To take a case in point: real world girls (guys) who may pick on a guy (girl) no matter how nice they are. Although there are theories to explain aggressive and mean behavior in social settings that argue these individuals are not intentionally “mean” per se, the point here is that from the victim’s perspective, anything they may try to do that should logically result in good will fails to attain (in the way that a deductive argument would fail). It makes perfect sense, then, that the result would be a preference for watching anime in which the characters are patterned and safe. No matter if the girl (guy) is the sensitive, sweet, and loving kind, or if they’re a tsundere, as long as predictability is there, romance simply makes sense.
As you can see in this line of thinking, we have no need to argue that otaku desire some “pure virgin” that will never betray them, or that tsundere have inherent sexuality. However, my argument up until this point will meet difficulties in explaining some phenomenon. One of these problems directly pertains to the my goal in writing this post: if all an otaku wants is for romance to make sense, then why are there preferences for, say tsundere over iyashi-kei (the kind, gentle girls that soothe you)? I will attempt to provide an explanation for this question in the next section.
In conclusion to part one, I wanted to establish an argument that tackles romantic love in anime (and more generally, any fantasy/fictitious world) as being a consequence of human cognition, and that romance can be thought of as not, perhaps, a desirability for any sort of metaphysical and abstract trait, such as virginity. Part two will cover specifically a theory explaining the “sexuality” of tsundere.
Notes:
First, I thank my fellow bloggers Sorrow-kun and Akira for posting their opinions first. Without doing so, I would find myself with fewer things to argue about.
As some of you may already have noticed, this article is similarly related to my previous article on waifu. However, my purpose in that previous article was to speculate a biological faculty capable of equating 3D with 2D romance. Here, my goal is to demonstrate, from a different perspective, how logic and reason may be a reason for the treatment of romance in anime and by otaku.
For further reading on propositional attitudes, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. My particular example was taken from: Ramsey, William, “Eliminative Materialism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/materialism-eliminative/>;. |
