Japan is decadent and is committing suicide with impressive grace and style. This is intentional Cathedral and MacArthur policy.
It does decadence very well, and decadence is attractive and entertaining. A little poison, every now and then, makes for an agreeable life, and a lot of poison, in the end, makes for an agreeable death.
In the course of watching more anime that I should, I have observed that the ideas projected in anime are invariably corrupting and self destructive, and probably a major cause of Japan’s epidemic of shut ins who live in their mother’s basement, watching hentai and playing video games all day.
Been watching various Japanese anime which increasingly indicate a terrible testosterone deficit in Japan, and probably are part of the cause of the deficit.
I recently randomly sampled an episode from the anime series Cat Girl Planet. Science fiction harem anime about cat girls. Sounds good.
Episode five, starting in the middle. Big pirate battleship whose all female crew wear a cross between sexy maid costumes and sexy pirate costumes.
They are under attack by umpteen different and mutually hostile groups, among them a couple of pirate girls wearing bunny costumes and teensy weensy itsy bitsy bikinis, two girls wearing powered battle armor suits, with almost identical uniforms but belonging to different and opposed factions, a bunch of identical robots, and probably maybe some more factions
Oh, I forgot, also under attack by the male protagonist and his super powered cat girl friend.
Unfortunately, her super powers, and her mind, are gone, because she is in heat. To restore her to normal, she needs to be laid, but the protagonist, the only male around, fails to take the hint.
Maybe I forgot them because they fail to do anything brave or manly unlike all the other teams.
Much dramatic action girl combat ensues, action girl on action girl. Finally the big confrontation.
Whereupon the male protagonist, the only male on the entire ship, and if he was not surrounded by extremely feminine girls, you would think him a girl also, proceeds to lecture people with moral lesson of the day – which moral lesson does not seem particularly relevant, but everyone is so impressed by this that they stop fighting.
The protagonist fails to do anything brave or manly, fails to hit on any girls, and fails to respond appropriately when girls hit on him.
The story line requires that the cat girl be restored to her normal self by the end of this episode or the start of the next. I suppose a bad guy is probably going to wind up servicing her off screen, demonstrating that manliness and hitting on girls is bad, but was not inclined to watch the rest of this series to test this theory.
Watched Btooom!
The protagonist has never hit on a girl, never intends to attempt to hit on a girl, lives in his mother’s basement playing video games all day. Never intends to get a real life woman or a real job. His single mum is getting increasingly pissed with this.
We see a flashback to his schooldays:
Evil horrible oppressive to women horrible sexist horrible bully at school learns that the protagonist loves some schoolgirl from afar. From very far. Evil Bully tells protagonist that evil bully is interested pumping and dumping that same schoolgirl, but he will hold back so that protagonist can score some sex.
Protagonist declines to hit on girl. Evil bully tells him to man up and hit on the girl. You will get no sex if you take no action he tells him.
Protagonist declines to hit on girl. Evil bully tells him to get moving or evil bully will hit on girl.
Protagonist declines to hit on girl. Evil bully tells him to get a move on, damn it.
Protagonist declines to hit on girl. Evil bully hits on girl, pumps her and dumps her. She cries a lot. Oh the horrible outrage.
Protagonist savagely attacks evil bully. Evil bully declines to fight back, even though he could easily beat the crap out of the protagonist. This is probably even more humiliating for the protagonist than being beaten up. The girl beloved from afar never has any idea why the protagonist attacked the evil bully.
It is perfectly obvious that the evil bully is going to become a successful man in a high status job when he grows up, and the protagonist is going to grow up to be a total loser. Further, the evil bully is not evil at all. He is mentoring the protagonist, trying to give protagonist a little bit of the fathering that he has never known and desperately needs, to help the protagonist to not become the total loser that he is growing up to become.
In the Btooom! universe fathers are invariably evil and a bad influence, and children are better off without them.
In the protagonist’s video game universe his player character has an in game wife. His fellow players tell him there are no women on the internet, and the player playing his wife is probably a fat fifty year old male. His in game wife declines requests for her real life identity, leading the main character to suspect “she” probably is a fat fifty year old male.
By an extremely improbable plot contrivance, he gets thrown into a real life adventure with the player playing his wife, who turns out to be an incredibly hot chick very much resembling her in game avatar.
Aaaand – still won’t hit on her. In fact, despite having completely heroic adventures, he remains the total loser he always was, never growing an inch.
I originally decided to watch Btooom! because of an online review that it oppressed and degraded the female love interest, though in fact the male protagonist is horribly castrated, and is incessantly bullied and oppressed by the female love interest, on whom he never makes a move.
Instant girlfriend plot, in that they wind up living together in an abandoned building. He risks his life to get food. She does not cook. Building is indescribably filthy. She does not clean. She treats him with absolute and total lack of respect. And did I mention the lack of cooking and cleaning? Good. I will mention it again just in case you forget.
He never hits on her. She never does any housework for him. The place where they hang out continues to look like a homeless squat. Skipping forward to the end of the series, he still has not grown an inch. At the end of the series, she assumes the position (on a couch that is no cleaner than when they first arrived) but instead of screwing her, or better, telling her to clean the couch so that it is fit for screwing on, he talks to the demons in his head.
Now I can see there is a moral argument for him refraining from slapping her around and telling her “I saved your life umpteen times per episode, so put out, woman” but she desperately needs to be slapped around and told to do some cooking, cleaning, and lose the bad attitude. Just as the protagonist would have been a whole lot better off if evil bully / mentor had beaten the crap out of him, she would have been a lot better off if the protagonist had beaten the crap out of her.
The moral universe of both animes is that masculinity is bad, the behaviors that lead to success are bad, male sexuality is disgusting and evil, while female sexuality is pure and chaste. Fathers are absent and/or evil in both animes.