The difference is that anime series—whether about a group of teenage girls starting a pop-rock band, a squadron of coed mecha pilots defending the galaxy, or about a team of male warriors on a quest to fight evil—rely on timeless archetypes and story cycles. The characters often have some set of
aspirational goals that they work together on to achieve. You don't have to be Japanese to relate to wanting to win a competition, get the girl, fight the bad guys, etc. Especially if your own life lacks goals beyond getting a college education, a white-collar job, and a house in the suburbs. Even when mired
in anomie, you can still empathize with people who have meaning. Your lack of meaning makes theirs all the more compelling. The more drastic the better. Set the series in medieval fantasy Japan and have the heroes fight demons, or put them in cyberspace and make them fight hackers. You'll never
get to drive a tank or pilot a giant robot in defense of your city, but that would be interesting at least. You aren't living the monomyth, but your people have been listening to it for a hundred generations. Why stop now?
What do most American television series focus on? Certainly not heroes’ journeys or tradition. it is almost entirely an expression of the coastal progressive agenda. Bonus points for blatant non-white, LGBT, or feminist identity politics. Why the hell should we care about this? Most
people | know in the Alt-Right, whether they watch (or have watched) anime or not, hate TV/cable/Netfix programming. They turn it on and all they see are anti-white values and messages, and they turn it back off. It seems to ramp up ever year. Is called the “Electric Jew” for a
reason.
Poz values are all over Weimerica’s media. Americans watching TV consume a top-down dictated set of values, and the (((producers))) know these values are foreign to the society—otherwise they wouldn't be pushing them so hard. Whenever | turn on the TV, | am treated to a cavalcade of forced
progressive tropes and stock-characters designed to normalize the reorientation of American culture. Neon Genesis Evangelion's quasi-orphaned Shinji has a more normal upbringing than the adopted Chinese girl with “two dads” on Modern Family. He at least knows his father (and wants to impress his
father), and misses his mother. The audience can feel empathy and pity for Shinij because of his abnormal family fe and the insecurity and low self-esteem it causes. Asuka too has parental issues, as she was conceived through artificial insemination, and her single mother committed suicide while she
was a small child. These are not ideal family situations. The audience is not supposed to come away supporting such arrangements.
Modern Family, on the other hand, from the name of the show itself to the cast of characters and their relationships, seeks to normalize things that range from somewhat to extremely uncommon: raising your wife's son, inter-ethnic marriage, homosexual marriage/monogamy, gay
adoption, and trans-racial adoption. In fact, most are all rolled into one, like having a monogamous gay couple adopt a Chinese baby (evidence strongly suggests most homosexuals are neither monogamous nor interested in parenting). It's not meant to be satirical either—the show
plays this arrangement straight as if there were nothing wrong. And for good measure, Modern Family does include a “normal” family of two heterosexual parents living with their biological children, but in true American sitcom fashion, the father is a bumbling moron and the mother is a
strong independent woman who is dragged down by him. It almost goes without saying that overseas Israelis are the producers of this series
As said before, anime is different. Series are typically not engaged in a metapolitical war of subversive ideas. They rely more on characters and events to drive the story, not ticking off affirmative action boxes to win awards and attract audiences who otherwise wouldn't care. The goal
is not to normalize fringe or countercultural lifestyles. Those, if depicted at all, are played up for humor or mocked.
Many anime series have transcendental values, and | mean that in the most mundane way. You don't have to be Japanese to appreciate them, even if a familiarity with Japanese culture would help. That's what has made them so easily transferrable to the post-normal West —they provide a set of, well,
norms. They're stories that could be told anywhere and about anyone. And sometimes they are, as not every series is set in contemporary Japan despite all of them being authored there.
Really the only anime series that have anything to do with identity politics are those specifically set in environments where identity politics would proliferate, i.e. not in contemporary Japan. And in many of those series, multicultural kumbaya is not the message. In fact, there is
probably some sort of war (or other less extreme competition) going on between different empires or nations. And if a multinational fighting force does emerge, they are still fighting for their team against their adversaries, To give one example, in the series Magi—set in a fantasy
world inspired by medieval Asia (from the Arab world to China) and loosely based on the Tales from the 1001 Nights and Judeo-Christian demonology—everyone is at war. There are stand-in civilizations for China, Rome, Mongolia, a generic Arab country, Jews, and so forth. There
is even a race of enslaved people. Other series with conflicts between nationalities include Code Geass, Hellsing, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Girls und Panzer, and Arslan Senki, to name just a few.
More common are series set in either historical or contemporary Japan, where if there even is a foreigner, his or her foreignness is frequently emphasized. NGE's biracial Asuka, who is arguably the most emotionally disturbed character in that series, often speaks in German. In a number of series, most
“American” characters are blonde-haired extroverts. Black Lagoon's band of multiracial renegades makes the self insert Japanese salaryman Rokku feel uncomfortable and gradually lose all ties with the country he left behind for the South Asian underworld. Diversity isn't being used as a prop to justify
mass immigration or ethnic/racial integration. The non-Japanese are eccentrics and oddballs, even when they're lovable characters. One of these things is not like the others, as opposed to not having any norms at all. It's not like American TV. It's storytelling rather than social engineering.
