DRAFT - WEEBS (Patron Exclusive)

This is the rough draft for the script about weebs that won the last Patron Poll, but which I scrapped for a variety of reasons. I decided to post this just to show the Patrons that I did actually try to do this one.

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I've talked about anime on this show a few times in the past, sometimes negatively, sometimes positively, and sometimes ambivalently. And there's an inherent problem when a non-weeb talks about Anime in a Youtube video and that's the fact that weebs will inevitably flood in getting grease all over the carpet.

Let's establish what I mean when I say weeb. I mean a North American, usually white but not all the time, whose media diet consists ENTIRELY of anime. The kind of person who gets cranky over the voice cast in a dub. The kind of person who sneers at people and questions their literacy skills when they don't want to watch something they can't hear. The kind of person who uses the honorifics of one language while speaking in another language

"I think that last one's just you being a grammer snob, Lily." 

Fine, I'll concede that one.

The kind of person who thinks they can gather a full and nuanced understanding of a country's rich and detailed culture and history by consuming their most disposable corporate products.

And most importantly, the kind of person who gets weirdly evangelical about it. Anime fans are like Vegans or Jehova's Witnesses, constantly wanting to tell you the Good Word, except the good word is a romanized Japanese word that they've pronounced completely wrong.

But as I watch animation discourse over the years, I have noticed a rather interesting overlap between all the things that are terrible about modern western cartoons, and things weebs like. You see, over the last ten years, people in my generation have gotten increasingly desperate for cartoons to grow up with them, and part of that comes from a lot of terminally online people my age watching all kinds of japanese cartoons that feature tons of gore and tits and misogyny and racism and wishing western animation would be 'mature' like that. Which is a sentiment that sparks giggling contempt from both sides of the ocean. See, the push for mature animation is something of a double-edged sword because most adults don't give a shit about animation being made specifically for them, the ones that do are routinely mocked as being emotionally stunted and regressed by the former. 

The idea of an R-Rated Superhero movie is something that fandom holds as a holy grail because they think it provides legitimacy, but if you know how an R-Rating works or how it's given out you're probably wondering how Tarantino levels of blood and seeing someone's penis would improve Superman. Like, if you wanted Superman but for adults, you're probably not going to watch Zack Snyder's emo cutting fest, or the Tween Drama with a bisexual archer, you're probably watching the soap opera from the 90's.

(Maybe play Lois and Clark clips)

Mature, well adjusted adults know what Superman is, and if they want Superman they're going to go watch Superman.

"Okay Lily, what does this have to do with weebs?"

I'M GETTING THERE! CALM YA TITS!

See one sentiment that's common among weebs is wanting to get more people into anime as if it's some kind of niche fandom that you need a special permit to access. But the kicker is... a lot of people already like it. The anime boom in the 90's didn't happen sight unseen, and indeed anime is extremely popular on both sides of the ocean. Hell it even has it's own Mickey Mouse, but nicer. Hello Kitty's remained popular for decades. Hell I found my mother watching old episodes of Pokemon with her grandkids and loving it. And the explosive popularity of Spy x Family all around the world has made it perfectly clear that anime remains as popular as it's always been. About as much so as any other cartoon.

And yet, weebs still remain a subject of mockery. And "Weeb Shit" remains a common criticism of many genres from the Magical Girl genre to that genre where a random, ugly, blank slate man gets transported to a fantasy world with a harem pre-made for them, what the hell's going on?

Well I don't know any nice way to put it but... weebs? Otakus? Japanophiles? The world loves anime, it just doesn't like YOU! NOBODY likes you! And they don't like the things that were made specifically FOR you!

Most well adjusted adults are going to be rightfully turned off by a cartoon that is desperately trying to get you to project onto the main character. Most people are going to be rightfully turned off by a cartoon where the major female characters are all dressed up in skimpy outfits where shit like this happens to them.

