Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate borrowing from another culture. Usually, it happens with a culture that has been oppressed in some way. Think about the Native American cultures in North America as an example. But cultural appropriation has a soft line. It’s hard to know when the line of admiration and appropriation is crossed…
Category: Otaku Culture
The Problem with Today’s Hype and Spoiler Culture
I’m an old school gamer, the type that grew up making maps for myself. The habit stays with me today. I prefer to go into anime, movies, and video games blind. But it’s terribly hard to do that now. The Internet has made hype and spoilers almost unavoidable. As many of you know, I’m a…
The Problems with SEO, Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, concerns many anime bloggers just as it does businesses. SEO is a package of techniques that are supposed to attract search engines like Google to your content. The best SEO is supposed to get an article onto the coveted first page of a search. Few Internet users go beyond the…
Reveling in the Ridiculous: Anime is Tame
Despite how odd anime and manga appears, with their fan service and visual language and odd stories, they’re tame compared to Japan’s literature. I spend a fair bit of time beating up on fan-service, but fan-service doesn’t compare to shunga and the woodblock print books from the Edo period. Manga has roots in ukiyo-e, or…
The Dangers Behind MyAnimeList and Goodreads
We’ve been trained by the so-called free Internet to disregard the value of our information. Although this begins to change, we still don’t think anything about leaving a comment on a YouTube video or keeping our MyAnimeList pages and Goodreads lists updated. Of course, these services are useful. YouTube suggests videos I would miss otherwise….
Understanding Culture Blindness
A fish doesn’t notice water. You can’t see the forest for the trees. Whenever I visit Amish country, as we call the areas where the Amish live, I’m struck by how a group I’m familiar with can seem foreign to others. If you don’t know, the Amish is a religious group that eschews owning technology…