Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa

It is never pleasant to have our old shrines desecrated, even when we have outgrown them.

—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

I.

The year is 2022, and anime is in decline.

I don’t think I know anybody my age who seriously denies this. Friends of mine who are in my age cohort—the ages of, let’s say, twenty-five to thirty-three, people who were in their late childhood or adolescence during the international anime and manga glut of the early to mid-2000s and who populated college anime clubs around the same years I did during the first three-quarters of the Obama administration—seem to be unanimous in the opinion that the medium and its fandom aren’t what they once were. Current high school and college students still entertain and enthrall themselves with My Hero Academia or whichever generation of Precure we’re currently on, and I don’t think the medium is dead or is no longer producing anything of value; each of the past three or four years has produced at least one series that I’ve enjoyed. Even so, there have been subtle but noticeable changes in both the content and the reception of anime over the second half of the 2010s and now into the 2020s, and many of those changes are making it difficult for people who’ve long been in media fandom to maintain interest in what’s currently coming out of Japan. In this essay I will seek to diagnose some of those changes.

First let me share my general impressions of what the medium and its fandom were like around 2007, when I was first becoming a fan. 1999-2007 are commonly accepted among fandom historians as the dates of the Western anime boom, in which brick-and-mortar bookstores had manga sections several aisles deep and the Western anime market was (according to Matt Clement’s Anime: A History) actually driving or partially driving Japanese production. “Animesque” Western cartoons came into vogue partway through this period, some (such as Avatar: The Last Airbender) becoming classics themselves, others (such as Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, which I had to be reminded existed) fading very quickly into obscurity. Spirited Away won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at one point, and basic cable stations like Cartoon Network had entire programming blocks of competently dubbed anime for teen and young-adult audiences. I came up at the tail end of this period; the first anime that I followed as it was airing was Code Geass R2, and I was probably part of the last wave of American teenagers to start using LiveJournal for fandom purposes before that website’s death spiral in 2009-2011.

At this time there was an accepted cursus honorum for inducting oneself into the anime canon before venturing forth into the badlands of cult classics and genre specialization. It differed a little for boys and girls, but I watched shows from both sets, probably because I was being introduced to anime by two girls with whom I was friends in high school. The first anime movies I watched were Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and one of the InuYasha movies (I had a hard time focusing on that one; I don’t remember why). The first full series I watched were Azumanga Daioh and Neon Genesis Evangelion. This was in the era of DVD box sets; for Azumanga Daioh I borrowed a friend’s DVDs and for Neon Genesis Evangelion I spent a couple weeks’ allowance. Once you saw some of these works that were in some sense representative of the medium, or at least representative of what other American teenagers were into, then you could venture forth into discovering new shows and favored genres and subgenres on your own. By late 2008 and early 2009 I was watching a lot of the “girls with guns” subgenre of action anime—Noir and its spiritual successors, Black Lagoon, and so forth—that had come out earlier in the 2000s. I also started watching a lot of anime with gay themes, especially shows with lesbian connotations that were less overtly sexual than a lot of what was being produced about gay men. And it was great for a while.

The problems with this fandom environment—and such problems did exist—mostly revolved around two core issues, gatekeeping and amorality. 4chan, a website that is now mostly known as a hotbed of far-right politics but in the late 2000s was an anime fandom standby, was in some ways the locus classicus for both of these issues with its culture of eviscerating “newfags” and “moralfags.” I experienced this more in Western science fiction and fantasy fandoms than in anime and manga fandom—for some reason I just had a thicker skin about, say, Fullmetal Alchemist than about Doctor Who—but I still noticed it. These problems became extremely relevant later as a highly pop-moralistic backlash against them began permeating fandom spaces around 2015.

The unsustainability of the Japanese foreign and trade policies that had led to the early-to-mid-2000s boom in the first place probably also contributed to the unsustainability of the fan culture that built up around Japanese products. As is well-known, the fundamentals of the Japanese economy were not sound, and a semi-deliberate national policy around pop culture exports did not have enough failsafe measures to survive the decline in faddish Western interest. The list of localization companies and fandom media organs that went defunct or had to merge with one another to stay afloat between 2008 and 2013—the peak years of my anime fandom participation—includes ADV Films; Newtype USA magazine; Shojo Beat magazine; the North American version of Shonen Jump magazine; Central Park Media; Bandai Visual USA (dissolved back into its Japanese parent company); and the original incarnation of Toonami. Perhaps oddly, I didn’t really notice this at the time; since I was just getting into the fandom, it didn’t really occur to me that its glory days were, in some wise, already behind it. I had the same experience with LiveJournal, which I had no idea was already a dying platform when I joined it.

