A Cynical Take on Contemporary Isekai Anime

Introduction

A conflicted diatribe against NEETs.

Motivation

People write with agendas; no writing is ever without at least some bias. People twist and distort facts; underemphasise some and overemphasise others; put less effort into the necessary counterarguments against themselves. Context is essential, and I hope this preface will provide the necessary background required to better understand the goal of this post—or even the lack thereof, as it is ultimately nothing but a wish—a desire for the genre.

In short, this genre is about a protagonist going to a different world (isekai) one way or another, usually either by going through a portal or dying and being reborn, almost if not always with their memory and self-identity intact.

Fear, hatred, and anger

One of the most influential precursors to hatred and anger is fear (see amygdala). People do not think rationally when they are afraid, which usually only means they become afraid of even more irrational things by way of a positive feedback loop where irrationality leads to more irrationality, but back to the point of hatred and anger.

If you are afraid of something—say a spider in your living room (most spiders are harmless)—you usually react in one of two common ways: fight, or flight; either you try and kill the spider, or you run away (and hope someone else kills it for you). When we are afraid of something, we want to get rid of it—destroy it, even.

Fear turns into hatred, and anger, especially when we cannot do anything about it. Take vaccination, for example, and the irrational conspiracies around it. People fear what they do not understand, and want to get rid of things they fear (from an evolutionary perspective, fear is triggered by danger, so it makes sense that we would want to be rid of the danger by any means possible). And fear that can’t be alleviated turns into stress, anger, and hatred.

So what do people in this state do? Perhaps they lash out at others for even suggesting they should vaccinate their child, or write angrily online about it hoping they will convince the world to remove this threat—or is it? Ultimately, what they want is to be rid of the fear, which proper education can do as vaccines aren’t actually dangerous, especially once you understand how they work.

But what could anyone possibly hold against Isekai anime?

The target audience

The fear in this isn’t direct. Rather, the fear stems from what it’s associated with, namely, their target audience—something no parent on earth wants their child to become: NEETs, or worse. If you’re not familiar with the term, I will be addressing common themes from this genre and how they map to the desires of their target demographic (NEET stands for Not in Education, Employment, or Training). Definitions vary, but the group I’m referring to is depressed, isolated, and mostly South Asian.

Though they are deemed pitiful and in need of help by compassionate psychologists, they are often colloquially referred to as simply “losers” (we’ll touch on the bullying aspect later). In many ways, it’s understandable they’re called losers due to being jobless outcasts who don’t contribute anything to society, but in many ways, they are also missing the nuances in every person’s life as well as their unique psychological traits and the complex interaction between nature and nurture. That said, nuances are one of the first things we discard when we think emotionally—aka intuitively. It makes sense that people fear, and thus hate these people, even beyond their lack of contribution to society.

Some people may also make the argument that though depression is complex, there are people who are genuinely so rotten to the core that at the end of the day there’s nothing left to do but despise them, but how are we to differentiate other than by using our own subjective judgements? How are we to know for sure until we really try to help?

Another source of hatred possibly stems from a sense of injustice as people wonder why these individuals get to laze around and mooch off others all day while they have to work hard to make a living.

Fear turns us irrational, and that irrationality can lead to feelings of disgust (amygdala/insular cortex pathway). We outcast them and want them out of our sight, like people with physical deformations or who are astoundingly ugly; we use the same words we would use to describe eating a spider. Bullying also takes place: we want to destroy things we hate. There may be some evolutionary roots in this behaviour. After all, our ancestors were better off not taking any chances with anyone who might be even the slightest bit diseased.

Either way, nobody wants their child to become a NEET, whether it means fear of their child being bullied by others or fear of their child having nothing to show for it, especially in South Asian countries like Japan—where anime originated—which places a strong emphasis on contributing to society. Parents may even spite their own children if their love for their culture overwhelms their love as a parent, causing these children to fantasise about growing up in a loving family. An exploitable weakness.

Writing this is a constant battle against my intuitive distaste for them and my otherwise rational understanding and logical compassion for them. I apologise in advance for any vitriol.

