67
Just Motoko admiring one of her gfs at work
(thelemmy.club)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
67 points (98.6% liked)
Anime & Donghua
11499 readers
37 users here now
Welcome to c/anime on Hexbear!
A leftist general anime and donghua community for discussion and memes.
Simple rules
-
Be nice.
-
Use spoiler tags.
-
Don't sexualise underage characters, including 1000 year old loli ones.
-
Don't post hentai here. This is an anime community.
High quality threads you should definitely visit
Gigathread: Good Anime Talks, Presentations, Conventions, Panels, etc
Piracy is good and you should do more of it. Try https://everythingmoe.com/ for streaming, and https://nyaa.si/ for torrents. Piracy is the only means of digital protest that audiences have to fight poor worker treatment.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
There was much less effort on the part of most speculative fiction writers to be legible and respectable to squares back then. Outside of the giants getting their Star Trek scripts picked up, these authors never expected anyone outside of a limited but passionate scene from seeing their work. Subcultures still existed and the wall dividing respectable fare from genre trash was crumbling but intact. Nerd stigma didn't really fade until the Web got big a full decade later.
I know about nerd stigma and all that, my thing was that there were a number of huge movies -- especially Star Wars, of course -- along with lots of other media, that had huge mainstream acceptance by them. Even Twilight Zone ran in the late 50s to mid 60s, was mainstream, and frequently had genre Sci-fi episodes, many of which are pretty famous to this day, e.g. To Serve Man.
Like, I know that pulp has increasingly been oriented toward the mainstream slop trough in the past few decades, I just think Sci-fi not being mainstream in 1989 is overstating the case.
What I'm trying to get at is that wonky shit that throws you in the deep end hoping to make sense of it in the margin notes like the GitS manga wasn't then, and arguably still isn't now, mainstream. Star Trek and Twilight Zone generally posed one or two troubling questions at a time. Their purpose was to render sci-fi's challenges legible and digestible to a primetime audience.
The uncut stuff by and for the stigmatized throws it all at the reader at once, drops some key clues, and counts on the readers to work out amongst themselves how social reality in the story has become so freaky and foreign to the world we know (yet hauntingly plausible if the same forces played out here), because the intended reader is into that shit and wants it in ever stronger concentrations.
Being digitally psyopped and possibly depersoned in real time is increasingly relatable to regular westerners, as is being materially exposed to international geopolitics, and watching anime is pretty normal there now, so I guess if the crank otaku GitS manga was ever going to be broadly legible, it's never been closer to being so.