THE LIMITS OF CASUAL ANIME DISCUSSION AND HOW TO GO BEYOND THEM

BLAKE MORRISON - Writer, 3rd Year, English and Japanese

If you’ve ever been on the myanimelist.com forums, you’ve probably noticed that many of the discussion threads for popular anime and manga are either fans gushing or trolls baiting. In a word, these threads are toxic. It goes without saying that the baiting is toxic. Only people with severely low self-esteem get a kick out of repeatedly insulting others because they have differing opinions on cartoons. However, “fans gushing” isn’t something most people would call “toxic.” “Toxic” isn’t really the right word for the deeper issue that underlies “gushing” and “baiting.” Alas, I chose to use “toxic” at first because I know it’ll get a greater response from whoever reads this than “unproductive” will, which would be the most accurate descriptor for the gush-bait dyad. Despite ostensibly opening a “discussion” forum, someone who creates a thread to gush about their latest favorite anime or manga being “the GOAT” isn’t looking for discussion, which is to say a discourse. They’re looking for confirmation from others. They’re there to learn what they already know. Similarly, someone who creates a thread to bait fans of a piece of media isn’t looking for discussion. They’re looking for fireworks. Some pretty lackluster fireworks in my honest opinion, but hey, it seems like some people are really into that. Why would they spend so much time regurgitating the same talking points to strangers online otherwise? The alternatives are truly frightening.

Of course, there will always be a time and a place for gushing over what you’re into and tearing apart what you’re not, but neither of these mindsets are conducive to discussion. A healthy discussion should not only help you to refine and deepen your thoughts on a piece of media, it should be able to change your thoughts or at the very least enable you to understand perspectives different from your own. To enter such a discussion, you need to be open-minded, but there’s more to it than that. My intuition (and hope) is that there are many people who have found themselves dissatisfied with this kind of “discussion” of anime and manga proliferating on the internet but haven’t been able to quite put their finger on why they feel so empty after reading most forum threads, reviews, or critiques even if they agree with them (and perhaps especially when they only agree with them). If you just thought something to the effect of “that’s literally me” just now, I salute you! Accepting that you’re lacking something in life is the first step to filling it. That said, the beautiful and terrifying thing about media analysis is, if you take it seriously enough, that lack is never filled! If you’re willing to accept that, then I implore you to start discussing anime and manga (and all other media) productively. Here are some tips for contributing to an analytic discussion:

1. Instead of writing about whether something is good or bad, try writing about why something is interesting

The point of an anime or manga review is to inform people whether a given piece of media is worth consuming. Media reviews are practical and will always have a place, but when discussing media, you have to eventually go beyond matters of likes and dislikes, or how well a show conforms to generic standards of quality, if you want to say anything unique. It’s fine to start with simple impressions like “I think this show is interesting because [insert aspect here],” but rather than explaining your reasoning with your likes and dislikes, actually investigate what lies beneath your preferences. Say you dislike mecha shows. Why? Maybe because you’re just not into giant robots, or maybe you’re unsettled by how so many mecha shows glorify militarism and military technology despite the often hackneyed and hypocritical anti-war moralizing of their narratives. The latter possibility, by involving the political stakes that always lurk behind artistic taste, is much more likely to spark an interesting discussion. Now that you’ve thoroughly conveyed why you’re not into giant robots, people can properly respond to your ideas beyond simple agreements or disagreements in taste.

2. Be consistent with your terms and rigorous with your logic

This tip goes without saying when it comes to most writing. Of course, people are naturally inconsistent and irrational much of the time, but it’s important to at least qualify the logical inconsistencies that inevitably come with discussing media when you’re writing to persuasively put forward your ideas. This mandate of consistency goes beyond simply knowing how to use technical terms like art and animation properly instead of confusing the two, for instance. It applies to the progression of your arguments. Say I’m arguing that Neon Genesis Evangelion is not a subversion of the mecha genre but a celebration of it. I first need to establish what I mean by the mecha genre and what would count as a subversion of it, perhaps bringing in examples of subversive works of art from other mediums to corroborate my argument. If I want to persuade anyone, I then have to be consistent in my usage of these terms, otherwise I risk falling back into the purely subjective realm of “I like this because I like it” or “I dislike this because I dislike it.” All discussion of media is subjective at its core, but you can approach a greater standard of objectivity by establishing clearly-defined terms at the start of your argument and sticking to them.

3. Remember that anime and manga don’t exist in a bubble

The example I just gave of looking at subversive works of art from other mediums to help determine whether Neon Genesis Evangelion is actually subverting the genre it belongs to would apply to this tip as well. Due to how niche the subculture of the anime and manga fandom can be, a lot of discussion on these mediums assumes that after a certain period they have evolved and are continuing to evolve by and large in a vacuum.

Fortunately, the people involved in these discussions are probably aware that anime and manga do continue to be influenced by other mediums to this day. However, much discussion sticks to comparing any given anime and manga series only to other anime and manga series. This kind of medium-insestuous discourse has the unfortunate side-effect of downplaying how much anime and manga borrow from other mediums, and not just from mainly visual mediums like film and western comics but from other narrative mediums like literature and plays.

4. Remember that all art and media is propaganda (and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing)

All art is created by people, and art can only exist as art if it’s interpreted by people. People, whether they’re aware, unaware, or willfully unaware of it, are involved in many “projects” simply by living, and these projects result from us investing care into them. “Propaganda” is admittedly a charged term to represent this care that all art is caught up in. “All art is political” or “all art is social” are both ways of expressing the same idea. It comes back to the example I gave in the first tip about how maybe the reason one might not enjoy mecha shows is actually because they think that those shows hypocritically glorify war while offering lampshaded critiques of it. It’s always possible to go beyond discussing art simply in terms of taste. The claim that one can have an apolitical aesthetic appreciation of art is itself political in how it so self-consciously disavows any political affiliation or social responsibilities. Art is all social, but we are all social beings, so this is both obvious and not necessarily a bad thing. It is, however, something one must keep in mind if they want to go beyond a surface level discussion of likes and dislikes and delve into what exactly makes those preferences tick and what their broader implications are on a social level.