What I want from this genre

I don’t necessarily like what NEETs like, and I don’t think most people do. I understand the many factors that can lead people to tragically give up on life, and I try my best to be understanding, but that doesn’t mean I have to also like what they like. Imagine going to a restaurant. The decorations are modern and detailed, and the music is catchy and upbeat, the chefs are top-notch, but they only serve the two lamest things you can think of: lollipops and Neapolitan ice cream.

I don’t dislike people who like candy, but it’s frustrating being handed a kids menu every time, especially when the place has so much more potential. This is what Isekai anime feels like, constantly pandering to these kids—I mean NEETs.

Take the fantasy concept of reincarnation. There are so many romantic, heartbreaking, and inspiring stories just waiting to be adapted from the many fables and folklore throughout the world and it’s tragic to see resources being constantly funnelled towards the one group of people who have so much free time they can actually watch all of—Oh. It’s about money, isn’t it?

There are also many modern examples of other world fantasies, the most relevant being portal fantasy works such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and The Chronicles of Narnia. As for the broader concept of other worlds, think about the incredibly popular MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) which essentially takes place in a parallel universe very much like our own but with different laws of physics—ones more closely aligned with our fallible intuition, making it extra satisfying to watch.

Along with so many talented animators, composers, and writers, there appears to be no limit to what they can create. Yet, all we have are carbon copies from the same template all catered to that one demographic with too much free time (That said, this may change in future as Japan deals with their ageing but finally tech-literate retired population. Perhaps we’ll see lots of anime for old people).

Here are some ideas from famous fables from the past:

A tyrant is reborn as a peasant, experiences the world from the perspective of an ordinary man, and eventually learns to become a good person. Alternatively, he’s reborn as a pheasant and learns how to be a bird because of an unfortunate misspelling.

A failed but ambitious businessman is given another chance in his next life and finally succeeds with the help of some peculiar new friends.

Or even: the typical self-centred, self-pitying, lazy, and objectifying misogynistic NEET gets punished instead of rewarded for his disrespectful and ignorant behaviour in his next life and is scorned by all, but eventually sees the consequences of his actions, inspiring him to learn how to respect others and work hard for what he wants. A (hopefully inspiring) story of someone finally pulling themselves up by the bootstraps instead of having the universe itself condescend to them.

Our protagonist

An adult male in his 20s or 30s. Unemployed, uneducated, and unintelligent [Citation needed]. Has no friends, never leaves his room, and spends all his time playing computer games, watching anime, or reading manga. Lonely and desperate for girls, more often than not depicted as a lazy, self-centred objectifying misogynist.

There is a female protagonist alternative (Otome Isekai; being transported to a dating sim and chased by all the guys), but this post will focus primarily on male protagonist works.

Mapping to the desires

Let’s look at common themes in our genre and see how they map to the desires of our typical NEET—our relatable protagonist.

Instant gratification

The most ubiquitous one, also desired by many ordinary people. The “I want it, and I want it now” mentality; getting things we want immediately without having to lift a finger. The difference between the way this manifests in ordinary people and in these depressed individuals is that while the former acknowledges it as nothing but a fantasy, the latter relies on it to live. With parents giving them an allowance, food, water, and shelter throughout their adult life without having to work for anything, it’s not difficult to see how they’ve developed such a mindset. Unfortunately, parents can only do so much, and there remains much for them to desire, hence drawing them towards fantasy. After all, life is more than just lying around and breathing—that role’s already taken by cats.

So what do people desire? Let’s start by taking some inspiration from the famous Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

Though the exact order has been contested, we’re not interested in the order, so let’s assume it’s arbitrary in our case.

Starting from the physiological, we have what our aforementioned parents provide such as food, clothing, water, and shelter, so that’s settled.

Next up, we have personal safety—perhaps staying shut in their room is a way for them to feel safe from all the bullies, but their financial security remains lacking (their parents will die one day), and depression directly affects emotional security, so we’ve already found our first section of exploitable weakne—I mean unmet needs.

