I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the youtube video these people dug up – or the inappropriate, generalized, biased, totally unfounded descriptions of anime and emo culture.
Emo anime:
Anime is a style of animation which originated from Japan. It is still a great deal centered in Japan. The word anime came from the American word animation. The anime is typically characters with large, sad eyes with hairstyles that are colorful.(1) The drawings are exactly depicting the sadness in an emo face.(2) Mostly Japanese anime illustrators are fans of emo punk. (3) Emo anime then can be said to portray emo punk attributes. (4) The emo anime episodes said of spurned love, learning life’s lessons the hard way or experiencing through music. (5) But Naruto anime talks about being born an emo, born to say creepy things, born to kill, born with no eyebrows and born with a sexy love tattoo.(6) This anime has that attribute born to kill which is likened to being cut. (7) Remember some emo people are wrists cutters.
When emo is scruffy or unkempt appearance often over dramatic while making very loud expressions, and obsessed with anime t-shirts, you are looking at an anime emu. (8) Sometime they have crazy outfits with crazy hair and do crazy actions. (9) An anime t-shirt displays the heroine on a tee with baby blue capped short sleeves. She is considered more emo then anime by some people. (10) But an anime emo is completely obsessed with anime.(11) The anime emo have even formed a group which accepted members who are true loners and nobody pays attention to them. They have forums which especially created for these people to express their own feelings of sadness and love deprivation.(12)
The anime’s can have a lasting influence on would be emo.(13) The anime’s made them emo. As well as some ero-games turned emo anime.(14) This depicts sorrow through a car accident and the lady loses her boyfriend and her best friend all in one. Cannot help but feel sorry for this tragedy. Another emo anime portray family break ups and then you can never be close to anyone. Indeed, very emo. And there is the anime which tells of a girl who has a year to live. It has some string pulling moments. Crying has always been the effecting results with these emo anime.(15) But probably the most heart tugging emo anime is when momije admitted that his mother did not even acknowledge him as her child. The emo said they get their money’s worth in this emo anime. These are the stuff an emo dreams are made of.(16)
Click on the following link to view more emo pictures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M734Fm_-ODo&feature=related
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My feelings about this article cannot be expressed very well – however, unlike the unknown author of this little piece of work, I hope to refute with academic, textual and factual evidence that more than half of this article is quite erroneous.
1. To say that all of anime characters are drawn with large expressive eyes is like saying that all elves are blonde, or all wizards have wooden staffs like Gandalf (Lord of the Rings). Large expressive eyes were the hallmark of anime – but as time has gone on, and styles have branched out to include other various types of characters such as:
Vash the Stampede
Re-al Mayer
2. I don’t think this sentence even warrants an argument… Is it possible that a “sad face” is an “emo face”??? What about this?
3. Although stating that anime illustrators are interested in emo punk, this writer does not give any examples, nor do they discuss why this might be so.
4. This statement is based (somehow) on the previous statement concerning the interests of mangaka. It also links the idea of “emo anime” to “emo punk”. What this sentence fails to do is make a further notice about anime in general. Anime is a very general word covering a large amount of media types. To say “anime” is similar to saying “film”. If the sentence were something like “emo film has emo punk attributes”, one’s response is two fold. First, one can’t help but state that the sentence is rather obvious. Secondly, one must note that “emo” is only one type of subculture which may (or may not) be closely tied to other subcultures. As a whole then, this sentence, within the context of the paragraph, gives the reader the idea that ALL mangaka like emo culture and that anime in general lends itself to emo.
