Comedy is Conservative by Default

That’s my problem with the common “Conservative Comedy is always bad” meme that Breadtubers go on about sometimes.  The Bad Conservative Comedians they are focusing on aren’t real Comedians, they’re just using the format of comedy to virtue signal.

Conservatism and Comedy both have in common being largely built on an innate appeal to “Common Sense”.  The problem is that sometimes “Common Sense” is in fact correct, but other times putting too much stock in it will lead to rejecting truths that require actual thinking to understand. That's why Leftist Memes are made fun of being too wordy. 

I’m a Leftist but I’m also capable of enjoying entertainment I don’t agree with, and that includes getting and laughing at jokes founded upon presuppositions I consider false.

Two of my favorite Stand Up Comedians to watch back in the day were Christopher Titus and Ron White.  And I really don’t care if they actually always voted Democrat, the core ethos of their Comedy appeals to broadly Conservative values.  Titus was all in on mocking Participation Trophies and White always included a segment dedicated to defending Capital Punishment.  I reject those values yet their Jokes still make me laugh.

But it goes beyond just those two, if you actually stopped to think critically about the Comedy you enjoyed growing up you’ll realize how much casual Conservatism is always peppered throughout. All the Comedians I remember seeing back in that day loved to advocate for parents beating their kids.

Left Wing Comedy can be done, all my favorite Leftist Online Content creators are also very Funny, but it needs to be deliberate, and often involves making fun of Conservatives using their own tactics.

I’m also certain that a lot of what I find Funny in Comedy Anime is stuff that can seem as Left leaning to a Westerner while being in fact more Conservative in Japan.

Update February 20th 2025: Well it seems Christopher Titus has become more Woke in recent years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qh9lH3NOkA

Isekai Smartphone is still the best Polly Anime

Season 1 specifically of In Another World With my Smartphone which aired in the summer of  2017.

Recently we’ve had shows that more quickly got the attention of people looking for Poly rep in Anime because they made that the title of the show, Girlfriend, Girlfriend and 100 Girlfriends.  And I enjoyed both those shows, the former more than the latter (which itself deviates from popular opinion) but I think the latter will get better once the gap between new Girlfriend introductions is longer in future seasons.  

The first problem however is that the way those shows Parody their own set up gets in the way of being at all helpful in actually normalizing it.  In Isekai Smartphone the way it happens feels much more organic.  And there is comedy in Smartphone, but not full Parody in my view.

The first problem with the state of Poly representation in Anime is that all three of these examples are Polygynous, with only 100 Girlfriends even kind of making Yuri between some of the Girlfriends explicit, but as far as what’s animated so far it kind of feels like it’s just a Joke each time it happens.  I want that problem resolved, I want a proper Anime adaptation of the first Boogiepop and Others LN and I want the gender flipped counterparts to all three of these shows, and Poly Yuri and Poly Yaoi and truly Pansexual Group Marriages.  But while we’re stuck in the context of comparing Polygynous arrangements in Anime, Isekai Smartphone is better for one simple reason.

The idea for the Poly arrangement comes from the Girls, they are the ones given agency in this situation.  We’re not fully shown it till the end of the season but it happened in episode 6, I could tell that’s what had just happened even though it was offscreen at the time, it was very obvious even to viewers who didn’t know this was part of the show going in.   I like how there are still times when they are kind of competing with each other, because I know what they’ve agreed to it always feels like friendly competition and not like the "fragility of female friendships” meme.

The way to make a Polygynous relationship not seem inherently Patriarchal is to frame it as the girls choosing to share the boy they mutually love.

The counter argument would perhaps be that that makes it even more of a male fantasy, the male protagonist doesn’t even have to do the "work" of asking for it.  Girlfriend, Girlfriend and 100 Girlfriends are defined by their male protagonists who are incredibly honest and upfront about their feelings.  However the convenience that makes that work is the issue of whether or not the Girls might also then want multiple lovers never comes up.  

As someone who was assigned male at birth and developed the Non-Monogamous part of my ideology before I started seriously questioning my own gender identity, I indeed always intended to be honest about my views. But we don’t live in an ideal world, the current status quo is still patriarchal and one aspect of that is women being conditioned to feel devalued by a boyfriend even suggesting the possibility of not being exclusive.

