Neo-Makaiōshin wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 11:38 amI agree that many great anime were released during the 2000s and were likely seen by many and that's Kunzait's point, not many people of this forum, have shown, that they have seen great pre-2000s anime, outside some popular ones aimed at children.
Ding ding ding.
For that matter, there's also a fair amount of post-2000s anime that sadly NOT a lot of people have seen (stuff like Mononoke, Mind Game, Sword of the Stranger, Redline, Kemonozume, etc) precisely in part BECAUSE they're not aimed at children or have the typical "Battle Shonen" style that people primarily think of when they think of anime (when its not Moe/Ecchi stuff and the like at least, which is the other type of anime that most folks might default to).
But its not nearly to the same extent as the incredible lack of even threadbare curiosity for most anime made prior to the 2000s that isn't of the Dragon Ball mold. And regardless, I still added the qualifier of " two or more of the following" among those options I laid out.
jjgp1112 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 13, 2021 11:33 am
I guess the black guy in America from a perpetually broke family that's had to repeatedly downscale because of the healthcare system, whose college degree amounted to a fast food job and then further financially crippled himself with a trade school (that fortunately paid off but gave him 2 years of never having more than $500 on a good day, $10k of accumulated credit card debt, and no dental and eye insurance, fuck yeah!) needs to learn how the real world works for the less fortunate as it pertains to a children's cartoon that he inexplicably still watches.
We're only a year into the 2020's, and we have an early contender for Post of the Decade right here.
Excellently put.
jjgp1112 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 13, 2021 8:55 amEhhhh, not really. Threads never got derailed to the extent that it has the last few years, and even though the quality of discussion took a hit during the influx of fans during BoG, you could be fairly certain a thread wasn't going to eventually end up becoming a debate about Batman movies or capitalism.
There's actually a solid, tangibly concrete reason for that: there was a fairly massive astroturfing campaign of white nationalist groups "infiltrating" various nerd and geek spaces online going back sometime around the turn from the late 2000s into the early 2010s, which we saw bear fruit with things like the whole GamerGate thing, as well as the whole "Redpill" movement, and so on and so forth down the line.
A portion of that stems in part from a core problem that I've noticed and have been concerned about in these kinds of online geek/nerd spaces since roughly around the time of my very early years posting on here (roughly the mid-2000s or so): a whole mass of historically and politically ignorant and disinterested young people who whiled away much of their time focusing solely on their nerd hobbies and interests and exceedingly little to no time whatsoever actually picking up a real book or paying the fuck attention to the real world surrounding them more closely, thus leaving themselves gullible and naive enough to be taken advantage of by these groups (who played on many of these folks' own insecurities and personal resentments to rope them in, as most white supremacist/hate groups have historically always done across various white disenfranchised and alienated groups before).
I'm not putting ALL of the blame on either the white nationalist groups OR on the hapless dipshits online who fell for their (incredibly obvious) indoctrination - there's plenty of blame to go around between BOTH parties, both the con artists *and* the gullible marks alike - nor does this aspect account for the WHOLE entire story of what's been happening in online nerd spaces for the past decade or so by any means (this is a story with a LOT of different avenues, almost all of them filled with some of the worst, most vile and disgusting people on the planet): but it IS a pretty significant piece of it.
The reason I bring this up is because I've been active enough in these online spaces - along with being politically engaged for much of my whole life now - to watch this whole transition play out in front of me in real time. I watched what used to be VERY apolitical nerd spaces (like this forum as just one of a great many examples) full of incredibly insulated and sheltered dorks go from total and absolute disinterest in politics to goose stepping "Kawaiicaust" Anime Nazis and /pol/ zealots over the course of a few key years throughout the very early into mid 2010s.
This wasn't an accident (not entirely at least): there were unquestionably deliberate efforts made in white supremacist organizations to take advantage of and exploit what was for a long time now a whole new virgin terrain for them: that of the Resentful, Sheltered, Online White Gamer/Anime Nerd market, which they'd left largely untouched for quite some time until roughly the last 10+ years or so (give or take) and which they found to be packed to the brim with PRECISELY the exact sort of psychological and emotional makeup that makes most of their followers susceptible to their propaganda (lonely, alienated, insulated, few strong familial or social ties, lots of undirected anger and resentment, spotty education history, etc).
Kanz is obviously by no means anywhere CLOSE to the only nerd forum to get hit by this, and if anything I think that, for all the abject awfulness we've seen on here the past few years, we've nonetheless gotten off relatively easy compared to a lot of other online nerd communities out there (Mike and the rest of the site admin's incredibly disciplined modding deserves a TON of credit there).
But there was absolutely NO way that this community WASN'T going to get caught up in that whole clusterfuck to at least SOME degree,
especially given the makeup of so much of this community having been just about ALWAYS rife with folks who were obvious and easy pickings to get roped into this horrible nonsense.
