I think you hit the nail right on the head some people want to pick and choose what discomfort they're feeling today. Some folks will watch Berserk and be like holy shit this is dark but amazing and then they watch Abyss and can't handle the first episode. I'm not a fan of Lolly stuff but at the same time I realized that most people immediately think Loli equals child therefore it's not okay to watch anymore but if you walked around and told them the ages of all their favorite characters they would faint. I agree with you though I think it's weird that some people try to pick and choose what they're uncomfortable with when it's all supposed to be uncomfortable that's the point it's all bad and horrible it's bleak it's dark. Of course they're going to topics that's hard to talk about that's the point.
What I think a lot of people kind of missed with Made in Abyss initially is that, if you look at the kind of art and fiction it's most similar to outside of mainstream anime and manga, it's not uniquely off-putting or perverse, but fits into a lineage of transgressive, often Capital-S Surreal speculative fiction and horror which tends to go some really uncomfortable places not so much to titillate or to shock as to prod directly at the reader's subconscious and get them to feel things that put them a little off-balance from their everyday lives. Specifically, the premise immediately reminded me of Angela Carter's infamous short story "Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest", and aspects of the second season have me constantly reaching for China Miéville's The Scar and Leena Krohn's Tainaron: Mail from Another City, which I heartily recommend people read if they're into deeply weird, more than a little fucked up fantasy fiction. Now, is the mangaka into some extremely weird shit? Obviously. He's not coy about that. It'd be weirder if he weren't upfront about being a bit of a pervert. But it seems like a pretty shallow reading of the text to suggest that the degree to which a lot of the more discomfiting aspects of Made in Abyss tie directly into the recurring themes of liminality, the malleability and permeability of the mind and the body, all this rich dense stuff, is both entirely unnecessary and purely a matter of the author's esoteric turn-ons. The weirdness is load-bearing. …at some point I will write the very long essay on this series which I've been threatening for the better part of a year now. Maybe I'll make it into a RUclips video. It would be, if nothing else, categorically hilarious to cite Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille in a video essay on a moderately popular anime series where one of the running gags is one of the leads being mortifyingly awkward in the most thirteen-year-old boy way possible.
i do really enjoy Made In Abyss so i was geeked to find out a few weeks ago that i had totally missed Season 2’s release! have never gotten the ick from a show that bad before. after a season and a movie, the show has no issue at all just being freaky and creepy towards all its little children characters. i still enjoyed the season and the story enough, but it made me more uncomfortable than most over shows ive watched.
having watched the video, you seem to have used examples from the first season. the second season has countless examples as follows. there being a toilet in the monster world thats a flower with 3 tongues that riko mentions “how its nice that it’s keeps wiping” as she has diarrhea from earlier. theres a scene where the plot point that happens is, Riko gets her whistle friend (a child from the movie body-horror’s into a whistle) upgraded by a monster into its true form. they get the whistle, thank the monster, the scene is over. the monster then proceeds to say out loud, i guess to himself and by effect the audience, “it was quite sensual moulding that whilstle into its true form. i finished the design, and then climaxed.” LIKE, ACTUALLY VERBATIM. thank you so much for telling me that show, i really needed to know that! i’ll still keep watching the anime, but its like that one tweet where the guy is reading a manifesto on the bus and shaking his head to let everyone around him know he doesnt agree with what hes reading
I'm sorry, but I don't really get a lot of your argument. You go back and forth about it being something inherent to the medium, or just what the medium of animation tends to do in the current landscape. First you talk about how illustrations are inherently dissociative, (even though most children naturally like cartoons and illustrative books, and the main reason they grow out of it is the stigma, and lack of stories for adults because of that stigma) then you you start talking about the genre of fantasy (even though there are tons of animations that aren't fantasy or speculative), and then you start talking about Hidmari sketch , which I haven't seen ,but as I understand it, Is a slice of life show. What about mainstream animation like the Simpsons, family guy and south park? I'm not that familiar with those shows, but I know most people in the US watch them. Do you think the average person sees them as more realistic, or is looking for more realism, than a cute girls show?
The point about people being selected for things they are uncomfortable with is true. For example, you mentioned JJK and how it manages to become mainstream just because it doesn't have sexual content in it. At the same time, some series like "My Dress-Up Darling" also become popular even tho is has the thing the should make people turn away.