I’m not saying Smartphone is perfect.  There is that moment in the season 1 finale where Yumina says having multiple wives would prove his masculinity which is an unfortunate implication I wish wasn’t there. 

But the same idea is unstated in the other shows, especially with the people for whom 100 Girlfriends is the only of these shows they like, all the talk in YouTube videos about Rentarou being some ideal male protagonist no one else in Anime can compete with, reinforces the very patriarchal notion that it’s the man who’s supposed to prove he deserves even one lover much less multiple while the girls are the prizes he has to earn.  Such ideas reinforce Patriarchy as well as Capitalist Meritocracy.  

These Anime Protagonists not exactly fitting a standard understanding of Masculinity helps.  But it’s still there.

I’ve been comparing these three because they’re less than a decade old; recent enough that I followed all three when they were current.  Cat Planet Cuties is a show I wish I knew about sooner.

Update August 2026: I have been informed that in the LN material that the Anime hasn't gotten to yet there are is Polyandry in the Isekai Smartphone world, as well as a Woman with a Bisexual Harem. 

Overdue update

If my blog has regular followers, you've probably deduced I've given up on consistently posting updates on my Seasonal Anime viewing.

I've dedicated to start more often waiting to binge.  I've finished the simuldubs I was following and all of them were good shows.  I'm now only still following Yuki Yuna is A Hero and once that ends I'll probably be following nothing for awhile.

The shows I do want to still follow weekly are ones that are more episodic with minimal overarching plot.  But it's difficult to know what shows are going to be like that up front, your seasonal round up videos on AniTube are usually going off just pilots.  I do know I'll at least start the new PreCure.  

LN adaptations I would be interested in binging by Novel or Arc, if I can know for certain when a given arc ends.

In the meantime I've bouncing around between semi-binges.  Re-watching YU-NO as I already mentioned and I may have even more to say primarily about that show, I've also obtained the Switch version of the VN which I'll give a try after finishing the re-watch.  I'm also 7 episodes into EdensZero and 20 into Legend of The Legendary Heroes.

I also watched D-Frag which I think is the most underrated comedy Anime of the 20tens.  I watched the movie Aura: Koga Maryuin's Last War which was good, what distinguished it from Love, Chunibyo and Other Delusions can't be communicated by a plot description, it has a very different tone which makes it a good a companion piece.  I also enjoy what I've seen of Sabagebu and would like to see it get dubbed.  Also the show Shattered Angels is fantastic Shoujo Melodrama with cool action thrown in.

On November 19th (today as I'm typing this and hoping still when it will be posted) I watched the first three episodes of Wheel of Time on Amazon and all 10 episodes of Netflix's Cowboy bebop.

WoT is one of those classic Fantasy franchises I have bene aware of for a long time.  These opening episodes are interesting,  I don't think it'll feel worthy of it's source material's legacy till we actually visit a setting that makes me go "wow, that could have been in a movie".

Cowboy Bebop I decided needed the perspective of someone not simply comparing it to the original all the time, a role I've given myself before.  It's a fun Space Western with likeable characters, that is perhaps goofier then some old school fans would prefer, but it does get serious when it needs to.

Cowboy Bebop was originally a homage to certain American genres like Western and Film Noirs and other pulpy stuff.  This show having more "Whedonesque" dialogue then the original fits how those genres have changed.  We're now in the era of Guardians of The Galaxy rather then The Fifth Element.

The 2000s were Anime's most Revolutionary Decade

I don't think Anime has changed more in any single decade then it did in the 2000s.

At the start it looks a lot like the late 90s and by the end it looks almost like what 2010s Anime has been.  That's normal of course.  My point lies more in how radically different the 90s are from the 2010s.  In a lot of ways the early 90s only looks a couple upgrades different from the late 70s.  However comparing what was airing in December of 1999 to January of 2010, it can be hard to believe that took only 1 decade.  

The 2010s meanwhile as much as I've loved the Volume of Anime they've given me (about half of everything I've watched), do feel like they've mostly been defined by a handful of trends.

The 2000s were the most experimental decade, a decade where seeds planted in the 90s were nurtured and cultivated to eventually fully blossom into what we see now.

How did the Magical Girl genre go from Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura to Madoka Magica and Yuki Yuna?  Well stuff like Magical Girl Lyricla Nanoha fills in the gaps.  But in the world of Magical Girl shows that stayed strictly kids' shows, the first 6 years of Pretty Cure laid the foundations of everything that franchise has been doing since.

