I had a moment when I realized how much my understanding of human relationships is influenced by anime, and, honestly, I felt disgust.
@2ck That sounds like a big reason I could never get into anime in the first place... The actions and motivations of the characters made no sense to me.
@2ck It's been a while, but I've had various people I've dated try desperately to get me to like it (although there's probably a question to be answered about why I keep dating dudes who love anime).
I think it ultimately does come down to, as you mentioned, the cultural differences with Japan.
Some of the things that bothered me are actually tropes in anime. For example: the constantly crying and completely useless adult woman. She always just stops in their tracks and start bawling while the other protagonists are trying to fight or make their escape or whatever. It's like the useless slasher teen girl victim from American horror but turned up to 11. (Although I think that trope is a bit more Chinese than Japanese)
And that's almost the opposite of another annoying trope: the "tiny screaming comic relief". Now, done properly, this trope can work. Pixar has made it a mainstay, and in American movies, precocious kids can be hysterical. But in anime, they're the height of 4-year-olds, but they just straight-up talk like they're in their 40s and then suddenly switch to screaming like children. It's... weird.
Which brings me to my next point: how anime portrays emotion. In American cartoons, emotion is portrayed fairly evenly and consistently. But in anime, there are two modes of talking: one where the only thing moving is the character's mouth and not a single other muscle on their face, or the mode where they're screaming so loud that the background changes and they're floating in the air and the words become visible. Watching anime is like living in a house of violently bipolar people.
And that's before you get to the... more off-putting aspects of anime, like how so many series seem to dedicate an episode to the pedos in their audience.
So, I've just accepted that anime is not for me.
@LouisIngenthron what you describe bears very little resemblance to nearly all of the anime I've seen, so I can't respond specifically to what you describe...
@LouisIngenthron I was 95% joking 😄 I was thinking about how I react to crushes and the idea of *confessing your love* in the way that high school girls in anime sterotypically do. Although I have a more natural way of interacting with people IRL, those ideas still run through my mind.
I'm curious what anime you watched, if you remember. I've genuinely not found the character motivations, writ large, to be any more or less incomprehensible than in comparable media. Certainly, a lot of things are heightened, but it's cartoons, so that's to be expected.
Also, there is a bit of an insider dialog through common tropes and certain cultural touchstones that are unique to Japan or to people generally interested in anime, but I've always felt that lends a richness to the media rather than making it inaccessible (in *most* cases).