not meant to entertain children (or anyone, really). Instead, it is part of the “parenting industry” and is supposed to pacify children. See my full article on that topic:

For all of the vices of Anime and its fans, it has one great virtue which it holds above Western TV and Film, and that is that it exalts human determination and spirit while Western TV satirizes and diminishes it. I have met many people who have legitimately been set on a path to improve themselves because they watched Dragon Ball Z or JoJo or some shit. I don’t know any live-action shows which have done the same.

Unfortunately, a lot of the “Anime Right” actually doesn’t watch good Anime and instead they watch awful garbage 24/7 about Anime schoolgirls doing nothing for 293 episodes. I’m pretty sure they’re made for 4 year olds in Japan and it is basically like a grown man watching barney. When a dear friend of mine tells me they watch K-On or Lucky Star or some sort of Idol Anime I imagine that this is the person that lurks behind the screen:

I only like Anime that has hype and aura moments, and I don’t care if you call me a Black monkey or a Squatemalan for it. If I didn’t want hype and aura moments, I would not watch such a flexible medium of storytelling. Often it is the shounenslop that Black people watch that is in fact the best Anime, because they are based in Eastern mysticism and teach da tradition ou algou. If Julius Evola was still alive he would probably be watching Dragon Ball Z…

And what would an Anime post be without a BOOB BREAK? Yeah, some nice juicy anime ti— wait… WHAAT!!??!?!?

BEJITA-SAN!?!?!?!? This is not a boob break… This is… The Prince of all Saiyans himself, explaining the power that comes from nofap!

Oh my god… Vegeta… Thank you Prince Vegeta. Thank you for teaching me nofap and semen retention. I will never fap again.

1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43896117.pdf