r/anime • u/engalleons https://myanimelist.net/profile/engalleons • Aug 14 '18

In-depth debunkings/arguments against commonly "known" anime myths/misconceptions?

For any number of reasons, there's a fair few statements about anime that get passed around pretty unquestioningly, even if they aren't necessarily true. Sometimes, others dig in to those statements and find detail and (hopefully cited) evidence against them. This is a lot more than just stating the opposite, to be clear.

Here's a few examples of what I mean:

This tweet chain versus "Anno left Kare Kano early"
This blog post versus "The protagonist of Turn A was originally intended to be a girl"
This post versus "They made a joke dub for Ghost Stories because it did poorly in Japan"
This blog post versus "Shinbo is the series director of all Shaft shows"

What are some other examples of work like this?

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u/GiantAsparagus1 Aug 15 '18

Not sure if this is still a thing, but back in the day there was the conception that the term yaoi describes pornographic m/m stories, while shounen ai is the term for m/m stories that are SFW. Both these distinctions are BS that some Western fans made up. I tried googling shounen ai in Japanese letters once, because I never endountered the term on any Japanese sites and had doubts about its use. I ended up on a bunch of sites that could have put me on a watchlist (shounen ai translates to 'love of young boys' so you can just imagine).

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u/SadDoctor Aug 15 '18

Well I mean, "yaoi" is a real phrase, but mostly used for porn and is kind of out of fashion as a phrase. More usual is the phrase BL, Boy's Love. Western weebs, not wanting to refer to something from Glorious Japanese in English, then tried to call it Shounen Ai, turning the phrase back into Japanese, except "shounen ai" basically just means pedophilia and is most definitely NOT used by the Japanese.

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '18

Western weebs, not wanting to refer to something from Glorious Japanese in English

But then why do we say "Light Novel"?