This in some ways commonplace story is one that I tell by means of explaining what I think a vibrant and interesting anime fan community does look like. I’ve deliberately avoided passing comment on the actual content of the shows that were popular at that point, because I want to discuss content in the context of where—in my opinion—it all went wrong.

When I told a friend about the concept for this essay, he said it had “Boomer energy.” Despite my self-consciousness about this, I am not going to take any special efforts to make the essay seem value-neutral or judgment-free, because it is not; it would be insincere to avoid the impression of someone worried about premature middle age complaining about the tastes and interests of teenagers, because that is, in part, exactly what this essay is. What follows is an attempt to explain those fogeyish opinions and complaints and to and advocate for them based on historical and cultural facts.

II.

Having come of age in anime and manga fandom during what we might call a transitional period—the late 2000s and early 2010s, when the fandom wasn’t at its peak in the West anymore but was not yet in obvious enough decline for me to notice it at the time—I can’t approach this question exactly as somebody with clear memories of the fandom of the 1999-2007 period might approach it. The decline that was underway during my period of heaviest fandom involvement had material economic roots that I mentioned above, and it was secular in the sense of being a sustained long-term process that would have been difficult to reverse. The collapse, or transmogrification, of a medium and a fandom that I recognized and with which I felt comfortable into a medium and a fandom that I did not, felt more abrupt, and I would argue that it was more cultural and in some ways even ideological. The cultural and ideological shift of the mid-2010s may have had its historical genesis in the economic and material shift of the late 2000s; however, I do not have enough experience or knowledge of the latter event to feel confident saying for sure.

I count three major factors that, taken together, determine what kind of characteristics a medium fandom will have: What kind of content is being produced, how that content is being disseminated to its fans, and what the fandom’s culture and ideology (i.e. its “superstructure,” Marxistly) are like when the fans receive the content.

I’ll begin with the intermediate stage, how content is disseminated to its fans. Until the mid-2010s, the prevailing model for anime and manga localization was what we might call “fansub (or scanlation) first, license later (if at all).” That is, a title that was making waves in Japan would be informally translated—a process that was legal under Japanese law but of dubious legality under most Western copyright regimes—by a group of fansubbers (if it was an anime) or scanlators (a portmanteau of scanner and translator, if it was a print manga). This informal localization would then be made available online, through several avenues that were themselves of dubious legality; when I first entered the fandom, you still often saw anime episodes uploaded to YouTube in five- to ten-minute-long chunks that you had to watch in order. (Amazingly, one can still at the time of writing find certain old episodes of the extremely well-known Western cartoon The Simpsons on YouTube this way!) YouTube ceased to be usable for these purposes around 2010 as its user base and the culture surrounding it were formalized and professionalized, so the fandom moved to an archipelago of other sites with names like KissAnime, Mangafox, and so forth. Many of these sites still exist in diminished form. They had—still have—domain names out of places like Tonga and Christmas Island, and were only usable if one had both an ad blocker and a good antivirus program; fortunately, most fans did.

An official, indisputably legal localization would appear later if enough interest built up in the West—or sometimes if a Japanese studio or distributor wanted to shill something in the West to make it turn a profit, as happened with the infamously iconoclastic localization of the flop horror anime Ghost Stories in 2005. The push-pull of Japanese production with a Western audience in mind had its genesis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and by the 2000s it had created a system somewhat similar to the “usual channels” of parliamentary democracies. That is, Japanese creators, Western localizers, and prominent fandom figures had some degree of professional and even social familiarity with one another, and negotiated amongst themselves to bring most official localizations into existence. For example, a gay-themed anime called Simoun that was a personal favorite of mine for a long time—it’s now mostly forgotten—got an official American DVD release almost solely because a well-known fan personality saw the fansubs and brought it to the professional localizers’ attention.

