It started in
junior high all of the
cool smart kids who knew about
computers or
science started talking about
anime. Well, if they thought it was
cool it had to be, right? I hopped on the
bandwagon. I watched and tried my best to fall in love with it, but the more
bored I became. I stopped watching it. I moved on. It’s 8 years later and I’m standing on Carnegie Mellon Campus a senior talking with a friend and
anime comes up.
“I hate anime.” I say. There is a dark silence at last he asks what no one has asked before when I give my knee-jerk reaction to the genre.
“
Why?”
It took me a long time to figure it out to articulate it, but basically it come down to this. Most of the anime we see in the
US is made by
young men for younger
boys. The characters are
severely gendered,
girls are
girls and
boys,
boys. There is a lot in anime to appeal to
adolescent males and sometimes it can come off as downright
obnoxious. Some of the
cartoons presented other
stereotypes, such as
dumb blonds and black girls with hulk-like rippling muscles. And it’s
cartoons not
high art!! but people talk about it like it is high
art and it drives me
up the walls.
That all said, not all anime is like this. But, like people who
hate rap I have trouble getting past the
biases I’ve built up against the
genre. Still, I plan to start again. My friend explained to me how the
Japanese invented the tradition of stories told through cartoons in the
15th century (it then spread to
Europe) this fascinates me.
So this weekend I’m going to give anime another chance and if I see any good in it I’ll make a
How I came to love anime node.