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Answerman - Holiday Madness Edition

If you want to blame the mid-2000s rise of moe for all of that, be my guest. But the moe aesthetic, or whatever gets lumped into that basket, also brought us The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Toradora!, Kannagi, and other genuinely good shows.

For the first question, it should be mentioned that many seiyuu actually ARE established music acts, too. Many seiyuu put out their own CDs and are essentially idols in their own right... its not like the American dubbing industry where all they do is voice an anime and thats it. Some are also part of existing music groups as well, like Sphere and YuiKaori. So there probably are some examples where they just do it because its cheaper, but its also because these are seiyuus with existing fanbases among the audience the anime is aimed at, and they want to hear their newest songs.

If you want to blame the mid-2000s rise of moe for all of that, be my guest. But the moe aesthetic, or whatever gets lumped into that basket, also brought us The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Toradora!, Kannagi, and other genuinely good shows.

If Space Dandy is a success, will this start a new trend in anime?

It appears that Moe is finally starting to hit it's expiration date, and that shows like 'Beyond the Boundary' are taking it's place in this weird Moe/Action/other genre hybrid.

Or has the term simply become a catch-all term for everything relating to the half-assed otaku-pandering laziness endemic to the industry?

Where do people get these silly ideas? Space Dandy isn't anything anti-moe, it appears to just be a rehash of Cobra with even more wackiness added in. It's not going to be your lord and savior of anime: Cowboy Bebop II. Even if it's a success, I kind of doubt it'll be anything that can shape the industry towards a new direction, anime's too interconnected with manga, visual novels, and light novels for those shows you don't like to not also be adapted. As long as semi-popular LNs continue to be published, so will adaptations be made from them.

But I do hope we see less dating sim-inspired "girls of different types do cute things pointlessly" shows, because lord knows we have enough of those.

Beyond the Boundary was the thumbnail for this article. The biggest reason that I couldn't get into the show was the "moeblob" artstyle: when the protagonist extolls the attractiveness of the depicted female lead it made me feel "skeeved out" and wonder if he's supposed to be a pedophile. I had to consciously remind myself that such probably isn't the case and that this female character is supposed to be an of-age, actually-attractive-to-non-pedos character. It would be easier if they'd just draw the characters that way, damn.

A psychiatric disorder in persons 16 years of age or older typically characterized by a primary or exclusive sexual interest toward prepubescent children (generally age 11 years or younger, though specific diagnostic criteria for the disorder extends the cut-off point for prepubescence to age 13). An adolescent who is 16 years of age or older must be at least five years older than the prepubescent child before the attraction can be diagnosed as pedophilia.

I can't wait for the return of high school-aged and adult female characters universally look their age, instead of looking like they just walked out of an elementary school class.

IMO this "pedo-pandering" has gone too far.

Someone's been spending too much time at a certain formerly-useful tropes site, which apparently defines pedophilia as "any sexual or romantic attraction to or among any person(s) under age 20."

Perhaps, but it's still a shitty trade-off. Especially considering how many early 2000s fans moe alienated.

It put industries in both countries in the unfair position of having to re-introduce and re-invent anime to general audiences, simply to let casual viewers know that most anime is not like that otaku crap. So thanks, moe. You succeeded where tentacle rape failed in turning off people from anime.