Anime: Picture For Proof
why is this little cartoon woman telling me to drink breast milk?
Why is so much of right wing twitter anime avatar twitter?
This is a question that has often puzzled us. Anime is well-liked across the political spectrum, but between Pepe and his cousins and buff Greek statues, anime profile pictures are perhaps the strangest thing to associate with the extreme right. Anime (which we will loosely conflate with manga, light novel, tokusatsu, and other such adjacent entertainment) is a mass-market product, usually produced in China or Korea on extremely low budgets, targeting literally every demographic possible within Japan, which happens to have translatable analogs in most markets.
The animation + comic market for Japanese imports is an order of magnitude larger than that for American-produced cartoons. Yearly, relatively low-budget adaptations of Detective Conan gross about 100 million dollars worldwide. Again, yearly. This is in comparison to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, which grossed about 400 million. In the time between releases, Detective Conan will have released 5 movies hitting similar numbers, in addition to a continuous-run anime series and an ongoing manga that has sold 250 million collected volumes, putting it on a par with Charles Schulz’ the Peanuts, outselling Captain America. Captain America. Which has been on sale for 53 more years.
So why is a mass-market product that is built on normie-appeal across Asia, sterile and hyperindustrial and urban home of the “,” anything but repellant for the neoreactionaries and wignats on Twitter?
History Part One: 4chan
Let’s look first at the basic historical narrative of how right wingers and weeaboos came to be a Venn diagram. First, we have 4chan, the wildly popular imageboard, now dominated almost entirely by bots and the secret police of the world, running crude influence campaigns on the easily convinced.
Founded in late 2003 by a man named moot, 4chan swelled in popularity. It spawned many, many different imitators, like 8chan, run by hotwheels, and 420chan, run by kirtaner. There were other, less notable ones, likely even more poorly run or offering significantly more illegal services. 4chan’s claim to differentiation, and its true greatness, lies in anonymity. Anonymity in a social network is a guarantee of performance and meritocracy to a certain extent. Now, in the age of bots and guerilla marketing done by third worlders, anonymity is only a way to guarantee invasion by the more inhuman elements of society.
With anonymity comes a certain anything-goes attitude. Were we all same-faced and sounded alike, like something drawn by Akira Toriyama, we would be socially aggressive, stupid, and even more easily controlled by the secret police. 4chan has rules, but they are enforced by janitors, also known as jannies. They do it for free, and that’s about all you need to know about them, their work ethic, their social position, and the respect they deserve and receive. Twitter has jannies, and while they are paid, they certainly don’t deserve it. China has a jannie-Internet. Janitors are a combination of snitches and hall-monitors. While they do noble things, like removing child pornography, they also form cliqueish politics, coordinate on discord with disruptive elements, and are generally enthusiastic earners of disrespect.
4chan had, for most of its history, been left-libertarian to a large extent. And of course, things changed after the Bush era died and was replaced by the spiritual death of the Obama era. Victory turned to resentment and thence to bitterness, and /pol/, established in 2011, became a bastion of people saying the N word for fun, calling trans people their natal gender, and rooting for ISIS and whatever else you can imagine could be done in the name of their god, shitposting. Anything to piss off the jannies, the only authority they regularly encountered on the Internet.
Enter: the bronzed god from Queens
In 2016, Trump not only ran for president, he won. Of course, Hillary Clinton, as a remarkably unqualified, bloodthirsty, scandal prone, conspiratorial, secretive, and demonstrably insane candidate was broadly favored to win the election. She did not, causing a newly empowered brand of shitposters and saloforum refugees to think: we did this. We called it. We predicted it. We saw the Trump Dragon Energy. We saw the MAGA movement as more than just an orange man shouting. They had found themselves possessed of the gift of Hyperstition, of thought that is made real.
Ever at odds with establishment thinking, since the establishment is many things, but right-wing-authoritarian is not really one of them, they adopted enthusiastically the self-concept of the dissident right. /pol/ and its cousin boards on different imageboards were the fertile ground in which they had planted their seeds. Naturally, being thoroughly mainstream (Democrat) and managerial corporations, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and their parasitic legacy media remoras all began to persecute the racist, loud, and now seemingly quite powerful dissident right. For the experienced poaster, they now saw the jannies of society, armed with the ability to silence mainstream communication. This, certainly, must be persecution, it is an inversion of the natural order. This helped their self-concept quite a bit, now billionaires and their subcon whipping boys in the salt mines of content moderation were extremely sensitive to the raw and unbridled political power of being racist or openly supporting the outré president.
