You don't get a pass because your 13 year olds of choice are japanese and drawn characters. It's creepy as fuck and I am judging you for it.

Not sure this is an unpopular opinion. At least not the people I know unless they are defending it behind closed doors.

There is a lot of anime that creeps me out.

There’s some good stuff out there, but Jesus Christ is there a large pile of problematic anime.

What? It's not about liking the girls it's about wanting to be one so bad imho

What's wrong with adult women?

Why is all the child imagery and school uniform so appealing to the point where you (general you) want to represent yourselves on the internet as anime school girls?

Btw I'm asking this as a gender queer enby who best fits in transfemme spaces.

Lots of things are wrong with being adults. I have not been for long but I'm already nostalgic about my college years

That's an attempt to change the meaning of a word though, it's the sexual attraction to minors, not the action of performing it. If they acted on it they are a rapist whom is also a pedophile.

The distinguishing feature of pedophiles is that they harm minors.

Their distinguishing feature is that pedos are attracted to minors.

Stop dilluting what words mean.

because otherwise, guess what! It gets weaponized against gay/trans/queer folks more readily!

If you are an adult of any gender or sexuality who finds children attractive, you fit the label pedo. Stop trying to paint calling this out this as sn attack on the queer community.

I would totally have a magical girl interface for like a pc ai interface. I mean I might do like sebastian or such but like the majority would be some female anime figures. Why do I care if you judge me for it. I lived my whole life realizing who I am and how I act is uncool. When I was a kid anyway. Oddly a lot of things so uncool about me became like. mainstream. man that is so wierd.

I always wondered if bronies were pedophiles, but I'm also too judgmental myself.

Correct

I wish there was a block anime feature to Lemmy

It’s super easy…

Its like the large pile of racist old cartoons you never see because they don't run them anymore.

I usually read manga about junior/highschool romance like The Dangers in My Heart and others like it (thus I don't usually watch the anime). When I do, I'm not self inserting into it but more so vicariously re-experiencing my own highschool romances and sometimes 'looking on' like a proud sibling of sorts, or more like the ghosts watching everything happening in Ella Enchanted (after they were murdered [was that Ella Enchanted?]).

I often see people saying stuff like this in the comments, of an internationally popular manga with a similarly popular anime adaptation, and I have to wonder what their highschool/junior high life was like because for some reason they cannot relate to the character or plot and view it from an outside perspective and project this onto other people. When I'm reading or watching media like this I'm totally immersed, thinking of my first crush or first kiss or cheering the protagonist (à la Ella Enchanted(?)).

Also downvote because it is a somewhat popular opinion in my experience lol.

I also wonder what you might think of this manga (iirc it's getting animated in the future):

https://mangadex.org/title/157ab2cc-1fc7-4b29-8955-72d94a140982/kesa-mo-yuraretemasu

It's pretty much what the readers/watchers are feeling when they consume media about highschool romance.

*Also, iirc from the psych classes I took at uni, ~1% of the global population has paedophilia, and ~0.2% of those people are also co-morbid with psychopathy which means they can harm children with no remorse. So, calling EVERYONE that watches or reads globally popular animes and mangas that focus on high school/junior high romances is statistically wrong and stupid. <.< Looks at almost everyone in this thread >.>

Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of everything is shit, and this absolutely applies to anime. The worst of the worst can be disgusting as hell, and I hate how often minors are sexualized.

That said, the good stuff is good! I can name a handful of high school romance anime/manga I've really enjoyed (Kaguya-sama: Love is War, Horimiya, You and I are Polar Opposites), and what these series have in common is that they're about romance, not sex. The characters aren't presented as sex objects for the audience to lust over, they're characters in a coming-of-age story, and the stories I just named are all kept wholesome and PG-13. I would honestly recommend watching these just to see if they change your opinion at all.

High school settings are popular because that's often the most pivotal turning point in a person's life - ideal for a coming-of-age story. For many people that's often when they had their most active social lives, and for a writer it's a pretty easy shortcut to giving the cast a reason to interact with each other.

And honestly, I think a large part of it also has to do with nostalgia for the audience. I'm sure you've heard the term 'loneliness epidemic' used a lot these days, high school settings can be appealing to those who lack much of a social circle today and maybe feel like their lives have all been downhill since then.

I don't doubt for a minute that a good number of people with waifu avatars probably want to fuck the anime schoolgirl. But I think that there are a lot more people who just wish they could be the anime schoolgirl.

Definition debates aside they're at minimum creepy for sexualising a children's show.

bro they're horses, and adult horses at that

Just went to a retro video game convention and they're was like 7 booths with with anime art. All the art is basically young girls with massive cleavage. It seems wrong.

Apologies. Somehow my comments got made as a response to a comment instead of the post.

