Anime

It was 1988, I was fourteen in my second year of high school and the one other metalhead/comics reader in my class brought in Among the Living: “look they’re doing a song about Judge Dredd”:

That day we poured over the liner notes in which the band members put shoutouts to their then favourite authors and characters: Stephen King, Frank Miller, Daredevil, Batman, Alan Moore, Judge Dredd, all of which was catnip to me, a nascent comics geek. The late eighties was when American comics, mostly American superhero comics became salonfahig in the Netherlands, or maybe it was just me having discovered them roughly a yaear before. In any case seeing my own interests shared by sucha cool band made me an Anthrax fan.

Among the Living has always been my favourite Anthrax record for these reasons, but that whole run from Fistful of Metal to Sound of White Noise is essential thrash metal. That last one was the first with Jon Bush as lead singer instead of Joey Belladonna and also was somewhat more …experimental and I lost interest in their later albums to be honest. Persistence of Time was the last Anthrax album with the classic lineup and it speaks to the band’s broadmindness that one of the lead singles was a Joe Jackson cover (which came as a real shock decades later when I first heard the original…)

Anthrax also introduced me to Public Enemy thanks to them touring together and doing collabs like “Bring Tha Noize”. It may seem weird, but metal and hip-hop after all were both outcast music back in the eighties, equally reviled by the moral majority and Tipper Gore’s crusade to clean up music.

So long live the greatest of the Big Four of Thrash Metal!

The latest controversy in Anisky was caused by this perfectly true Zero Utopia tweet which a lot of people took umbrage with for some reason:

Genuinely impossible to make people understand how much most the United States in the 90s hated and looked down on anime if they didn’t live through it.

A common reaction was yo say this couldn’t be true because anime became popular in the nineties, like Zack Davisson here

This is bullshit.

Dragonball, Sailor Moon, and Pokemon were ridiculously popular in the 90s.

There was never a time in the US when people “hated and looked down on anime.” At the most, there was a time when people were “unaware of anime.”

The other common response was to downplay it as just bullies being bullies as James Beckett e.g. argued

The U.S. didn’t “hate” anime in the 90s. People these days tend to conflate (or confuse) “broad teasing of foreign cultures and nerd hobbies” for “hatred.”

As for the nerds and bullies that may have gotten weird or douchey about it…I mean, what do you expect? That’s what nerds and bullies do.

What this misses is that bullies (as well as South Park mentioned later) take their cues from the larger culture they’re swimming in. And Japan was the number one target of American xenophobia for most of the twentieth century. The anime backlash of the nineties, when anime first truly went mainstream with Pokemon was very real and very much an offshoot of that much older xenophobia. Just like the slightly later backlash in the early 2000s against Japanese videogames, especially JRPGGs (the X-Box first being called “project Midway” frex).

Japan after all was America’s primary rival for supremacy in the Pacific and East Asia from roughly 1905 until its defeat in World War II. Japan was feared and mistrusted not just for its military strength and rapid climb from insular hermit state incapable of defending itself into a Great Power threatening the US’s position in China and elsewhere. A far greater fear was that Japan would infiltrate and subvert the country itself, by way of the many Japanese migrants who moved to the US in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. A fear so powerful even the great liberal president Roosevelt ended up putting American citizens in concentration camps for the duration of the war. (For a victim’s testimony of this awful proces, see Citizen 13660, a graphic novel written by a survivor in 1946).

Postwar, Japan subjugated and occupied this fear slowly disappeared, but the xenophobic attitude didn’t disappear. World War II and especially Pearl Harbour gave new reasons to mistrust Japan and a lot of americans would hold that grudge into the twentyfirst century. Meanwhile Japan’s economic resurgence from the sixties and America’s industrial decline from the early seventies on saw this xenophobia re-ignite again. Once again Japan was seen as infiltrating and taking over America, now using economic warfare.

By the eighties American economic anxiety was so great you got Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca talking about Japan’s “teflon kimono” that needed taking off and books like this happily resurrecting pre-WWII infiltration conspiracies. Japan’s econmic stagnation since the mid-nineties has driven much of it underground again, with China replacing Japan as the new bogeyman, but it was still very much present in the nineties when anime broke through, slotting perfectly in with the preconcieved notions of Japan as weird and dangerous.

Zack is right that series like Dragonball and Pokemon were incredibly popular, but they were popular among kids (and maybe but not necessairly the older cohort of already existing anime fans). As Elvis Presley proved some fory years earlier, what’s popular with kids and teens may very well lead to a backlash under their parents and authority figures. So it went with anime too. Parents hated Pokemon, certain churches declared it “satanic” (like everything they didn’t understand) and even in nerd circles anime was tolerated at best. True acceptance of anime only happened this century.

Nine series and one movie with yuri elements is enough to make anybody’s head spin. Right, Major?

To be honest, nine out of sixtynine (nice) new series this season is not even fifteen percent yuri this season and not all series listed here will have actual yuri romance, but after years and years of maybe getting one or two Manga Time Kirara a year, I take what I can get. Series listed below are in under of their start date.

