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@Noahpinion I appreciate your enthusiasm and passion for the craft. It's human instinct to relate to things you love by drawing easy comparisons to what you're already familiar with, but I feel you're also you're divorcing work from it's original cultural context to make it fit your ideology
@Noahpinion Anime and manga are the direct descendants of East Asian narrative traditions that have been secular and humanistic far longer than Western narrative traditions that were centered around religious and classical topics until only very recently.
@Noahpinion Mass media entertainment has existed in East Asia far longer than the west. By 1000ad the Chinese were printing books numbering in the hundreds of thousands in circulation.
@Noahpinion Western modern art is very much the result of Western artists discovering East Asian art and being blown away at not just the elegant aesthetics but also the fact that it has been tackling secular issues for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
@Noahpinion There was the hugely popular "Japonism" movement. Van Gough, Degas, Klimt, Rodin, Whistler, Manet, Beardsley etc. Absolute luminaries in the fine arts. All hugely and very directly influenced by East Asian art.
@Noahpinion And in literature TS Eliot changed the landscape with his works that were very much inspired by East Asian poetry and philosophy. I believe he was one of the first to attempt to translate Confucious into English. He was absolutely in love with Confucianism! 
@Noahpinion Circling back to anime, it is the product of Japan, a deeply Confucian society. Confucianism was transmitted there via China, where it's focus on the secular helped China became a huge multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire for thousands of years. These concepts are not modern.
@Noahpinion It's great that you can relate to anime on such a deep level. And I think your comparisons are valid. I just wanted to point out that those areas are overlaps in common values and not just anime somehow adopting modern Western values. Thanks for the thoughtful thread!