The underlying economic process that made this social and cultural system possible was the buying and selling of DVDs. The system relied on the practice of accumulating physical home video sets of one’s favorite shows, because “fansub first, license later” was only economically viable for localization companies if the fandom had a collector mentality and an ethic of “rewatch value.” Western anime fandom as such had been intimately tied to the technology of home video from its inception; many fan communities had originated as AV clubs in the eighties and nineties. The almost totemic quality of DVD sets in “old” anime fandom—something analogous to the totemic quality of hardcover books among self-professed bookworms—can hardly be overstated. I still have complete DVD sets of at least half a dozen shows I’ve only ever watched once, despite the fact that my computer no longer has a drive to play them in, because you never know.

With the advent of online streaming services and their supplanting of physical audiovisual media culture starting around 2012, the economic incentives for professional localizers changed enormously. There was no longer any real reason to tolerate illegal or semi-legal fan treatment of Japanese material as a means of building up word of mouth about a property. So producers, distributors, and localizers began to build a “license first, fansub never” model, which relied on simulcasting via streaming services such as Crunchyroll and, eventually, Netflix. (I know I said I felt self-conscious about this essay’s boomery premise, but I have to say this: I feel a pang of genuine heartache whenever I see the words “A Netflix Original Anime” at the beginning of an episode of Carole & Tuesday, a show I otherwise love.) This had the effect of making the economics of anime fandom much more similar to the economics of first-run Western TV fandom—only first-run Western TV fandom was itself being transmogrified into something much more top-down and supply-side.

Moreover, because of other technological and social shifts that are part of the same zeitgeist as the rise of streaming services, such as various “pivots to video” and the increasing stranglehold of algorithmically-arranged social media platforms on our culture, attention spans in general seem a lot shorter these days. I once ran across someone who watched Haibane-Renmei, created a fan Instagram account for the show (of all platforms!), then abruptly decided barely a year later that they were no longer interested in the show or in anime in general. Someone doing that ten or fifteen years ago would have been called a filthy casual and told to get the hell out of Otakon, the way a cowboy might be told to get the hell out of Dodge.

III.

The first of the three factors I mentioned above is one I’m addressing second because it requires somewhat more extrapolation and interpretation as opposed to hard facts. The actual nature of anime being produced, and whether and why it’s changed, is difficult to assess from a vantage point stateside, and it’s been the better part of a decade since I actually spent time in Japan (although I’m in both internet and postal contact with people in Japan semi-regularly). Summer 2013, most of which I spent in Japan, could be taken as a transitional period in terms of many of the changes I am discussing, but even that requires some degree of eisegesis—what makes 2013 “more transitional” than 2014, or 2012?

What I do know is this. Although Western demand driving Japanese production was a phenomenon that created its fair share of cross-cultural problems and resentments, the relatively mukokuseki (“stateless”) characteristics of the shows being made in the 1990s and 2000s did mean that most of those shows avoided the worst excesses of Japanese political and artistic discourse. A show that was consciously being produced for an international audience would have to include internationally appropriate themes not only in the sense of “statelessness” around character designs and pop-cultural references, but also in the sense of avoiding preachy overconcern with domestic Japanese issues and, in particular, Japanese nationalism. This was how you could end up with a property like Code Geass that was obviously sympathetic to Japanese nationalism and anti-Americanism but that was still watchable as something other than a rightist screed because its themes were couched in abstracted terms about imperialism and self-determination.

Moreover, Western fantasies of Japan as some sort of “animeland” utopia (which Japanese politician Yuriko Koike has, hilariously, tried to make into a winning message in Japanese domestic politics) were always missing something essential about Japan itself. Japan, like every other country on the planet, has a “normie” supermajority in its population, and because it is also a conformist and collectivist society, people who are “weird” have diminished social capital relative to weird people in most Western countries. Continued passionate love for anime and manga into adulthood is seen as unusual in Japan—the arbitrary yet curiously widespread “age ghetto” for animation and comics is probably, if anything, weaker in Continental Europe than it is in Asia. Being an “otaku,” a word whose Japanese usage is clearly pejorative and comes from a formal and slightly archaic term for one’s own house, has for a long time actually been more broadly acceptable in North America and Western Europe than it is on anime’s home turf.

