Anyone else notice this with Japanese anime? Less so with anime produced in collaboration with a Western media company or anime they know will be heavily viewed in the West like Pokemon, but full-on Japanese anime, produced solely in Japan, for Japan. Japanese characters are obviously depicted accurately, white characters are depicted fine too and more often than not are just interchangeable with Japanese characters. But any darker skinned characters… oh god. Between endless stereotypes and straight up weirdness when you have a person of colour on screen, from my experience, if there’s a dark skinned character in an anime, more often than not it’s unwatchable because you’ll smash your TV if you watch it. Seriously, there are anime produced in the 2010s/20s that feel like Disney cartoons from the 30s! For fuck sake sometimes they even depict Chinese, Korean, or Southeast Asian characters horribly! For a culture that gets super offended if other people use stereotypes of them, they’re horrible at reasonable depictions of other cultures. And for a genre that consistently deals with aliens and spirits and talking animals and magical creatures, those things seem to be depicted as more human than darker skinned actual humans.
So that being said, are there any anime that break this trend? Anyone care to recommend any anime you like that has a major character who is a person of colour, that doesn’t screw it up?
Nothing sexual or suggestive either please, definitely not looking for that kind of anime.
There are many good shows without any racist depictions of characters (at least nothing that I noticed), but I’ve certainly never seen anything with radical political messages. Manga and other comics (excluding the ones owned by massive publishers like Marvel) is definitely better in that regard, probably because it’s significantly less expensive to make
Do you know of any finished comics worth reading? “Monstress” looks interesting but it’s ongoing
I don’t read comics too much. The ones I have read are The Sandman, Hellboy (this would have been 10x better if Hellboy was a Soviet asset) and Transformers: More Than Meets the Eyes. All these are finished and really good. None of these is left wing though but at least due to their settings they avoid being vehicles for liberalism.
I have partly read Saga (until the hiatus) and Mostress. I thought they were decent though I don’t remember the latter too well because it has been a while.
There is a horror I read called Gideon Falls which was good too but a bit overrated. Still worth exploring.
I have never read a superhero comic that I liked except I thought Vision was pretty good. It was about Vision trying to start a family. I think the TV show WandaVision was loosely based off this run but the little that I watched of it seemed garbage in comparison to the comic book run. I have also read the Immortal Hulk series because it was touted a lot by critics and fans. I thought that was okay too. But a bit overrated.
Nice, I’ll check those out. I read Immortal Hulk recently and it was pretty good, but there was significantly less anti-capitalism in it than I was lead to believe
totally off topic, but - historically “led” (pronounced like it’s spelled) would be the past tense of “lead” (pronounced “leed”) https://www.grammar.com/lead_vs._led
shakes fist at the concept of the English language
My favourite out of these is Transformers: More Than Meets the Eyes. It’s a bit confusing at first because it is hard to tell the character apart at times but it becomes very good if you get past that. Instead of focusing on the war between the two factions it has heavier emphasis on the personal failings of the characters and how they deal with that. So it ends up becoming very sweet and funny.
Is it understandable for someone who knows basically nothing about Transformers?
Yeah it is. It is the only Transformers comic book I’ve read apart from Lost Light which is the sequel to it. It takes place after the war between Autobots and Decepticon kinda ends and you don’t need to know how that went.
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Yeah it got very anti-capitalist in the middle. After that they kinda just threw that premise into the trash and transcended into godhood which is pretty lame.