People talking about escapist media is always the weirdest thing to me. It's, like. I tend to enjoy it to a fair degree -- I read sci-fi/fantasy stuff almost exclusively, due to the flat fact that things without it is generally either boring or superfluous* to me -- but the concept of putting yourself in a character's place, just. I've never really been able to grok it. Even first person stuff hasn't clicked like that for me. I enjoy reading the stuff because it has amusing scenarios with characters scurrying about in them, but to actually put myself in a character's position is just... ugh. Zero appeal, almost zero comprehension.
Personal attachment to characters in the whole escapist sense is just weird to me. More power to folks that enjoy that, but it's basically an entirely alien mindset. Can't really get the whole substitute self for <character> thing. It's more interesting watching them suffer.
*If I want the real world, I will look outside, y'know? Day to day drama bullshit or history fulfills just about anything real-world media can give me, costs less, and has potential benefits.
I've argued the same thing before, I don't really get it either.
I don't watch anime because I want to pretend to be someone else, I do it because I want to be told a story. I want to see interesting tales about other people.
The amount of people who actually try to mentally pretend to be fictional characters are probably pretty small, though.
Don't get me wrong, I'm of much the same opinion. What I'm getting at is that a large portion of the audience for such things, particularly the more puerile sort,
do use them to build power fantasies and so forth. This in turn encourages the translation and creation of series which cater to that audience -- it's how we move from Asimov through Roddenberry to Cameron, or more generally from anything which is creative and thoughtful towards things which discard all other merits in the pursuit of the ideal that sells well. Fanfiction is actually an excellent metric of this part of the audience; not only are the majority of stories written some sort of power fantasy or SI/OC rubbish, so too are the most popular trashy stories. PLH's writing is a quintessential example of how popular this sort of lazy, bad writing can be, and ff.net provides a good overview of the sort of people who popularize it; you'll find a similar mindset in a lot of anime review sites.
This isn't meant to be some sort of nostalgia trip, but I do think the argument could be made that across a number of media there's been a significant uptick in the proportion of crappy series:total series translated/published in the U.S. over the past few decades, and that it's rooted at least in part in a popular desire
for that sort of crap specifically. I'm rather inclined towards "genre" fiction myself, for much the same reasons you two are, but it's concerning to see quality work being edged out by crap, especially in a medium like this where we're wholly dependent on licensed and fan translations to access series; I'd rather watch a good SoL or sports series than a mediocre SF/F series any day, and when most of the SF/F series available are catering to the lowest common denominator while
also pushing other things out...
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3140887 times)