5. First of all, this sentence is grammatically incorrect. Secondly, there are MANY classic western stories that are about “spurned love, learning life’s lessons the hard way or experiencing through music”. Although one must ask “experiencing what?”, I can’t help but think that emo culture, then, must be as old as the hills. Consider the songs of troubadours during the Middle Ages, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Charles Dicken’s novels (Oliver Twist is a good one), Shakespeare’s plays (Hamlet) or the more recent movie Finding Neverland. The great hymn, “Oh Love, That Will Not Let Me Go”, was written by a blind man who had been left by his fiancee due to his blindness. Was his outpouring of grief to God (and the resulting celebration of thankfulness), an emo act? To label those literature and media archetypes as being “emo” is doing these authors a great disservice, and, to my mind, shows little understanding of human behavior and culture as a whole.
6. Finally we get an anime actually listed! But it certainly is an interesting choice. Of all the anime out there, Naruto is definitely NOT the ultimate emo show. There are many characters who have very sad lives – but the ultimate lesson of Naruto is not supportive of an emo culture. Naruto is about acceptance and working with others to create a better world so that people DON’T BECOME EMOS. No person can say that a person is “born to be emo”, anymore than Dawson’s Creek says that you are “born to be preppy”. Most media is about change of one state to another – whether it is the mind, the character, the physical body or an outside situation, whether that is political, social or economical. So while some Naruto characters could be said to have some characteristics of being emo, there is no stasis of character. Most people when coming into contact with the main character, Naruto, CHANGE. This statement shows a gross misreading of what is actually a fairly simplistic text. In fact, if there’s anything to criticize Naruto for, it is the extreme cheesiness of how everyone learns to forgive, forget and get along…
7. Not only is this sentence making no sense grammatically it is intimating that Naruto (and by implication, all anime) is all about being born to kill and is therefore linked to cutting. Saying something general, once again, like this is comparable to saying, “Lord of the Rings has an attribute of magic and is therefore likened to Wiccan philosophy and Satanism”. How “being born to kill” is linked to cutting, I don’t know. What I do know is that realistically – those who kill and keep their sanity, rarely cut. Because they know what life really means. Considering how many people die at the hands of say the two Pevensie boys in Chronicles of Narnia, would we then say they were born to kill and therefore are examples of possible cutters? Edmund the Emo… I think I can see that… Or maybe not – since the issue of killing/”being born to kill” has no real link to the issue of cutting – other than the basic fact that both spill blood.
8. Once again, bad sentence structure… and… if one looks at the EMO culture, fashion wasn’t important until the past few years. According to Wikipedia, Emo culture is identified by a very smart type of fashion, which although arguably androgynous, is well-groomed.
Knotmag [Warning: Some language] – Blog discussion of Emo
Incendiary Mag [Warning: Language] – Another discussion of the evolution of Emo
Label It Description
Therefore, this description of a person who is an emo AND is interested in anime is basically a generalized stereotype which borders on a slur. It reminds me of those really bad APBs put out on criminals… In fact, it almost makes these people sound mentally handicapped…
9. Crazy outfits, crazy hair, crazy actions… hey… I know what that describes! Star Trekkies, Tibetans, Muslims, Goths, those old men who drive motorcycles and have long frizzy grey hair… Me in the morning… Emos, believe it or not, are one small bunch of people in a very large, crazy world. Ambiguous descriptions like this could apply to any number of groups who don’t act the same as you. Now if this article was on goth culture and anime, this kind of statement would be more believable…
10. I’m not sure what they are trying to argue here…
11. “An anime emo is obsessed with anime.” Well, that is fairly obvious. I don’t know why this person didn’t also just make a statement saying, “An anime person is obsessed with anime”, because, after all, otaku (the correct word for this kind of person) come in all ages, colors, classes, shapes and sizes. But what is disturbing about this sentence is that it seems to imply that anime emos are particularly obsessive… Which is not true, in the least. Many emos aren’t even into anime. So this is yet another annoying misnomer.
12. Now this is true. There are forums and blogs and journals and facebook groups for tons of people to come together over a perceived cause or interest and form an “us vs. them” sort of feeling. So while mentioning (possible) emo otaku forming forums to bond over their depressing feelings, I feel that, to set the record, we should also remind the internet audience that there are other scarier groups forming on the internet who talk about worse things. The question that I have to ask is why we as Christians aren’t finding ways to reach out to these (perceived) emos who are feeling depressed?
