I agree totally.

What Guest said is pure nonsense if applied to manga, but you COULD make a case that anime has stagnated. Of course, you could also make a case that anime stagnated in 1996. I wouldn’t be making either case.

I get the feeling that people like Guest who are down on anime have been disappointed by a few recent series and forget that over the last few years we have had reams of titles – GiTS TV, Mushishi, etc. that would compare well to late 1990s or late 1980s canons(although not, perhaps to 1970s). There have been lots of recent titles that are not based on a boy-girl-bigger super attack or robot-pattern which is a real breath of fresh air.

Also, if Guest has not been to Akiba (don’t knock it til you try it), I take it that he has not been to Japan (people who post about anime online and have been to Japan have usually gone)and is relying on fansubbers and US companies to organize his anime watching for him…. which raises another problem….

I mean, we had this same point rasied here a month or so back and someone argued that anime is hitting rock bottom…. if we throw out Miyazaki, Oshii, Kon Satoshi, Shinkai, Anno, etc.

Nakano Broadway would be a better resource for that. To me it seems odd that there’s this fear of Akiba becoming something non-anime/manga mecca that it supposedly is. I’ve personally never considered it that despite it’s rapid growth in that realm. Of course that’s mainly because I remember what it was like before the anime boom from 2000 onward, back when Akihabara was primarily about gadgets and electronics basically being the “Radio Shack” of Tokyo. Sadly a sizeable portion of that has gone with the declining economy of the 90′s and influx of anime/manga and cosplayers.

Will Akihabara die out? No, it’ll just go on evolving to whatever moves in next..

Am I the only one that thinks anime/manga is far to large and diverse to be simplified this way? It’s kind of like saying beverages have stopped evolving because we still drink them.

I notice that you left out the macron when you wrote that.

Also, Aso’s aristocratic background allows him more privileges on this blog than more plebian types.

Easy to go on forever about misogyny in anime, but Akihabara is chock full of female otaku creating things for other female readers (many of which are examples of some of the most spectacular misandry anywhere so we can also call Akiba the site of an epic pop cultural payback).

Does Akihabara represent something as meaningful to you as the sixties are?

I’ve been thinking about this lately: it’s easy to see the negatives and the pathologies of akiba-kei, but what is it that makes it good? I could go on forever about misogyny in anime, but I can’t quite place why I love it as much as I do.