When it comes to the really out there trippy stuff, yeah everything in the 2000s may be standing on the shoulders of Eva, Utena and Lain, but that just helps them reach greater heights.

Is Mecha dead?  That's a question that's been haunting Anime discourse for awhile now, and I'm not interested in answering what most people mean by that question.  What I miss about the late 90s and 2000s was how Mecha just sorta popped up in shows that weren't mainly Mecha shows.  Like oh you're gonna do Futuristic Space Opera Anime Count of Monte-Cristo, of course the duel is gonna be with giant robots instead of swords or guns.  And even among stuff that Mecha could be considered the main genre classification, today they are usually one of three things, trying to be Eva, trying to be Gundam, or very rarely trying to be Mazinger Z.  It's only in the 2000s that we had a lot of Mecha shows that don't easily fit into any of those.

The nature of these transitions were complicated.  Partly in how often Anime is behind it's source material.  A lot of the trends that have defined mid to late 2010s Anime were already flourishing in these more niche mediums in the late 90s and early 2000s.  Remember when the Sword Art Online Anime debuted it's source material's original publication was already a full decade old, older then some well known franchises that got animated a lot sooner.

Light Novels have existed and been an occasional source material for Anime longer then Visual Novels have.  But in the 90s and very early 2000s the kinds of stories an Anime fan would associate with the term "Light Novel" were completely different.

You could conceivably take any year from the 2000s and argue it to be a key transitional year.  But for the rest of this post I shall focus on arguing for 2006, simply because some shows from that year have been on my mind.

Prior to 2006 no Visual Novels got any 2 cour Anime adaptations, AniDB may list some but I'm pretty sure those are based on games that don't properly count as VNs under the strictest definition.  But in 1 year 2006 saw the debuts of three 2 cour Visual Novel Anime, Higurashi, Fate/Stay Night and KyoAni's Kanon.  Two were instant hits that were in some way followed up immediately.  The one that didn't quite take off as immediately eventually dwarfed the rest to become one of the most all consuming brands in all of Anime.

And in the world of Anime adapted from Light Novels, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya single handedly changed everything.  Though The Familiar of Zero also got it's Anime that year.

In addition to shows that were seemingly giving birth to the 2010s in that year, there were also shows that were in some ways send offs to trends of prior eras.  Nerima Daikun Brothers isn't technically the last Nabeshin Anime, but I feel it was mostly the last gasp of the style of Anime comedy popularized by Excel Saga.  Meanwhile Strawberry Panic felt like the Magnum Opus of everything the Yuri Genre had been for the prior half century.

And Pokémon quite literally transitioned from Advance Generation to Diamond and Pearl.  At the same time it's English localizers made some production transitions.

There was also plenty of stuff that feels just as related to what came before as to what came since, but still while being innovative.  Code Geass, Death Note, La Chevlair D'Eon, Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl.  And then there was a show that wound up making a good case study in Anime obscurity.

Update: On my Twitter thread promoting this post I wound up talking about an interesting 2007 show.

https://twitter.com/KuudereKun888/status/1459123983417229338

Juggalo Anime Recommendations (Also Bone Thugs)

I'm not a Juggalo but my brother is, so I know a lot about that community that the average outsider probably doesn't.

But also I'm an Otaku.  Being an Otaku and a Juggalo are kind of parallel in how to outsiders it just seems like a fancy way of saying you're a fan of something (Anime in one case and in the other the Insane Clown Posse hence forth called ICP for short and affiliated artists), but there is in fact a deeper hard to define identity behind it.  You weren't an ICP fan before you listened to ICP music but you were probably already a Juggalo.  Likewise I only got enough into Anime to even start considering calling myself an Otaku in the latter half of 2016, but what an Otaku is I in fact always was.

There is also how it sometimes becomes almost a quasi religion.  While Juggalos symbolize God as a Dark Carnival of freaky clowns, Otaku symbolize God as a Cute Anime Girl in Sailor Fuku.  

Also like with a lot of insular fan communities that chiefly interact online there has been post Gamer Gate an increasing visibility of the loud minority of political reactionaries in each community tainting how they were once perceived as fairly inherently progressive.  My brother and I are both Socialists.

