So I’m housesitting/dogsitting and the first channel on the TV when I turned it on is a channel that streams old anime, I guess. I never bothered to change it since I always just airplay videos from my phone, but today I left it playing normally for background noise. The current anime playing is City Hunter and I noticed the main character is a HUGE pervert. In the beginning of an episode he literally steals and revels in a pile of girls bras and underwear.

I’ve grown up seeing these types of characters in every anime I’ve watched but I guess I’m a little put off by the fact that it goes farther back than my era. Pervert characters have always bothered me, even when I was younger and less aware, and I know they’re supposed to be comedic relief but I have a hard time finding the comedy in sexual harassment. Some even go as far as sexual assault. They are so common and also happen to be part of the main cast which, for me, makes it so much worse. One Piece is a show I had to stop watching because of Sanji, I had other issues too but he was a big contributor.

Does anyone know why these characters are so prevalent?

  • @HaSch
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    211 year ago

    Because there is hardly any public funding for anime and manga in Japan, animators are at the mercy of the free market, and given the demographics and sexual mores of Japanese society, producing erotic wish-fulfillment is not just a, but the safe bet for any profit-driven studio. Consumers of such products tend to ignore the story, worldbuilding, characters, creative directing and storyboarding, general aesthetics, or the quality of the animation; therefore the studios which supply them tend not to be interested in such things either, which makes their products much less labour-intensive and hence cheaper and faster to churn out. I won’t name any names, but it is not coincidental that such studios also have the worst work environments in the industry. This is why there are like 5 good shows every season, and the whole rest either goes to the dogs together with the chequebooks of its former studio (which is a shame because often they butcher and waste good source materials), or is forgettable dogshit produced by studios which are good at accounting, marketing, then serving unsuspecting first-timers the most recent mutation of their usual formulaic crap, and little else.