Half the comments here are basically, um you see the japonic skull…
yeah its like, idk if it’s breaking news to anyone but western culture is also pedophilic. not just in the velvet dungeons of the elite cabal, but in the culture consumed and reproduced by the whole social order. sure the exact form that tendency to sexualize youth, naivete, and vulnerability takes, and the attitudes and emotions surrounding it might be different, but it’s clearly there.
Capitalism. Which one is gonna be more willing to schill out for merchandise? The normie or the sexless sex-obsessed guy thats being constantly had the heel of capitalism turning them into ground meat with no time to live for himself beyond cheap and easily accessible escapism?
It’s more or less the same marketing concept that uses kids shows to sell kids plastic toys and the shitty microtransactions in video games, and gambling. Changing out the medium in which you’re being rinsed of your cash of course.
it’s slightly more mainstream than it is here, but not by much. whenever a female child actor stays relevant past her debut there’s a national countdown of millions who are vocal about finding her hot. there was an snl sketch about how hot emma watson was in the 3rd harry potter movie when she was at most 14 during filming. pedophilia is a very real public phenomenon in the states, in some ways significantly more mainstream than in japan, it’s just expressed differently
I think that the rise of loli content in mainstream anime is directly tied to CP being outlawed in Japan in 2014. (production became illegal in 1999, but that didn’t stop dvds from circulating and then of course the Internet got big)
Actual CP being illegal in Japan didn’t make the mass market for it that existed in 2013 go away, or undo the decades of normalization that it had from being a mass produced (if niche) product. Its consumers dispersed and started making demands of adjacent industries to pander to them - thus the growth of so-called “junior idols” which ride the line of legality to appeal to pedos, and an increasing demand on anime for loli content.
IMO it’s a clear example of how doing the bare minimum fails and you need a large scale social engineering project to fix large scale social problems. The Japanese government cannot solve the problem of normalized pedophilia without forming a Comics Code Authority and banning this shit at all levels and blacklisting authors who refuse to stop producing it (meanwhile the producers of junior idols all get the wall).
maybe this has something to do with it, anime is one thing, but this is really creepy
