[throw18376]

outside of the actual pornography, more and more of anime is just emotional pornography for people with attachment troubles.

it can be a great art form. even some of the emotional pornography can have artistic merit (recently: Frieren). but increasingly, despite diversity in genre and visual presentation, all anime just tries to push the same emotional buttons of loneliness, belonging, connection, in a very heavy-handed way that is more about provoking the emotions in the body than about artistic expression.

not everyone has those buttons, which is why anime fans are a devoted minority, and why it seems like lonely, traumatized, and marginalized people are drawn to it.

[B-Con]

Mass-produced media always recycles the same thematic stories.

Western cartoons aimed at kids recycled the "power of being yourself" to death. Ask my tweens about the shows they've watched, and they'll pick apart how repetitive the story beats are between them.

The beats that anime is recycling may be different, but all of them get tiresome and feel pandering.

[dragontamer]

Have you tried watching something like OddTaxi?

It's a bit social commentary (not very heavy but you can feel it). But I don't think it's about loneliness or relations much at all (I guess the Walrus and the Nurse Llama have a bit of a romantic fling but I don't consider it a major part of the show).

I'd say one of the major villains is someone who has fallen into the stereotypical gachapon gamer / whale / hikkomori type shut-in that sounds like you'd enjoy him as a villain.

So rather than catering to that demographic, OddTaxi skewers it by clearly marking that character as villainous.

It's just a solid Film Noir murder mystery, except the main character is the Taxi Driver with damn near perfect memory and facial recognition rather than a proper detective. It takes some time and discussions with various people around town to figure out the murder plot, but I was quite satisfied by it.

It's a dry show with a lot of talking. The bulk of the show is just the Walrus / Protagonist picking up customers around town, talking with them for 5 minutes and dropping them off.

But it's those discussions alone that leads him to the murder plot. It's really fun to see how everyone around town was so close to the murderer.

-------

I agree with you that there's a genre of anime that celebrates or dramatizes the Hikkomori / shut-in type (ex: Re:Zero, Jobless Reincarnation). But at this point, the Hikkomori is a stock character, just one tool to tell a story.

There's a lot of different uses of the "emotionally stunted Hikkomori" (ex: Anohana is the Hikkomori who through the drama of a Ghost coming back to talk with him, he gets pulled out of it and emotionally heals).

But anime and anime culture is above all, about stock characters that are borrowed, remixed, and turned into something new in the next story. The emotionally-stunted Hikkomori can become the hero in Re:Zero, the antagonist of OddTaxi, or a source of Comedy in Devil is a Part-Timer.

Frieren seems to cover a lot of Hikkomori Tropes (emotionally stunted character who is suddenly learning how to deal with emotions as she interacts with humans). So I think you're right in that she's seemingly related to the trope. I don't think I thought of her like that before but it seems to match up more-and-more that I think of it. She has all the markings of a Hikkomori in terms of attitude and even story progression (Himmel had to convince her to get up and try)

[throw18376]

this is a good point about stock characters. a very lively and thriving art form can rely on these (as theater, movies, novels have at various times).

that’s not all of what bothers me though. if you look at Frieren, every main character is going through some kind of lonely attachment thing, even the ones that follow other stock character archetypes. it’s the whole show. It’s also the main drama in Spy x Family (another show that’s good on the merits).

I recently watched the first episode of “Wind Breakers”. They set you up for 5 minutes to think it will be about a strong guy fighting his way to the top. Surprise! It’s actually about belonging and finding friends who care about you.

Fine to have works of art about lonely people coming together and finding belonging. But it really is weird how much of a dominant theme this is, seemingly in the majority of new anime and manga.

“Chainsaw Man” is interesting because it sets up and subverts this at every possible turn, over and over.

[entropicdrifter]

I wouldn't say that that's a recent trend in anime at all, but rather a side effect of following what's coming out at any given time. In other words, recency bias.

If you dig through the older stuff for just the gems, you'll be ignoring a mountain of "emotional pornography" shows from the past that are largely ignored today because they weren't especially good art.