As you may or may not have heard, last night’s Saturday Night Live, hosted by the always-funny Anna Faris, featured a skit called “J-Pop America Fun Time Now!”, which basically took a few completely overblown stereotypes about Japanese and Otaku culture and beat them to death.
I personally found the skit hilarious, but if you watch the video via Crunchyroll here and read the comments, this made a lot of anime fans very, very angry.
I can see why people would be angry at it, and I was slightly irked by it myself, but they made it very clear a little ways into the skit that this is clearly not what the culture is really like, and that the people hosting this ‘show’ were being borderline racist. Even so, most people who left comments seemed to have gotten so disgusted that they didn’t even watch that far into the video.
This skit seems to be taking more shots at American fans of anime and Japanese culture than the actual culture itself, and that is the part of it that irritates me. Either way, I don’t feel particularly offended by it.
What is your take on it? Did SNL go too far, or is the anime community overreacting? Share your thoughts, I’m very interested in hearing them!
The Dood said,
December 12, 2011 @ 5:22 pm
No. There are way too many people in America who are exactly like the characters in the skit. I studied Japanese with them in college. They tended to do poorly in class and say random catchphrases, much to the professor’s chagrin and befuddlement.