>>22207920I, personally: because of anime. I am a Philistine. But due to their cultural distance, they often have a very much accurate view on what we look like from the outside, and this is also often expressed with anime, e.g. in Overlord, or Elden Ring. More implicitly in Bayonetta, where you fight that mirror-god.
But also in anime: you tend to really see what sort of weirdos we are if you look at how pompously they depict the nobility, for instance. It's always some medieval/17th-century European nobility with bullshit names like "Prinzess Lightingsun zi Estamagarossia" or such. We also go crazy over our "by God!"-bigotry, like with that theocracy they have in Overlord or, in that anime-screenshot which is allegedly about a Jew with his Talmud-magic.
They must be sitting over there and thinking: "and they call US strange?"
We do not see the splinter in our own eye, yet clearly, we see something when we gaze to her: a blossom of a finer sort than is appropriate for barbarian brutes to seize; at least in terms of culture, if not politics.
What Western show (except maybe Supernatural, which is the "inconsequential travel-comedy/drama" into which much of anime also falls) would have a fanservice-episode? Or not go on for 30 seasons. Ok, that's a bad example. But at least they end some shows early.
If I'm quite honest, they're fun foreign cartoons, I don't gotta justify shit.
