Mayonnaise Dispatch 003
Content Warning: Look, I’ve tried to keep this as SFW as possible but it’s a post about anime and hot VR avatars so you may want to scroll with discretion.
Post-Pandemic Otaku
Anime’s rise in the western mainstream has been unignorable since COVID and as in many subcultures today, the old archetype of the anime-enjoyer (neck bearded basement dweller weeb) is crumbling away to reveal a varied audience, captured in Polygon’s audience survey published earlier this year.
Now, anime getting big isn’t new news but what is worth picking at is the spread of the subculture. Outside of the content itself, anime culture is visibly seeping into all walks of life: from gym bros channeling their inner Goku, to horny car mods, to Old Navy x My Hero Academia collabs, bringing together an otherwise disparate group of people under the banner of ‘anime fan’.
Now, obviously most subcultures bring together different people via a shared passion but what’s interesting about anime in particular is how it’s only recently become widely accepted, after decades of being marginalized - arguably rightfully so because, without beating around the bush, anime is an disproportionately horny genre.
I get why there has historically been an aversion to anime - across the board, it’s extremely sexualized. In even the most entry level, mainstream shows (like Dragonball Z, Naruto, and My Hero Academia), sex and adult humor is a consistent, almost constant feature and going beyond the surface of the genre simply increases the heat. Of course, anime is a huge, varied genre with something for everyone and not every show or film has jiggling boobs and panty shots but I think it’s safe to say that by the numbers, the majority of them do.
By tracing hot anime characters like contrast dye through the veins of the internet, it is possible to uncover the vast spread of the subculture.
Maybe it’s because anime is an export from a different culture, it’s exotic, it is a bit more grown-up, whatever the reason, fan service is a sanctioned staple of the genre. Some tolerate it, some embrace it but all accept. In fact, it’s such a defining facet that even brands have leveraged its power to reach anime fans by creating waifu mascots, Microsoft in particular. I’m too afraid to rule34 the latest WcDonalds campaign (which is a whole other discussion best had on Discord).
Anime hasn’t gotten any less horny so why has it become more popular than ever? It’s more accessible thanks to the likes of Crunchyroll and it provided a necessary stopgap for Hulu, Netflix and other streamers during the pandemic whilst live action production was shut down but attitudes towards sex and sexual content have also become more loose. Maybe it’s because Gen-Z grew up online, had premature exposure to adult content and have thus been desensitized, making them ready to embrace the comparatively tame, borderline-but-not-entirely-NSFW features of anime. In any case, its popularity is unprecedented and continues to grow globally. In fact, the overseas market is the main growth factor for the Japanese animation and manga industries, leading to studios looking westward for business as well as foreign investment making its way to the comics and animation industry in Japan, most recently from Blackstone.
Obviously anime is not entirely defined by it’s racy content and I am by no means suggesting these new viewers are tuning in specifically for it but I wanted to identify its adult-oriented aesthetic as a keystone in the visual lexicon that ties the genre and its growing community together. Understanding and accepting arguably one of anime’s most recognizable signifiers is essential to membership in the community and I believe it strengthens the bond between members, giving them knowledge of a risque inside joke. And by tracing hot anime characters like contrast dye through the veins of the internet, it is possible to uncover the vast spread of the subculture.
Travelling Without Moving
Recently I found myself in the rabbit warren of the VR community; a subculture that truly triggers my simulacra, simulation fetish. As a gamer and streaming enthusiast, I’m acquainted with VTubers and VRChat and, as a long term internet denizen, avatars and exclusively online communities are nothing new but I’ve never participated in the VR space and my understanding of it didn’t really go beyond simply knowing it exists.
The VR world is truly fascinating; existing in parallel with but separated from the physical world by both technical and emotional barriers. You need a VR device to interface with this mirror dimension of course, but you also need to not need to prioritize in-person interaction. Or at least deprioritize the sensory elements of being face to face with another real live human - body heat, pheromones, physical contact - because despite the incorporeality of being together in VR, it does provide a better facsimile of intimacy than traditional text-and-image based online spaces.
These barriers to entry result in a thick, opaque curtain that doesn’t provide many opportunities for outsiders to see past so it was a surprise to me for VR content to reach me at all with even more surprises to come once I peeled the curtain back.
