/lit/ - Literature

>>16548527
>while simultaneously deconstructing the mecha genre

Why is Japan fascinated by the mecha genre? What is in their character that mecha is so appealing to them?

Is it related to the atom bomb?

Does their WWII ultra-militancy somehow connect up with their mecha fascination? (How did they, as a culture, manage to shrug off that ultra-militancy, which seemed to define Japan, like an old overcoat?)

What was the first expression of the mecha genre in Japanese culture -- Godzilla stuff, or something else?

random post, but anyways.

it seems sometimes that we're living through a paradigm shift again. not only does it not make much sense anymore to take an old hardline Marxism v Capitalism route, but increasingly there may not be a single Capitalism to respond to anymore either. there's a US bloc but increasingly there's a chinese bloc as well. and we suspect now that no great marxist intervention will change anything.

but even within that US bloc there is now this widening cultural rift between left and right, red and blue. each side there claims oppression from the other side - conservatives by progressives and progressives by conservatives. and there is some truth on both sides of that. china in turn is trying to catch up with the US and everybody seems to triangulate in on AI and information technology as the royal road to power.

somewhere in there are all of these people, us, struggling to adapt to sociopolitical systems that all seem equally compromised w/r/t each other, and part of a big and faintly diabolical perpetual motion machine that has no brakes. it can't be absolutely refused any more than it can be absolutely embraced, because at the edges it turns into absolute speed itself, or the Outside, or whatever else.

trying to stay in the middle and balanced seems to wind up placing you on the conservative side of the spectrum, when all you're really trying to do is conserve your own equilibrium in a world that burns up thought itself as rapidly as it can just to feed culture, and in which progressivism becomes an absolute orthodoxy that uses semantic bludgeons of shame and guilt in order to maintain a stockholm-syndrome relationship with precisely that which oppresses it: that is, Capitalism. this may be an uncharitable reading of race and gender theory, and it can be said equally that accelerationists have simply fallen in love with their own brand of idpol also: as romantic hauntological martyrs, beings in love with the Capital that only devours them also. such that there doesn't seem to be any point in thinking and yet one must think. so to have an identity is to get fucked by the limits of identity politics, and to not have an identity is to get fucked by that which preys upon your subjectivity for big $$$. to wish for the state to control everything is to beg for totalitarianism, and to reject the state is to presume that you can somehow function as subject supposed to know.

have i got this right? it's the narrative of continental philosophy itself in the late 20/early 21C that i'm asking about.