I've enjoyed anime for most of my life. Yet when I look back on the media I was consuming, I cannot help but remember the constant violence, promiscuity, and creepy shit like Princess Fatora's twelve-year-old concubine in El Hazard.
In hindsight and from a results based perspective, is it necessarily a bad thing?
Should children be raised in a sanitized world, naive to the existence, nature and their own reactions to such things? That goes double for boys, who are both the target audience for this stuff and are naturally drawn to it, for good reasons.
In the end, its the demographics who are the biggest on playing violent videogames and watching unPC anime who populate the nightmares of progressive activists (gamergate, chans and the like), not the people who live insulated from all these things even in their virtual form, which these activists hate too, except for some specific kinds of weird shit.
Makes me wonder if that stuff was not so common and practically unavoidable, the most leftist of countries would be even closer to a Demolition Man style culture than they are now.
Not to mention the relative lack of stoicism and moral virtue. There were exceptions, but they were just that -- exceptional. Most anime and western cartoons too were garbage at best, and some of it was hella suspect. I do not think it accidental that American weebs became a recruiting pool for the trans-cult.
It loves targeting social outcasts/outsiders, like any cult really, so of course there is a massive crossover there.
After observing how America and South Korea have gone (and Japan to a lesser degree), should we really be mocking China for driving this sort of popular entertainment media underground? I mean.. they're gonna replace it with media compliant with CCP propaganda, but would that genuinely, honestly, be worse?
CCP has its own axe to grind here. The irony is that people thought North Korea will take an example from China and become more like it. Meanwhile the opposite has happened - Chinese state preferred and produced propaganda is struggling to compete with foreign entertainment and independent videogames, so the only way they have to indoctrinate their youth with the stuff they have painstakingly made is to forcibly remove the alternatives, so that they will entertain themselves with the proper propaganda materials out of lack of competition if nothing else.
Of course in the west a symmetrical scenario would unfold out of such measures, because there, the competition begging for such a helping hand are the likes of CNN, Hollywood, and various "studies" professors, who would love to push their stuff instead, and we all know what that is.