You don’t wanna see where the toast pops out on your cute young anime girl toasters! :eek: 
Now, the milk dispensers, on the other hand…
And then you proceeded to ignore or argue with every response that didn’t support your preconceived notions about anime or the Japanese. The first few posts in this thread should have provided you with all the answers you needed.
No, I didn’t. I said “most adults are not regular watchers of anime of any kind unless they have kids” (emphasis added), and I said this after you accused me of making some sort of strange claims about pornography in my first post. There’s not a damn thing about pornography, or even anime in general, in that post. It just says you’re going to get some strange ideas about a foreign culture if you try to judge it based on its media alone, and these ideas will be stranger still if your only sample is anime that isn’t even popular or mainstream in its country of origin. This is a perfectly reasonable statement, and I don’t know why you’re so determined to twist it into something completely different just so you can argue with me about it.
Only if you are using “implied quote” to mean “wholly invented one”.
There’s more to learning through questioning than just asking the questions. You also have to actually pay attention to the answers.
EvilCaptor, the above was a little harsh and I apologize. In an attempt to make it up to you, I asked one of my co-workers about Chobits so I’d be able to pass on the opinion of a real, live Japanese person. I deliberately asked the office “bad girl” so I wouldn’t get an answer tainted by excessive modesty or prudishness or anything. Here’s our conversation as best as I can reconstruct it:
ME: Yoko-san, have you heard of an anime called Chobits?
YOKO: Chobits? Yes, I know it…but it’s chotto hentai (“a little perverted”).
ME: Really? I read something an American wrote about it on the Internet…
YOKO: Well, don’t say about it to Japanese! The characters are cute, but it’s like a 14-year-old boy’s fantasy.
ME: The girl’s a computer, right?
YOKO: Yes, and she always does what he tells her. And she wears a costume like a princess, or a maid.
ME: Was it popular?
YOKO: Yeah, it was popular…with 20-year-old or teenaged boys who don’t have a girlfriend…or NEVER had a girlfriend.
Now, this is just one woman’s opinion and I’m not even sure if she watched the show much or at all herself. But it seems she agrees with you that this sort of thing is kind of icky in a “loser guy dreams of perfectly compliant pseudo-woman” sort of way, but that she doesn’t think the idea has much appeal to anyone in Japan except for lonely, horny teens.
I was actually surprised by how much she seemed to disapprove of Chobits since, as I said, this woman is no prude and certainly isn’t shy about sex. I think it must genuinely be the premise of the show itself that bothered her and not whatever erotic content it had. Since she warned me not to bring the subject up with other Japanese I’m assuming that Chobits is more widely-known than I thought but that the general opinion of the series and its viewers is not positive.
Well, thank you, I did get the impression I have been stepping on toes that I did not know existed.
That was interesting. I was under the impression that young girls liked some of these sexy toons aimed at younger audiences, too. And it’s funny to see a commonplace meme in the U.S. – that only a small number of guys like sexy stuff in their media – reflected in Japan. I have read stuff that indicates that Japanese guys really LIKE their porn.
Of course, her complaint seemed to be more with the doormat nature of the Chobits character, which I can’t evaluate, not having seen the anime in question.
Oh, they do! I know some women around my age who were big fans of the hugely successful and long-running Urusei Yatsura TV series (based on a manga; there were also several videos and feature films) when they were young. It took a while for the show to make it to the US, so I saw it when I was in high school…and was a little surprised to learn it was considered appropriate for children in Japan! The heroine is a sexy, bikini-clad alien who occasionally loses her top, and the hero is billed as the biggest but least-successful letch on Earth.
Actually, the whole thing is pretty innocent (mostly PG-level), but there are plenty of racy jokes and some boob-grabbing and such. But this apparently went over the heads of the very young, and kids who were beginning to hit puberty probably thought it was hilarious.
I don’t know if they like it or use it any more than Americans, but there’s not a brown-paper-wrapper mentality here. If a guy wants to buy a porno mag, he can grab one right off the rack in any convini. Heck, he can stand right there in the store and browse through them without paying.
Yeah, that seemed to be her problem with it to me, and I think that’s why she said such a show only appealled to young guys who couldn’t get a girl in real life. Many other “magical girl” type shows, sexy or not, feature more assertive heroines who don’t sit around awaiting orders from their man.
Rrrrr…this is driving me nuts so I’m coming out of lurking to say something. I have read the “Chobits” manga and seen a few episodes of the anime so maybe I can shed a little light on it. The computer girl (Chi) does have a helpless personality because she was found kinda broken so her user has to re-teach her everything. A few times in the series some sleazy men had tried to take advantage of her niave nature but she ends up kicking their asses. She does want to please the main male character and if that is too dormatty for you then this will make you feel better. He can’t ever have sex with her or it’ll wipe out her memory.
As to how people can use a computer without a keyboard and such, the persocoms have wires that come out of their ears and hook up to a screen and then the commands are voice activated. They read your email like an answer machine and such. Why they are in the shape of people, that very question is asked by one of the characters off the series. Can’t remember if it was answered.
There is some perverted humor but there is a little more going on then a guy and his cute, girl shaped computer. It’s a kind of “what if” type world where humans regularly interact with AI and the problems it can cause. There are some different relationship problems that are shown, like one characters marriage falling apart because her husband prefers to be with his computer then her. There’s also a character who actually marrys his computer but because she was an older model, she starts to malfunction and lose her memory, and you see the heartbreak the human character has from losing “just a machine”.
“Chobits” is far from being my favorite japanese series but it’s a nice read with pretty CLAMP artwork to look at, and no I’m not a horney 20-something-year old male. I’m a horney 20-something-year old female who was introduced to the series through a 15 year old girl who loves the series.
This seems as good a place as any to mention the big problem I have with the climax of the Chobits manga, which is:
The apparent implication that if Hideki really loves Chii, he shouldn’t want to have sex with her.
Is this everyone else’s understanding of it? Because it seems really perverse to me.
Chii! ^^;;