Then we have belonging and love. This is a big one. From an evolutionary perspective, finding a partner and reproducing is literally the goal in life, and it makes sense that we’re naturally so obsessed with it. In addition, a sense of belonging to a group is a powerful feeling. Historically, individuals acting on their own fared much worse than groups of people acting together; those with this desperate sense of wanting to belong ended up surviving and reproducing far better than scattered individuals, eventually completely dominating the population. But, this post isn’t about our evolutionary history, so let’s move on. In short, it’s viscerally unpleasant to be an outcast and have nowhere to belong; people need to belong and be loved.

But where does an unemployed adult in his mid-20s to 30s who does nothing but play games and watch anime belong in society? And where does someone who rarely if ever leaves his room meet potential romantic partners? To put it bluntly: nowhere. And they’re overwhelmed by loneliness, and nobody knows why (it’s really hard not to be sarcastic here, even though I know depression is so much more than “just snap out of it”).

Quoting Wikipedia for the esteem section (emphasis mine):

Remember the words in bold; our target audience is missing all of these. Though often thought of as the result of bullying, it can also be the result of being an outcast for any other reason, and I can’t assume being an unemployed shut-in who hasn’t accomplished anything in the last 30 years helps. We’ll end the pyramid here as the rest are much less integral to our day-to-day life.

What is integral is how the following needs will be fulfilled by means of instant gratification: our protagonists automatically get everything they need in the other world, no questions asked.

Computer games

For people who spend most of their life playing computer games, familiar elements such as announcer voices, stat screens, crafting, experience, and other common features of MMORPG games are a fantastic way to relate to them. Some say that it began with the popularity of Sword Art Online, but it may also have been the other way around: Sword Art Online was popular precisely because it was based on computer games. These elements also happen to be incredibly convenient for fulfilling our purposes of instant gratification (specifically knowledge and power, which we’ll explore later). Two birds with one stone.

Safety

Let’s begin with safety, in our case primarily financial and emotional security. But before that, let’s change our perspective a bit. We’re not going to be the NEET, we’re going to be an employee at a company trying to exploit their weaknesses and get their—I mean their parents’—money. Also, unless we want our protagonist to stay safely locked up in a box even in their fantasy world, we’re going to have to address personal security too.

So, let’s write a story for them that addresses personal, financial, and emotional security. Let’s get started. We can solve the financial security easily by having the protagonist be born into a wealthy family, or we can make it easy for him to become rich. For example, if he is incomparably strong, knowledgeable, or even both, he can easily accomplish things everyone else in the world struggles with and exploit this economical imbalance to acquire precious goods and amass unimaginable wealth overnight. As for emotional security, let’s make everyone he meets fall for him at first sight, showering him with nothing but praise throughout his life because our audience won’t notice how patronising this is.

Methods include being given unique, special powers from the start, retaining knowledge from their previous, more technologically advanced civilisation, and being born with the same cognitive capacity as an adult (keeping their memories), receiving lots of undeserved praise as a result. More elaborate examples include omniscient voiceovers that spoon-feed information about the world, as well as the UI, stats, and various other forms of omniscience mentioned in the previous section. The protagonist learns new skills not by, well, learning them, but by pressing a button on an imaginary screen or even more lazily: just thinking about it. It’s like Neo learning kung fu in The Matrix, but far more dull and unimaginative.

For people who want everything without lifting a finger and putting in any effort, this is perfectly appealing (for the rest, it’s appalling). Why spend all that effort learning something when you can just… know it? It would be interesting to have a character who’s amused by this ability at first but quickly tires of it and decides to put in his own effort into actually learning things, appreciating the journey as its own reward and setting the stage for other inspirational stories. But, I’d rather browse Facebook and that sounds like a hell of a lot of actual work I’d rather not do.

Love

Moving on, let’s try and fulfil the need for love.

