The Stratosphere Lounge | Episode 307

Nice to meet you, A-s-h-d-o-n! Good to have you on! I hope you and your uncle had an excellent Christmas! …though you probably won’t see this. 🙂
tl:dr: Manga/anime is far less woke than our own media, which is probably one of the reasons it’s grown so much over the past decade. Doing right by Japan in WWII could very well be saving our souls now.
Too bad about Australia… it’s like seeing Texas bowing to Californian overlords. What the heck T-T
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The topic of manga and anime in this setting with Mr. Whittle suddenly made me realize a few things that give me enormous hope and relief:

1. Hollywood (kinda by definition) doesn’t have anything to do with either manga or anime, since it’s imported.
2. There are very few woke mangas out there – they don’t make it, not with the sheer volume of content that’s pushed out on a daily basis from Japanese media.
3. American media has yet to really be able to break in or capitalize on Japanese media – live action remakes of popular mangas & animes are infamous for going very, very poorly.
4. This is a good thing, because it keeps it out of the grubby paws of the left-wingers (at least until China realizes what Japan is doing and starts bullying them directly)

All of this means that there’s a significant subset of media that Americans are consuming that have little to no woke overtones. It’s grown over the years until now anime is not just some weeb’s collection in a closet but a significant part of our culture, right up next to gaming (which was also aided by the Japanese).
The implications are fascinating… the more I think about it, the more I’m glad we made the decisions we did in WWII and became friends with Japan. It could very well be what’s saving our souls right now.
Side note: I decided to start learning Japanese specifically to watch anime in Japanese without subtitles. I’ve always admired their culture, so maybe I’m a little biased. Obviously it’s not the only thing that’s helping, and maybe I’m overstating how much it’s helping, but damn I didn’t really recognize how much it was helping until you brought it up in your uncle’s presence – your uncle, who has hammered and hammered on the concept of the pop culture playing such a huge part of politics.
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One of the saddest things about the Australian situation is that I had the greatest impression of them years ago – I thought they were like Texans (me) but with a whole country to themselves. I just thought that if there was anywhere other than the United States that I would want to live, it would have been Australia.
I didn’t keep up with their politics, so when I started hearing about how they were trying to buy back guns and treating COVID and all the lockdowns… it seriously broke my heart (after it broke my head). It was like hearing that Texas had done a 180 and started bowing to our Californian overlords. I couldn’t believe it.