One claim that many—incorrectly—argue for in explaining the popularity of anime on the digital right is that the characters look White/European. This could have some explanatory power for series which are set in Europe or in situations where White characters would be implied, but
I don't buy it as a general rule. Some series do have European characters, like Trigun, Attack on Titan, and Hellsing, but even then many are just palette swaps of typical anime designs given foreign names. Anime characters are abstract representations of humans, meaning that
they look like they are human without being human. In other words, the audience infers that characters are human, since they have humanoid form and (usually) do human things. If that audience is White, since our default conception of the human is a White person and anime
characters are pale-skinned abstract humanoids, some might also read White into their interpretation. The Japanese do not—they read them as Asian because their default human image is a Japanese person. Besides, what's so “White” about Japanese names and technicolor hair?
The regionally-unlocked values and myths are what make the format attractive to outsiders. That we can even parse these characters as White at all is telling as to how transferrable the stories are.
I don't want to paint too lionizing of a picture though. It would be incomplete to not address Rick Wilson's critique of monkish onanists. While many anime series do capture a set of appealing norms and a homogenous society where affirmative action storytelling is outweighed by plot
and character development, as well as aspirational and monomythical values, plenty of them are just a kind of junk culture. (Like any form of pop culture, really). Some are made purely to market to lonely single men with spending money, and rely on softcore fanservice and inanely
stupid plots. But they at least aren’t trying to convert you into a libertine ethno-masochist. If they are feeding a sexual or emotional frustration, then so be it. Fanservice-laden shows are not creating that demand or implanting it in their audience. That's coming from somewhere else,
and the market is meeting it.
It would be a mistake to blame anime for the stereotypical, reclusive and asocial “lifestyle” that is correlated with the more degenerate fans of it. Even the Wall Street Journal recognizes the decline of male participation in the workforce and civil society is a problem, anime aside. There are in fact a
growing number of hermits on both sides of the Pacific. Terms like NEET (a primarily English term for those Not in Education, Employment or Training, or in other words unemployed young people), hikikomori (a Japanese term referring to adult shut-ins who often live with their parents), or otaku (another
Japanese term, refers to obsessive fans of anything and not just anime) often describe these people.
That's more anomie than anime, | would wager—not being able to relate to society (which is why some people retreat into fiction and fantasy). The NEETs would be less dysfunctional if they had more meaning to their lives. A number of anime series actually deal with this to some extent
quite well—to the point where they can be difficult to watch if one relates to the loneliness of the characters too much. Most notably these include Welcome to the NHK and Watamote (about a male and a female beta, respectively), and to a lesser extent Tatami Galaxy (about an alienated
college student). Being NEET or an asocial beta male is actually a form of suffering, not a paradise of tendies and Ovaltine.
Fanservice-heavy series are there for a reason, and it should not come as a surprise in a country with low fertility rates and overcrowded housing stock that lust is still around after all. NEETs and herbivore men—men who are sexually inactive but attracted to women, a term that predates
the manosphere’s "incel"-do consume these series, whether in Japan or the United States. Even then though, we cannot dismiss all of it as soft-pornographic. Ironically, some series with a heavy dosage of fanservice still have more inspiring values than typical Weimerican television
(which is soft-pornographic in less obvious ways, but that's another subject entirely).
One salient example of this is the absurd comedy Prison School, which features a group of five boys in a female-majority high school who are literally jailed inside the school for being perverts. (Your author assures you that he definitely watched this series entirely for sociological research
purposes). In their quest to escape from prison and their buxom guards—and later to avoid being expelled from school altogether by feminist-misandrist conspirators, yes seriously—they form powerful bonds of male friendship, camaraderie, teamwork, self-sacrifice, and loyalty aimed at
accomplishing their goals. Escaping from prison, clearing their names, exposing conspiracy against them, etc., all required mannerbund. Reminiscent of the notion of honor among thieves, the protagonists can be seen calling for “death to traitors,” while being immoral themselves. The
show even tackles gay hermeneutics (that in this particular case arise with prison life), and the boys are able to move past it to accomplish their objectives. And this is in a show with so much fanservice it reaches parody.
Teenage voyeurists aside, does American television or cinema feature much in the way of bands of brothers putting aside their gripes and working together to achieve collective goals, or s it a diversity pageant? Does an (((industry))) that caved to #OscarsSoWhite even bother trying to
tap tradition? The closest thing to a mannerbund in an entertainment culture that produces Broad City and Inside Amy Schumer might be the misadventures of "the gang” in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Anime stands apart, in my opinion, in having these sorts of values.