Our protagonist meets a girl for the first time, and she’s already the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen (the only girl he’s ever seen, really). How should we approach this? Well, if we’re trying to appeal to lonely, desperate men in their mid-20s, we can’t just present them with a realistic story and portrayal of women as, well, human beings with real thoughts and feelings who deserve to be treated with the same respect as everyone else. So, let’s just have every girl fall in love with him at first sight while I go back to watching this really funny video of someone falling over on TikTok.

Also, our data[Citation needed] says that pornography is quite popular among lonely, desperate men in their mid-20s. How can we take advantage of that? We can start by giving our characters exaggerated proportions and dressing them in sexually provocative clothing. It makes sense because the story is set in a medieval era rife with violence, sharp weapons, and muddy roads, so clothing that exposes the most skin is the only practical choice… Not really, but our target audience loves it so it doesn’t really matter if she gets stabbed or scratched. Perhaps it might matter if her skin gets covered in rashes, infections, scratches, and cuts, but we can just not draw those extra details; it’s more work anyway.

We can double down on it by adding a relatable inner voice: what kinds of thoughts would our protagonist—our main audience—have? Well, what kinds of thoughts would someone whose fantasies involve sexually assaulting a girl five seconds after meeting her? I… don’t really want to imagine it. Regardless, assault implies that the girl doesn’t like our protagonist, and we did say we’d have every girl throw themselves at him so maybe he doesn’t always have to start first.

In other words, it can’t be assault if she rubs her breasts on him first (sexual assault only goes one way so it’s perfectly fine; it’s part of the whole equality thing, you have to understand.)

In order to encourage our protagonist’s quickly objectifying, selfish, and disrespectful behaviour that’s borderline illegal in real life, we can also have everyone else in the story go along with it as if it were not only inoffensive but desirable.

As we’ve seen from Maslow’s hierarchy, esteem has to be grounded in some kind of capacity, so we have to invent a basis for girls to think our protagonist is attractive. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to be something that’s recognised as positive and that they can achieve. Kindness and heroism come to mind as one of the easiest traits to fulfil.

Our protagonist finds a pretty slave being abused by her master (basically the analogue of bullies in real life), defeats the big bad bully and frees her, who immediately falls in love with him. Or, we can have our protagonist save people using his unparalleled god-given abilities and have all the girls in awe of him, talking about how they’ve never seen someone as benevolent, kind, heroic, generous, and every other positive adjective as him.

To exaggerate this effect, let’s set the bar extremely low and have everyone else in the world act as disrespecting, violent, and arrogant bandits, so all the main character has to do to put himself above everyone else is… literally nothing. And all the girls fall for him as a result because they’ve “never seen anyone as nice as him”. Perfect for our NEETs who do literally nothing all day. It may seem hard to convince our audience that we’re not just patronising them at this point, but we have another trick up our sleeves—their feelings of injustice: the belief that the world has done them wrong; not the other way around. Painting everyone else negatively fits their narrative of the world, and people believe what they want to believe.

On a semi-related note, perhaps the real reason these stories are often set in the Romantic Medieval era is not because of the magic and fantasy theme but the misogyny and social inequality. A disturbing theme also has other characters happily enslaved by the protagonist as a form of unconditional loyalty and love using unbreakable magic. Slavery is a very convenient (and lazy) premise when it comes to finding damsels in distress.

Also, we said that every girl he ever meets would throw themselves at him. Does that mean he has to choose one? It’s natural for males to favour having multiple mates, and our best bet of keeping our audience hooked is fulfilling all their desires, so why not have him choose all of them?

In conclusion, this character really isn’t going to be relatable to anybody outside of this particular demographic, but it really doesn’t matter because no other population group has this much free time coupled with reckless spending habits (he’s not spending his own money after all). Our protagonist is a vulgar, shallow character who views women as walking sex toys, yet every girl he meets all but throws themselves at him. Unbelievable. This is going to make a ton of money and the bosses will be pleased.

Esteem

I’ll be a good person as long as it’s easy.

Taking the keywords from earlier, esteem is built upon: status, recognition, fame, prestige, attention, strength, competence, mastery, self-confidence, independence, and freedom. In addition, esteem also has to be built on real capacity and achievement. We can quickly get that out of the way by cranking up his powers so high it would be inane to question them and have his achievements leave everyone perpetually stunned. Nuances begone.

