Anime Isn't All Bad

When I watch anime I've reached a point where I admire the cooks and healers most. The conflicts that are enhanced (not resolved, made worse) by violence are often either asinine or pure evil, often by both sides. The healers pick up the mess, heal the bystanders and combatants and they'll do it all again, killing more helpless people. If you heal a violent person who kills people, doesn't that do harm? Anime never asks those hard questions. They really ought to. One of the cuter anime I've seen that made me feel better about them is Kamichuu! which is subtitled "The Goddess is a Middle School Girl" and its very cute.

There is good anime to watch which doesn't leave you feeling angry with the Japanese. Sure, most anime is aimed at teenage boys who desperately want to commit the Rape of Nanking over and over again, but they mostly grow out of it. We're busy punishing their great grandchildren for the war crimes of WW2. At some point we're going to have to relent.They've only got two formula one race car drivers, and one of them is a rich poseur who's reasonably good in the wet but otherwise non-competitive. How sad is that? Too many Divine Wind attacks meant these guys left behind no kids. The best of Japanese men died in WW2 in suicide attacks. Only the cowards and the wounded or those much too young to fly even survived the war. After the surrender, Japan was more than ungrateful. Hateful would be a better description. We built their schools and power grid, which is why it looks the same as here, and bootstrapped them to the point that they could destroy our car industry and Sony gave us CD music players that made vinyl a sad commentary on analog technology. Things moved forward. Japanese cellphones are still on a better network than ours. 12 years advanced over our legacy crappage.

For a pure newby interested in anime that doesn't make you want to bomb Tokyo, I'd recommend a classic like Tenchi Muyo, which is on Hulu. Please note, this is Tenchi Muyo, NOT Tenchi Universe or Tenchi in Tokyo. Those are different and not nearly as good. This show is characterized as a story of good hospitality with a side of comedy and space opera in a fairly short format. The characters are memorable and the show is a classic of anime for good reason.

Another classic is Love Hina, which is slapstick based on a Japanese version of French comedy from the Dark Ages. Punch and Judy, specifically. The main character is a bit of a loser who happens to be largely indestructible but also somewhat stupid. He's been conned by his grandmother to manage a girls dormitory in hopes that he'll marry one of them. So its a romantic slapstick comedy about college and living with the opposite sex. The characters are memorable and the hijinks are exactly the sort you'd get from La Cage Aux Foles (more modern version is "Threes Company") which again, is French slapstick.

Naru, the brunette with the antenna hair in the towel, is what's called a "tsundere" girl, which could be translated to thunder if you want to be dramatic but is more accurately described with "methinks the lady doth protest TOO much". She's a popular type of trope girl, but since the girls of Love Hina are actually such archetypes as to be models of modern Japanese Feminism, there's entire Tropes pages dedicated to it. Again, Love Hina is another classic, about 15 years old.

While there's tons of Japanese Anime dedicated to giant robot combat, like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Mobile Suit Gundam (so many series!) they aren't all serious.

There are some great ones that actually parody the serious shows, like Martian Successor Nadesico which has so many in jokes and references that you need to watch at least one season of Gundam to get the joke. Evangelion is so depressing people have committed suicide after watching it. A couple of its creators did, during production. When they finally got around to finishing the series a few years later, the creator opted to kill off the popular Tsundere in a really horrible way that traumatized fans. He got death threats for that. Evangelion is noteworthy as a classic anime for a specific reason: it applied full cinematographic techniques to ANIME, making it like a movie rather than a kids cartoon. This proved that anime could be QUALITY filmmaking beyond Studio Gibli and raised standards. So its worth watching, just understand you might want to cry afterwards. Compare this to Nadesico, which romps all over the typical tropes abused by Gundam and Space Battleship Yamato, which is so bad that its basically a denial that Japan lost WW2. The star of the show is the Battleship Yamato, which we blew to hell using a couple planes and bombs dropped from the air. Battleships can't defend against a couple hundred pound bombs with that kind of energy. The physics says "up yours!" to deck plating armor. We proved that point in WW1. Japan was asinine over that decision.

Btw, in Yamato, Americans are the thinly veiled "alien invaders", since it was made when we were rebuilding their schools and hospitals after the war. Ungrateful pricks. Any time you see a character with 1950's style hair? That's supposed to be the bastard child of an American serviceman, and the Japanese think they're subhuman rapist brutes who bully the good and decent Japanese, the same Japanese who were busy beheading Chinese and Korean civilians during the war just for kicks. Yeah. No honor there.

One of the better points for Nadesico is that it uses the same voice actor from Evangelion, mocking HIMSELF in every possible way. Nadesico just makes you laugh and laugh, most of the time. It has some dark points, but mostly its parody. Also, the hero is a cook. He doesn't actually LIKE giant robot combat. He just wants to make good tasting food. "I'm a cook!" is his literal battle cry, more than once. You have to like that.