Anime aesthetics got mixed into at least a segment of the Alt-Right through chan culture, the ethos of 4chan and its derivative imageboards. The site's millennial founder, moot, originally set it up in 2003 to be an English-language imageboard/forum for discussing Japanese media
(especially anime and manga), analogous to the Japanese-language board 2chan. This is where a segment of the Alt-Right started.
4chan was rooted in anime but grew beyond it. The founder effect is there—Japanese culture discussion in English. No matter which board one was on, 4chan provided an almost un-moderated anonymous social space, which gave rise to irreverent and deliberately provocative memes.
These were in the beginning primarily associated with the site's misanthropically random /b/ board. The environment there let meme makers hone their skills. While the ability to interact with others online behind a mask was not unique, it was a crucial component in creating chan culture.
And that such an anonymous communication format became popular in a country of alienated youth should be unsurprising.
In anonymous or pseudonymous digital spaces, the ideas expressed tend to be socially less left and further right, as there is no need for the social approval and virtue signaling that contemporary leftism thrives on. The memes are incendiary because they are allowed to be. The libertine, whiggish
society that calls itself Western is shockingly curmudgeonly, so why not take swipes at it? Troll your adversaries for the lulz. Raid other forums. Tell black jokes. Photoshop swastikas on things. Why not? Just think back to the golden age of YouTube comments, or how Twitter is now. Its a Wild West of
unfiltered, irreverent, and politically incorrect views. It's pissing people off for sport on one hand, but a sign of festering dissent on the other. The people doing these sorts of things are unhappy about something.
Jokes and pranks make people laugh—if they're funny. Laughing along to Louis CK isn't funny. Trolling and provoking numales and catladies who agree with everything he says is. Right wing humor tends to be a lot funnier than that of the left, at least under the current zeitgeist. The Alt-
Right has a better understanding of how society works, and can laugh at the duplicity and inconsistencies of the left. It also doesn't have to worry about offending anyone's arbitrary feelings.
Without censorship (self-imposed or otherwise), one can A-B test his memes over and over until he has something a lot of people respond to. Anonymous and pseudonymous digital media in the early 21st century are game-changers-—content spreads not based on how socially
acceptable it is offine, but based on how interesting it is to users, independent of gatekeepers. And being edgy, irreverent, and illiberal is what became interesting to users (and alarming to administrators). Its why the Daily Shoah gets in the news now and not the Daily Show. It gives us
outsized influence.
It leads to the (((ADL)) classifying Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol of white supremacy. Our puritanical enemies are addicted to outrage, and our memes were crafted to elicit that outrage.
Beginning around 2011, /pol/, or Politically Incorrect, pretty much became 4chan’s most infamous board. It's where all the so-called racists and sexists were supposed to be quarantined—and where if you kept calling them such, they adopted those labels proudly. It's where the sharpest and realest ideas
were coming from. It was where people were making unfiltered observations and memes about race, gender, religion, history, politics, culture, and crime. It was where you could talk about George Zimmerman or the Ferguson riots from both a realist and an irreverent respective. And it was on an anime
imageboard.
If vou think about memes like genes, in a Richard Dawkins kind of way, they are ideas that get passed on from individual to individual across generations in a population. They evolve over time as well. From watching foreign cartoons and reading foreign graphic novels, to discussing
them anonymously on the internet, to discussing politics and current events anonymously on the internet, to engaging in meme warfare against the left this is an evolution that could certainly describe a sizable subset of the Alt-Right.
The memes change over time. They go from anime girl reaction images to smug anime girl reaction images, to smug anime girl reaction images wearing MAGA hats. Even though today's 4chan is very much a shadow of its former self in terms of quality content output and users, its
milieu has transcended its servers. Your author percolated there for several years before really moving on to the Alt-Right blogosphere c. 2014.
But back to anomie. Would millennial and Gen-X White men be sitting in front of their computers watching chinese cartoons and discussing national socialism with anons over the internet if not for anomie? Would they spend time trolling their ideological adversaries and slaughtering the
sacred cows of the Judeo-Calvinist progressive faith if not for their alienation from those paradigms? Why have an interest in foreign animation and interwar right-authoritarianism in the first place?
It was never preordained what we were supposed to use the internet for. It didn't have to turn out like this for a subset of the population. But it did. People living in the suburbiae of Texas, California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the South can all communicate with one another
about their 2D waifus, dindu crime, and how much they miss Hitler. In real-time. | guess Europeans and Australians can too, come to think of it.
Welcome to the post-postmodern world. Don't ride the tiger, force-feed it some Mountain Dew and Doritos. You can't ask what the meaning of life is if no one has any concept of what meaning is anymore. We aim to restore not only meaning, but direction. No more aimless wandering
through the ruins of a once mighty civilization to just barely escape the momentum of its ongoing collapse. The Alt-Right is a revolt against anomie.
/end/
May the blessings be upon you for this text version.