A Childish Medium to Explore an Adult's World

I’m a sucker for a good character. Doesn’t matter the genre, the medium, or the story, anything from cartoons and kid’s shows, to comedies and romances, to Oscar winning movies and epic HBO fantasies, if it’s got the skill to explore complex characters with deep backgrounds and believable motives, then I’m intrigued. However, I have found one genre in particular to not be shy about toeing lines, pushing boundaries and exploring difficult and sensitive topics in unique and often heart-wrenching ways: Anime.

Many people here the word anime and they think cartoons, something silly, childish, often episodic, with little to no over arching plotline. Maybe they do think of adult cartoons, those late-night favorites like the Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, Archer and many more, but even those don’t quite encompass what anime is and what it is capable of being.

Anime refers to animated series that often originate from Japan, Korea or China. That’s it. Anime can be any genre, from fantasy to historical, comedy to serious and philosophical, and they can be geared toward any age group, from young children just learning to read to adults looking for some hardcore X-rated material. Anime tends to be serialized, with multiple episodes and many of them have overarching plots, often following a story that was originally published in weekly magazines as manga (manga is to comics and anime is to cartoons). But some anime are one-shots, existing as one movie, or a single short story. Others follow the more cartoon-like episodic format, with each episode self-contained with little to no relation to the other episodes. But wherever an anime series falls in the broad spectrum of possibilities for anime, they all offer a chance to explore their stories within a different medium than most people are used to, and utilize their own unique tricks and techniques to draw and audience in and convey its story to them.

I personally love watching anime, for the very fact that it can cover such a broad scope of topics, viewpoints, and audiences. And because anime covers such diverse possibilities, it’s ripe for finding guilty pleasures to binge watch. Here are just a few of mine.

Monster Musume – A Hentai with Soul

In short, hentai is anime porn. It’s known for having shallow plots, stereotypical characters, and lots of sex that often takes liberties with physical realism. A common subgenre of hentai is the harem genre, which is exactly what it says, one male main character, and lots of female love (or sex) interests. Monster Musume falls squarely in the middle of this genre, also falling into the fantasy genre with the girls being half-monsters from an alternate world, who have come to the human world as ambassadors, hence the reason for them needing a host family, AKA the main character.

It’s as cringy as most hentai usually is. It’s sexually explicit, often trivializes or objectifies the girls, and uses common female stereotypes that aren’t exactly flattering to women, and certainly aren’t empowering. But at the same time, the anime gives you glimpses into the girls’ histories, their reasons for being there as ambassadors, their motives for so relentlessly pursuing a relationship with the main character, and the complexities of their personalities underlying their outward appearances. They aren’t just sex objects, the anime let’s them be fully formed people, and delves into exploring deeper topics of social rejection and isolation, the weight and burden of carrying a family legacy, and personal insecurities.

Junjou Romantica – Boy on Boy Porn for Women

Where guys like to fantasize about girls on girls with lots of physical sex, girls like to do the same with boys on boys with lots of emotional drama. Enter Junjou Romantica (AKA Pure Romance). Junjou Romantica is a manga and anime series that falls into the yaoi category, also known as boy’s love. Yaoi stories feature gay romances, often written by women, for women to read. Accordingly, they focus heavily on the emotional backstories of the characters, the interpersonal dramas of their lives and the struggles and challenges they must overcome.

Junjou Romantica follows three different couples, one couple with a rich writer and a poor college student, another with one man emotionally distant and closed off and the other overly emotional and very needy, and the final couple being an older professor and a barely legal student. The show is bingeable for its unique characters that play off each other with a balanced mix of seriousness and humor. It’s cringy because of the whole “written by women” part of the yaoi genre. Because of that, it’s often not the most realistic when it comes to the physical aspect of the relationships, and can even come across as offensive to the LGBT+ community.

Beastars – How much fur makes a furry?

Beastars is the Zootopia for adults you didn’t know you wanted. It’s a fantasy-themed slice-of-life and romance where all the characters are anthropomorphic animals. The cringe? Most people can’t get past the furriness of the characters, especially as the show draws you in and makes you start rooting for the two main characters to hook up and get down to some sexy times. Does wanting to see two anthropomorphic animals get hot and heavy make you a furry? I don’t think so. Especially because with Beastars, the animal natures of the characters are often treated more as symbolic representations of things like race, sex, gender and other cultural stereotypes. The anime takes full advantage of this, exploring the darker sides of human biases, such as racism and sexism, as well as things like cultural taboos against casual sex. The fact that the characters are all animals put a little bit of distance between them and the viewer, allowing the anime to convey a powerful message without feeling as in-your-face about it as it might have with a fully human cast of characters.

No Game, No Life – Where to start?

No Game, No Life follows two siblings, brother and sister, dragged into an alternate world by a game-loving god. The cringe is everywhere. The co-dependent, barely-not-sexual relationship between the siblings, the self-centered egoism of both of them that somehow doesn’t make them unlikable, their unrealistic intelligence and ability to use it to nearly predict the future… I could go on. So where’s the binge-ability? All of those things as well, because somehow the show makes them work while also exploring the idea of being so misfit in society that you feel more at home when thrown into a completely different world.

Hetalia – Historical? Maybe. Satirical? Definitely.

Hetalia is a series of short episodes featuring adorably cute characters as representations of different countries. The plot is a series of political and historical allegories and satirical commentaries, often to the criticism of many about the offensiveness of the stereotypes embodied by representing an entire country in one character. However, satire thrives at throwing punches at everyone, and it’s that relentlessness in pursuit of humor that makes Hetalia so very bingeable. And with six seasons, there’s plenty to binge.

My Hero Academia – Superheroes, Meet Classism.

My Hero Academia explores a world where being born with a flashy and useful superpower sets you up for a luxury life, being cursed with an undesirable power can lead you down the path of villainy, and being born powerless leaves you literally powerless and living a lower class life. The story is written for young teens, and keeps itself very PG most of the time, but woven throughout the anime are threads of heavier topics. The idea of fighting against the odds of your birth, overcoming challenges, and what it means for whole groups of people to be unequal in status or power and all the ramifications that echo throughout society because of it. The anime’s somewhat naïve ideas of being able to overcome anything by just working hard enough can be somewhat cringy, especially in contrast to the current epidemic of burnout running rampant through the millennial generation, but overall, the series is a heartfelt coming of age story told in a world where superpowers create as many villains as they do heroes, and can easily captivate viewers into a long binge session.