Quote:
|
This is where my question comes in: why was Behind The Nihon Review so widely respected during its run when much of their content ended up being thinly-veiled attempts to tell people what to think?
|
I am not going to write a wall of text, but being around for long, I can remember that it was cool to hate on the slice of life/Cute Girls Doing Cute Things genre (and the studio KyoAni crystalized that Cool Thing to Do). We were in the late 2000s-2010s. All talk about the genre, and that studio, became toxic. It reached a point that any series talk that reached those territories, the mods of this forum will close the thread or delete posts.
So there may be the reason why it was popular: people flocking to places where their views are validated. And it did it with, what I'd say as a native French who dont have much command on English, Big Words. That give the impression that it is well articulated (*). I think it gives them the impression they are much more sophisticated individuals. But as you say, too much toxicity eventually drive people away. And places filled with overwhelming negativity (as in shoving everyone's throats with THEIR preference for anime and hatred for certain tropes) like 4chan, anidb, ann, etc, are simply too big to fail. Meaning people wanting to hate on something will always find some place to go.
Also, the hatred on slice-of-life and Cute Girls Doing Cute Things have shifted on Isekai since mid-2010s and it look like it wont stop until Japan stop adapting all the godamn isekai light novels under the sun. So, on the brighter side, series like Yuru Camp and Healing Girls were allowed to be discussed and loved for what they aimed to do, without having the toxic people ruin people's enjoyment (someone in twitter have pointed out this fact. Healing Girls would have been bashed to oblivion in the late 2000s early 2010s). And in a time where terrorism is rampant, fascism is openly embraced, work conditions and environment is changing for the worse, slice of life is a balm for our minds filled with anxiety. Sometimes, we just want to swallow the blue pill because we realized that, in our scale, we are powerless, with no political clout and none of the wealth to make a significant change.
(*) In the french youtube cinema vlogging, there is a vlogger who uses his education and his quoting of philosophers like Nietzche to bash Hollywood entertainment, while praising French movies. While failing to grasp that French people run away from French movies because those tell the same fucking stories (spouses cheating each other) over and over.