Point being: that seal's now been broken, and topics like politics and world events - which I well remember used to be discussed by almost NO ONE on here EVER, and in fact the sheer amount of abject ignorance that most folks in this community showed at the time regarding even what were at the time then-VERY recent and MAJOR world and societal events was downright bloodcurdlingly disturbing (true story, I once had to handhold and walk one user here, off the forums, through what exactly the Iraq War and 9/11 was about: and they were back then, late 2000s or so, in their late teens/early 20s and they were American) - have now had the bandaid ripped off and been given a precedent for them to crop up in places like this when topics inevitably derail.
Back in the day, when a thread detailed around here, it'd be usually people talking about I dunno... Danny Phantom or Justice League, or whatever dumbfuck children's cartoon thing, or something they saw on TVTropes or something to do with the cartoon industry (what Nickelodeon's ratings are, how much toy merch something is selling, etc) or whatnot.
Now though, now that the whole GamerGate, Redpill, anti-SJW, and MAGA shit has (for better and for worse) politically "activated" this swath of internet manchildren, politics is now on the table of discussion in a way it basically almost NEVER was among them previously. For the absolute worst and most bone-chillingly stupid and corrosive reasons possible initially in the beginning (there've thankfully been at least SOME incredibly positive upsides to it that have developed since it first started), but nonetheless that's where we are now today.
JulieYBM wrote: ↑Tue Jul 13, 2021 10:24 amEh, I'm willing to assert that the form may be different but the same root cause is still the influx that came from Evolution. Things were super chill before then. Then again, 99% of my memories are gone so who knows if I'm not forgetting shit.
God knows my memory of that time can be plenty hazy (I was totally zonked on pain meds for much of that time): but even I have enough clarity of that period where I can comfortably say that no, even during some of the years before Evolution things weren't exactly THAT rose-tinted around here either.
The closest period that I can remember to when this forum was as close to its ideal conditions as it ever got was maybe its very first year or so (maybe year and a half at most) of its existence. So like... mostly the bulk of 2004 going into 2005. That's the only real time I can remember where this forum was largely just wall to wall intelligent civility and people who generally knew what they were talking about on a given subject being predominant.
By 2006 though, there started to come about a LOT of asinine "dub vs sub" arguments and Toonami nostalgia warblings and the like from every which possible way, and things have been a pretty marked and steady devolution ever since then. But that downward slide had begun well before Evolution started to materialize (which IIRC was sometime around 2007 or 2008 or so).
JulieYBM wrote: ↑Tue Jul 13, 2021 10:24 amI'm way too embarrassed to read posts from when I was fifteen.
I somehow, much to my own surprise, can actually remember a bunch of them.
....you will undoubtedly cringe going back to them (no offense, but a LOT of them were plenty cringeworthy even at the time you first made them), but I'd probably recommend going back to them at some point regardless, if only for some much needed perspective in how radically you've shifted and changed in various key areas over the years.
One that stands out in my mind - partly because it might've been one of your very first ever interactions with me on here - was you attempting to go all Church Lady on me via verbally slapping my wrist and "tut tut!"-ing me over my using an f bomb once.
If it makes you feel any better though, while most of my old posts are now gone (long story why that is), there were certainly at least a few I made back then that were probably fairly awful in their own right, just by the sheer virtue of how much pain medication I was doped up on at the time.
JulieYBM wrote: ↑Tue Jul 13, 2021 10:24 amI'm also willing to assert that one can't have media analysis without understanding the environment in which media is made, which obviously means discussing things like the role capitalism, misogyny and more play in the workplace and on creative influence.
While this is all largely true of course (in one form or fashion anyway), I'll just note here as a form of friendly and constructive advice: having read enough of your own thoughts and posts on here and on social media before, you yourself still have quite a loooooong ways to go in regards to having a more full and critical grasp of a whole LOT of media history and context as well.
Basically always remember to practice what you preach, and always remember that (like all the rest of us, myself absolutely included) you're still a work in progress and still have tons and tons more to learn yourself.
As someone who still vividly remembers well enough your presence in this community stemming from well before your transition and "awakening" of sorts: you're still very much new to a LOT of this stuff yourself. Not everyone else is though, and the world is a LOT bigger and filled with all kinds of people, many of whom are radically different than those who might mirror some version or other of your own personal trajectory (and those of people you might know personally) with a lot of these topics.
This ties into a universal truism that I feel has been all too often lost on a LOT of this particular community throughout much of its lifespan and history: just because something is new
to you, does
not mean that it is in fact also new to tons of other people that are also out there. The world doesn't start and end at just the exact point where you happened to enter into it, and there are VERY *exceedingly* few roads left in life and in the world at large that SOME group of people or other haven't already walked down a zillion times before you.
So always keep that in mind and to keep some perspective in how young you still are and in how relatively little time you've changed a LOT of your own perspective on some very big and major concepts and worldviews.
