Bittercon: Ethics and Politics in Anime
Even if Eville-con had been able to take place, by now it would've been long since over, and even the vendors and the staff packed out and gone. But here's one last interesting panel discussion topic: how are ethics and politics handled in anime?
Way back when I was first discovering Robotech, the US adaptation of three different anime series into a single narrative arc, I remember reading an essay about the adaptation being complicated by how US audiences tend to think of animated works as being for younger audiences, which made it tricky to deal with some of the more complex and complicated parts of the storyline without setting off the Moral Guardians. For instance, there were character deaths, which raised concern that they could be too upsetting for the expected audience. There were also complex moral choices in which there was no clear right answer, often as a result of overlapping and competing loyalties making contradictory demands on the character.
Now that anime and manga are being translated without adaptation for American audiences, we're seeing more works that include significant ethical complexity, as well as more dramas that focus upon the politics of the imagined world, for instance, the drama of a royal court, rather than the typical action-adventure or romance that a lot of people think of when they're talking about anime and manga.
Way back when I was first discovering Robotech, the US adaptation of three different anime series into a single narrative arc, I remember reading an essay about the adaptation being complicated by how US audiences tend to think of animated works as being for younger audiences, which made it tricky to deal with some of the more complex and complicated parts of the storyline without setting off the Moral Guardians. For instance, there were character deaths, which raised concern that they could be too upsetting for the expected audience. There were also complex moral choices in which there was no clear right answer, often as a result of overlapping and competing loyalties making contradictory demands on the character.
Now that anime and manga are being translated without adaptation for American audiences, we're seeing more works that include significant ethical complexity, as well as more dramas that focus upon the politics of the imagined world, for instance, the drama of a royal court, rather than the typical action-adventure or romance that a lot of people think of when they're talking about anime and manga.