Sorry, but this is a very common opinion. Perhaps phrased in an unpopular way, but it's still super common

Are "reborn as villainess" pedo bait? It's still high school, even if it's victorian/fantasy era, and have a lot of the same tropes.

I wish Japan would slow down with all of it. You get really deep and cool animes sometimes only to have it covered in weird stuff. I can count on my hand the amount of shows I can recommend in general without coming off as a creep.

A few different effects that culminate into a large perception. This is all opinion, so prepend every sentence here with "I think" or "in my opinion".

1. Most popular anime are high school themed. There certainly are anime with adults, but the majority is high school or younger.

2. Kids are cute. Young men growing into adulthood are in that weird metamorphosis phase where they used to be cute and could be silly without repercussions and now have to start fitting into the societal gender role that tells then they have to start taking things seriously. Online, no one knows you're a dog [meme drop]. They can hide behind a cute girl avatar and be silly.

3. So why not adults? See point 1. But also, humans tend to be in their prime around 18. I'm in my 30s, but wish I had some of the features I had when I was a teenager.

4. Dysphoria from a time you know: most people posting online are teenage or older. Their dysphoria is going to come from times they had the most free time: usually as a teenager before they had work and responsibilities. They don't know what it's like to be an adult yet, so they relate more to the teenage characters. School is ubiquitous, salary work less so.

In short, the actual answer likely lies somewhere in these few points, and will be a different mix for everyone. Some guys might have it for creepy reasons, but in the vast majority of cases it's because they feel a connection to the character, who happens to be a high school girl.

I just started Re:Zero season 4 and Shaula is too much.

I filter what I can, but it ain't 100%

The gray area that exists is when you remember something you were attracted to when you were a teenager and start entertaining the fantasy before realizing you're now 40. But a normal person does NOT then make it their avatar.

but what if I was a 13 year old girl when I saw them?

I entirely dropped a friend the second they started talking about installing mods to make their gnome /little person character fully nude in an MMO we were playing.

"Yeah they kind of have a child's body but their actually like 30 years old so it's fine."

The whole guild splintered away from her weird vibes.

Anime about the dating lives of school kids is not something that interests me. Romance as a genre is not something I'm interested in, and as an adult, the lives of teenagers also aren't interesting to me. I'd rather watch sports than teenagers kissing, and I hate watching sports.

If you (general) peaked in high school and like anime school girl shit because it reminds you of your 'glory days', lmao, ngl that's just sad.

Adults wanting to be/be seen online as anime school girls are on par with the adults who have no qualms with sharing online that they want to fuck anime school girls. You're both creeps imo.

Hopefully none of you work with kids/teenagers.

So why is this not called out more?

If you all call Trump and Epstein pedos for fucking teenage girls, what makes your anime school girl yuri obsessions not pedo shit?

The majority of shows I actually enjoy either ignore that shit entirely or have the author's self-insert moment of having a character go, "Now that's fucked up" to any such things. The most recent one I saw was Spy x Family, the one character is madly in love with his sister. The child in the wildly dysfunctional family takes one look at the situation and in her hilariously understated and dry way just proclaims, "Yuck." Mind, this is after the object of his affection beats him to a bloody pulp because stop that shit.

Why have the trait? Because there are funny situations that can come from it, especially if you're willing to make the character almost entirely unlikeable. Which this show does.

I don't agree but, if I did I feel like I would also be criticizing your username

What does my username have to do with this?

Its part of why i struggle with a lot of Persona or Japanese anime style games. And I love Shin Megami Tensei but please let me be an adult character. Strange Journey was soooo good because it didn't have any of that teen angst and everyone acted like adults in a dire situation.

One is real.

(I don't get the anime shit either, but there's quite a difference to real rape, international sex trafficing, etc and fucking cartoons)

Someone made a post below about one taking a liking to the stuff at an appropriate age... Never reassessing that one is 40 and still on about [insert trope]... Which is very valid.

Re:zero has a great plot but has full episodes dedicated to lolicon fan service. It's actually specifically the one I was thinking of. One of the witches in the rabbit arc was a child in a G-string. Very frustrating.

Peridot largely because there's a difference between seeming creepy and being so.

It isn't like your average anime waifu loving fanfreak started out obsessed in their thirties. While it's true that anime isn't just for kids, it is where most people first encounter it. Some folks just stay fans rather than developing other interests that replace it as a primary hobby.

It changes the landscape. There's a massive difference between someone that's obsessed with an anime teenager and someone that's actively trying to fuck real teenagers. Hell, there's a difference between that and pedophilia, but that's a semantic quibble, not substantial thing.

It's like the difference between fantasy and reality.

That being said it is called out to some degree or another. Not so much using an avatar, but the people that get obsessed with some thousand year old demon that just happens to look five catch hell a good bit. Even online, but most definitely in meatspace

Adults with anime school girl avatars

Some of them, I'm sure. Some people I think just have a favorite character or look like them or relate to them somehow. I live in Japan and it's not uncommon for adults to have a character for an existing anime or even something drawn for them in that style based on their own appearance (men and women, old and young) in LINE (messaging app) or whatnot.

