There was a little bit of Japanese anime on TV when I was growing up in the 1980s, but I wasn't really into it. My childhood was literally a Disney marathon, those were my absolute favourite cartoons/comics as a kid. Back then, manga wasn't a global industry the way it is today, there were no conventions, there was no cosplaying, none of that stuff. I remember I had a handful of serialized anime comic books, but again, it wasn't my main interest as a kid.
I didn't encounter adult manga until I was 14 or 15. A friend's older brother had hired the notorious
Lord of the Overfiend/Urotsukidoji to watch with his friends. My friend, who was way too young, had also seen it, and described some of the scenes to me, which disgusted me but also piqued my interest. I eventually got to see some of those scenes for myself, but I found them way too extreme and horrific, more like an extreme horror movie than anything else. Suffice to say,
Lord of the Overfiend was unlike anything I had ever encountered in Western media. I really did end up developing a bias against manga from having seen those highly disturbing scenes. For years I thought that all manga was like that, and avoided it. In my 20s I did try to watch some non-anime Asian feature films but I couldn't get into them. The cultural barrier was too high for me, and I just couldn't relate. I mostly avoided Asian media.
Something happened eventually which changed my negative perception of adult anime being perverse, violent and grotesque. One day in my early-to-mid twenties I spontaneously went to see
Ghost in the Shell at an art house cinema. That experience was the literal opposite of
Lord of the Overfiend. I was very impressed by GitS. I could definitely see how it had inspired so many other Western sci-fi movies that came thereafter. For me, that was the first time I was confronted with the true artistic and cinematic potential of anime.
It was only in my 30s that I really made an effort to watch some of the most representative feature length anime movies by Studio Ghibli and others By then I had learned more a bit more about the Japanese culture and the language, so these features were easier to get into this time. I now understand that anime is very diverse in content and quality. I never got into any series. I'm more of a movie watcher myself, I never have the time to get into a whole series of anything.
If I had to describe my opinion of manga/anime at this point, I would say that there are definitely some masterpieces that people should be familiar with the way they familiarize themselves with other iconic or foundational works of art or cinema, but there's way too much badly drawn derivative commercial shlock out there. But that's also true of Western genres like romance, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc, so it isn't specific to anime.
The entertainment industries as a whole are more exploitative.
I eventually read a "pop psy" article online speculating about why anime is so attractive to autistic people. If I remember correctly, it said something to the effect that anime characters have big eyes and exaggerated responses/grimaces, which are convenient to autistic people who have a hard time reading social cues otherwise.
When I began to research TRAs, I discovered that there was this very dark internet underground of autistic young men self-medicating with darknet HRT, who want to turn themselves into girlie anime characters as a form of perpetual self-infantilization or "bimbofication". I was quite alarmed when I discovered this "subculture" of young men who want to be stupid and helpless, a subculture which seems to intersect with conventions and the cosplaying scene. I do think there is a general tendency in our culture towards self-infantilization, learned helplessness, people clinging onto their mental illnesses instead of learning to cope with them, etc. I don't think that this general tendency is exclusively the fault of Western kids having access to Japanese anime. Based on what little contemporary hentai I had the misfortune of encountering online, I do think that genre has become more disturbing and extreme than ever, and immensely worse than the
Urotsukidoji I had encountered when I was 15.
A while back I saw this video on Youtube about a new(?) or alternative genre of manga that is even more extreme than adult manga itself, called
gekiga or "surreal/absurd manga". I think it was on the Youtube channel Kayfabe Cartoonist that I saw a video of someone going through one of these gekiga comics, which he had picked up in Japan. It was highly disturbing, just visual extremism of the sake of shock value.
I know there's anime for children and anime for adults in Japan but I wonder if people in the West who consume such foreign media are even aware of that distinction. They don't seem to observe it, and thus a lot of material that is completely inappropriate for minors, nevertheless ends up before the eyes of minors because in the West anything that looks like a comic or cartoon is still mostly associated with children.
Suffice to say, I do not subscribe to any of the dumb racist xenophobic KiwiFarms conspiracy theories about Japan exporting its degenerate media to the West in order to fuck up Western children and make them go trans with gender confusion. I think a lot of anime actually promote far better and healthier norms and values than hyperviolent Western cartoons/comics that many Western parents feel perfectly comfortable showing to their kids. I think it all goes back to parental neglect and people having kids they don't actually plan on raising.
It's the racists on KF who prefer this simplistic self-victimizing narrative of poor, gullible white children deliberately fucked up by the evil Japanese degenerate cartoons. You could argue that for example
The Secret Life Of Pets (where a dog "transitions" into a cat, which is literally a trans narrative smuggled into a children's cartoon) is more corrupting than the Japanese stuff, yet it has an "all" rating.
