Anime, manga, and light novels tend to go on indefinitely or stagnate.
[ATTACH=full]2942[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]2943[/ATTACH]
Yes, I am aware that this is complicated by the fact that 500 trillion people have worked on these dogshit characters who refuse to die. In the case of their original creators there are the other problems of artist abuse and terrible frames they have to work in. Stories have to be short, go nowhere definitive, and be strung along together indefinitely.
The above works should be compared to something like the legacy of Godzilla or Devilman. Individual works go places and end. And then they just run it again whenever they feel like it. Continuity and lore are tenuous and disregarded because that would get in the way of the potential power of each individual work. A conceptual debt is owed to past works, but this is genuinely felt respect and obligation, rather than America's weird fake sentimental pretending to care about Superman. A retarded character who means nothing to anybody. People cried at Devilman: Crybaby in the 21st century. Superman's 21st century peak was Zack Snyder making a Zack Snyder movie and dragging demented comic "fans" along kicking and screaming for the ride.
If we wanted to make fair comparisons of cultures across media we would look at what both do within similar structures, and of course, we would consider the structures themselves as potentially reflecting the characters of the cultures in question. Manga is the most powerful culture industry on Earth because of its extraordinary empowerment of auteurs and hands on creative directors. American comics are by contrast ZOGGED to hell and back. A bunch of retarded Jews trying to create recognisable BRANDS through exposure and repetition which they can then force their artslaves to make repetitive iterations of forever.
Manga to some extent has its content dictated by form, but in all of the ways you take issue with it suffers from this the least out of all comics made anywhere in the world. And succeeds on the grounds by which you're judging success MORE THAN ANY OTHER MEDIUM ACTIVE RIGHT NOW. Out of all pop media manga more than any other is making an impact on the level of narrative. If you disagree tell me what is.
I really can't believe that this discussion is possible. That someone could say "I hate that one country that floods the world with pointless media that ambles on forever in accordance with production requirements" and you would think "yeah Japan has real problems".
If you want an anime that goes somewhere I recommend the original Mobile Suit Gundam. It caught on for a reason. But it's also not one of a kind. For one, they made several more which were also good, and the broader "mecha" phenomena produced many comparable works. Gundam is Axis Star Trek on one level, but it's also a successor to works like Space Battleship Yamato which already existed, and worked as complete space opera narratives. You can't do space opera that just hangs or fizzles out. These kinds of epic stories are meant to reach epic conclusions to make their points, and as a rule they did. In Japan.
People still watch and enjoy Gundam 79 in 2024. I have told people to and they've told me they like it. Have you found any new Battlestar Galactica fans lately?
Again, I am going to have to tell you to turn your anti-Japan microscope around. Where is the western tv with good endings? Is there a single "problem" with Japanese media that you're oh so reluctant to make an issue over that isn't 10000x worse in our own culture?
