Anime in the Age of the Dark Trio

Not long ago I took up the topic of whether anime had changed and argued that indeed it had. In such ways as the tendency to one-cour-at-a-time production and shorter overall runs even as storytelling became more arc-oriented and less prone to the episodic, its propensity for young adult protagonists and general shonen-centeredness, its heightened stress on action-adventure, fantasy and fan culture, its diminished proneness to formal experimentation and politically critical views (and for that matter, original content or first-time adaptations of any kind), anime was now very different from what it had been in preceding decades, and even after. Still, if I intended the list to be reasonably comprehensive--enough so, at least, to give a sense of just how much in it had changed--I was also limiting myself to the least disputable aspects of the matter. (Talking about its increasing tendency to one cour at a time production and shorter series', for example, you could just count up the figures, the inevitable contrarian idiots having no defense against that.)

After all, there were others matters that seemed more disputable. In the original version of the post I raised the issue of whether the shonen category had become more sanitized with regard to violence. Certainly thinking of how things looked in the heyday of Jump's "Big Three"--Bleach, Naruto, One Piece--that seemed a safe thing to say when one compared them with the controversially violent Fist of the North Star. Still, we are a long way from that heyday now. Admittedly Bleach had a recent revival, Naruto's spin-off Boruto has had remarkable success, One Piece remains a chart-topper, but as is so often the case with bestsellers they often tell us more about what made for a hit in the past than what makes for one today, with the hits of more recent years rather than those that won their original fans in the early '00s a different matter. Attack on Titan seems indicative of the turn in hindsight, while more recently we had Demon Hunter, and of course Jump's "Dark Trio" of Hell's Paradise, and Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man. That did not rule out the scene having changed in that way between, for example, 1985 and 2005, but rather indicated its having changed yet again, such that the view that the category had become less violent no longer seems tenable, all as, rethinking the matter, violence as such seemed merely a reflection of a still deeper change than that in the very "political imaginary" of the genre.

The media commentator of conventional mind, approving or simply obtuse, uses words like "dark," "mature" and "realistic" to speak of said imaginary, oblivious to the hard fact that not all "dark" material is the same, and that terms like "mature" and "realistic" are highly relative. After all, what does it mean to be mature--grown-up--in outlook? What is real, and thus the standard of realism? In this day and age these usages are almost always a valorization of a pessimistic, misanthropic, even nihilistic outlook describable as "market pessimism," or even the simple cheap edgelordism to which the pseudo-mature (and those who know how a certain kind of pseudo-maturity can bring in an audience) are so prone--which, however light-minded it may be, is nonetheless significant. There are those who look at the world and find it a dark place because of a social order that can and must be changed, and others who look at the world and locate the darkness in "human nature" itself such that the social order is not worth bothering about, and indeed trying to change it would only bring out the worst of that nature--the former view that of the (genuine) liberal or radical, the latter that of the conservative or reactionary dismissing reason and humane values, commonly with a great deal of self-satisfied swagger. It is the latter vision of the world's darkness that commentators valorizing "dark" and "mature" and "realistic" overwhelmingly embrace, with this no accident in an age in which the far right and its vision of life is triumphant globally, with Japan absolutely no exception to the trend. Naturally there are many who, understanding what all this really means, will not be delighted--but then few such persons ever get to be among the cultural gatekeepers interpreting art for the rest of us, today even less than ever.