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Comments
simplistic, too black and white to be taken seriously or applied to real
life. That's a valid complaint.
...do you really expect everything to be applicable to every situation, ever?
> hobos
What do you have against hobos? Why are you grouping them with gangsters and drug-dealers?
> zodiac signs
Really? You actually believe this?
> animé is necessarily better
I present to you Kirarin Revolution. Your point is invalid.
You're accentuating the negative. I'm not sure how my philosophy can be seen as that negative, since its basically all about being open-minded, trying new things and valuing experience. I mean I guess if you're uncomfortable with that true "open mindedness" means you have to also consider the ugly as well as the beautiful I can see the problem, but, well, that's life.
Strawman argument.
I don't hate hobos. If anything I feel kind of sorry for them.
Not really.
I never said anime was better (not on this particular issue, anyway), and in fact said the exact opposite in the OP.
The less educated might point out that this could suggest that Dantes' considerations have obvious flaws. But they are less educated and we should not listen to them.
You ARE?!
I was being frivolous when I said that. I didn't think there actually was one... guess I better start watching my back, huh?
Dismissing my thoughts without argument because I don't like the same comics and lolicon porn you do isn't the same as seeing flaws in my reasoning.
You constructed the strawman first.
For example, "friendship is important, stand by your friends" is actually "friendship is important, and you should generally stand by your friends", which obviously doesn't apply if your "friends" are thugs or criminals. And for that matter, if you stood by your friends even if they were thugs and criminals, you'd be going against another morality lesson you might find in the same sort of media, "do the right thing, even if it's hard".
The point of these lessons is to teach guidelines, not to teach infallible, inflexible rules to be slavisly followed. By citing drug dealers and gangsters, you've pointed out the exception that the lesson-teaching doesn't (and I'd say shouldn't be expected to) account for.
(This is not to say that some kids may take such a lesson too far and apply "standing by friends" to drug-dealing and turf-warring friends. However, I think it's safe to say that such situations are a sufficiently small minority that we ought not to have to worry about this exception.)
> > zodiac signs
> Not really.
Fine, fair enough.
> > anime necessarily better
> I didn't say that
> "But, it seems like anime doesn't need the lesson--the better writers already use the kind of more nebulous morality I prefer."
There you go. That said, if you want to nitpick, my counterargument was wrong itself since it went for anecdotal evidence rather than statistical evidence.
However, I still challenge your assertion that animé has better writers. Western animation could have access to just as good a pool of writers.
I believe the issue is that this writing ability--be it inherent to writers who are intentionally dumbing down their scripts, or only existent in some writers--is much more strongly linked to the "animation age ghetto" that plagues western animation far more than it does Japanese animation.
if I was saying "anime writers are better" my wording would've said "anime writers already use the kind of..." instead of "the better writers already use the kind of..." the use of "the better writers" given the usage and context clearly indicates that I mean "better (as relative to other anime writers)."
This is third grade literacy here, and I'm rather sad that I had to explain it to someone I presume is older than myself.
Second of all, this is devolving quickly into a contest of who can exude a greater sense superiority over other people, and this is really not helping the discussion.
Third, yes, you never said that animé writers are better, but you have implied that animé has a greater incidence of writers of higher quality (higher quality being defined here as more deftness in dealing with issues of morality. Your blanket suggestion to western writers also supports this implication.
Now, as I noted before, what we're talking about here is trends--statistical evidence, if you will, rather than anecdotal evidence, which is why I admitted in my last post that my citation of Kirarin Revolution earlier was misguided. (That said, statistical evidence is significantly harder to demonstrate than anecdotal evidence.)
But my point still stands--your criticism of western writers is, as I see it, much more related to the animation age ghetto effect than any writing ability. I believe that western writers are just as capable of subtle treatments of morality and ethics; it's just that they don't use this ability in a lot of cartoons since the cartoons are meant for children and thus intended to be more heavy-handed.
The Periphery Demographic must have something to do with this too - you have cartoons being watched by people older than the main audience, who can see the over-simplifications in the moral messages that the young kids may not. And all moral messages addressed to young kids, in school, church or on TV, tend to be over-simplified because, rightly or wrongly, it's assumed they aren't ready for the complexities of adult life.
Is it really harmful though? Most kids will grow up and realise that things aren't as simple as they look in cartoons. A few may not, but if you can't distinguish real life from animation you've probably got bigger problems than a child-like moral outlook.
... And why exactly is this a problematic assertion? Am I for some reason not allowed to imply that anime may have at least one advantage? Honestly I'm tired of this notion which reeks of "trying to avoid being a named a weeaboo" that both the mediums have to be treated as exact equals when clearly they are not.
I've seen some cartoons that do amazing things, but they tend to be one or two stand-out episodes in otherwise average series, and then they tend to be "amazing... for a cartoon."
While the age ghetto is a force at work here, I tend to think its used as an excuse far too often. If a barely-edited with all the characterization and story intact version of Macross can grace broadcast television in 1985, then there should be no reason American writers couldn't do something of a similar calibre. Either they simply don't have the skill, or they're being held back by something.
Some consider this to also apply for Batman:TAS and a couple others.
> Honestly I'm tired of this notion which reeks of "trying to avoid being a
named a weeaboo" that both the mediums have to be treated as exact
equals when clearly they are not.
...here's the other thing: you have shown a repeated tendency to consider the lot of us tropers and media geeks in general to be both (1) animé fans and (2) embarrassed that we are animé fans, and thus wanting to do opinion posturing to show off how we're so not weeaboos or we're oh-so-respectful of western animation too or something.
I have no problem observing that animé has a number of advantages, including lower animation budget (not without tradeoffs, granted) and less influence from an "age ghetto" effect, as well as a tradition of symbiotic collaboration with the pop music industry.
So if you feel that I'm disagreeing with you in order to rack up anti-weeaboo points for whatever reason, no, I'm not.
> If a barely-edited with all the characterization and story intact version of Macross can grace broadcast television in 1985
Isn't that Robotech? I haven't seen it myself but IIRC I've heard that it's pretty heavily edited.
All right, you're not, but that is the impression I've gotten from the majority of forumites both here and on TV Tropes.
I've seen both versions and surprisingly there's not much difference. Actually, I recall thinking Robotech was slightly better, but its been awhile.
Batman strikes me as a "it was around when I was a kid" nostalgia thing. It's similar to how I talk about how He-Man or G.I. Joe were so great--I probably wouldn't think they were so good if I weren't born in the early 80s.
Avatar was pretty good.
Fair enough; I'll let them speak for themselves then.
> I've seen both versions and surprisingly there's not much difference.
Actually, I recall thinking Robotech was slightly better, but its been
awhile.
I thought that Robotech, Sailor Moon, and Cardcaptors (and secondarily Voltron and Yu-Gi-Oh) were the poster-children of heavily edited western releases of animé early in the development of the western animé localization industry.
I thought it was 4Kids One Piece. Which I haven't seen, but I suspect "Yo ho ho he took a bite of Gum Gum" speaks for itself.
As for Robotech, Tvtropes's Macekre page (ironically) has a long explanation of why the criticism of it is undeserved.
Though, I guess "4Kidsescre" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
I never understood the appeal of TMNT 2003 to be honest. It's not bad, but it wasn't something I would watch if there was something else on.
Southern Cross was basically the most edited series of the three. Mospeada... kinda survived, but I feel it was hurt by the conversion (it's my favorite of the original three Japanese shows).