For both of these reasons, diminished demand for anime in the West could be argued to have actually sapped the medium’s vitality even in Japan itself. This is not because Westerners can judge Japanese art more sagely than Japanese people can—far from it!—but because the assortment of Japanese action-movie and romcom tropes one commonly sees replicated in your “typical” anime benefited from having to be used more judiciously to attract a worldwide audience. Somebody inclined to laissez-faire thinking might even see it as a competitiveness issue, in which 1990s and 2000s anime had to make a name for itself on a grander scale and over against a massive variety of rival cultural products.

In Japan in 2013, I noticed that a lot of the anime and manga being produced for what we might call domestic consumption was being microtargeted to maladjusted subcultural interests. The most benign such case, and possibly also the most familiar to Western audiences, was the inexorable advance of the toxic cult of “deconstruction,” in which an anime that treated its genre, its medium, and even its own fans with cynicism and contempt could actually attract a devoted audience due to the false perception that it was saying something profound. Good “deconstructive” anime have been produced—nineties masterpieces Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena being two such—but invariably the deconstruction in such shows is commenting on something external to the shows themselves: mental illness and antisocial behavior in Evangelion’s case, misogyny and homophobia in Utena’s. In 2011 a bombastic attack-from-within on the magical girl genre called Puella Magi Madoka Magica emerged, dominating fandom conversation in both Japan and the West despite its mere twelve-episode length. The delayed airing of its final two episodes due to that year’s earthquake and tsunami cemented the show’s instantly legendary status. Madoka itself did have interesting things to say, but for some reason that I cannot quite pinpoint, the series solidified a perception of edgy, grimdark subject matter and themes as both artistically superior and more profitable than sincerity and optimism. Very little has been produced in the magical girl genre since 2011 that isn’t somehow preoccupied with either replicating or refuting Madoka’s extraordinarily gloomy take on the genre’s key conceits, and much of what is being produced is therefore very difficult to watch.

If the Madoka phenomenon was a peptic ulcer, making “old” anime culture significantly more painful and annoying but not actually killing it, the Attack on Titan phenomenon was the bubonic plague, or possibly some sort of bioengineered supervirus thawed out from some IJA ice prison to maraud through modern Japan. I actually loved Attack on Titan initially, as did, I dare say, the vast majority of rank-and-file anime fans. Its 2013 first season, which was actually airing while I was in Japan that summer, is the most recent anime for which I’ve bothered to buy fandom merch. I still in spite of myself have genuinely wonderful memories of fiercely debating its twists and turns with my friends, and of becoming invested in its, at the time, wonderful female characters. It wasn’t until at least a year into its initial burst of cross-Pacific popularity that it became clear not only that its creator was aligned with the political far right but that the series itself was actually meant to communicate and advocate far-right views. The series recently ended, and won back some of its old fans by ending in an unexpectedly pensive, ambivalent, and self-reflective way, but by that point it was too late to save its general reputation as “a fascist anime.”

Japan as a whole has lurched to the political right over the past decade. This is true of many countries, but in Japan the effect has been particularly pronounced, producing repeated electoral landslides for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which despite the name is conservative and nationalist. A center-left government that briefly dethroned the long-dominant LDP in 2009 proved inept and rudderless and was itself turfed out in 2012, after which right-wing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe managed to entrench himself as the longest-serving premier in Japanese history.

The pluses (they do exist) and minuses of Abe’s time in power could be an entire essay of their own, but the policy area most relevant to anime and its fandom is his avowed nationalism, historical revisionism, and desire to rehabilitate the legacy of the Japanese Empire that was defeated in World War II. This is a winning issue for younger Japanese people, and in particular younger Japanese men, because young adults in Japan right now do not have much else to believe in; it hasn’t been a good economy into which to come of age for nearly thirty years, and the economic incentives of Japanese life make timely family formation for young adults all but impossible. Thus, the Abe years saw a boom in overtly right-wing anime.