13. Anime can have impact anyone, not just the emo. But for the sake of the argument, since this article is about the emo group of people, WHICH anime would do that? Certainly not all of it… And once again, the sentence is grammatically incorrect.
14. I am not sure how anime makes a person emo. In fact, it is more possible for Weezer and James Blunt to make you feel emo than anime. Anime makes you SAD, it can make you CRY… but that is not being emo. Imbalanced people could watch anime and try to model their life after Sasuke from Naruto (Lord forbid) – but equally, they could obsess over Chronicles of Narnia and look for a wardrobe that leads to Aslan. Although it is arguable that anime is often conveying worldly philosophies, the reader has agency to disagree or decide on another course of life. In other words, both the media and the person have the power to cause oneself to become emo. This kind of inside-outside influence dialogue can be seen in the Augustinian vs. Manicheaen discussion on the nature of evil, for example. At any rate, this statement (however questionable it may be), leads then into a discussion of ero-games.
ERO-GAMES: Past, Present and Future
Eroge (Wikipedia)
History of Ero-Games (mentioning of ‘crying games’ and a list (until 2005) of around 35 games made into anime – OVAs or series)
In these articles, there appears to be no mention of the huge impact of emo on the hentai gaming industry – although there is an ongoing process of selling ero-games for their story more or less, and going easy on the sex. There is some mention of how this impacts anime culture as a whole – but one would do well to note that the eroge genre of gaming is only one part of anime. Eroge to anime is what conventions is to Star Trekkies.
Also, while there are scenes of “emo”ness in these games, which are supposed to appeal to the player – one cannot help but assume that they are no different than films in the Western Hemisphere (in reference to emotional impact) although the media style is different.
15. All of the scenes described here are very sad and depressing, but that would then put anything written, composed or filmed in the tragedy, romantic tragedy, drama category as being emo as well. Movies such as Finding Neverland, Kingdom of Heaven, A Walk to Remember, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Little Mermaid (or anything by Hans Christian Anderson). The idea that anime has a subgenre for emo is a little bit of an overstatement. I could see emo being depicted in anime, explored in anime – but the effect of North American culture has yet to be made itself more felt on the anime industry. Emo, being a mainly North American phenomenon, might affect anime stylistically, but it has as yet to change the anime subculture into something labeled as whiny and depressing.
16. Once again, there is a clear reference to a specific anime here. Fruits Basket. Fruits Basket is close to emo in the sense that there is a more complex exploration of human relationships and emotions – since it IS a shoujo title. However, the message of Fruits Basket isn’t about the depressing state of loneliness – although it is addressed. Rather, Fruits Basket is one of the more positive anime stories out there.
Momiji: The Face of Emo Anime (the one with blonde hair)
Momiji’s Sad Story Part 1
Momiji’s Sad Story Part 2
The Point of Fruits Basket
In other words, Momiji’s story in particular discusses the importance of holding onto memory and overcoming the negativity of some memories. As a whole the story is about how a girl’s positivity (although one wonders where it comes from) changes an entire family’s life. Momiji is one of those many people. Once again, this writer is only looking at superficial similarities and not really digging deeper and reading in context the story as a whole.
CONCLUSION:
In conclusion, I was both shocked and amused when I found this obviously amateur piece on the emo and anime culture on the Freedom Village website. While it was no doubt written with good intentions in mind, it is dangerous to perpetuate false assumptions about emo and anime culture together or separately. Both cultures have many issues since neither originated with Biblical principles. Not everything within anime is good, pure and lovely – but neither is it a breeding ground for emos.
I think the stance of Christians on emo and anime should be one of critical, unbiased thought – attempting to measure up the messages of both cultures against God’s Word – and then finding avenues to use the media promoted within both cultures as a tool to spread His Love.