One of the roles I have self appointed myself in the modern Anime community is being someone who thinks they know how to recommend potential entry points to people who haven't tried it yet.  And in this case one of the things I think Juggalos and Otaku sometimes have in common is their sense of humor.

You see I think I might very well be the only non Juggalo who's watched Big Money Hustlas and found it funny, I get the sense of humor it's going for, meanwhile Big Money Rustlas which has had better luck at getting nice things said about it from Normie critics I found rather unappealing.

Now there are a lot of Comedy Anime out there going for a lot of different styles of humor.  But the first Anime to pop into my mind as material that might be enjoyable to the same people who find Big Money Hustlas funny are Nabeshin shows like Nerima Daikon Brother and Excel Saga.  The first one I listed is probably better for people new to Anime, if you've seen The Blues Brothers you have basically have all the pop cultural context you really need.  Excel Saga has a lot of meta going for it that makes a working knowledge of the 30 years of Anime history leading up to it helpful, but still I don't necessarily think entirely necessary.  I hate that neither show it seems can be legally streamed online right now.

Those are comedy recommendations.  Juggalos are also known for being into the Horror genre.  Recommending Horror Anime has already become a recurring theme of this blog, but it's become increasingly necessary for me to qualify my recommendation of Higurashi When They Cry.  

Please for the love of God start with the 2006 Deen Anime and then it's sequel Kai, and then take a break, contemplate that story knowing that for a long time what was all there was, they are legally streaming on HIDIVE and can be found for free on sites I won't risk linking to here.  Then maybe give the Rei and Kira OVAs a shot but their canonicity was always ambiguous at best and their goofiest episodes definitely not cannon.  For the Gou series that started in late 2020 and it's follow up Sotsu which is still airing (officially in English often called Higurahsi When They Cry New) I won't have a final verdict till I see how it ends which I now fear even Sotsu won't have the final ending, right now my feelings are complicated leaning towards not liking it.

Now when it comes to Umineko When They Cry, as the only person who seems to truly love it's Anime version, I think Juggalos if they found it might appreciate it.  It can't legally be streamed anywhere right now however.

For Zombie Media, the Anime equivalent to the George A Romero films would be School-Live! aka Gakkou Gurashi!  While something more like Zack Snyder's Dawn of The Dead for better and for worse would be High School of The Dead.  Both are also on HIDIVE along with Vampire Hunter D and Princess Resurrection which I haven't watched yet.

The 80s Vampire Princess Miyu OVAs are on TUBi, RetroCrush and Midnight Pulp if I remember correctly.

Many Juggalos are also into the Music of Bone Thugs N Harmony, and I have two kinds of recommendations based on that.  First my favorite Anime Composer, Yuji Kajiura, has a musical style that I feel can at times have a similar appeal to that of DJ U-Neek who is Bone's main Producer.

She did the music for most of the old Bee Train shows of which I still consider her best work to be Noir followed closely by it's sister serises Madlax and El Cazador de la Bruja.  She then did Mai Hime a show I still haven't watched most of yet, and the Kara no Kyoukai films, then really hit it big in 2011 with the one two punch of scoring Fate/Zero and Puella Magi Madoka Magica.  Since then she's done Princess Principal which was great, Demon Slayer which is a Shonen I didn't watch, the Heaven's Feel Trilogy, Lord El Melloi's Case Files and more.

She also did the Music for at least one Live Action Japanese film and that's the Boogiepop movie from 2000.

Boogiepop and Others is a series of Light Novels that started in the 90s that in-spite of their influence didn't get a proper Anime till 2019.  The Author of that series liked to reference in various ways the Music he was into.  And one of those was clearly Bone Thugs N Harmony because the prequel novel features a character named Mo Murda (but that gets back translated into English Localizations as Mo Murder by people not getting the reference) which is a confirmed reference to the multitude of songs Bone made with some variation of that title.

The 2019 Boogie Pop Anime is difficult to talk about, because I found it pretty enjoyable when I watched it not knowing what they cut.  But it's first three episodes are to anyone in the know a frustratingly abridged version of the first novel.  The live action movie is a much better adaptation of that source material.

The 2019 Anime still has value, the books adapted for the latter half of the 18 episode season I feel were adapted much better, at least in that the Anime version can stand on it's own better.  Episodes 10-13 is the Prequel story, Boogiepop At Dawn which contains the Bone reference character mentioned above.  

