Retroversy

I fucking hate the way the Internet talks about anime, man. Stop calling things “lewd”. Stop joking about “truck-kun” or “NTR”. Stop arguing about who is “best girl” or about which shows are the new “big three”.

Stop turning tired tropes into memes instead of critically engaging with them, otherwise we’ll all be complicit in normalizing paint-by-numbers power fantasies for entitled toxic nerds as the only thing anime can aspire to be.

Why do we take the incredible narrow lens that the very worst anime uses to look at the world, and use that to look at the entire medium. Why do we let crappy light novel harem tropes and isekai clichés compose our vocabulary? Why do ceaseless reiterations of the same jokes, the same archetypes and the same stock plots dictate our discourse?

You know those tweens who summarize every media they engage with using exclusively BookTok romance tropes like “forced proximity” and “enemies to lovers”? You know that hypothetical guy who has only ever seen The Boss Baby watching his second ever film? Those people everyone rightfully dunks on for being media illiterate?

That’s anime fans. And by God, this medium deserves better, or else it’s only gonna get worse.