In more recent times, I have to recommend Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu aka The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Haruhi is a Genki Girl. Genki is cheerful and enthusiastic. She kind of bipolar. The problem is, when she gets frustrated or depressed she destroys the world. She's literally God. With the capital G. She's surrounded by some amusing trope characters and is counterbalanced by a fairly normal boring guy who is forced into adventures without telling Haruhi what's going on because if she knew she was God (capital G again) she might destroy the universe even worse than the last couple times. She rebuilds it again, mind you, based on how she wants things to be, but the super-aliens and time travellers get a little upset about it. So they've got spies minding her. Haruhi is a wonderful girl, very bright, very enthusiastic, sometimes too much so, but still filled with energy. The very definition of Genki. And the show is pretty amusing since the hero mumbles to himself with complaints which he thinks are his monologue but most people actually hear because he doesn't realize he's saying them out loud. How can you not like a character so goofy?

Another quirk of Haruhi is she's actually quite brilliant. She thinks she's smart so she is, and doesn't realize that her ability to do anything she sets her mind to is unusual. Even learns to sing and play guitar in one of her better moments.

I think Haruhi is meant to represent the frustrations of women having no future in Japan, and why so many flee for California. I ran into dozens of Japanese women, most with education greencards, going to Foothill College for medical degrees so they could stay here instead of deal with greedy rapist males back in Japan. Did you know that in Japan, the worst punishment you can face for rape is 2 years in jail and $2500 fine. That's it. And most of the time there's no jail because "she was asking for it and I'm Pure Japanese". And that's good enough for their justice system. Small wonder women move here. Segregated railcars because of train perverts groping female passengers being COMMON?? That would NEVER happen here. So wtf Japan? WTF?

One of the better anime about modern Japanese poverty is done with aliens acting as a metaphor. Its called Niea_7. The _ is read as "Under". Niea is a freeloading alien living in the closet of a girl trying to get into college, attending cram school and working 3 jobs while living in the bathouse, itself a sign of poverty, that used to belong to her family but was sold because they lost their shirts in the economic collapse. In this world, the aliens are just as incompetent and impoverished as everyone else, and the girl in question barely has enough to eat. A boy she knew as a kid brings her bags of rice to LITERALLY KEEP HER ALIVE in hopes of winning her heart and marrying her. She doesn't really want to, since that means giving up on college and her dreams of business success, but the economy is terrible (just like real life).

Its kinda disappeared so likely has to be rented or purchased unless you can track it down. This is one I own.

For purely absurd parody of giant robot mecha anime in a modern setting, I have to recommend Full Metal Panic, the first arc, followed by Fumoffu. Its got Punch and Judy style slapstick with the typical "His Power Level is over 9000! That's impossible!" jokes.

This is all you really need to know about THAT show. Full Metal Panic is hilarious. A child soldier mercenary who pilots mecha gets assigned as a bodyguard to a high school girl in Japan. Hijinks ensue. She's a tsundere bluenette who happens to have a head crammed full of secrets. He's scarred identically to Ruroni Kenshin.

Another classic, but one I don't care for so didn't watch. Sousuke Sagara is rather broken, seeing as he's a child soldier so doesn't know how to talk to normal people or be a teenager without seeing everything as a combat operation. The majority of the humor in the show is this distinction. I was married to a female soldier and she sometimes acted that way herself. Falling back on training can lead to hilarity.

See? Comedy gold. Particularly when Japan is one of the strictest anti-gun nations on earth. Small wonder they also have the highest rate for Rape on earth too. Sousuke would never stand for that, but he's heavily armed and utterly ruthless. A good part of the humor is the women around him spend their time holding him back from his usual level of destructiveness. This one is on Hulu. Worth watching if you want to laugh. The animation quality is good, too.

Ouran High School Host Club is a comedy about rich people being weird. I like that one. Watched it many times. Cheaper animation doesn't detract from the dry humor of the cross-dressing heroine (girl dressing as a boy because she just doesn't care). Haruhi, not Suzumiya, is a good comedy character with a male harem (aka Reverse Harem) of rich boys who kind of dote on her in their way. She's part of a club that for pricey donations pretends to woo rich girls while serving them tea and cakes at a fancy private school. Host Clubs actually exist in Japan, btw. A hot woman will drink with you, and encourages you to buy you both drinks. She drinks colored water while you get drunk, paying for the actual drink and she splits the cost with the bar owner while giving you company so you aren't drinking alone. No sex, she's not a prostitute. She's a hostess. There's a reverse version for women, too. Either tea or proper drinks for salarywomen. And there's a cross-dressing version too, for gay people, who are more accepted in Japan than here, apparently. Cultural acceptance is different there.

There are anime that should be avoided. Bleach is awful. Naruto is awful. One Piece is basically a comedy retelling of the Asian classic "Journey To The West". Its not very good, though. So is Saiyuki. There are a bunch of these, actually. Hellsing has its moments but its largely not very good and the remake is actually worse. Pretty much any anime that's made entirely for boys should be avoided.

The "slice of life" anime tend to be funnier and sweeter, with cute girls doing cute things. I can't complain about those, so long as they're properly dressed. Lucky Star is hilarious. So is Moyashimon, Yuru Yuri, Pet Girl of Sakurasou, Wagnaria (aka Working!), and Sket Dance. These are light comedy which makes you feel more cheerful. Stuff worth seeing instead of being stressed out or depressed. These are shows Japan has every right to be proud of, and go some distance to improving their own image internationally. They're on Crunchyroll.com btw. The best thing about anime? They don't suck hard like American TV shows. They're interesting. That's a great reason to watch them.