Attack on Titan is an infamous example of a right-wing 2010s anime, as is a mecha show called Darling in the Franxx, which aired in 2018 and included an extended paean to heterosexual family formation, including via teenage sex. (Personally, I think the moral panic about teen pregnancy that characterized left-leaning Western fans’ reaction to Darling in the Franxx was also ridiculous, but it is still probably not something a mecha anime should be outright glorifying.) My personal favorite example of this cottage industry, though, is something called Gate: Thus the Japanese Self-Defense Force Fought There. This was a 2015 isekai anime based on a light novel series about the JSDF, Japan’s postwar “military,” launching an incursion through a wormhole into a high fantasy world. Gate actually had to have some of the web novels on which it was based edited for conventional publication to tone down some of the nationalism.

Another subcultural-pandering genre that’s become more and more popular lately is difficult to describe except by saying that it tends to be based on light novels and those light novels tend to have titles that go on for half a paragraph. Examples include No Matter How I Look At It, It’s You People’s Fault I’m Not Popular (I actually liked this one to an extent); Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?; Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie?; I Don’t Like You at All, Big Brother!; My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy; Lately, My Little Sister’s Been Acting a Bit Strange, But…; and Though Young People Recoil from Entering the Black Magic Industry, I Found Its Treatment of Employees Quite Good When I Entered It, and the President and Familiar are Cute Too so Everything is Awesome! Some inkling of the common themes and plot conceits of this type of series should be evident from the titles themselves.

I don’t mean to say that no overly cynical, politically questionable, or sex-fetishistic anime were being produced before 2011 or so. Obviously that would be an absurd claim. When I was coming up in anime fandom it was common to sarcastically recommend that people watch a show called Boku no Pico that was honest-to-goodness child pornography. (Since it’s animated, no actual children were harmed, and I don’t think anybody actually watched it—the suggestion that one do so was basically a form of hazing—but even so!) However, it does seem like shows that appeal to baser instincts—sexual, political, philosophical—have cornered the market in a way that wasn’t always the case, and I would attribute this to the perceived need to sell things to the harder core of Japan’s domestic otaku subculture. It’s not just me who says this; quotes floating around imputing hard forms of this claim to all-time great Hayao Miyazaki are usually falsely attributed, but he has made the claim in softer forms. In a television interview in 2014 Miyazaki said that most anime then in production was being made by creators who “don’t spend time watching real people” and “can’t stand looking at other humans.” I can think of no better way to describe a creative industry that would make a fantastic actress like Eri Kitamura voice a protagonist who’s motivated by proving that she’s not really related to her brother so that it’ll be legal for her to marry him.

IV. 

This brings us to the issue of reception and the cultural—and, yes, moral—strategies that anime fans have for watching anime and deciding what it means to them. Obviously the sort of material that I described in the above section does appeal to real audience desires; as early as 2000 Tamaki Saito could claim in his book Beautiful Fighting Girl that many anime fans were interested in the medium due to a psychosexual fascination with the types of female protagonists common at that time. (Think of Evangelion’s Rei and Asuka or Sailor Moon’s Inner and Outer Senshi.) However, there is also an intensely moralizing style of anime engagement, one that interacts with the fetishizing style in unexpected and sometimes counterintuitive ways.

A lot of this interaction has to do with a time-honored fan tradition called “shipping.” Most readers of this essay will be familiar with this concept, but some may not, so I’ll define it briefly. Shipping, short for relationshipping but these days invariably used on its own, is the practice or habit of favoring, rooting for, or creating fan content (such as fanfiction, fanart, etc.) for a romantic relationship between two characters in a work of fiction. A real-life equivalent of shipping is familiar to anyone who’s ever attempted to set up two acquaintances on a date; the fandom version will be, on some level, known to anyone who came away from Little Women wishing Jo had said yes to Laurie’s proposal, or who wanted Jerry and Elaine to stop sleeping around and get back together in Seinfeld. The pairing being shipped can have any level of textual support ranging from “completely nonexistent” to “they’ve been blissfully married since before the plot started,” and oftentimes a particular fan will have a preference for shipping straight, gay male, or lesbian pairings. (I mostly ship straight and lesbian pairings, but there are gay male pairings I like as well.)

For most of modern media fandom’s existence, it was understood that a fan’s shipping preferences had very little connection to what that fan actually wanted in a real romantic or sexual relationship. For example, there was never any question of whether a fan who favored ships between characters who were on hostile terms in the source text also favored relationships between people who hated one another in real life. An anime fan might enjoy Beatrice and Battler from Umineko: When They Cry, a pairing that has a sadomasochistic subtext, without desiring a sadomasochistic relationship for themselves; a fan might think that a three-way would solve some of the entanglements in Toradora! without condoning infidelity or even open relationships between real people.

