Safe as Bunkers

Is there more to life than just getting by and hiding in the margins? Our classical stories and our art tell us there is, and yet you would be hard pressed to find such a belief in the modern works of today. Especially in the mainstream. Instead we are told the only meaning in life is to hang on tightly to whatever you can grab hold of and squeeze it for all its worth since it can disappear at any moment. There is nothing beyond that worth striving for, little worth building, and only a fool would tell you different.

We only live to be safe, but is that so bad? Who wants to live in constant fear of the unknown, after all? We are more Progressive than that. In Current Year, we know everything.

I can't be too facetious here. Safety is something everyone wants. We want our family to be safe, we want knowledge that our homes will not vandalized when we look away for but a second, and we desire to have a stable income to keep ourselves afloat and out of poverty. There is not one who would disagree with any of that.

However, this is where it gets funny.

The safer a society is, the more its art tends to go wild in response. We still want excitement, unpredictability, and new thrills, even while we desire a life as free of said danger as possible. Humans are strange that way. Our art typically reflects the part of life we see but don't quite experience fully ourselves in the moment. This is why the best creations usually come up in times of peace, when reflection is possible and safety is around us.

Oddly enough there has been a shift in that mentality in recent years. As our society has grown more socially unstable, basic utilities begin to fail in nonsensical and embarrassing ways, and public trust among the populace has dropped in regards to each other and those in charge, art has instead become safer, more nostalgic, and frightened of things in life as common as aging or the basic family unit. The danger and wonder is all but gone in mainstream spaces, replaced with mechanized comfort food instead.

Safetyism, the desire for emotional safety above anything else, is now the rule of the land, even over human ambition and personal connection. It rules everything in the mainstream art and entertainment world. The highest goal is to be safe and accepted in a world you cannot trust or love. You cannot escape this mentality today.

And, to be honest, I don't think a lot of folks have even realized the shift has happened. It is as if this change occurred overnight. For many of us, especially those who don't value safety as much as other things, it basically did. Now everyone is supposed to treat it as the highest ambition to achieve.

There is more at play than just that, but we should just get to the meat of the topic.

For anyone who has been paying attention to mainstream art for awhile, you know those in charge of it have not been firing on all cylinders for ages now. The people in charge of the industries in the West really do dislike tradition, their audience, and anyone who dares criticize them even a little. This antagonistic relationship has ruined the modern landscape to everything from music to short stories.

But we've talked about this before. Many times, in fact. What we haven't much talked about is a place where the opposite has happened: a place where the people in charge are so absolutely scared of contradiction or challenge that they vomit out bottom of the barrel art without any personality or character to pander to the lowest common denominator for a status quo that is rapidly changing from underneath them. What this leads to is a field exactly as stagnant as the one we have in the West, and one just as likely to avoid taking risks.

In case you aren't aware, I am referring to Japan.

Now, I can hear you now, coming at me with counter examples and refutations, all in the name of hoisting them up over our broken system, but I'm not specifically talking about individual pieces here. This is about a growing attitude in Japan's mainstream that is completely ill-equipped to deal with the "Global Standards" currently watering down art and entertainment everywhere else.

Far be it from me to criticize another country I don't live in, and have never visited, for their practices, but this is an attitude that is indicative of an older problem from decades ago that was never really addressed by those in charge. What I'm saying is that the industry itself is in danger of surrendering its identity despite its current massive worldwide success today.

This will be a controversial opinion, but it can't be avoided given the current topic, so I will just go into it. There is no sense beating around the bush on this issue.

Japan has had a serious issue with Safetyism for a while now, and they have been letting it take over more and more of their industry. This has been a problem foreseen for a long time, as said by animator, director, and mangaka, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko as to why he originally left the industry way back in 1990 after his movie Venus Wars released.

This is why he originally left the industry:

I don't care what your opinion on the quality of anime is today, but one would be a liar at this point if they do not see this attitude dominant everywhere in the industry. It has turned adventurous and ambitious storytelling into a Pleasure Dome of unreality where tropes are celebrated as the ideal and hedonism and empty platitudes are about all you'll find inside the shell.

