Oof…

There is enough good anime out there that I don’t foresee slop like this gaining much popularity outside the very dedicated niche that it speaks to.

That stands in contrast to a historical example like Birth of a Nation, which was actually a bit of a technical marvel when it was made. It was listed on the AFI list despite the extremely problematic content because of the technical contributions to filmmaking at the time.

Years ago, I was working at an art gallery, and we had one customer who would come in every few weeks with the latest vaguely renaissance-looking oil painting he’d found at a yard sale and spend an hour or two tediously pointing out and explaining the artfully hidden brush strokes or initials or subject matter or shapes in the clouds or what-have-you that proved that it was actually a Rembrandt.

I had forgotten all about him until just now, when this essay very forcefully reminded me.

And on another note, it also managed to Streisand the Galverse. I didn’t even know there was such a thing until just now, but now I’m going to go track it down.

I didn’t even make it all the way through the first paragraph and that’s time reading an article I wish I could have back. I don’t like NFTs or crypto either, but I don’t make hating it my entire personality. Sheesh.

TLDR - shitty NFT funded anime full of nazi and antisemitic dogwhistles

Jesus Christ that person is insufferable.

Normally I’m pretty open to the idea that something has dogwhistles. I saw someone post about your blog negatively and was ready to side with you over it, but looking at your actual blogpost, I feel like you’re just seeing what you want to see.

To be fair, I’ll agree with you on the black-coded villain - that sort of villain design that evokes black people is a staple of the era the anime is trying to emulate and carrying that racism forward into the modern day is not a good look.

Everything else you point out, though, seems like a huge reach. For example, “children are the future” is a pretty common sentiment, and there’s a reason references to the fourteen words need to stick to a pretty specific sentence structure to be understood as such. Similarly, the idea that a reference to Amaterasu is code for antisemitism because of the connection to historical to race science ignores the many many other cultural connotations Japanese viewers will have about their country’s creation mythology. Would you think the same about a reference in western media to Zeus just because white nationalists always evoke Greek and Roman mythology?

Anime has a lot of problems - racism, sexism, queerphobia, apologia for war crimes, you name it - in the fandoms, in the creative staff, in the works themselves sometimes. But this really isn’t the Nazi-coded anime you seem to think it is.