My IG algorithm once again delivered the launchpad for this brief journey, serving me up viral content from @zilverkeng; a virtual reality, Mexican-American-Ugandan Knuckles who’s schtick is posting chicano comedy skits mostly about day laboring.
I find it funny and I think that it’s objectively well crafted comedic content but it’s what’s happening behind the scenes that really makes this worth talking about:
Picture the same content as above but this time visualize a guy in an empty room wearing a VR headset and full body mo-cap suit, seeing through dead-ended windows the size of his eyes, performing the skit, waving his arms around, yelling and selling the scene. Both performances are impressive in their own right but whereas in virtual reality the whole thing comes together and makes sense, in physical reality it’s dissonant and surreal and the image of it plays in my head like performance art or, worse, a scene from post-societal breakdown science fiction. The realtime synchronization adds another thick, greasy layer of eeriness as performance and production blend together.
It didn’t take a lot of poking around in zilverkeng’s back log of videos to see recurring names pop up and, after hopping from one page to the next, a tight yet extremely generous and active community emerged - alien on one hand but with a somewhat familiar face because even if not welcoming, the prevalence of anime aesthetics made the community at least navigable.
In VRChat, on IG and elsewhere unknown to me, there is a community of enthusiasts who’s tight-knittedness calls back to early days on the internet: who collaborate, call out, share and promote their friends; who offer services from creating skins to making music videos to hosting stand-up comedy to providing lap dances (and places to receive them); who inhabit a strata of online culture impenetrable by those without VR equipment.
Becoming anything you want in virtual reality is and has been one of the central attractions to the space from the 80s til now but today, with physical and digital reality blending together to the point where most of us know at least one person by their username before their given name and it’s impossible to sense when someone’s appearance is augmented by AR, the idea of being one thing in VR and one thing in IRL is outdated. Now, what we are online influences what we are offline and vice versa, creating an uncanny, smashed together aesthetic that feels simultaneously both right and wrong in either space. The best example of this is the e-girl and e-boy looks where traditionally desirable attributes collide with anime, idol groups, video games, CGI and cosmetics to create a overly saturated, hyper-sexualized chimera. Digging through the pages of zilverkeng’s VR community, the model egirl/eboy appears again and again, especially as we get closer to the more adult spaces in VR, suggesting a chicken and egg scenario.
The reason I wanted to write about this was because of a death of subculture sentiment that often gets kicked around amongst older millennials. I’m absolutely guilty of this so when I get introduced to an extant, active, lesser known subculture such as VR, I’m reminded that the lament is premature and those feelings are simply down to essentially being out of touch.
The Spread
Despite fear mongering predictions of the human form mutating to suit our cell phone symbiotes, worry not because the future of mankind is hot. And as the lines between our online and physical lives continue to blur, we are presented with countless more ways to amp up our sex appeal. We’ll be downloading otherworldly DLC skins to wrap our ozempic riddled bodies in in no time.
‘What for’, however, is yet to be seen. I’m still confused by the libidolessness of a hypersexualized generation but maybe I’m just falling prey to being out of touch again and maybe these articles about Gen Z not doing it are published to make aging millennials feel better about getting older. Who knows. One thing is sure: sex is back but maybe it never left. Onlyfans is still on the rise, hot anime characters adorn beat up Honda Civics and Subaru WRXs alike and the hero of one of the biggest gaming releases this year is the ass of its main character.
More Emulsion
Parallel Cultures as portrayed in 1997’s Selena.
They did the math (Highschool of the Dead’s boob physics)
This HuffPost article on entering the anime community (it’s wholesome)
Kommando Store’s weeb-to-insurrectionist laser guided missile waifu pipeline.
Peter Pan Enablers Adult Swim are reviving the programming block that first exposed millennials to anime with Toonami Rewind.
Some highlights from VR world on IG: @akueverything @RenTheDemon @saturnisvr @kimchi.vr
Join the conversation on Discord.
Discuss schediaphilia and more in the terminally online channel in the Mayonnaise Discord server!
This has been the Mayonnaise dispatch, thanks for reading. What did you think? I think I kinda biffed this one but let me know in the comments or tell me on Discord because it’s your feedback that helps improve this project. If you liked what you read, consider sharing the substack to people you think might like it too.