As for the rest (i.e. being actually attracted to or overly-obsessed with), yeah, that's getting in to creep/pedo territory.

Sorry for enjoying some entertaining comedies I guess. If you just don't enjoy romcoms at all then fair enough I guess, taste is subjective, but I think you're just projecting too much outrage that other people enjoy things. There's truly nothing wrong with any of the shows I mentioned, and even if they're not to your taste I think you could at least get a better idea of why someone else might like it.

Yeah, i get it. Loli fetish is straight up pedo, and should be called that. Obsessing over high school aged children and talking about them as sexual objects, straight to creep. A thousand year old vampire goddess in the body of a hyper-sexualzed twelve year old is a tramsparent justification.

At the same time in general it depends on the motivation. I love the show Lucky Star. It depicts a group of girls in middle school just being girls, and living their life. Which is something i missed out on as a young person, and so fulfills a empty part of me. I'd hoped for something similar in yuruyuri, but that felt more sexualized.

Some of the ponues are children. But technically the mane ones are suppose to be adults.

Oh good Strange Journey was so good. I lost my copy sadly in a move or few. The reference in SMT4 got me excited. I thought that one did pretty well.

Those girls in Lucky Star are no l16-17 and all become 18 over the course of the show. Still weird for anyone over 23. Love the show.

I literally run a Mastodon server specifically for non-toxic English-first anime/etc fans and I understand where you're coming from. I created the community for a lot of the same reasons

That said, you are projecting an extreme puritanical Western philosophy onto a culture that is dramatically different for deeply ingrained cultural reasons.

Teenage stories are prevalent because of the concept "seishun" (springtime of youth). Japanese culture is extremely rigid and conformist, and as a consequence highschool is viewed as the time in life where you have the most freedom to try new things, express yourself, and discover your passions. Watching teens experience their first love, for example, is a cathartic release for people who don't have the freedom to make drastic changes to their identity anymore. It is a depiction of someone discovering a new identity, and embracing change.

"Kawaii" (cute) culture has deep roots in Shinto spiritualism. For a large part of Japanese history, due to mortality rates among children below the age of 7, children were literally considered not fully human until they reached a certain age. They were "close to the spirits" because they might be reclaimed by the spirit world at any time. This, along with some other tidbits, led to the trope where a spiritual being regresses to look childlike when they lose their spiritual power. It is "closer to the spirit realm". And because there are many stories about being careful not to malign spirits, this became a reverence for childlike things.

Yes, especially among westerners, the are a lot of people with transgressive tendencies who gravitate towards the medium because it's an easy mask for their predilections. But you would do well to more about the history of the culture and medium you're attacking.

Because the way you present your position right now just makes you look like an ignorant westerner who didn't bother to ask "why" before painting an entire culture with a single brush.

Please see my comment here for information that directly responds to elements of this comment: https://piefed.social/comment/13300209

I'm not a huge anime fan, but I have seen some anime and western animation that takes place in highschool, or highschool age, so I guess I get to have a casual opinion.

And that opinion is that when I see animated characters in highschool I don't think of actual highschool kids, because highschool kids are gross children. Similar to how Hollywood will have a TV show about teens and cast a bunch of 28 year olds to play them, there's not really any connection or association in my mind between these characters and real youths I might see on my walk to work or on the bus.

The reason that highschool keeps coming up is because the setting has a lot of constraints and dynamism. True children have no agency in the world, and adults are set in their ways or part of the system, whereas teens are becoming people, and so there's a question about who they'll become. There are adults and structures that have some level of authority over them, which can make the stories have conflict, but those adults don't hold ultimate authority like they would with toddlers or something, so there's a chance of victory. This is why even shows that aren't about highschool, like Avatar the Last Airbender, still feature kids in an age where if there was highschool, they'd be in it. Or fantasy adventure + "highschool" like Owl House. They're stories of self-discovery that most adults don't experience because they already self-discovered and they're through that now.

So my answer is that I don't want to convince you of anything. If, when you see a character that's meant to be in highschool, you feel like that is a highschool person in real life, that's fine. And I could see that being creepy. But when I experience an animated character they don't feel like a real person to me, they're an abstract sketch of a person, lacking in detail, and one of the details they lack is "actual organic age and the implications of the body characteristics that come with it". Instead they're just "confident" or "awkward" or "shy" or "bold, but reckless" or whatever.

There's nothing about them that feels anything like any real person I've met or seen.

it really isn't, or if it is it isn't intuitive and I would love to learn. (can I please stop seeing the idiots that think AI will just go away in a few years)

Your opinion is partly wrong.
The peak of adulthood is around 30-35.
I know by example.
You bet i could still do a backflip without training it for 15 years.