OP: Do you think Japanese animation could benefit from larger body types for women?
Thread: Lets discuss how Japan seems to glorify Nazi germany... also T H I C C women i guess.
Oh Escapist people, never change.
On the topic of body types and Japan, its pretty much the same way that you get western media constantly having the ideal woman be someone that's thin with a large bust and shapely butt, it's what the general viewing pubic see as ideal or what marketing departments want to push as ideal. Whenever it comes to discussions of Japan's lack of diversity in representation, whether it be in body types, skin tones etc, I always see two camps of arguments pop up that I'm somewhat curious about.
The first is that:
Japan shouldn't change cause it's their Culture. An argument that pretty much boils down to "its their media, they can do whatever they want with it, 'we' as an outside demographic have no say or influence on what gets made there.", let Japan do Japan and all that; which is an argument that holds ground if you think about it in a 'its unique to them' kind of way. The key thing that makes other cultures appealing is their difference from one's own culture and if said culture doesn't offer thin, fair skinned girls on display en masse in animated media like Japan does, then there's reason there to say let Japan keep doing things their way, because as far as I know a lot of anime/manga is made for Japanese audiences with no thought of what outsiders would find more appealing, since a lot of sales for those mediums is domestic.
This is usually counter argued by the flip side of the argument:
Japan should get with the times. Despite the modern technological age essentially bringing the world closer in terms of ideas through media, Japan still operates mostly as an isolated nation to some extent, meaning that the stuff they make is mostly for them with little thought of a worldwide audience, and this sometimes leads to their influences being mostly local. As such there's a lot of times when the media they make is very similar to one another, whether it be in story settings, or even character body types. Which leads to western/overseas audiences seeking some diversity because in a lot of western media, diversity is what's the talk of the town, some people are tired of seeing the same type of characters over and over again and are looking for some variety but would Japanese media provide such variety for an outsider audience? and audience who, unless I'm mistaken, aren't really considered much of an influence on sales (haven't looked up any recent figures that would prove that an international market supports japanese animation/manga as much as they do in game sales.)
Then again this is just outsider speculations and stuff, rarely do you get people from the actual anime/manga industry talking about this stuff (unless I'm not looking in the right places) to shed some proper light on how it is.
NPC009 said:
And then there's the sad case of Akira Hiramoto. In his early career, he wrote and drew the acclaimed manga Me and the Devil Blues [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_the_Devil_Blues_(manga)]. It was a commercial failure. As the story goes (and I have no idea if this is true), Hiramoto was so fed up with good manga failing, he set out to create the trashiest thing he could image as an act of rebellion. Prison School was a worldwide hit.
That's gotta suck, try to do something different and it bombs, but conform to the norm/niche and it sticks. I can kinda believe that Kangoku Gakeun (Prison School) was an extreme counter act to appealing to the niche because in the earlier chapters the absurdity of its titillation seemed like it was poking fun at just how absurd normal titillation in other works is.