The funny thing about social media is that you’re only banned when you stop going to the site. They can declare you persona non grata an infinite number of times, but it’s trivial to get new phone numbers, emails, and start a new one. The moderation salt mines inspect contents and accounts that are algorithmically fed to them. If you’re careful, if you don’t say the wrong words, tweet too often, insult the wrong public figure, and keep your true identity secret, you can keep a nice presence on Twitter. Bronze Age Pervert does it. Mister Metokur does it. Second City Bureaucrat does it. Hell, even an idiot like Nick Fuentes manages to keep new accounts cropping up on Twitter
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A persona, if you will
Obviously, to keep your identity visible, yet concealed you need a mask. And what better mask than smug anime face? It at once puts you in a crowd of normies and dweebs to The Algorithm, disguises your true identity, and has the added bonus of being something ironic, for losers, since this is a crowd that trades in ironic as much as sincere trolling.
But that’s just a narrative of how they got to a certain point. Memes are used amongst an often-censored crowd to obscure both their identities and intentions. Anime is just a culturally ubiquitous vector, and one with some historical association to them and their childhoods, since many of them are millennials. Some other thing used include memes of famous racists like Mel Gibson and Michael Richards, Roman marble statues, European male models, apes, bears, lions, other various charismatic animals, Golden Age bodybuilders; all of this contributes heavily to the macho aesthetic of the weird and wild right online.
So, why anime
Anime is extremely popular! It is the most normie shit you could imagine. Detective Conan is a comparable media franchise to The Peanuts, or Spider-Man. Dragonball is arguably bigger—in Asia it certainly is. One Piece will outsell Superman before its run ends. Next stop, the Quran! Incels like anime, since it is often perverted, and shonen anime, thanks to some half-assed attempt to live up to the letter but not the spirit of the law, is very perverted, but takes place in a perfectly sexless universe. Many anime focusing on the psychological journey of young men take place in a world where fucking is just an ontological impossibility. Ask Shinji Ikari, that poor bastard. Or Mister Metokur, whose profile picture is Shinji.
Beyond the natural affinity between shonen and harem animes with the incel crowd, what about the affinity between the form of anime and the demand for a suitable mask for public discourse for particular elements of the right? If you aren’t affecting machismo or primitivism, anime is your way to go. Wat means?
Japan isn’t pozzed
Anime is nationalist in character and nature, right down to using Chinese and/or Korean grunt work that they pay in peanuts. It is a distinctively Japanese thing. You can spot the difference between a Japanese product and a Chinese one—look at the differences between manhua and manga. Do Koreans even draw for themselves? I couldn’t tell you, to be honest. Avatar: The Last Airbender walks and quacks like a duck but it doesn’t look like one.
Japan is patriarchal, putatively a low-crime and highly xenophobic society. Japan is run for the most part for the benefit of Japanese people. Immigration to Japan is well below its Western peers, and while their birth rates are low, politicians are at least telling people to have sex. Their history is their history, and they do not disavow their past, which causes consternation amongst Westerners, who perform guilt and shame exquisitely for crimes real, imagined, and which they had little part of except by accident of birth. Japan’s time under fascism is, in many ways, a sensitive topic, but not one that is as ardently denied as Germany’s. In fact, Japan obstinately refuses to do anything but honor its war dead, and critically did not undergo the same kind of antifascist political reconstruction that Germany did. It was and remains a one-party, right wing, corporatist state with an emperor, albeit with liberal methods of power transmission.
Japan is accessible, and loyal
Japan may not be pozzed, it may not have kowtowed to the extent expected of it by the liberals in the west, the baizuo as the Chinese Communists are fond of calling them, but it is nevertheless a subject state. Its Self Defense Force is likely capable of resisting an armed invasion, depending on the brutality and ferocity of the enemy. Given the history of warfare in Asia and the deep, mutual ethnic contempt famous in the continent, it would likely not be a grinding, civilian-sparing war-effort as the ‘brother-war’ in Ukraine currently.
It was disarmed, defanged, and while not fully reformed politically, it certainly is no longer a militaristic state. It has been nearly 100 years since the adoption of its pacifist constitution, and the leading man seeking to reform the constitution to allow for an army has been assassinated by a zipgun in broad daylight. Japan is what it is because it is a subject nation to the United States. Its security is vouchsafed by the US Navy. Its economy is guaranteed in dollars. The yen is backed by the credit of the United States, ultimately. Japan has no rivalrous relationship with the United States currently. Much like the EU, it is a safe space of difference, incapable and unwilling to challenge its master, and extremely happy to bark at the United States’ foes. Its financial might and technical acumen form a part of the United States’ non-military armed forces.