To start with status, recognition, fame, prestige, and attention, we can have the protagonist defeat a monster to save a village, or accomplish a task deemed impossible by a famous public figure. Our protagonist is showered with praise and anyone who hears his name has nothing but admiration for him. Of course, from time to time we’ll also present arrogant bullies who think they stand a chance against him before being knocked out of the park, literally. For people who have been bitterly holding a grudge against bullies their whole life, this is particularly satisfying to them.

Next, we give them the power of omniscience using magical voices in their head or convenient floating screens that tell them everything they need to know about the world instead of having to discover the knowledge by themselves via the unfamiliar process of learning.

While we’re at omniscience, why not take it a step further and turn it into omnipotence so we can strike off competence, mastery, and independence? Let’s give our character the ability to get and master any skill just by thinking about it, or alternatively receive them from enemies that basically keel over with no effort while also levelling up from doing almost nothing and raking in tons of “skill points”, like one of those Roblox “simulator” games (made for kids) where you get to level 1 million after defeating literally two enemies. Of course, our main character wouldn’t feel special if everyone were as powerful as him, so let’s make everyone else have to work at least a million times as hard to achieve the same result.

As an aside, I’m now wondering if these people are also bad at computer games despite spending so much time on them as I can’t imagine anyone who’s even remotely good at computer games being less than impressed by such a lazily-designed game. That said, if our main audience had the concentration and humility to learn games properly before skipping the tutorial and throwing themselves headfirst into it before crying “stupid game” and uninstalling, they wouldn’t be where they are right now, impressed by ludicrously bad game design.

Moving on, we have freedom and self-confidence. Freedom is easy to obtain in our medieval setting since we can just kill anyone we don’t like. Of course, this doesn’t fit the narrative of the whole “hero” fantasy, but as long as we dehumanise our enemies by depicting them as ugly monsters, nobody will question the morality of our character’s actions. Self-confidence is ostensibly more difficult to address since it’s hard to imagine NEETs being able to empathise with actual confidence, but confidence is difficult to differentiate from stupidity, the latter being far easier to write about.

With actual confidence, we’d have to portray the character putting effort into carefully planning and preparing in order to receive his sense of confidence, but with stupidity, we can simply go: “the character recklessly charges into battles with a confident expression and wins every time because of some bullshit that I definitely did not just make up”. Also, the heretical idea of putting deliberate effort into something wouldn’t be very relatable to a target audience who can’t even get off their arse anyway, so there’s no reason to not go with the more relatable latter (depression impairs cognitive function in the vast majority of people and makes them stupid).

Death and suicide

One of the most common types of Isekai involves reincarnation (tensei). To put it simply, the relatable NEET protagonist dies before being reborn into our fantasy world. NEETs are often if not always depressed and suicidal, so to frame dying as having positive consequences such as being transported to a magical world that fulfils every desire instead of actually dying conveniently doubles down on that suicidal fantasy—dying becomes even more desirable: “Don’t worry about your suicidal thoughts, you’re on the right track”.

If depression were the push towards suicide, this would be the pull. Depression is a living hell, and just like scratching an itch to temporarily ease the discomfort, many of them hurt themselves in order to shut down their mental suffering for a while. But why stop there? Everyone tells them they’re worthless, and they have no esteem that’s “soundly based on real capacity or achievement” because they feel down all the time and have achieved nothing with their lives to tell them they’re anything but worthless. Whenever you tell a depressed person they’re an idiot, even if they openly disagree with you because their pride gets in the way, just know that deep down, they already know.

Nobody likes to be depressed; nobody likes to accomplish nothing with their lives, but it’s hard to escape the clutches of depression. From their perspective, everyone else seems to be living an easy life just doing things one after another while even getting out of bed in the morning (or at all) is such a difficult challenge it drains all their energy for the day. It’s like everyone else just grabs the ladder and begins climbing while they’re struggling to even reach the first rung. No matter how hard they try, it’s as if gravity is heavier where they’re standing and they can barely manage a hop off the ground.

