Like a week or so ago I stumbled upon a Twitter thread where someone lamented how Superheroes have become Mainstream now, among responders were people saying that Superheroes have "always been mainstream" and that is of course debatable.
Then someone made a comment implying that Anime is just as mainstream as Superheroes, and I of course objected to that sentiment as someone who gets "Anime PFP don't take seriously" anytime I insert myself into an Internet conversation not specifically in the Anime community.
One argument thrown out as proof that Anime is mainstream now is that you can buy it at Walmart. And I found that very odd, there is plenty of niche stuff at Walmart, at least in the entertainment section, heck the book section seems to be only stuff I haven't heard of. The only reason there is a narrower range of DVDs and Blu Rays you can buy at Walmart then at a place like FYE is that FYE sells more older and used stuff. Yet all that said the Anime selection at my town's Walmart isn't great actually, Ghibli films, Sailor Moon, Pokémon, DBZ and maybe a few things that are indeed mostly known only within the community. But apparently even Fate/ stuff is still too obscure for our Walmart.
Then this person went on to respond "just because not all Anime is mainstream doesn't mean Anime isn't mainstream", which floored me a bit as I was preparing to make the exact opposite argument, just because some specific Anime are mainstream doesn't mean Anime is mainstream.
And at this point I guess we have to define our parameters. The context is comparing Anime to Superheroes, which is perhaps an innately flawed comparison, one is a medium the other is a genre, there are after all Anime about Superheroes, even by the narrowest definition of what makes a "Comic Book Superhero", One Punch Man and My Hero Academia are clearly drawing on American Superhero aesthetics and tropes. And not coincidently those are two of the most popular mainstream Anime franchises born in the 2010s.
However Superheroes in the strictest sense of what we're thinking here are strongly tied to a specific medium, American Comic Books. And in that sense you could almost argue Anime is more mainstream since with the Anime that are mainstream it is the Anime people are watching, the mainstreaming of Superheroes is largely via adaptations into other mediums, actual Comic Books have not improved their sales at all. However most Anime are adapted from some even more niche (at least to Americans) source material, like Manga (basically Japanese Comic Books), Light Novels, Visual Novels and certain kinds of Video Games, and fans of those mediums feel a similar resentment towards the Anime being what most people know that Comic Book fans feel.
But setting all those semantics aside, the reason Superheroes as a concept are mainstream now but Anime is not, is that while plenty of specific Superheroes still aren't household names yet, the moment a new Marvel or DC character gets a role in a Movie or Streaming App TV show announced they will start trending on Social Media just as much as the latest Batman news. The same is absolutely not true for Anime.
Now you could say that's more about Marvel and DC as brands, but then you have shows like Invincible and The Boys becoming huge Pop Culture talking points for being alleged "Deconstructions" of Superheroes. Anime "Deconstructions" rarely gain such automatic notoriety, even Ikuhara's 2010s work didn't get noticed much outside the Anime community. And Anime does have at least one corporate Brand that can compete with DC and Marvel, Toei Animation, a number of Toei franchises are among the most globally mainstream stuff Japan has produced, but is every Anime they make cared about simply for being Toei? No absolutely not, even Pretty Cure still struggles to get noticed in the English speaking world.
This debate was also about how mainstream Superheroes have become recently, their current mainstream status is the product of the last decade, maybe 2 decades. In the 90s certain Superheroes already had their place in pop culture, even ones that hadn't had a big Blockbuster movie yet like Wonder Woman, The Flash and a handful of Marvel's. But most of what people who'd call themselves a Comic Book Nerd cared about was not, if you told one of them in the 90s that within their lifetime the Goddamn Peacemaker would be the star of a hit HBO TV show, and there would be big budget Hollywood Blockbuster movies with Multiverse shenanigans, they would laugh in your face.
Anime Fandom currently is where Superhero Fandom was in the 90s, our existence is acknowledged more then we used to be, but only so we can be the cultural punching bag that people who knew what Pre and Post Crisis meant used to be.
The Anime equivalent of the Goddamn Peacemaker getting an HBOMax show would be Summer Radish Vacation getting a Netflix Live Action adaptation.
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