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[Magistrum]

Ah, that was it.
Just checked it's page and it seems to be very narration heavy.
At least looks family friendly, might watch it eventually.

[JoshuaFH]

I decided to start up Overlord, and I'm very pleased so far.

[Reelya]

I'm glad there's Overlord 2 starting now, as Overlord 1 ends on an inconclusive note. BTW there are a couple of movies, though it sounds like they're just season 1 repackaged. However, people are saying there are a bunch of additional scenes, so if you were going to rewatch season 1 before seeing season 2, the movies might be a good choice for that.

[kingawsume]

Yes. :-P
I recently finished the French series called Wakfu.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The season 1 finale hit me hard

It was pretty good for a kid's show anyways. I want to sit myself down and rewatch the last 5 or so episodes of S1 Attack on Titan, then watch the new stuff.
Sub.

[Reelya]

If it's not made in Japan (or, East Asia at a stretch), it's better to class it as Western animation / cartoons than anime. Not because it doesn't look similar, just because making style-based classifications are entirely subjective, so they open up a potential can of worms of nobody agreeing on which things are anime, and which things are not.

The term "anime" was coined to be a shorthand for Japanese cartoons (at one point called "Japanimation").

If you say "this style is an 'anime' while that style is a 'cartoon' " then to be 100% consistent, it would have to be a universal rule. e.g. applied to both Western and Japanese things. When you say "this is anime" you're implicitly saying "these other things are not anime".

And that opens up a bigger issue of who decides which are the "real" animes and which are not that are going to be the "true style"? It's not the Japanese, since to them, it's all anime regardless of style. e.g it would be made entirely based on Western notions of which animes are "canon" based primarily on the fact that the West broadcast Sailor Moon, Pokemon and Dragonball in the late 1990s. If you take a look at classic animes by Osamu Tezuka, the "father of anime" such as Kimba the white lion and Unico you'll notice that those titles heavily resemble Disney cartoons. So, it's not a universal distinction, an older viewer would have a different opinion on which ones are the "true animes" that the "anime is a style" distinction would be made.

While Wakfu is clearly influenced by shows like Dragonball, that doesn't mean it automatically gets the "anime" label. Unless you're also happy with me calling Powerpuff Girls (which looks like the Panty and Stocking) and The Lion King (which looks like Kimba the white lion) as animes too.

While the "anime is stuff from Japan" definition isn't perfect, it's far better as a categorization system, because it provides a yes/no answer that can be agreed upon for pretty much every show, basically avoiding having a subjective debate about it.

Someone complained a while back that "from Japan" doesn't cover all the nuances of "anime" in cultural terms. But I thought up an important point about why that argument is off the mark. A categorization system isn't intended or designed to describe all aspects of a thing. e.g. if you say "this is a dog, and we know that because we use these markers for dog-vs-not-dog", the claim isn't that whatever classification markers you've chosen encompass all things it means "to be a dog", it's just a rule that was made up and agreed to, so that there's no subjective argument about what things are dogs, and what are not. The same as the "planet" rule that excluded Pluto doesn't need to encompass all the cultural meaning of planets, it's just an abstract yes/no rule so that scientists don't have to have a subjective point of view about that either. A classification system is meant to be abstract and not take into account everything. So "from Japan" is a perfectly good classification rule, that does what classification rules are intended to do: end debates and remove subjectivity, as much as possible.

[IronyOwl]

If it's not made in Japan (or, East Asia at a stretch), it's better to class it as Western animation / cartoons than anime.

Except that's worthless as a definition, so we don't actually gain anything keeping it pure and objective. There's also the question of whether "made in" means original premise, grunt work, etc, since you get weird shit like things designed in one country but animated in another, or different parts/episodes animated in different regions.

What Japan considers 'anime' is also irrelevant, because as you point out it just means 'cartoon'. It was stolen to have purpose for English speakers, which does tend towards the stylistic rather than geographic; eg most people do mean Dragonball or Inuyasha, not Astro Boy or That One Artsy Historical Drama With No Release In English.

[Reelya]

We do gain something, which is not constantly arguing about it.

As for "made in" it's not hard to pick some ground rules for that. If it was made and broadcast in japan, in Japanese, as it's initial audience then call it anime. If it was initially broadcast in some other language, don't. Just because some other rule is possible is no reason not to just pick one and stick to it, the same as there are many possible rules for what "Planet" means, however, the scientific community just picked one, and stuck to it. Which one they picked wasn't important, what was important is that they did pick just one rule, that each thing can be tested against to see which category it is in. Shared definitions are preferred, because they facilitate communication, which is the whole point of language.

