Last year, political commentator, Matt Walsh, said in a video that anime is Satanic. While I think that he was mostly saying this in a joking manner, I can’t say that I don’t disagree with his stance on this massively popular genre. Sure, there are anime out there that aren’t horrible such as Avatar: The Last Airbender (which I am a huge fan of), Pokemon, or One Piece, but there’s also a large part of anime that is absolute garbage. That said, here are my reasons for not watching anime.
#1: Where are their clothes?
I can’t be the only one to have noticed this, but for the longest time, anime has been portraying most of their characters in clothes that are really provocative. While the guys’ clothes are fine (though they also have a lot of problems in how they’re drawn), what the hell is with the girls’ clothes?! It’s a running joke in my family that Sailor Moon needs an episode called “Sailor Moon and the Quest for Pants” with how tiny that miniskirt is.
What’s worse is the fact that most of the characters wearing these outfits aren’t even supposed to be adults. Most of them are high school students or even younger wearing stuff that would make a prostitute blush. While I realize that Japanese/Korean/Chinese school uniforms have short skirts, they usually only look like they’re an inch or two above the knee. They don’t look like the type of skirt where if you bent over even slightly, you would be flashing everyone. Additionally, Japanese schools are now allowing for more variety in what girls can wear, allowing them to wear longer skirts or even pants.
On top of that, videogames with the anime style like Genshin Impact are even worse since the fantasy aesthetic in anime seems to be wearing as few clothes as possible. The amount of female anime characters wearing “armor” that leaves swathes of skin containing large blood vessels exposed, especially around the chest, is ridiculous. Even if they aren’t wearing armor, why the hell are they walking around town in what I can only describe as a swimsuit with less coverage and more frills?
It just seems like the creators are trying to fetishize girls, which leads me to my next point….
#2: Unrealistic body standards
I don’t usually have a problem with animated characters having weird looking bodies where the eye to waist ratio is way the heck off, but in the case of anime, I have a massive problem with it.
For one thing, it just looks gaudy a lot of the time. Sure, it may look good depending on the character and the context of who that character is or what they are, but often, it just looks like someone wanted to go to the gym and thought of what they unrealistically would want to look like. The guys look like they’ve been pumped full of insane amounts of hormones and steroids (maybe they should compete with the Russians during the Olympics) and the girls often look like aliens who got way too much plastic surgery.
The other reason why I have a problem with the unrealistically muscular guys and overly curvy girls is that it perpetuates ideas of what a person should look like that can never be met. Given the fact that so much of anime is watched by guys (62% of male high school students report watching anime once a week or more as compared to 48% of female high school students) and is often very pornographic to one extent or the other, this can really mess with people’s heads. Just look at Japan nowadays, where guys are actually marrying AI anime characters instead of actual women and it’s causing the birth rate there to drop dramatically. While there is something to be said for the fantastical aspect of animation that is why it’s intriguing to us, when the art acts like a drug and becomes addictive, then you have a huge problem on your hands.
#3: LGBTQ+ Garbage in Anime
While I don’t think it was originally intended to be this way, a lot of people in the LGBTQ+ community, particularly in the trans and furry community, have cited anime as something that inspired them to swap genders or species. In the documentary What is a Woman, a trans-identifying wolf therian from TikTok told Matt Walsh that he decided he was a wolf while watching an anime about wolves when he was 11.
Now, while this could happen from any form of popular media, not just anime, but it seems that anime especially has a huge influence on this. A common theme in anime is gender bending, shape shifting, etc. When you put that in front of a bunch of kids who are already very confused for a variety of different reasons about their sexuality (amongst other things), this can lead to very bad results, especially if when – like I said earlier – a lot of what they’re watching may be pornographic and highly addictive. Add a culture that cheers questioning your sexuality on top of that, and you have a group of people who are now very disturbed.
Until next time,
M.J.
The Tanuki Corner 
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