03-Mar-2012, 8:57 PM
Quote:People who don't watch anime but know a little about it will generalize it around the elements of those shows that are popular. The shows I like have often little in common with the shows most people that I'm talking about have heard about, especially if they got their opinion of anime from watching what shows ended up broadcast in dub form on Cartoon Network, which is how I discovered it and resisted it for years. They might think that all anime fits into tropes like tedious fighting series that go on for hundreds of episodes, magic-girl superheroes, mechas, etc. Or if they know a little bit better, they might think that I'm some creepy guy who just likes watching kawaii high schoolers do ridiculous things all the time.
A lot of "mature" series subvert this stereotype by being ridiculously violent and hyper-sexualized. Eva is a good example, although I still have some affection for it, because I find it hard to justify liking it when it's so brazenly cerebral while having pornographic violence and a whole cast of characters with personality disorders fighting the apocalypse and losing.
Lots of people who haven't watched any other anime have watched Princess Mononoke, or My Neighbor Totoro, or one of the other famous Ghibli films, and liked them. Their popularity is not working against any anime stereotypes because their greatness stands outside of anime tropes.
Fair enough. It is a bit frustrating when anime as a whole gets viewed just as a collection of those tropes (and its viewers as crazy for said tropes), although I wouldn't eschew them by any means.
Evangelion is a bit of an extreme example, don't you think?
But even still, those elements you listed aren't necessarily bad things unless they're mindlessly included. It's all about why those elements are present in the story. I haven't gotten far enough into Evangelion to be able to comment about it specifically, unfortunately. [Also, since I compared Evangelion and MSMM in my previous post, I should clarify that MSMM is a different kind of "dark"...]Also, (WARNING: TVTropes link)