For a few different reasons, fandom discussion in the first half of the 2010s gradually called these understandings into question. First of all, an important feature of traditional shipping culture was that it was mostly disconnected from questions of sexual morality. This made shipping spaces relatively convivial for people whose beliefs about real relationships might sharply differ—“your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay”—but it also meant that in many cases fans found themselves exposed to content to which they might have strong ethical or even religious objections. The overall ethical framework, such as it was, derived mostly from the “sex-positive” Western feminist consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, making it very difficult to get any moral criticism of consensual sexual behaviors (and sometimes even certain kinds of nonconsensual ones) taken seriously in fandom. This made life in fandom very difficult not only for people with strong religious beliefs about sexuality but also for partisans of the by-then-unfashionable “radical feminist” project of constructing a specifically feminist normative sexual morality. For whatever reason, in the early 2010s there was a convergence in interests between these two groups. A close friend of mine who’s narrated much of this history to me suspects that what happened was that a group of young people raised in conservative Protestant religious environments developed radical feminist opinions upon reaching adulthood, then set about putting those opinions in active opposition to prevailing fandom mores.

I don’t mean to over-idealize pre-2010s shipping mores, especially since they actually weren’t totally amoral but rather reflective of generically social-liberal views, which are not as value-neutral as they claim to be. Had I been asked at the time, I would have said that I was all for attempting to impose some moral parameters on the way media fandom, including anime fandom, approached shipping and fictive portrayals of sexuality. However, given what happened next, I would evidently not have been careful enough what I had wished for.

In 2014 or 2015, a subset of users of the microblogging website Tumblr.com whose own fannish interests mostly lay in newer lesbian-themed anime undertook an organized push to change the way their preferred series were discussed online. I noticed this at the time because it involved an, in my opinion, bizarrely disproportionate degree of hostility to the 2006 anime Simoun, mentioned above, which at the time was already fading into obscurity but was still a personal favorite of mine. According to the friend of mine mentioned a paragraph and a half ago, a lot of these people had specifically come from Madoka Magica fandom and were understandably upset about a then-recent sequel movie’s even darker and more cynical take on the show’s already-edgy subject matter. The culture of Tumblr—to which much of Western media fandom had migrated after the LiveJournal death spiral a few years before—encouraged, and in some corners of the site still encourages, taking an overtly political and thus in some sense overtly moral angle on almost any imaginable aesthetic question. The purpose of fiction is, as Marx might put it, not so much to describe the world as to change it; the purpose of changing the world through fiction is to vindicate the values and priorities of the post-materialist Millennial and Generation Z political left. Therefore the measuring rod for works of fiction became how hard they tried to represent, and how well they succeeded at representing, oppressed social groups in a positive way. It was into this overall structure of thought and set of standards for assessing media that the phenomenon of “anti-shipping” was finally introduced—first in lesbian anime fandom, then in anime fandom in general, finally in media fandom writ large.

“Anti-shipping” does not mean that one actually opposes all shipping; this would be next to impossible in media fandom as currently constituted, in which it is almost a dogmatized fact that the best reason to become invested in a book or series or movie is for its characters. It means, in effect, that one opposes the culture whose basics I describe several paragraphs above. To an extent this entails reasonable and normal moral positions (it’s true enough that well-adjusted people don’t usually want to read extensively about, say, incest). I don’t want to completely elide or discredit that point; in the days of “old fandom” much of the tone of fannish discussion of relationships and sex made me uncomfortable, and some corrective, at some point, was probably necessary. Those who knew me back in the early 2010s remember somebody who was in fact very rigidly moralistic in many ways. I was once challenged to write a piece of Doctor Who fanfiction using a common sex-related plot conceit that I strongly dislike and the only way I was able to make it convincing was to play it up for cosmic horror.

