This is a bit of a touchy subject from what I’ve gathered discussing with people in my own life and over the internet. Anime is a genre of Japanese animation that is stylized in a specific manner that defines the genre. It’s a very broad genre that can only be pinned down to this specific style and origin. I’m sure most people reading this knew that already but it’s important to understand how broad it is in order for me to make my point.
There is a huge social stigma involved with anime and those who watch it. As many fans can probably concur, there’s always that one person (if not many) who doesn’t understand the genre and demonizes it and its viewers. There are many anti-anime arguments out there but the two most prominent that I’ve come across are that a) it’s made for children and b) it’s made for “degenerates”.
The first argument is mainly based on the fact that anime is a style of animation, thus it is a Japanese cartoon. Many people, especially in the West, have a hard time recognizing that mature, meaningful, adult-oriented stories can be told in the realm of animation since they grew up with Saturday morning cartoons like Tom and Jerry and The Flintstones. However, there are incredibly deep and dark stories to be told in this medium. Series such as Cowboy Bebop get at mature issues like drug use, sexual identity, and PTSD. Even series made for kids like Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, and One Piece get at issues of discrimination, existential crises, and the loss of loved ones.
The second argument deals mainly with the group of people that only see anime as a sexual medium. There are a lot of hentai (pornographic anime) out there that are far too widespread and easy to access on the internet which forms the basis of this opinion. Clickbait YouTube videos like “Top 10 Anime You Should Never Watch in Front of Your Parents” with overly-sexualized thumbnails don’t help with this stigma. This is especially considering that the video in question is only a day old and has over 450K views as of my writing this. I also believe this argument is flawed because it takes a very specific subgenre of anime and treats the whole genre like they are of that subgenre. That would be like if someone watched the sex scenes in Game of Thrones and said that all Western television is pornographic and for “degenerates”. Another comparison would be taking actual pornography and saying that all Western media is like that. Just because there is an incredibly niche and lewd subsect of a genre doesn’t mean the entire genre is like that.
There are other arguments against anime but these are the two that stick out the most. Anime isn’t just for kids. There is plenty of animated content (including Western cartoons for that matter) that are made with adult audiences in mind. That being said, these adult anime aren’t made to be sexual, but rather mature stories dealing with adult themes. The hentai subsect of anime doesn’t represent all of anime; that’s why it’s called a subsect. Anime is just like live action content in that it is a visual medium that represents multiple subgenres. This visual style makes for an incredibly unique and oftentimes beautiful method of storytelling. Hopefully this does something to help open up someone out there to giving anime an honest try. There are plenty of wonderful series at your disposal representing multiple subgenres that you may already be a fan of like sci-fi, fantasy, slice of life, etc. Do yourself a favor and give at least one a shot even if you’re apprehensive. Who knows, maybe you’ll love it.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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