Pandering to an otaku audience goes to far when you make them the stars of the show. Everything becomes too incestuous and closed to outsiders, which eventually leads to both moral and financial decline.
There is a great danger when any group only “preaches to the choir” whether it be in religion, politics, art, entertainment or business. One thing that a lot of outsiders to manga/anime notice is how almost everything is currently set in high school or the protagonists are high school age. It is as if the only valid beings in existence are teenagers. But there are some reasons for this and it doesn’t have to do with the physical age of the audience the producers are catering to. It has more to do with their emotional age and the curious attitude that life ends when you become an adult in modern Japan.
While young protagonists have always been part of the genre, they were often university students and you used to see more adult characters in the casts. That’s what I remember from the 1980’s and 1990’s, so I looked through archives on the Internet to see if I was misremembering things. It turns out that I wasn’t and that things had started changing around the turn of the century.
Perhaps this is the end result of a declining population and an entertainment driven society, but I also suspect that the pressure to succeed and conform is a major factor. Rather than deal with reality, the plethora of media to distract has become a potent drug, much like Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World. The otaku’s represent this more than the average citizen, I expect.
But back to the changing protagonists. They are nearly always high school (or sometimes middle school) students and quite often are perverts. By this, I mean they are into sexually deviant behavior such as peeping, collecting pornography, exhibit sado-maschistic tendencies, and collect harem’s. This includes both male and female characters in both shounen (boy) and shoujo (girl) stories.
To make things worse, the shounen leads usually fall into two types: rude idiots or wimpy whiners. Sometimes they manage to blend the two, but they are usually outcasts at school. Gone are the strong good guys out to save the day at the first opportunity; instead they have to be dragged into taking action or doing good at all.
Does that sound like a bunch of emotionally arrested anti-social misfits? Ah, that would be the main consumer of this dwindling market, wouldn’t it?
If that wasn’t direct enough pandering, many series are now featuring otaku’s of both genders as leads or main cast members. Even mangaka’s (comic book creators) have become the focus of series! I’ll give a pass to Bakuman as it has been a great expose on how the industry works while still managing to be entertaining.
So what has happened is that the pandering of the industry to its dwindling customer base has resulted in a self perpetuating limit, since more and more you need to be a die hard otaku to get all the references and in jokes. But a problem with having such closed community is that things get boring fast as only very formulaic stories get purchased, achieve high ratings, or get votes. Yes, voting is a big factor in manga success.
Because so many stories are printed in weekly magazines such as Shonen Jump, the editors rely on sent in votes from the readers on what titles are succeeding. At least the comic books in the United States are stand alone titles and sink or swim on their own merits. In Japan, a tiny amount of readers hold vast sway over what lives or dies. These are the most motivated and obsessive otaku’s who have been handed immense power over the content published – simply because they bother to vote when most readers don’t.
No wonder things have gotten to such a point.
Getting back to boredom with content being a problem; there are only a few ways to break that. One is new and innovative stories and ideas, but the otaku’s aren’t really interested in that. Their behavior is that of a drug addict instead. What they want is a more intense high, or in other words, the same old tropes but taken to ever greater extremes. So more sex, more perversion, bigger battles, and anything else that is titillating to break the boredom.
Don’t get me wrong, there are good series of manga’s and anime’s being produced. But much like the decline in television shows here, it is like panning for gold in a sewage treatment plant. I don’t foresee things improving at all in the short or long terms.
So parents, check out what your children are watching or reading, especially on the Internet. A lot of people view comic books and cartoons as innocent fun, but those days are long gone.
Well, after writing this extended rant, I’ll have to be fair and do some writing about some of the nuggets of gold I’ve found in manga and anime. But that will have to wait for another day.
