It finally clicked for me. Hollywood gets ahold of a popular franchise like The Witcher and seemingly uses it as a medium to educate rather than entertain. They try to flip the script and push a message, often straying far from the source material.
Anime, on the other hand, usually has the manga releasing weekly or monthly. The fanbase is essentially “voting with their wallet” on which series they want to see adapted. When a studio picks it up, they just adapt it pretty faithfully. You get exactly what you paid for—the story you already love, just animated. It’s refreshing to watch a medium where the priority is giving the people what they actually want.
No, not at all. All art has a message or belief (usually progressive, at that), anime is created in a conservative hellscape and so usually simply has ideas you already internalized and take for granted (freedom from oppressive systems, equality, etc etc). I won’t make assumptions about you, but many idiots and tourists often also just ignore the message of Japanese works and claim it’s ‘apolitical’ or whatever fake standard they pretend to have.
The reason eastern media tends to be better is because it usually has less fingers in the pie. Most of the best anime, manga, and even games can ultimately be attributed to a single person’s vision, either because they had a hand in every production based on their creation or because the studies stayed true to their vision as a rule. That isn’t the case with Western entertainment, Spider-Man has been recycled through dozens of different authors with even more interpretations, it is not the vision of any single person anymore. Not to mention design by committee nonsense that makes up the biggest names in Western media
I really do think Western media is more likely to hit you over the head with it’s message than Japanese media though.
That’s just not true.
P4 was so painfully obvious about it’s messages of tolerance and feminism that some people thought it was even more progressive than it was intended to be (making naoto out to be trans instead of the message it intended: acceptance of women in all areas of life). Wonder Egg literally had someone fight a physical manifestation of transphobia that was threatening to ‘cut it off’ when talking to a trans girl just to make it so obvious it’s impossible for those stupid people i mentioned before to ignore it. Killing slimes for 300 years is entirely based off of being anti-work culture. I haven’t watched One piece but it’s apparently obvious in it’s message against authoritarianism, just to point out a big one. Anti-homophobia messages tend to be said out right in long running shows or yuri/yaoi shows. Nothing gets more brow beat-y and obvious than anti-war and anti-violence stories in eastern media.