The Live Action Boogiepop movie doesn't and shouldn't have a Dub, for LA that's an inherently more awkward process.  For the 2019 Anime I like the English Dub but I'm known for being not too Dub critical in general, either way of consuming it should work fine, do what ever you'd generally prefer.  Same is true of everything else recommended except Higurahsi Kai and Umineko which sadly don't have Dubs.  Nerima Daikon Brothers might be the one that's most better to watch Dubbed, since it's unique musical nature can be harder to follow subbed even for people very used to it, that of course could make it more difficult for a Dub to work, but they pulled it off spectacularly.

The possibly unavoidable problem the Abridged Series medium faces.

(This can potentially apply to a lot of Internet Content that is serialized and composed of more then just a person talking.)

Most of the fun I've had watching Abridged Serieses on YouTube has been me discovering ones that were already old and so had a lot of episodes I can binge (like how I've gotten into a lot of Anime).  Starting with SMA (Sailor Moon Abridged, the one made by Megamie33), and then Wedding Peach Abridged and a number I looked for based on Attack on Titan and Code Geass and so on.  I've had hours of fun with stuff like that. 

But when one that's just starting catches my eye, and it's inevitably months or even over a year till we get a new episode, it's kinda hard for me to stay interested.  I'm currently subscribed to two channels airing Abridged Serieses of Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works, and by the time a new episode drops for either my memory has no longer even kept tract of which one was which.

This is not me criticizing the people making them, I know this long amount of time between episodes in unavoidable.  It may seem at first like they're easier to make then an actual Anime since it's using already animated stuff.  But however true that may be is more then counteracted by these being done by single individuals not entire studios, they have far less resources and usually are doing it as a hobby and so also have school and/or a real job to worry about.  So I don't expect them to drop their lives and do nothing but slave over dumb comedy videos for my amusement.

And yet the consequences of this problem are still real.  It's much easier for me to invest in something if I have a reliable schedule to expect new installments, even if it's more then the standard weekly wait of old media, but A Slap On Titan season 2 failed to keep even it's attempt at a monthly schedule.  These shows do build fan bases in-spite of this obstacle, but they could be much larger.  Because I greatly value the potential of this medium, I love Mel Brooks style parodies, but it's much funnier to me now to simply see the actual original show I love dubbed over comically.

Basically it's an art-form I feel has a lot of potential being held back by the fact that it only ever will be done by amateurs.  Professional studios won't treat works they own this way because they want them to be respected, and they also won't engage in something so copyright ambiguous with another studio's work because they want to maintain a moral high ground when they defend their own IPs.

The first thing that enters my mind as a potential solution is the idea of simply not releasing anything till you've completed a whole season.  But again while something like that is a viable risk for professional studios working with Netflix, an amateur probably won't want to put all that work into the later episodes before they even know if they can get a fan base.  Plus I think they value the fan interaction influencing future episodes, sometimes jokes they make about the comments section are part of the fun.

One thing I don't know is whether or not it was always so normal for new episodes to take so long.  Those old SMA videos don't look as polished and sophisticated as the new Fate/ ones I've been following, and it looked like most of the VAs were like actually living in the same city.  In fact it doesn't seem like that series even ran long enough for how long it'd take a current Abridged Series to cover 50 episodes.  But the current artists value the modern advancements and so aren't gonna want to sacrifice them for the sake of getting stuff done faster.

There is one feature of modern Abridged Series production that I personally think is worth throwing out whether or not it would save any time.  The Cartoon Cipher did a video about why Anime Dubs don't edit the lip flaps which of course had to bring up how Abridged Serises do edit them, or do now anyway, it doesn't look like SMA ever did. The fact is the actual Anime in Japan doesn't care if the lip flaps match. Thus I don't even agree with how much legit Dubs bend over backwards to make them match, so I certainly don't get why friggin parodies want to take this one technical aspect more seriously then the original product did.  But regardless I highly doubt dropping that alone would make Abridged Series production significantly more timely.  And I will say they sometimes do make the lip flaps look kinda funny.

I wish there was a way to fix this problem, but I can't think of it.

Well I think Abolishing Capitalism might for at least the creators who don't want to do anything else and only do because they need money to live.  But that isn't gonna happen under this President.