1st off totally agree & I love the way u analyze this stuff cus it really puts my thoughts into words & goes where not many go in terms of relation to fictional content like anime. I feel that to a point it's understandable that 1 individual may view 1 thing as "worse" than the other when it comes to more sensitive things but wut really gets to me is how wide spread such a thought process is & how there isn't an admittance at the very least regardless of wut 1 can personally handle that neither can really go over the other objectively cus it's alr gone beyond a certain bar where it's all bout the same from there no matter how much higher either 1 goes. It's odd but for a few reasons I feel the west/america aren't the only places that have this weird thing it's jus seemingly most openly egregious here & it makes me sorta wish anime hadn't gotten so popular here to an extent. Anyways that Arm scene in MiA still gets to me & that's rare. Peak uncomfortability lol
i could honestly give less of a shit if the show i like is popular or mainstream, in fact id rather it wasent because the bigger the audience the more toxic and annoying the community gets, since one piece got more popular the community has gotten way more obnoxious
I loved Made in Abyss season 1. Its uncomfortable parts were a big appeal for me, and I recommended the show to a bunch of people. But somehow the sequel movie with Bondrewd and the manga chapters around that were too dark. I stopped enjoying Made in Abyss and I told people to avoid the movie. I think it has to do with the first season feeling like a grand adventure. I can enjoy the discomfort and I know that either way the adventure will continue soon enough. But for the movie their adventure grinds to a halt as they deal with all this darkness and there was no moment of relief or joy in overcoming it.
Ugh don't get me started. I still don't get why they went so dark with that movie. They struck such a good balance of darkness and happy times in the first season. I wish they could have maintained that.
@@davysnave1903 100% agreed! Have you seen Season 2 of Made in Abyss? I still wanna see it, but do you know if its too dark like the movie? Or a good mix of dark+happy like Season 1?
Your ability to make concise points and orate them in an enticing or otherwise easy to follow way is pretty amazing
I think you hit the nail right on the head some people want to pick and choose what discomfort they're feeling today. Some folks will watch Berserk and be like holy shit this is dark but amazing and then they watch Abyss and can't handle the first episode.
I'm not a fan of Lolly stuff but at the same time I realized that most people immediately think Loli equals child therefore it's not okay to watch anymore but if you walked around and told them the ages of all their favorite characters they would faint.
I agree with you though I think it's weird that some people try to pick and choose what they're uncomfortable with when it's all supposed to be uncomfortable that's the point it's all bad and horrible it's bleak it's dark. Of course they're going to topics that's hard to talk about that's the point.
What I think a lot of people kind of missed with Made in Abyss initially is that, if you look at the kind of art and fiction it's most similar to outside of mainstream anime and manga, it's not uniquely off-putting or perverse, but fits into a lineage of transgressive, often Capital-S Surreal speculative fiction and horror which tends to go some really uncomfortable places not so much to titillate or to shock as to prod directly at the reader's subconscious and get them to feel things that put them a little off-balance from their everyday lives. Specifically, the premise immediately reminded me of Angela Carter's infamous short story "Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest", and aspects of the second season have me constantly reaching for China Miéville's The Scar and Leena Krohn's Tainaron: Mail from Another City, which I heartily recommend people read if they're into deeply weird, more than a little fucked up fantasy fiction. Now, is the mangaka into some extremely weird shit? Obviously. He's not coy about that. It'd be weirder if he weren't upfront about being a bit of a pervert. But it seems like a pretty shallow reading of the text to suggest that the degree to which a lot of the more discomfiting aspects of Made in Abyss tie directly into the recurring themes of liminality, the malleability and permeability of the mind and the body, all this rich dense stuff, is both entirely unnecessary and purely a matter of the author's esoteric turn-ons. The weirdness is load-bearing.