The point is, it doesn't really matter what we call things. call all things cartoons and call them anime (which would in fact be the most in line with Japan's usage). But when everyone has their own private definitions, then that's a block to communication and discussion. So having a rule about what a term means is beneficial since you can focus on the important things and not semantic quibbling. No rule is ever "perfect", the same as not all astronomers agree on the "planet" ruling. But that's not the point. A rule that's noticeably more "fuzzy" in it's application is inferior to a rule that's more easy to test. "well i think it's an anime because it looks similar to the anime I know and/or like" isn't a good rule, but it's what people are effectively saying (even if they haven't thought about it) when they spread the term around.

(also, it's not really about "inclusion" as shown by the fact that people who strongly want to call Avatar an anime would get upset if I went around calling "My Little Pony" an anime, even though Japanese people do call it an anime. So that shows that the appropriation of the term "anime" is as much about exclusion as inclusion. It's all about people wanting to "up-market" their favorite shows, but they won't necessarily accept other people doing the same thing, because if everyone gets to "up-market" their shows, it loses the "special status". From my point of view, either all shows get that "upgrade", or none of them do, there's no middle ground. But, from a western cartoon point of view it's also problematic that they'd have to adhere to some of the most cliched and banal Japanese stylistic elements, from shows aimed at 12 year olds, to "earn" the "upgrade" from cartoon to anime).

[IronyOwl]

We do gain something, which is not constantly arguing about it.

As for "made in" it's not hard to pick some ground rules for that. If it was made and broadcast in japan, in Japanese, as it's initial audience then call it anime. If it was initially broadcast in some other language, don't. Just because some other rule is possible is no reason not to just pick one and stick to it, the same as there are many possible rules for what "Planet" means, however, the scientific community just picked one, and stuck to it. Which one they picked wasn't important, what was important is that they did pick just one rule, that each thing can be tested against to see which category it is in. Shared definitions are preferred, because they facilitate communication, which is the whole point of language.

The point is, it doesn't really matter what we call things. call all things cartoons and call them anime (which would in fact be the most in line with Japan's usage). But when everyone has their own private definitions, then that's a block to communication and discussion. So having a rule about what a term means is beneficial since you can focus on the important things and not semantic quibbling. No rule is ever "perfect", the same as not all astronomers agree on the "planet" ruling. But that's not the point. A rule that's noticeably more "fuzzy" in it's application is inferior to a rule that's more easy to test. "well i think it's an anime because it looks similar to the anime I know and/or like" isn't a good rule, but it's what people are effectively saying (even if they haven't thought about it) when they spread the term around.

(also, it's not really about "inclusion" as shown by the fact that people who strongly want to call Avatar an anime would get upset if I went around calling "My Little Pony" an anime, even though Japanese people do call it an anime. So that shows that the appropriation of the term "anime" is as much about exclusion as inclusion. It's all about people wanting to "up-market" their favorite shows, but they won't necessarily accept other people doing the same thing, because if everyone gets to "up-market" their shows, it loses the "special status". From my point of view, either all shows get that "upgrade", or none of them do, there's no middle ground. But, from a western cartoon point of view it's also problematic that they'd have to adhere to some of the most cliched and banal Japanese stylistic elements, from shows aimed at 12 year olds, to "earn" the "upgrade" from cartoon to anime).

It does matter, which is why we have so many words and why so many of them mean so many things in different circumstances. We could just call everything stuff and avoid all semantic arguments ever otherwise, but it's the semantic equivalent of destroying everything of value to prevent conflict. It's no coincidence that the most common words are often the vaguest or most multifaceted.

Even assuming a singular, ironclad definition was more important than organic use, arriving at that definition via arbitrary decree is still generally useless; eg you, the Japanese, or the original 90s meaning extrapolated well past its explicit intention at the time are all probably pretty bad at coming up with a definition people will actually value. You might notice scientists declared "planet" to have a meaning, noticed some stuff they hadn't noticed before, and then rejiggered it for scientist purposes. Some bureaucrat didn't just get into a huff that normal people were using a fuzzy term and declare that, look, anything orbiting a star is a planet, all those other people are wrong.

So even if we did absolutely need a singular, sole definition of anime that all must adhere to (we don't), we'd probably want to arrive at that definition by looking at how people are using it currently, eg how it's useful to the people who find it useful. Tut-tutting that what people are talking about isn't anime is literally the opposite of this.

[Reelya]

I think we do in fact need that, because if we started to have lengthy Avatar discussion in this thread and bringing all other types of show in then the thread would end up being about 80% discussion on the very topic of what's anime, rather than about the shows themselves. The "tut-tutting" isn't about shutting people down, it's about trying to avoid the thread becoming entirely meta. But for that, I had to explain my reasons for doing so.