(Play that cucumber mouth clip Noralites has)

You look in me in the fucking eye and tell me who this is supposed to appeal to other than a horny 14 year old with no friends, or a registered sex offender? I get the same feeling from a lot of anime that tends to be a favourite among weebs as I get from George RR Martin books. Namely this looks like it was made for an edgelord, and also there's a weird fixation with incest here, and IS THAT AN UNDERAGE GIRL?!

Whoever made this needs to be beaten with a shovel.

Now of course anime isn't just rampant pathetic male gaze all the time. But certains tropes are a lot more prevelant among the anime that weebs like that most other people don't. And when you hear weebs talk, they'll say this is animation for a more mature audience, but there's nothing mature about this. A 17 year old straight boy hanging posters of bikini clad women on his bedroom wall is to be expected, but if you're still doing that at 27 people are going to assume something is wrong with you. Everyone goes through this overcompensating "That's for babies" phase as teenagers, but you are expected to grow out of it. And this is a group of people who have never grown out of it and continue looking for the most shameless content out there to prove how mature they are.

DON'T MAKE AUNTIE LILY GET THE CS LEWIS QUOTE!"

This is why nobody's going to watch your favourite Isekai no matter how mature you insist it is, because what's mature to you and what's mature to actual adults are two very different things, and they didn't necessarily come here looking for either of them. This is one of those "Go outside and get re-acquainted with the real world" things that nerd culture of all kinds needs to start doing a little more. 

I don't know how to explain this to weebs, but the whole "It's just a drawing" thing in regards to sexualizing underage characters isn't a workable argument to most people. If most people saw you jackin' it to one of the girls from Dragon Maid, they'd be understandably creeped out and they'd probably call the police because this shit is actually illegal in most places. And in even in places where it isn't, I promise you that most people would hear about those legal loopholes and immediately conclude that they need to be closed. They wouldn't go "Oh, well I guess that's a point, carry on, then!"

If I were interested in looking for anime to watch and nearby weebs started shoveling reccomendations down my throat, those would be shows that would immediately get thrown into the "never touch this" bin because I've learned as time goes on that when weebs like something, it's usually something I wouldn't want to touch without rubber gloves and industrial disinfectant.

Hell, less than ten years ago it was considered a common joke among weebs to trick people into watching an actual child pornography series. 

There's a common sentiment among everyone else that anime is hard to get into because you have to wade through so much garbage. And I've said this myself, but in recent years I've objected to that notion. First of all, if something isn't already appealing to you, you shouldn't aspire to "get into it." You shouldn't force yourself into something. If you don't like it, you don't like it. But second, it's actually not hard to find good anime, you're just trying to find a gold nugget in a pile of shit. There's another pile of gold nuggets over there, have you tried looking there? Trying to find good anime based on what's recommended by weebs is already setting yourself up to fail.

Weebs will love to accuse anyone who doesn't like anime or doesn't want to get into it of xenophobia. It's their number one go to because accusations of racism are immediately disarming, but the truth of the matter is that it's not a hatred of Japan that makes people dislike anime. It's you. You're the reason they don't want to get into anime, because your reputation is fucking infamous by now and nobody wants to see exactly what it was that put you down this path of social degradation.

But the more banal truth of the matter is that for all our fears of how you got to this point, the anime itself probably had nothing to do with it. Dragon Maid didn't make you into someone who sexualizes minors. You got into Dragon Maid because you already did. All these sexualized young women in anime didn't make you into a misogynist. You were already a misogynist, that's why you like it.

When the fighting game series Guilty Gear decided it was going to stop being completely fucking retrograde with the "guy in a dress" jokes and make one of their mainstay characters a trans girl, American weebs threw one of their classic hissy fits and went through the usual littany of excuses for why it wasn't canon. Usually blaming an agenda-driven translation, prompting the creator themselves to go "Yeah no. It's like that over here too."