…at some point I will write the very long essay on this series which I've been threatening for the better part of a year now. Maybe I'll make it into a RUclips video. It would be, if nothing else, categorically hilarious to cite Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille in a video essay on a moderately popular anime series where one of the running gags is one of the leads being mortifyingly awkward in the most thirteen-year-old boy way possible.
i do really enjoy Made In Abyss so i was geeked to find out a few weeks ago that i had totally missed Season 2’s release!
have never gotten the ick from a show that bad before. after a season and a movie, the show has no issue at all just being freaky and creepy towards all its little children characters. i still enjoyed the season and the story enough, but it made me more uncomfortable than most over shows ive watched.
having watched the video, you seem to have used examples from the first season. the second season has countless examples as follows.
there being a toilet in the monster world thats a flower with 3 tongues that riko mentions “how its nice that it’s keeps wiping” as she has diarrhea from earlier.
theres a scene where the plot point that happens is, Riko gets her whistle friend (a child from the movie body-horror’s into a whistle) upgraded by a monster into its true form. they get the whistle, thank the monster, the scene is over. the monster then proceeds to say out loud, i guess to himself and by effect the audience, “it was quite sensual moulding that whilstle into its true form. i finished the design, and then climaxed.” LIKE, ACTUALLY VERBATIM. thank you so much for telling me that show, i really needed to know that!
i’ll still keep watching the anime, but its like that one tweet where the guy is reading a manifesto on the bus and shaking his head to let everyone around him know he doesnt agree with what hes reading
I dig Trixie after Twilight.
I'm sorry, but I don't really get a lot of your argument. You go back and forth about it being something inherent to the medium, or just what the medium of animation tends to do in the current landscape. First you talk about how illustrations are inherently dissociative, (even though most children naturally like cartoons and illustrative books, and the main reason they grow out of it is the stigma, and lack of stories for adults because of that stigma) then you you start talking about the genre of fantasy (even though there are tons of animations that aren't fantasy or speculative), and then you start talking about Hidmari sketch , which I haven't seen ,but as I understand it, Is a slice of life show. What about mainstream animation like the Simpsons, family guy and south park? I'm not that familiar with those shows, but I know most people in the US watch them. Do you think the average person sees them as more realistic, or is looking for more realism, than a cute girls show?
The point about people being selected for things they are uncomfortable with is true. For example, you mentioned JJK and how it manages to become mainstream just because it doesn't have sexual content in it. At the same time, some series like "My Dress-Up Darling" also become popular even tho is has the thing the should make people turn away.
1st off totally agree & I love the way u analyze this stuff cus it really puts my thoughts into words & goes where not many go in terms of relation to fictional content like anime. I feel that to a point it's understandable that 1 individual may view 1 thing as "worse" than the other when it comes to more sensitive things but wut really gets to me is how wide spread such a thought process is & how there isn't an admittance at the very least regardless of wut 1 can personally handle that neither can really go over the other objectively cus it's alr gone beyond a certain bar where it's all bout the same from there no matter how much higher either 1 goes. It's odd but for a few reasons I feel the west/america aren't the only places that have this weird thing it's jus seemingly most openly egregious here & it makes me sorta wish anime hadn't gotten so popular here to an extent.
Anyways that Arm scene in MiA still gets to me & that's rare. Peak uncomfortability lol
i could honestly give less of a shit if the show i like is popular or mainstream, in fact id rather it wasent because the bigger the audience the more toxic and annoying the community gets, since one piece got more popular the community has gotten way more obnoxious
my dad's much the same way, so I relate to this dynamic
I loved Made in Abyss season 1. Its uncomfortable parts were a big appeal for me, and I recommended the show to a bunch of people. But somehow the sequel movie with Bondrewd and the manga chapters around that were too dark. I stopped enjoying Made in Abyss and I told people to avoid the movie. I think it has to do with the first season feeling like a grand adventure. I can enjoy the discomfort and I know that either way the adventure will continue soon enough. But for the movie their adventure grinds to a halt as they deal with all this darkness and there was no moment of relief or joy in overcoming it.
Ugh don't get me started. I still don't get why they went so dark with that movie. They struck such a good balance of darkness and happy times in the first season. I wish they could have maintained that.
@@davysnave1903 100% agreed! Have you seen Season 2 of Made in Abyss? I still wanna see it, but do you know if its too dark like the movie? Or a good mix of dark+happy like Season 1?
I'm an Anime fan who didn't like Made in Abyss, I tried it and found it very boring.
don't you mean a pedo fan