[RAM]

It was stolen to have purpose for English speakers

If it was made and broadcast in japan, in Japanese, as it's initial audience then call it anime. If it was initially broadcast in some other language, don't.
just pick one and stick to it

[Reelya]

I did say no definition is perfect. however, Robotech isn't much of a grey area. The original shows were in Japanese well before they were dubbed, and any sale to an overseas company was an after-thought. Same with Samurai Pizza Cats. By the "initial broadcast" rule those are anime adaptations. These examples are the prime reason I said initial audience. They merely dubbed those, there was almost no original artwork added. "poorly translated" or "loosely translated" are both subsets of "translated". e.g. if a book was in French, and was loosely translated, nobody confuses that for an original work in English. The same, if you dub a Japanese cartoon "creatively" or just "badly", nobody confuses it for an original English cartoon (assuming they know that the original work exists, in both the case of a book or a tv show).

A proper grey area would be things that were commissioned for overseas production, but also broadcast in Japan at the same time, such as the Supernatural cartoon, or some Marvel/DC stuff, but those are pretty uncommon so they don't really cause much of a problem with actual arguments that can start. And anyway, those are from western franchises, and commissioned specifically to be shown in western nations from initial broadcast, so most people aren't going to confuse e.g. that Batman is an anime.

What Japan considers 'anime' is also irrelevant, because as you point out it just means 'cartoon'. It was stolen to have purpose for English speakers, which does tend towards the stylistic rather than geographic; eg most people do mean Dragonball or Inuyasha, not Astro Boy or That One Artsy Historical Drama With No Release In English.

Sure, what Japan thinks isn't relevant. However the term was coined in English to cover all Japanese cartoons, so that we didn't need to ever specify "Japanese cartoon", because the word anime covered that. Saying that it ever makes sense to exclude something like "Astro Boy" from what's considered anime just exemplifies the problem with trying to use that alternative definition as the primary one.

differentiating it as a specific style means that we'd have to start using redundant terms like "Japanese anime" vs "japanese cartoon" if "american anime" was a separate category to "american cartoon". Now, you have 4 categories, not two, to cover country of origin and subjective style. And the problem with that is exemplified by your off-hand comment that people don't mean Astro Boy when they say "anime". What's Astro Boy then? A "Japanese cartoon", right, which we're now considering to be a separate category to "Japanese anime".

So the big problem is that now instead of having two categories, we need four to properly classify things, and we're starting to literally have a discussion about which Japanese cartoons are the "real" ones that deserve the japanese loan word to describe them, and which ones get labeled with an American catch-all term, which is frankly preposterous.

[IronyOwl]

I think we do in fact need that, because if we started to have lengthy Avatar discussion in this thread and bringing all other types of show in then the thread would end up being about 80% discussion on the very topic of what's anime, rather than about the shows themselves. The "tut-tutting" isn't about shutting people down, it's about trying to avoid the thread becoming entirely meta. But for that, I had to explain my reasons for doing so.

But you're the one starting those arguments. You could solve this whole thing by just shrugging and saying "eh, anime enough." Or going with someone else's definition. Or, I guess, putting your foot down and generating arguments now to avoid arguments later, but that's a weird fucking choice if your only goal is to avoid arguments.

It was stolen to have purpose for English speakers

My point was that the word should continue to serve a purpose, not that it should continue to serve the purpose it had when we first stole it. I'll freely admit that what people generally meant by 'anime' is different now than it was back in the day, but my takeaway from that is that the word is healthy and functional, mutating as needs dictate.

I did say no definition is perfect. however, Robotech isn't much of a grey area. The original shows were in Japanese well before they were dubbed, and any sale to an overseas company was an after-thought. Same with Samurai Pizza Cats. By the "initial broadcast" rule those are anime adaptations. These examples are the prime reason I said initial audience. They merely dubbed those, there was almost no original artwork added. "poorly translated" or "loosely translated" are both subsets of "translated". e.g. if a book was in French, and was loosely translated, nobody confuses that for an original work in English. The same, if you dub a Japanese cartoon "creatively" or just "badly", nobody confuses it for an original English cartoon.

So AMVs and Abridged Series are anime? Not made of anime or harvested from anime, but actually that same anime?

Sure, what Japan thinks isn't relevant. However the term was coined to cover all Japanese cartoons. differentiating it as a specific style means that we'd have to start using redundant terms like "Japanese anime" vs "japanese cartoon" if "american anime" was a separate category to "american cartoon". Now, you have 4 categories, not two, to cover country of origin and subjective style. And the problem with that is exemplified by your off-hand comment that people don't mean Astro Boy when they say "anime". What's Astro Boy then? A "Japanese cartoon", right, which we're now considering to be a separate category to "Japanese anime".

We already do that where it matters and don't worry about it where it doesn't. RWBY is Basically Anime But American. I've heard Wakfu referred to as Baguette Anime. Avatar is referred to as anime, anime-ish, western anime, etc. Nobody seems overwhelmed by the added layer, any more than the gulf between 'slapstick comedy' or 'romantic comedy' is decried as clumsy and a sign that we need a singular objective definition for the word comedy.