Weebs have had a long history of denying the existence of any LGBT representation that isn't blatant pornography for long time, usually blaming translation changes. But of course, LGBT characters have had a long and storied history in anime, facing their own social backlashes. Japan has feminist movements. It has LGBT movements. Gay people and trans people exist over there. But weebs actually know very little about the country because of two things.

1. Old fansubs would jack up the swearing and mature humor and then claim it was from the original that was censored out.

2. Conservative projection.

To hear weebs talk, you could be forgiven for thinking Japan is a conservative utopia where women are demure and submissive, gay people don't exist, trans people are ostracized, and there are no black people. But none of these things have been true for the last century. At times Japan has been more conservative than the US, but conservatism is not a culture. Conservatism is not an ingrained element of a nation. Conservatism is a political philosophy designed to help people keep power based on race, gender and wealth, in that order.

Japan has had it's history with imperial isolationism for a long time, but it is not an isolationist nation anymore. It hasn't been since World War 2. To hear  weebs talk, the US and Japan are these different worlds hidden from each other by a mystical barrier. But in reality the US and Japan are trading partners, military allies, and they share fundamental core values. I'd have a hard time thinking of two nations that you could more accurately call "Best Buds."

But weebs WANT Japan to be a place where they don't have to see "wokeism" and can find all the submissive Asian women they could dream of, and it's a country they're never going to travel to and so they just make shit up in online arguments and hope that nobody bothers to check.

It's all a self-perpetuating bullshit cycle from the worst of the very worst kind of men you've ever met, who write off all of their violent, hateful fetishes as "coming from a different culture" that they just make shit up about.

There is a firm dividing line between "culture" and "pop culture." You can't get really get a bead on a culture based on the corporate products made specifically in a global market. 

Have you ever wondered why women in anime went from looking like actual women, to all having this waify toddler face? That's not the fault of a culture. That's the fault of one man: Hideo Azuma. He discovered in the 80's that a lot of lonely men fantasize sexually about a defenseless "little sister" figure and will spend embarassing amounts of money on comics and cartoons or anything emphasizing girls with exaggeratedly childish characteristics.

That market has steadily grown ever since and those character tropes have become both more commonplace and more exaggerated with it. It’s set the bar so low that even characters intended to be sexy older women are still overwhelmingly drawn more kidlike than they used to be. Squeakier voices, nervous mannerisms, innocence and naivete as a primary character trait. This has reached the point where even good shows with good characterization still fall into these problems.

(Yor Montage)

This was actually the core complaint made by Hayao Miyazaki, who claimed that modern weebs view female characters as characters they can see themselves tending to like pets. And these are people who are, and deserve to be, ostracized on both sides of the Pacific. 

You can't be in a situation where the reason an entire side of animation is viewed poorly is on the backs of a single person and the whales willing to shell out embarassing amounts of money for creepy bullshit, something that is routinely derided by respected figures in that artform, and claim it's part of a culture.

This isn't culture. It's capitalism.

Disliking a medium because of the tropes it routinely engages in is the opposite of a problem. But an important part of that is that it's not the only side of that medium, it's just the side that the most vocal defenders of it would rather hold up as ideal. You only have to wade through garbage to find the gems because you're being given directions by your local weeb. And when weebs give recommendations, they're not taking your tastes into account. They're just giving you the things they like in the hopes of finding a new convert. 

You have to kind of sidestep them. Material aimed at women would be a good start, though admittedly in 2022 that's not the sure bet it used to be. You have to know how to read a room.

When a weeb complains about something being woke, that usually means that female characters are treated like actual people or LGBT characters aren't just fetish fuel. When a weeb complains that a dub is terrible, that usually means that they gave grown women normal women's voices instead of a toddler-esque chipmunk chatter. And when a weeb says "culture" they really mean "conservative status quo."

And most importantly, you don't need to "get into" something if you don't actually want to. I watch maybe one of these things every five years. You don't need to make it your life, and you don't need to go through an entire backlog just to make a decision on if you want to keep going or not.