No wonder it’s so enticing when we flip the entire narrative around and put them in a world where everything is easy for them, but difficult for everyone else.

Fantasies like these, along with computer games, help them feel more powerful and in control, providing them with temporary relief from the torment of depression. Games like MMORPGs reward people not for skill (which requires concentration and discipline), but for how long they play, and time is perhaps the only thing they have too much of. It’s easy for them to grind levels and items to improve their overall strength, which helps them escape their powerless reality into a world where they can finally be somebody.

But escapism of this kind is unhealthy, and one day, they’ll have to face a reality they’re completely unprepared for. Well… not really. For many, their plan is to just kill themselves if they run out of money or get kicked out of the house. How’s that for a strategy? That way, they never have to actually live in this terrible reality; their life ends along with their fantasy.

It’s tragic, but talking to these people and wondering how they even got there in the first place is mostly a challenge of resisting the urge to give up and accusing them of doing it to themselves or saying they deserve it for having such a detestable personality.

Only the most patient and understanding people should be allowed to be therapists; I’ve met and heard about far too many who can’t stay focused throughout sessions and start behaving unprofessionally, some even only mere minutes into one. I understand that it’s a stressful job, but if they are like me and can’t stand these people, then they really shouldn’t be working in this profession.

I know that some people appear to be beyond hope, but we can’t know until we try. Ultimately, this job is about saving lives—both in the abstract and physical sense of the word, and it comes with immense responsibility. Just like how surgeons who lose their cool shouldn’t be in the OR, therapists who lose their cool shouldn’t be in the therapy room.

You may be wondering why I want these people to be helped despite already making my distaste for them unquestionably obvious, and it’s because I don’t think it’s fair to judge someone while they’re sick. I believe that people should be in a healthy state before we judge them, and these people aren’t. You wouldn’t judge someone’s ability to run while they’re down with a cold, so why would you judge someone’s ability to think while depression is tearing their mind to shreds?

The desire to help is easy on paper, at least. The hardest challenge really is maintaining that compassion and empathy while speaking to these self-centred, lazy mor— …I lost my cool again.

Counterpoints

The whole point of fantasy is experiencing things that don’t happen in reality

That’s true, but a fantasy story that nobody can understand let alone relate to is not a very interesting story. A bit like abstract art. Perhaps it can be appreciated for its beautiful elements, but every interpretation will be subjective as people try to invent patterns from random splashes of paint.

Stories are meant for people to read, and more importantly for people to understand. There have to be parallels with the real world in order for us to relate to the characters and feel what they feel.

What I’m asking for is not for these stories to be realistic, but rather for them to be more relatable to people outside of this particular demographic. The fantasy genre itself has so much potential: we can use fictional ideas like magic, reincarnation, and mythical creatures. Yet, what all these production studios seem to want to do is appeal to this particularly unrelatable demographic with very uninspiring desires. It’s frustrating thinking about how all these resources could have been channelled towards better stories instead.

To elaborate on something that was perhaps glossed over too quickly in the section on love: people do not act even remotely like those in pornography. Even ignoring the notions of realism and respect, it’s unconvincing, uninspired, and lazy writing. It’s as patronising as having someone buy a shitty mixtape that’s just singing praises every five seconds on loop. Put in some damned effort. Don’t just go: “People watch pornography”; “It must be because of the plot”; “Let’s copy the plot”. Yes… it’s the plot, isn’t it?

Texas sharpshooter fallacy

A form of cherry-picking, accusing me of only choosing the traits that suit my narrative while ignoring the fact that the rest of it does indeed appeal to everyone else and is perfectly normal. The story goes like this: A shooter fires randomly at the side of a barn, then goes to the spot with the most bullet holes and draws a bullseye around them, ignoring the rest of the data.

The protagonist is rewarded for socially-inappropriate and selfish behaviour, other characters seem to enjoy being treated as less than human, and everyone loves him at first sight. It’s… difficult, to make the argument that a character like this is pleasant to relate to unless you were from that target demographic, in which case it suddenly makes sense.

