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Originally Posted by bhl88
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Same can be said for high school. Yet it is everywhere in anime, you can't even escape it in death
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Originally Posted by 4Tran
Is it really so true for anime? The science fiction boom in the '80s and '90s came largely from OVAs, and the decline has come as OVAs were phased out. This doesn't seem to be a coincidence.
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My guess is it was mostly driven by the toy industry and their sponsoring of children's anime in the 70s and 80s. The consolidations and mergers left far fewer toy sponsors post 90s. The OVA market transformed in to the late night market model and just found different sponsors in publishers and game developers.
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Originally Posted by 4Tran
Mecha shows are basically the Japanese equivalent of superhero shows/comics.
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That is too narrow a definition. Vehicles/robots have been used in plenty of different genres as a means to build plots around. It's different from the empowerment fantasy that drives shonen, sentai or superhero content.
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Originally Posted by 4Tran
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the American scientific pessimism is due to the perceived failure of NASA and the space shuttle. Manned space exploration has always been the sexiest image of scientific endeavors, and as such has been the primary seller of science fiction and futurism to the general public.
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It's not only visible in US fiction but all across the West. The postwar optimism that (scientific and social) progress will make each generation better off in comparison to the previous one seems to be lost. It's not unlike the pessimism that permeated Japan during the lost decade of the 90s.