Astral Codex Ten

anime

4 min read

anime

Article

anime is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 17, 2024 and April 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “people seem to obsess over… various forms of lowbrow art from Harry Potter to Marvel to anime”; “if anime becomes too cheap to appreciate”. It most often appears alongside AI, Catholic Church, France.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: December 17, 2024
  • Last seen: April 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
28: Sympathetic Opposition contra me on taste. If I understand correctly, her thesis is that taste doesn’t just make you hate bad art - it also gives you the ability to love good art more deeply, which can be a transformative experience. I’m not so sure - people seem to obsess over (to the point of centering their lives around) various forms of lowbrow art from Harry Potter to Marvel to anime. I think that distinguishing this from the deep love and transformation of highbrow art risks assuming the conclusion - the guy who says Harry Potter changed his life is deluded or irrelevant, but the guy who says Dostoyevsky did has correctly intuited a deep truth. But we believe this precisely because we know Dostoyevsky is tasteful and Rowling isn’t - I would prefer a defense of taste which is less tautological.
Inline links: Sympathetic Opposition contra me on taste
The Colors Of Her Coat
April 01, 2025 · Original source
Hoel is writing about the new “Ghiblification” trend, where people use OpenAI’s new art model to make photos look like Studio Ghibli anime.
What if they are? It would be facile to say that, just because technology has threatened our sense of meaning before, we shouldn’t worry when technology threatens our sense of meaning today. Some of the past apocalypses were genuinely bad. The semantic satiation of the previous forms gave us modern art and architecture, hardly known for their broad-based appeal. Do we really want Studio Ghibli anime to go the way of paintings that look like stuff?
Maybe Progress repays us with interest for every medium it takes? Without mass-produced, mass-transmissible images, music, and bright colors, we couldn’t have Studio Ghibli. Dare we hope that, if anime becomes too cheap to appreciate, that very cheapness will open the door to new forms of art? But why should this always be true? If AI is better than all human artists, and you can run 100,000 inference copies at 10x serial speed in a data center, then why should anything be non-cheap ever again?