Anime/Manga Tropes in Current Cultural Context
 

There's a lot of tropes in anime/manga that get used a lot, but some of them really don't seem to make sense either because of the cultural shift or because of western perspectives.

One really common trope is the inheritance of a substantial amount of debt upon a parent's death (or disappearance). A ton of shoujo manga use this to force the heroine into a rich family (who they owe debt to). A lot of comedy manga also uses this trope to get the main character into the rich female lead's house as a servant. Some gambling mangas use this to force the main characters to take on dangerous games in order to pay it back.

In most western countries, the children do not inherit a parent's debt, so these story tropes would be unusable. Does Japanese inheritance law force the remaining family to take on the debt of the deceased?

Another trope that's still currently used is the stashing of porn magazines inside of a male character's room. This would have made sense 10 years ago, but nowadays I'd think most people would just use their PCs. Do Japanese teens still use porn mags, or are most authors not really up to date culturally?

Though I might be wrong, such a trope is usually used when the people are in debt with ... Yakuzas. I highly doubt a child has to inherit his parent's debt by the legal way and you know that yakuzas aren't in the legal way ( example : Hayate no gotoku, G Senjou no maou)

So far I never saw a manga where the protagonist is pursached by a gang of capitalist bankster going hurr hurr pay our money.

I think there's a list of these on Tv tropes Values Dissonance, but there are few examples that pop out to me (correct me if I'm wrong)

-In harem/romantic comedy, the guy is often abused without provocation. They are expected to apologize and admit their wrongs instead of clarifying the situation.

-Protecting people who are clearly stronger due to gender roles

The first listed trope have, imo, overstayed its welcome, comedy or not. For a society supposed to struggle for equality of gender, this just screams double standard, or "the road to equality is fine as long as it is a one way road", "Feminists want to eat their cake and have it."

This trope needs to die, in a fire. Abuse in comedy should spare no one, man, woman, child, old or Klingon.

The inheriting your parents debt is only actually something that happens in North Korea and that works with Jail time too. Not sure if it's the same as Russia now but it used to be like that in Russia too with the Gulag's. If you died before your sentance was finished you got shoved in the Gulag if you were their family member to continue the sentance.

I don't think it's ever been like that in Japan.

Fyi, the Japanese still has a giant public event for selling porn comics (it's called Comic Market, ComiKet for short). The doujins that most of us westerners read in digital form is originally published in paper, but I guess it's easy to forget that sometimes. :heh:
oh, and there's Tora no Ana...

afaik they also still produce gravure idol magazines, though I'm not sure about this one.

Well, it IS comedy :heh:. Btw this reminds me, I don't know if this is true, but I have heard stories that being a female in Japan, you can trap males by accusing him of molestation or whatever and the police will arrest him without a second thought. I even heard some female teenagers make extra money by deliberately doing this (the money comes from fines I guess).
Personally I think this is more likely an exaggeration or simply rumor, but the rumor is there nonetheless.

Beat me to it.

Anyway, there's two topics that you brought up in your opening post, erneiz_hyde. Tropes that are no longer relevant with the time period, and tropes that are not relevant to Western culture. You should try to seperate the two, because they are very different.

One thing you are all forgetting in regards to the equality thing in regards to thsoe tropes is that while, yes, in western culture the equality has pretty much hit the appropriate notch with arguements proving in both directions, but that's not so much the case in Japan. In Japan, it's still dominanelty a patriarchy, so these old fashioned tropes are still relevant.

It's the same with the comics under the bed, as quoted at the start of my post.

As for the inheritence of debts, I don't know enough of the facts to comment, but it was previously stated that most of the examples that use that trope involve Yakuza rather than legal debt sharks.

TLDR; There's a big difference between trope relevance in culture gap and generation gap.

That's true for otaku and what not, but most of the protagonists are totally not otaku, and the porn mags they hide are generally those with 3D people/idol mags.
I think something like 99% of the harem/rom-com protagonists are not otaku (most of them seem to have spartan rooms too). So I'm talking more about the 'average' teen and the role of dirty mags.

You can buy porn mags like everywere in Japan and you see people reading them on the trains all the time.