What Mr. Yasuhiko is predicting here is the growth of Safetyism: the desire to escape reality, not through escapism, but by turning reality itself into a bland mush of a playpen. It is about turning imagination itself towards unimaginative things. There is no ambition or hope of greater meaning here. It is just everyday things, stripped of their greater meaning in the web of society, presented in a fetishistic way. The championing of alienation and the atomized self, and pandering toward others to keep such a thought process alive.

He predicted the modern landscape quite well.

For an example of the full flowering of Yasuhiko's predictions, I wish to present to you this twitter thread commenting on an interview with a more recent Safetyism obsessed mangaka and his willingness to bend the knee to censor his work overseas to avoid stirring the pot. There is no great aspirations here: just a desire to be left alone to pump out product.

Be warned, this is quite bleak for anyone who loves the possibilities of art and entertainment. You can find the thread here. Read it in full before we continue here. It is important to understanding where we go from here.

The part of the interview worth pointing out:

There are no beliefs here: just mindless capitulation to whoever complains about whatever. In other words, the artist in question has nothing to say at the base level. This is why they are so easily steamrolled into doing whatever those in charge wants them to do. For those who think Japan is immune to the same issues as the West, you might want to think again.

They are extremely vulnerable to this, especially within certain ranks of more modern creators. They have no desire to learn what their audience wants when localizers will make those decisions for them, and they will not fight back. They will not fight back because they have reason to: they lack any sort of ideals to fight for.

The part of the thread that got me to make this connection is the quote where the poster says:

"guys like this spent most of their lives in the anime dollhouse in their heads so they have no real worldviews and belie[f]s of their own to fall back on when attacked. you can tell just based on how they draw"

He proceeds to give very well drawn, but artistically bland examples of the artist in question to show. The obvious takeaway is that this creator just pumps out fetish content that he doesn't really ever think about because of his appetites, therefore if another country's puritans tell him to censor it he has no problems doing it. The mangaka has no problems doing it because none of this essentially means anything to him. He doesn't care about his own works in the first place, so why would he care if his bosses wanted him to change them however they want to?

Such a creator is ideal for corporations that wish to pump out factory beltline product. And wouldn't you know it, there is a large segment of otaku who want this sort of thing. It all ends up coming together.

Of course I am in no way saying this weak-willed attitude is the way the majority of creators think or operate. It is very clear that, for instance, in Shonen Jump the stories that succeed are the ones that go beyond delivering only expected tropes and have something the creator wants to impart on the reader, even if it is straightforward. There is an attempt at communication being made between artist and audience. This is why their industry is a powerhouse both at home and especially overseas where we have long since forgotten what this is all supposed to be for.

However, that does not change the fact that Safetyism is a growing issue overseas and one that can threaten even what they produce. Japan is not infallible to this modern poison, as no one is, but they also have a tendency to misread just what those of us overseas even like because the localization industry runs interference with them for their own selfish needs over the actual customer.

This is the exact problem Yasuhiko was foreseeing coming down the road, how it would lead to art and entertainment less concerned with wonder and excitement, and more focused and banal trivialities and the mundane. Such a landscape is not sustainable.

This is where an industry led by such base thinking will eventually lead. It is destined to be steamrolled over and ruled by one with a stronger hand. Our own desire for safety is giving ammo for those who dislike us.

There is a reason trash like Sword Art Online is so vapid and nothing but a collection of tropes. Allowing this artless pandering to be the standard of your industry is going to be a problem in the future. You are giving influence to people who are, in the end, corporate drones that will do whatever they are told by those in charge. Even if those in charge are people who hate you. This is the danger of declining standards.

This soulless attitude is what kills art dead.

You need to believe in something to have principles and stances. The problem is that many modern creators don't even really think about what they believe because as long as they pump out content they will get paid and be allowed to live in peace. There isn't anything more to it than that for some of these types. They allow clichés and slogans do the heavy lifting for them in life. They merely function to get by and have no higher aspirations.

At the same time as this, there is a whole other problem developing from those same crowds who are having their soul filled in by those who hate them. You can teach anti-reality very easily this way, and you can make it seem normal. Once again, you can't not have principles. Eventually someone will get to you and change who you are and make you have them.

For those who know how awful and twisted mainstream western art and entertainment has gotten over the years, they know a lot of it is driven by ideologues who believe those who think differently than them as inhuman and worthy of destruction. Would you be pleased to know that such a mentality is actually more prevalent in the glorious land of Japan than you previously thought it was?