Astro Boy is really old anime. Note that the 'really old' isn't any less valid or important than the 'action' in 'action movie' or the 'historical' in 'historical fiction.' If I say "recommend me an anime," nine times out of ten I want "something like Dragonball Z or Lucky Star." Astroy Boy is also anime, but in a different and typically less useful context. Case in point: Nobody actually cares whether Astro Boy is anime or not, because nobody actually cares about Astro Boy. It only ever comes up in either a historical context, or in disputes about whether the thing people actually care about is anime.

and we're starting to literally have a discussion about which Japanese cartoons are the "real" ones that deserve the japanese loan word to describe them, and which ones get labeled with an American catch-all term, which is frankly preposterous.

No, it's not. You keep coming back to this weird obsession with the original Japanese definition and prestige-wankery. We've both agreed that the former is useless and not relevant, yet here we are again: It means this in Japanese, therefore. For the latter, I don't know who you're arguing against regarding the honor and prestige of being inducted into the esteemed ranks of True Anime, but I don't think it's me.

[Reelya]

I don't think so

It means this in Japanese, therefore.

That's a little off. The point was that it's original meaning in English was a shorthand for "japanese cartoon". That isn't the same thing as its meaning in Japanese. Point being that changing that definition means we would need to start clarifying what we mean whenever we say "anime" because it wouldn't be immediately apparent: not all anime would be japanese, and not all japanese cartoons would be anime. Which could get confusing, also everyone would have different opinions about exactly which shows stylistically qualified. e.g Ben 10? Teen titans? Ninja Turtles? why/why-not?

The other problem with the stylistic one is that it's prescriptivist, and it only covers a small subset of the available styles. e.g. it needs to look like 1980/90s shonen anime to really qualify. The number of long-running shonen type shows that have that sort of style is actually fairly limited in terms of the total amount of shows produced. e.g. if you count all the episodic / slice of life / school type shows, they are far more numerous than shonen action-adventures, yet by using the term "anime" to refer to a specific type of show, that's effectively making a judgement about what shows are out there that may not be reflective of the true situation.

Why not say that e.g. "K-On" is the quintessential anime style. After all, there are far more shows that look like K-On than ones that look like Dragonball and Naruto. This is probably my main contention with using anime as a style identifier. Basically, it's very narrowly defined and seems to largely be based on a handful kids shows that were translated in the late 1990s, not anime as a whole. That sort of locked in stone style is completely out of date, doesn't really reflect any of the modern shows unless they're literally aimed at gradeschoolers.

So in other words, it's a very specific image held by a particular age/generation, based on the shows translated in their youth, and from a biased sample filtered by the American "animation age ghetto", along with a gender bias from the TV companies towards action shows for little boys. And that brings up another issue: if the term "anime" is used synonymously with a style which was pretty much aimed at 12 year old kids in Japan 20+ years ago, that just makes it harder for the stuff to get taken seriously, or to get any traction for the shows that are aimed at a more adult audience. "anime is all about spiky haired kids" is something you still hear commonly.

If "anime" itself is the style, in the sense of e.g. art styles such as impressionism, cubism, etc, then there would have to be new stylistic terms when the style changes too, right? e.g. "post-anime" etc. I'm not sure how that would go down. Assuming that nobody would want to call something a "post-anime style" calls into question whether a meaningful "anime style" could even be formulated as a concrete thing. "Post-impressionism" for example is a meaningful term. "Post anime" would seem to be more akin to saying "post painting". Hitching the wagon to a specific style that's pretty much already completely out of date and calling that the be-all-end-all "anime style" would seem like setting it up for a big fall later on. Styles go out of date and are superseded with new styles, with new names to differentiate them: "locking in" a bunch of rules about "what anime looks like" does a couple of things: ensures conformity, goes against experimentation/evolution, and ensures blow-back against the term itself when that style invariable goes out of fashion, as styles always do.

[Cruxador]

I'm glad there's Overlord 2 starting now, as Overlord 1 ends on an inconclusive note. BTW there are a couple of movies, though it sounds like they're just season 1 repackaged. However, people are saying there are a bunch of additional scenes, so if you were going to rewatch season 1 before seeing season 2, the movies might be a good choice for that.

Season 2 won't end super conclusively either, assuming they do three volumes like season  1. Volume six does end in a big and dramatic way, but it's more opening up to things that may happen in the future than concluding anything. Not as open as the end of volume three and the first season, but the novel series is ongoing and the anime is faithful to it, so nothing's ending for a while.

[kingawsume]

>tfw you accidentally start a kind of flame war bc Franime isn't technically anime