>>14947061It's a little more complicated than that. Anime in Japan is made for children; however, unlike in the West where there were guidelines that hamstrung the plot and characters, Japanese animators were more free to include what they wanted, so long as it made the toy companies funding the animation money. If you went to Japan in the 1990s and asked an adult 'what is your favourite anime?', the Japanese adult would laugh and reply, 'anime is for children'. It's only in the last two decades with the decrease in birthrates and the rise of Otaku that you will see something like One Piece having an increasingly middle-age audience. So there's a shift from anime being an advertisement vehicle for children's toys towards being an advertisement vehicle for adult Otaku toys.
