Most of it is shit, but I think your reasoning is backwards. I don’t think people (At least Americans/Westerners) like anime because it’s Japanese, they like Japanese stuff through exposure to it in anime.
When we were kids and watching stuff like Pokemon and Yugioh, none of us knew wtf anime was or where it came from. They were just some more cartoons. In fact the localizers like 4Kids actively tried to scrub “foreignness” from the shows because they thought it would ick American audiences.
And this pop cultural dominance has been very successful at rehabilitating Japan’s image, both erasing the past and glazing over some of the uncomfortable parts of the present.
As for actual show quality, I’d say all mediums have mostly bad art with a few gems, but I do think anime is exceptional in two ways: First, it seems like the barrier to turning some random author’s bad ideas into a commercial product are much lower, I’m not really sure what the exact economic or cultural reasons are for that though. Second, most anime ends up being kind of bad in the same way. It’s a medium that’s practically defined by it’s tropes and they are shared amongst the good and bad shows alike. The difference is usually that the good ones have something else worthwhile going on and the bad ones are almost nothing but a reheated remix of these tropes.
I suppose there’s that too. But even then, I think the same point about those products being made or localized to avoid associations with foreignness holds. I don’t think people were buying Nintendo and Sega games because they were japanophiles.
EDIT: Actually, thinking about it some more, I think while those games had a wider adoption than anime, they probably had less of an impact on Western perceptions of Japan than anime did. Anime eventually evolved past that initial localization trend and the people who stuck with it got introduced to more and more (anime filtered) Japanese culture over time. The Japanese game companies kind of just blended into the global games industry. While there are some games that are very distinctly Japanese, if you showed someone the average Nintendo game without any context, they wouldn’t know where it was from. We have anime weebs, but we don’t really get game weebs in the same way. I mean, there are some communities that are heavily nostalgic for older nintendo games, but I wouldn’t really describe that in the same terms as weebs. They’re more in love with older tech and design principles that happened to coincide with a time when Japanese studios were the dominant force in the market, but again, not in a very culturally apparent way.
Most of it is shit, but I think your reasoning is backwards. I don’t think people (At least Americans/Westerners) like anime because it’s Japanese, they like Japanese stuff through exposure to it in anime.
When we were kids and watching stuff like Pokemon and Yugioh, none of us knew wtf anime was or where it came from. They were just some more cartoons. In fact the localizers like 4Kids actively tried to scrub “foreignness” from the shows because they thought it would ick American audiences.
And this pop cultural dominance has been very successful at rehabilitating Japan’s image, both erasing the past and glazing over some of the uncomfortable parts of the present.
As for actual show quality, I’d say all mediums have mostly bad art with a few gems, but I do think anime is exceptional in two ways: First, it seems like the barrier to turning some random author’s bad ideas into a commercial product are much lower, I’m not really sure what the exact economic or cultural reasons are for that though. Second, most anime ends up being kind of bad in the same way. It’s a medium that’s practically defined by it’s tropes and they are shared amongst the good and bad shows alike. The difference is usually that the good ones have something else worthwhile going on and the bad ones are almost nothing but a reheated remix of these tropes.
I would argue that Nintendo and Sega did more to assert Japanese cultural identity in the West than any anime.
I suppose there’s that too. But even then, I think the same point about those products being made or localized to avoid associations with foreignness holds. I don’t think people were buying Nintendo and Sega games because they were japanophiles.
EDIT: Actually, thinking about it some more, I think while those games had a wider adoption than anime, they probably had less of an impact on Western perceptions of Japan than anime did. Anime eventually evolved past that initial localization trend and the people who stuck with it got introduced to more and more (anime filtered) Japanese culture over time. The Japanese game companies kind of just blended into the global games industry. While there are some games that are very distinctly Japanese, if you showed someone the average Nintendo game without any context, they wouldn’t know where it was from. We have anime weebs, but we don’t really get game weebs in the same way. I mean, there are some communities that are heavily nostalgic for older nintendo games, but I wouldn’t really describe that in the same terms as weebs. They’re more in love with older tech and design principles that happened to coincide with a time when Japanese studios were the dominant force in the market, but again, not in a very culturally apparent way.