I may have drawn a bullseye around our metaphorical cluster of bullet holes, but there are hardly any bullet holes anywhere else on the side of this metaphorical barn. It’s quite safe to say that this spot was indeed where the shooter was aiming, even if we can’t quite know what’s going on inside the minds of these companies.

The reverse no true Scotsman fallacy

Maybe you think I’m not qualified to talk about this because I haven’t watched enough anime to really know the genre. Well, judge for yourself.

You’ll notice a lot of Isekai in them, and that’s because the inspiration for this post actually came from a discussion last year when one of us wondered if the majority of anime/manga was about NEETs. What we found instead was out of the total 55 unique new releases from two major sites (ComicWalker and Syosetu), only one featured a NEET protagonist (keep in mind this was a casual discussion and not intended to be a scientific analysis).

But new releases don’t indicate popularity. So, we looked at the top 10 on MAL (MyAnimeList) primarily used by those outside of Japan and found that 4/10 of them featured a NEET protagonist. This suggests it’s more popular among audiences than writers, but it’s still not the majority.

However, that wasn’t the most interesting finding. While going through the lists and categorising these works, we found a different, disturbing theme. One of our other categories was defined as:

24/55 new releases found themselves in this category, as well as 5/10 from the Top 10 MAL rankings. I wonder who finds these most appealing…

It’s not just NEETs

Not really a criticism, but worth pointing out. NEETs aren’t the only people who are lonely, depressed, and looking for an escape. People can feel lonely even when surrounded by others, especially if they have no common ground. There’s also another related population in Japan called Freeters who either can’t or won’t find full-time jobs. Not technically NEET, but many share similar desires, especially those who are forced into this life because they have no other choice. Overworked, lonely adults may also share similar desires, and with their lack of time for social life, it’s not difficult to imagine them behaving completely inappropriately in front of potential romantic partners.

This is just pseudoscientific bullshit

The oversimplification I use and sense of certainty I sometimes imply despite the fact the science at this stage still isn’t fully mature and hasn’t made any indisputable conclusions can be viewed as pseudoscientific, but elaborating on each and every point every time is impossible, and nuances have to be sacrificed for the sake of brevity. This is also why compact soundbites on social media or suggested paragraphs from Google are hardly replacements for actual reading. As the comments section of YouTube often suggests: Read more.

Valid points, however, involve directly criticising the validity of the science itself or how I’ve incorrectly extrapolated or interpreted the information. For example, if I say that men are more promiscuous than women because of game theory and use a quality/quantity strategy to describe it, one could point out (with data) that perhaps men are not more promiscuous than women, or perhaps game theory has little to do with it and it’s really something else, or that using quality/quantity is actually a very inaccurate way of describing what’s actually happening, or even all of them at once. That said, “I disagree.” hardly constitutes an objection, no matter how angrily it is shouted.

Nobody’s forcing you to watch anime

One can like something while still criticising it; it’s not always a dichotomy. There have been many examples of well-written stories over the years such as Violet Evergarden proving the potential of anime as a storytelling medium. Anime has more potential with stories that ordinary people can relate to.

Closing

To those who think this post was too cynical and that I should just accept anime as it is because “it’s always been like that”, the answer is: maybe the anime you watch is always like that, but you’ll be surprised how much of anime as a whole isn’t all about pandering to NEETs.

The point of this post was to try and look at things from a different perspective instead of happily accepting it as is. Sure, it reads like a conspiracy at times (and there’s a small chance it might be), but reality is often far less dramatic and what we have is likely the simple result of lazy, uninspired writing. It’s like accusing the Marvel Cinematic Universe of being part of a conspiracy against science when what we really have are just writers who don’t really understand physics; competent sabotage is hard to differentiate from incompetence—is that person intentionally trying to ruin everything or is he just an idiot?

If you need advice on anger management after reading this post, please click here. Alternatively, you can click here for how to find a therapist if you’re struggling with depression.

Thanks for reading.