Not only that, it was recently paraded in one of its most storied franchises they have: Kamen Rider.

For a summation, Kamen Rider is a tokusatsu franchise created by Shotaro Ishinomori. Ishinomori's true beliefs could probably be best summed up by his influential Cyborg 009 manga (also reflected in many anime adaptations) where divisiveness will always exist but can always by conquered by those willing to look for a way to unite. It is a view very much of its time, and one that tends to carry over in adaptions of his work to this day. But it is undoubtedly his.

So then it might be interesting to note that the recent Black Sun series ultimate message is that killing your political enemies is a good thing, and we should train our children to do so. Who are these political enemies? I'm sure if you've consumed any mainstream western entertainment you can hazard a guess as to who the strawmen worth dehumanizing are. There is even a scene where they gleefully murder an obvious stand-in for a real life politician who was famously murdered.

But there is more than that. It manages to get even stupider, as hard as that might be to imagine.

Here is a random scene from the series in question:

I don't think I need to add any more context than that. It is a scene Marvel Comics would blush at as subtle high art. There is a twitter thread where the topic is broached upon here. The series itself was controversial, and not very well liked, for good reason.

This is "political" as far as that meaningless jargon word goes, but has little to nothing in common with the purpose of the original idea or creator. It is insipid, loud nonsense from people who have no beliefs or thoughts original to themselves.

In contrast, here is what the original Kamen Rider actor has to say about the franchise and his involvement in it:

How do you go from this to what is pictured above? What sort of lesson is being imparted on viewers now? In what universe is this similar to Ishinomori's original vision?

In this newer series you can see the slight of hand faux-centrism that exists to slip in propaganda and dehumanize those one disagrees with politically over views they were taught by others. It is absolutely the sort of garbage that the West produces now, and there is a very good reason its reception was not exactly glowing even in Japan. But once that hatred of the audience sets in, the rot only grows from there. Art reflects the artist and the society they live in. This is not a good sign for their future if this sort of attitude is their highest ambition.

Do you think it possible to live in a society where your neighbor doesn't know anything about you, doesn't want to know anything about you, yet considers you expendable for voting wrong, believing the wrong thing, or wearing the wrong colored hat? The desire for safety and ideological conformity overrides common sense and turns what was once a typical neighborhood into a potential warzone over trivialities. At a certain point this stops being a community and starts being spaces between enemy lines.

Perhaps this is why the term "conformist" is no longer used as a pejorative among these types. They always wanted conformity: they just wanted to be the ones enforcing it. And that is exactly what they are doing.

This insanity will only continue to bubble before it spills over in the worst kind of ways. Demonization, dehumanization, and selfishness, will not build anything. It will not make anyone safer or more creative, but it will make them spiteful, and lead to the sort of hateful trash the exists purely to spite those their masters told them to spite.

This is a societal dead end.

Don't think this is just a problem in the West. The evil of Safetyism has only spread worldwide over the years, despite the public's protestations, but for certain creators their ingroup fashioned around their designated political leaders matters more than having a functional society to grow in or industry worth supporting. Their desire to be safe from interacting with their inferiors outweighs the desire to want to communicate or understand them. The unknown must be avoided, at all costs. Until this problem is finally dealt with, the weeds will never stop growing.

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself these hard questions. Can you live with people you don't see as people? Can you exist around ideas you think are not only incorrect but evil? Can you operate and build in a society that wishes to destroy society? Because, at the moment, we are giving the exact wrong answers to these questions and wondering why it is killing us and making everything more miserable.

Life is more than safety, and it is more than what we see on the surface. We have to have desires and ambitions or else we have nothing to live for in the first place. The wonder of the Unknown is worth striving for.

How much longer can this clown show of modernity and deliberate worshiping of anti-reality go on? Will you be the one to steer the ship to safe waters, or the one to steer it into the rocks? It will not go on this way forever.

Time is running out, and I don't want to find out what will ultimately happen if we continue to steer in the wrong direction.

All we need to do is remember that there is more to life than just getting by. Once we seek out where our destination is, we can set the right coordinates towards it again. We just have to remember there is more to existing than just existing.

Here's hoping we figure it out before it is too late.

Stories of modernity where wonder still lives!