Heroine? Seijo? Iie, All Works Maid desu (Hokori)!
A genius girl reincarnates into the world of an otome game and instead of trying to be the hero or saintess, decides she’d rather skip all that and be a maid, like she dreamed of in her previous life. The opening and ending give away the likely heterosexual end game, but that doesn’t erase the romantic tension between her and her mistress.

Grow Up Show: Himawari no Circus-dan
Mizuka is the daughter of the world’s greatest trapeze artist. Unfortunately she hates both the circus and her father, especially after he ‘sells’ her to the Sunflower Circus, a dilapidated all-girls troupe. Nevertheless, years of dedicated training having giving her trapeze skills that make Ouka, the circus’ existing trapeze artist, immediately obsessed with her. So far this feels like an ensemble cast show focusing on the circus and its performers more than any possible romance between Mizuka and Ouka. But we can hope.

BanG Dream! Yume∞Mita
After MyGo and Ave Mujica you might’ve thought Bang Dream would’ve run out of blorpos to torture, but nope, here’s a brand new batch and now they’re vtubers, thrown together to become a band. The main protagonist, Arale, has a Dark Past that left her traumatised and a childhood friend in a rival band who shared that past. Worse, that childhood friends shares the band with the main cause of Arale’s trauma, the very evil indeed for Bandori standards Viola. It all makes for a deliciously toxic if chaste yuri love triangle.

Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha EXCEEDS: Gun Blaze Vengeance
With the possible exception of Hibki & Miku, Nonoha and Fate are the reigning yuri couple of mahou shoujo series, having gone so far as to adopt a daughter together in a previous one. This may be set before that happened, but also opens with a loving pair of “sisters” living together before Nanoha even enters the picture.

Sayonara Lara
Episode one was a straight (no pun intended) retelling of the story of the Little Mermaid but ended with a meet cute between the two protagonists as Laura the mermaid fell out of the sky onto Mari the boixer, who immediately punched her lights out. And then she took Laura home to meet her family. Given that Laura was sent into the human world to search for true love by her evil (?) withc aunt to save her family from her own curse, odds are high that Mari might be just that.

In a recent interview the director said he didn’t want to make it “a ‘typical’ yuri anime” and that he wanted to “portray their relationship with strength and complexity. Depending on your cynicism this is either a good or a bad sign. Does not wanting to be a “typical” yuri anime mean that ti’ll be all about female friendship rather than proper romance, as more pessimistic fans think? Or will director Koide Takushi surprised us and deliver a strong, complex romance?

Honoo no Toukyuujo: Dodge Danko
A bunch of dumbass girls start a dodgeball club together. Based on the sequel to a nineties dodgeball manga, whose protagonist is this series’ protagonist’s dead father. The focus here is on dodgeball and the various antics the club members get up to, with any yuri being on the fanservice side of things. It’s all very much too what you might suspect from a modern sequel to a nineties series, not very subtle in its humour or fanservice.

The Ghost in the Shell
Such a faithful adaptation of Shirow Masamune;s original manga that it reinstituted the lesbian threesome scene in its fsecond episode that was removed with Shirow’s blessing from the manga reprints ever since the first publication. The Major was always portrayed as bisexual but it never actually mattered in previous Ghost in the Shell projects. Don’t expect much more lesbianism in future episodes either, to be honest. But at least she has proper emotions in this series!

Kimi ga Shinu made Koi wo Shitai
Sheena is the weakest pupil at the school for magical assassins the government put her in when she became orphaned. The night after her roommate died in battle, she couldn’t sleep and went for a walk only to meet a blood soaked girl she’d never seen before. Because she feeds the girl onigir, Mimi becomes obsessed with her to the point of becoming her new roommate and joining her class. Will this be the start of a truly toxic romance? The title, I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day certainly promises as much. Encouraging is that while there are boys at the school, they have been non-entities and there’s actually at least one other yuri couple there. Also, by kissing somebody who is on the same wavelength as you, you can restore their health. Uh-huh.

Tai-Ari deshita. Ojousama wa Kakutou Game nante Shinai
Ojo-samas flirt by playing Street Fighter at each other. Aya used to play fighting games as a child until all her friends grew out of it. Despite her talents, she decided to quit to and join Kuromi Girls Academy to become a proper lady. Mio, also known as Shirayuki, “the white lily” already is that, the idol of all the other girls at school. And then Ayo catches Mio playing Street Fighter online in an unused classroom, something highly forbidden at Kuromi Academy… By the end of the first episode they’ve not only fought each other so hard their lips are bleeding from biting them, but they crashed through a plate glass window to escape when a custodian threatend to discover them…

I have high hopes.

Shibou Yuugi de Meshi wo Kuu. 44: Cloudy Beach
Young girls being made to fight their environment and each other in sadistic death games broadcast to an audience of perverts unable to stand the sight of blood, so it’s all transmuted into cotton, as if they’re just dolls being broken. The participants, desperate and badly adjusted to the real world, finding some sense of comfort in each other, even forming emotional ties with their female handlers responsible for sending them into these situations in the first place. Is there a more perfect platonic form of toxic yuri possible? This is a movie sequel to last season’s original series, promising more of the same twisted thrills.