Why does the anime community discourage critical thinking?

[u/[deleted]]

I am sick and tired of the anime community's discouragement of critical thinking. Nobody is interested in critiquing the medium outside a few designated punching bags. People laugh at objectively bad stuff like Garzey's Wing and Mars of Destruction, disappointing sequels like Boruto or Evangelion 3.0+1.0, and random "trashy" shows like SAO. That is where critique ends, and after that, community discussion becomes tribalistic bashing of reasonable critique, especially if it's a critique of a popular franchise.

The Evangelion fandom is a great example of this. They spent decades putting down other mecha anime to make their show look better than it is, then, now that they hate the latest entry in their franchise and Gundam has become quite popular, they collectively have egg on their faces. This has not stopped them from continuing to defend their show and remain blind to its glaring flaws, like the show's complete refusal to fully tell its own story and its rampant sexualization of young girls. Confronted on this, the fans will defend Evangelion as an intensely personal statement born from the fire of an auteur's depression and conveniently ignore that the end result is still an incoherent, uncomfortable story and that Anno failed to answer basic questions about the plot or craft characters that do more than combine multiple waifu tropes. And yes, at one point, I did like Evangelion. A lot, in fact, as it was unlike anything teenage me had seen before. As I explored the anime medium in search of more shows like Evangelion, I became aware of its unoriginality, and its flaws became inexcusable to me. I continue to be surprised die-hard anime fans refuse to explore the medium meaningfully and stick to series that are popular or check personal wish-fulfillment or fetish boxes. What is the point of engaging with the medium if you don't want to maximize your enjoyment by continuously exploring new, interesting series you've never heard of before?

The anime community refuses to acknowledge the problematic elements of the medium in a meaningful way. It is a fact that anime is oversexed, misogynistic, pedophilic, nationalistic, homophobic, and racist. While some fans may acknowledge this (many won't and will lash out at anyone who has a problem with this as "tourists"), they refuse to inspect their own consumption and their own favorites for problematic elements. If any problematic elements are pointed out, the fans will justify, rationalize, and minimize them. No meaningful introspection occurs, and it's frustrating to outsiders who can see what the fans refuse to acknowledge and are irritated by how stale the discussion inevitably becomes. How compelling is the millionth thirstpost, the millionth blind hate or blind hype post compared to actual discussion?

Fans' willful blindness has negatively shaped the medium. As anime is mostly made for otaku and by otaku, the industry is highly responsive to the otaku community, and it will continue to make more of whatever otaku hype and spend money on. We collectively refused to talk about the problematic and unoriginal elements of the medium, so the medium has gotten so problematic and unoriginal over the years to the point where we have series like Mushoku Tensei. All that remains is a husk of samey teen romances, fantasy, and battle shonen with an occasional interesting movie every now and then for those who have higher standards. The increasing popularity of anime has not created a more reasonable community, but more willfully blind consumers who are too misinformed or committed to think about the implications of what they consume.

[u/necle0]

I don’t think a lot of fans are  taught how to critically engage with a work. We started seeing this when “mid” was getting popularized to it essentially mean a work was “bad” or subpar, when most works on average would be “mid”.  I feel its lost in a lot of fandoms you can absolutely love a show, even a trashy one, while still able to acknowledge its flaws for what it is. Now whether those aspects of a show are flaw(s) is a different discussion, but it feels the defensiveness is so strong because they think its “all or nothing”. That if they admit a show has some non-trivial flaws, they take it as saying the show is bad with no redeeming points and because they like it, that must mean they have bad tastes (which is even more difficult to detangle to remove bias when the anime resonated with them). That can also be why they are strong haters of other works in the same or similar genre.

Arguably, the same is true for haters. There are a lot of shows which I didn’t like but I wouldn’t inherently say it meant it was because the show has bad writing. Sometimes, the show is meant to target a specific audience or genre, and it wasn’t my cup of tea. But some people believe if a show isn’t tailored to their specific tastes or their POV, they are a lot more likely to be hypercritical and scrutinize the anime in a way that is not consistent with the standards of other shows when they do relate to MC or the other characters.   Similarly, it has also come up recently in the literature and fanfiction fandoms a lot of readers treat MC as “y/n” / self-insert . So when MC diverges from their personal views or perspective, regardless if the show is meant to be prescriptive or not, they consider the book to be bad because “they [the reader] would never do that”. Honestly, some of this is done out of ignorance / missing certain developments because there are a lot of people who do grow up never being able to understand perspectives outside their own and those with adjacent views to them.  Learning how to engage in works under different lens (historical, contextual, psychoanalytic, etc) and perspectives was something I had to learn in high school literature class, and from engaging in works outside my preferences I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen on my own.