However, the anti-shipping mindset also entails a moral stridency that, much like similar moralizing styles elsewhere, often apophatically carries a prurient subtext. In other words, if someone looks at (to use an example I have in fact seen very recently) a relationship between two orphans who were raised in the same institutional setting and sees a case of sibling incest, that “someone” probably already had incest on the brain to begin with. So too with seeing a relationship between a twenty-three-year-old and a seventeen-year-old as not only legally dicey and probably exploitative but actually pedophilic in the same sense as if the twenty-three-year-old were molesting an elementary school student.

Some—admittedly mostly in the fandoms for Western cartoons rather than anime as such—apply this quality of moral analysis to previously uncontroversial forms of fanwork such as fanfiction about child characters as adults or ships between high school-aged characters played by adult actors. As well, many “antis” tend to see anybody who disagrees with them about these things as themselves suspect of an actual desire for pedophilic or incestuous sex in real life.

What happens when this lens is turned on anime, a medium with a long history of otaku-baiting raunchiness that comes from a culture with little in the way of a deeply ingrained theory of sexual morality? The answer is that many younger anime fans who have come up in an “anti”-dominated environment in the past five years don’t actually like anime as a medium at all. The idea of anime as an art form in conversation with itself seems to have evaporated. In its place we have, as I said above, a fandom culture more akin to that of Western first-run TV fandom, in which someone can happen to be a fan of a few shows-that-are-anime without knowing or caring much at all about the medium as a whole. Sometimes this even extends to whether or not one is actually a fan of the show in question. “I don’t watch My Hero Academia,” I saw one person with a My Hero Academia-themed Tumblr say recently. “I’m just here for Bakugou.” (Bakugou evidently is a specific character in My Hero Academia.) Evidently this person didn’t get the memo that being a Bakugou fan makes you an emotional abuse apologist.

V.

I don’t mean to moralize overmuch about the current state of the fandom or imply that my way of doing it in the 2008-2013 period is the way everybody has to keep doing it forever. I also don’t mean to suggest that there is no good material coming out of Japan anymore; in fact there is still plenty, despite the trends I have described. Carole & Tuesday, which I mentioned above, is a delightful show that fuses a mellow singer-songwriter sensibility with the two-fisted sci-fi setting of 90s classic Cowboy Bebop. Anime movies like Your Name and A Silent Voice still speak to audiences worldwide in much the same way that The Girl Who Leapt through Time and Summer Wars did in the late 2000s; Netflix distributed a movie of this type too, A Whisker Away, after its Japanese theatrical release got cancelled due to COVID-19. I’ve even liked the episodes of My Hero Academia that I’ve seen, although I evidently haven’t seen enough since I still barely know who Bakugou is. A friend of mine keeps trying to get me to watch Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and I’m confident that I’ll love it once I get around to it.

What I think has been lost is the sheer amount of high-quality content that was coming out of Japan in the 2000s; the “innocence” of anime fandom as it didn’t use to need to ask questions like whether a show was shilling right-wing nationalism (since even if the show was, it could usually be ignored); and the wild-west fandom culture that made anime fandom such a hot spot for heady cultural and aesthetic remixing. These features are in decline even among people who are nominally committed to preserving or honoring the way the fandom used to be. 4chan anons who were once apolitical and latterly became Ron Paul or Occupy Wall Street types have converged on the identitarian right along with the genres they follow. Nobody these days is as blasé about ungovernably amoral fan content as they used to be (and that, if nothing else, is almost certainly a good thing). People with discerning tastes have less to discern from, have become pickier and picker for all sorts of reasons, and often end up repudiating shows they once loved. Of course, some of this may be, simply, the fact that anime fans who were not grown up ten years ago are grown up now, and growing up is the first step on the inevitable road to bereavement.

A year or two ago I heard an interview with an academic of some sort, I think it might have been Jonathan Haidt, who said that after 2014 or so he had noticed a change among university undergraduates. New classes, he said, suddenly began to have next to no brute-facts, pre-ideological understanding of, interest in, or tolerance for the past beyond what they had personally experienced. This has not universally been my experience with younger people, but it is something I have noticed about some. It is something I have noticed in fandom not least of all spaces. Fortunately, “some” is not “all,” and there has not been a complete loss of memory. Plenty of people are still talking about—or, more often, being lectured to by people like me about—the fandom of the 2000s and early 2010s. Even though it is not where the fandom is right now, even though it is difficult to see how it could ever be where the fandom is again, it has not become a place that is never visited or never remembered.