This seemingly permanent beachhead in the northern Pacific is a tremendous irritant to both North Korea and China, who have for reasons of accuracy and expediency, portrayed the Japanese as shameless war criminals who also have achieved an economic miracle which must be learned from. This duality is an irritant in the mind of many a nationalist.
Its culture, then, is differentiated from other Asian cultures by its loyalty, development, and a mutual fascination with the west. Its value lies not just in its exotic nature and fascist-imperialist past, but also in its accessibility and friendship with Americans.
Handholds
Japan, in short, has handholds for the right wing imagination, a way to reconcile the apparent inescapability of managerial society with their political preferences for patriarchal society and ‘owning the libs.’ It has the added advantage of its popularity being a perennial though subliminal humiliation to China, the Current Enemy and exemplar of what is wrong in the world.
So, why not city pop album covers, or actors, or films, or video games? Why latch on to anime of all things? No one can watch moe anime and come away feeling like they’re part of a right wing movement without significant prior indoctrination. Fist of the North Star, sure, Gundam, definitely, Gundam is a fascist anime if there ever was one.
Hyperniche production
The anime industry is ruthless. Hypermanagerial, exceedingly market-focused. What’s cute sells—so there’s a lot of cute shit. What’s buff, or feminine, or perverted, they also sell. There’s a shitload of that too. Ironically it is the incredible diversity of expression and distinctiveness, quite apart from the general stylistic uniformity of animation in the West, the famous ‘calarts style’ that has consumed popular entertainment for children. This isn’t to say that anime doesn’t look the same, but it only looks the same locally.
The otherness of Japan is a massive advantage in its cultural production. Anime is, above all else, strange to foreigners in spite of its syncretic history, and it is either attractive or repellant to people. Anime, taken abstractly, represents a nationalistic cultural empire, whose tastes and trends are dictated by the imperial core. The imperial core here being otaku. They are shameful people, the NEET, the incel, failed men and women whose lives revolve for the most part around utterly trivial and wasteful consumption. If you were a person of erudition and education in Japan right now, you would probably hate anime like you hate Marvel and YA fiction and porn addicts.
The other exists in a realm of fascination. Disgust is itself a form of fascination—how else do you think corprophiles get off? For Japan this is doubly true, hence Osamu Tezuka’s fusion of Disney aesthetic with his own to create things like Astro Boy. Here we come to the odd truth of the ‘nationalist right wing dissident’ with the anime pfp. He tells you to drink breast milk for gainz while he has a picture of some moeshit blob staring at you. It’s not just irony.
Anime is an empire of losers
Anime is a metaproduct, encapsulating more than just animated cartoons, but also print, live action film, video games, music, plays, and tchotchkes. Its market reach is global, and it is a charismatic metaproduct if there ever was one. It is, after high technology manufactured products, the primary vector by which Japan exports its culture. It is dictated and hypermanaged to create something that appeals to all demographics (primarily in Japan) that buy overpriced merch, hump bodypillows, buy image songs, make pornographic fan cartoons, go to theme cafes, and aspire to enter the brutal production cycle themselves. It is insanely mannered, in the sense of Mannerism, because it has become a hothouse of positive feedback loops, what sells gets iterated on, ad infinitum. Voice actors go to voice actor college to learn to do character types and sing idol songs and do cool tokusatsu poses. A single starring role pays the bills forever. Artists work relentless schedules to pump out 20 scripted pages of inked drawings a week. The paradox of the hypermanaged product appealing to those selling machismo and caudillismo and whatever brand of right wing politics drives engagement and pisses off their Internet foes is not so much of a paradox after all, is it?
The dissident right, the one clamoring for a return of phrenology, the execution of the pedo cabal running society, telling us about the R1b haplogroup and telling us to lift our problems with ourselves and society away—well, they’re not all wrong. Lifting is great! But the fascination with machismo, history, hard science, is the masculine pole of this magnetic force. The feminine one is a fascination with kawaii, with moe, with irony and subversion. The identity of a samizdat political movement, which is the self-concept of the ‘dissident right,’ that takes on the identity of the persecuted and seeks redemption from a powerful father figure and succor from an industry geared towards children and the infantile is fundamentally feminine. Their sources of identity, redemption, and entertainment, then, contain everything they dislike about the world. The anime pfp is the shadow self of the Golden Age bodybuilder pfp. To identify with the shadow self, it must hide, it must present itself as a vessel that can, plausibly, contain their professed values.