>>25003684>No, it's like saying the Divine Comedy and Paradise lost were invented by the bible due to the inspiration from the bible, and if the bible didn't exist neither would those works so don't obfuscate what I said retard.The Bible is a collection of books, you illiterate. It can't invent anything. Both of those poems are more than sufficiently differentiated from their inspirations to be considered original artistic works. Plenty of things 'wouldn't exist' without some set of prior conditions, but that doesn't stop them from being meaningfully differentiated from them. If you're going to be reductive about the origins of culture, you may as well claim nothing is an original invention because it's all based on a long chain of causality.
>Wrong, it's about selling a characterNot mutually exclusive with what I said at all, and I was implying as much. The difference is in the type of character being sold, which with Japanese idols is intentionally meant to be an imperfect one so you are encouraged to be invested in their narrative.
>america invented hamburgers, hotdogs, pizza, sushi, sandwiches simply because it varies from the original in some small aspects? Again, invention isn't some either/or reductive question. These foods in their usual American form have particular characteristics: served in a distinct style, sometimes with regional variations (e.g. Chicago-style pizza), and with specific cultural associations and rituals that distinguish them from those foods elsewhere, just as Japanese, British, Thai, and Indian curries are indeed regional inventions. But the differences between idol subculture and poor black kids learning good etiquette so they can maintain a good public image are far greater than that, anyway. They are not small aspects. Your entire argument relies on the notion that you can reduce idol subculture to a single principle: the image management of pop stars, even when said images were totally different and they existed in a largely differently media environment to the one under which idol subculture has historically existed, especially since it became a primarily otaku interest in the '90s. I could likewise point out that image played a substantial role in the success of pop stars even in the prewar era ('40s pop marketed to bobbysoxers etc.), and the culture of image and advertisement was of course in full swing especially in America well before then, so you could easily reduce any of the particular characteristics of sixties manufactured pop to their constituent parts and claim that actually they invented nothing simply because they built on preexisting models of marketing pop stars to teenagers. What we now call the idol industry in Japan is substantially further apart in its aims, methods, and audience from Motown as Motown is from '40s crooners.
