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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1582296" data-attributes="member: 5171">Hey, reaper,I have a theory, and it's one I'd like to float by the anime-people -- but I really don't want it to sound like an attack on those people.  I don't think of it as one, but it's kind of awkward to say properly.Something you said struck a chord with me -- the people who say that they appreciate it but don't know enough about Eastern culture to actually do so.So here's the theory: fire away.Some people in the United States have an inherent mental somethingorother that just plain prevents them from getting some elements of the culture in which they were raised.  One guy in my gaming group is like this.  If he were a character, either Wis or Cha would be his dump stat.  He's intelligent, he's even clever, and he is a very nice person, but on some level, he doesn't get human interaction here (and he's a native U.S. person).  He says inappropriate things -- not rude, just not exactly in-line with the conversation.  He doesn't pick up on social cues.Because he doesn't really get American culture -- doesn't like much of its television, thinks most of U.S. movies are stupid because he doesn't appreciate the cultural area in which the movies are working -- he looks for entertainment that lacks the sensibilities of American culture.  He's a big anime fan.My theory is that, as someone with an inherent inability to interact in an American cultural context, he enjoys anime not because it has an emphasis on Eastern cultural values, but because it does not have an emphasis on Western cultural values.  In other words, he likes it because, in his own mind, it's closer to what he is.  He's missing all kinds of Eastern cultural stuff watching anime, just like he misses all kinds of American cultural stuff watching American television, but because it's foreign enough that he wasn't raised with an intellectual recognition of the cultural tropes, he doesn't, on some level, realize that he's missing as much -- he's just happy that the show isn't bothering with that stuff that American audiences insist on all the time, that stuff he doesn't really appreciate.If it sounds horrendously awkward for me to say this, it is -- because in the little pre-marital personality test I had to take, I'm an off-the-charts empath.  I soak in cultural and emotional stuff and get body-language pings all the time (as does my wife -- works well for us sometimes, is a pain other times).  It's difficult for me to understand what it would be like to lack the "social sense" that this guy seems to lack, and I'm wondering if that lack of social sense is what causes him to gravitate to anime -- to get an entertainment source that isn't hitting him over the head with all the cultural stuff he's been raised to think he should understand, which has to be, for him, as frustrating as giving a color-blind guy a book where every third word is written in red on a green background.I'm not trying to suggest that all anime fans are this way.  Some folks obviously enjoy Eastern culture and really get a kick out of it.  Other people like the art.  But I'd be curious to hear if anyone sees an element of accuracy in anything I've said -- or at least tried to say.And lemme say one more time -- I'm really not trying to say that this means that anime people are all maladjusted losers or anything.  That's often the stereotype that non-anime-lovers fling at anime-lovers, and heck, we've all heard enough gamer-geek stereotypes to be tired of those.  The guy in my gaming group is odd, and it's sometimes frustrating for me to have a conversation with him because of the verbal cues he misses (and the apparently inaccurate ones he sends out), but he's also a genuinely nice and decent guy.</blockquote>

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