By Maximilian King
As a person who finally decided to buy a subscription to an anime streaming service out of patronage for Japanese studios (as opposed to American studios), my initial struggle was asking myself: Do I really want to spend money JUST to watch anime? Well… here’s how the story goes.
At the sprouting age of 4, I remember first being immersed in anime with classics like Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Ponyo, and The Cat Returns (which undesirably led me to realise I like cat people; no, I’m not a furry, at least I don’t think so). As a kid, I remember enjoying anime for the complex themes and its strikingly (and sometimes cutely) designed characters, which felt more appealing to me in storytelling compared to live-action storytelling (which I grew to love as I got older).
The occasional thing that drew me away from watching anime was how sometimes the characters could lack unique individual characteristics, and how sometimes the way continuity was told wasn’t always as smooth as you would see in Western animation, which led me to not enjoy anime as much as I did Western animation. At the same time, it’s hard to find much adult animation in the Western world that leans into the dramatic like Arcane or Bojack Horseman, and it often feels like animation is too infantilised in a Westerner’s eye.
As a teenager, I went through a phase of my life where I thought the only way to rebel from tradition was to only approve of films that would lean as far from archetypes as possible. I got sick of the same old messages being told through mainstream animation, and I felt the same way as Green Day: “Down with the moral majority, ‘cause I wanna be a minority.”
I was tired of leading goals by feel and building towards them with logic. As an adult, I’ve come to realise just how hard it is to find logic that can make you feel like you’ll have everything, which I feel is often informed by the fact that all of our motivations come from what we’ve collected in the reality we reside in. Archetypes seem like a greater contributor to stories than I’ve realised, because they are proof of how the human condition is the only way to get goals for anything. They’re the difference between our basic human needs for survival vs. our cultural needs for better living.
Every culture is imperfect, and even the way everyone judges things is imperfect, because we base our values on what our cultures teach us more than we think. Despite the imperfections of cultural points of view, it’s still important to learn from different cultural points of view simply because of the escapism that can come with it.
My background is rooted in an English setting as half of my parents were immigrants from England, and I was raised mostly by one of my parents from that side of the family. Throughout my childhood, I was told to be honest about any mistake you’ve made, no matter how bad it is. The way I’ve interpreted it is that you can only have a better life if you can work with the honest opinions of people, without a clean social filter to please the senses (at the same time England is also a culture that binge drinks, sometimes to an obscene amount, much like the other European countries surrounding it). Meanwhile, on the Canadian side of my family with my parent born in Canada, everything feels so anarchic in terms of social order, and you have to be prepared to build common ground from rubble with a lot more people in order to just get somewhere, especially in the age of filter bubbles.
I consider myself to be very sensitive to other people’s emotions. I’ve struggled to feel motivated to be assertive and often shied away from being aggressive, just because of how rough and brittle maintaining a social life can be, especially when you feel everyone around you so deeply. One of the unique beauties of anime is in how you can see so many characters that seem to work hard to maintain strong relationships with people. They assure each other, social values are reinforced with labours of love, and social bonds can be easily forged if people just work hard to make it happen in their own capacity. My experience being raised in Ontario is that it often seems like the only way you can maintain a clean social image of yourself is by choosing not to argue for things that make others look bad, even if some arguments are necessary for things to objectively improve for most other people involved (which can often lead to a greater downfall if not addressed).
Even though many Westerners often view Japan’s social expectations as repressive, there is always some wiggle room for acceptance as long as you can show your respect for what you want by dedicating your life to working on it. It’s often hard to find acceptance in Ontario (I think I’ll just say Canada at this point) if there’s always a strong fear that you might not get to have a deep relationship with someone, just out of mutual fear that a lack of nepotistic relations will immediately isolate you from the other person, or if you don’t think in the same way another person does, just because you do a couple of things differently.
Despite it being counterintuitive, I find I have a better social life in Ontario as long as I have a mindset that keeps me persistent enough to want to socialise with people. What I’ve learned personally from watching a lot of anime is that strong social cohesion is often achieved through hard work, because the hard work lies in just being able to know when to show friendliness and vulnerability when you don’t have a close connection with another person, and that can take a lot of courage sometimes.
I really like watching anime that depict non-human beings with very human-like feelings, which I think is a good way to remind yourself that not everything different from you will disagree with you, especially if the character depth is strong throughout. I’m even starting to see more Western media try to depict non-human characters like anime does, whilst weaving essential continuity to try and explain character depth more.
As raunchy as this suggestion is, My Dress-Up Darling is a good example of an anime that shows someone who is socially reclusive but gradually learns to become more outgoing despite being kind of squeamish (which is often funny because of how often Marin Kitagawa keeps teasing Gojo with stuff that frazzles his mind). At the same time, it’s nice to know that there’ll always be some form of feel-good anime coming out, while Western critics tend to overvalue anything bleak and dramatic, which is another reason why anime is great for escapism beyond reinforcing a positive social mindset in certain anime.
Archetypes and tropes are a good tool for any anime or non-anime media because they can always be adapted to almost any trend of any time, even if it does get used in stories over and over again. The beauty is that if you can understand why archetypes are used so often and how they still work, you start to realise how patterns can be repetitive but when well represented in the present day, they’re always strong. The more you view different types of media from different cultures, the more you begin to see a pattern of what people from diverse backgrounds of thinking can feel and experience, yet approach differently.
If you’re ever looking for an entertaining tool to help you escape reality by going into a reality of heartwarming people (or twisted ones, or fun ones, there’s a good selection), and maybe take a bit of social anxiety away, if you feel like a lot of people are too fraught to socially organise, or if you’re new to non-western media, watching anime can be a very good place to start with that.