onsdag 3 Feb 2010, 0:44

Not a lot of time to spend on this one but metal is a lot like anime: fandoms of young people are infatuated with something low-quality, formulaic and in bad taste, all the while convinced that it's the deepest, most meaningful shit ever and superior to any "mainstream" forms. Just as the intended audience of anime is Japanese 12 year olds, so too does metal appeal to the 12 year old in the driver's seat of every metal-loving manchild's cumbersome frame. Anime fans brag endlessly about how a lot of anime is "mature" in content, but the reality is that the only thing setting apart "mature" anime from the childish pap that is regular anime are cartoon boobs and geysers of blood (instead of, say, a thought-provoking message). Metal fans suffer from a similar delusion, thinking that pentagrams, inverted crosses, lyrics about how much you hate Christ, album art of gory nun porn, blastbeats, screeching and an overall angsty, disgruntled sound are the hallmark of maturity. They're not, you goddamn fucking idiots.

Metal fans see something like this and instead of laughable find it relatable, maybe because it looks like something a middle-schooler would make and metal fans are either mentally or chronologically still 13. They see some band dressing up with plastic horned helmets, some douchebag in a cape posing with a mace that looks more like a dildo or album art of an imagined viking hacking down a cross and actually think (if that word is even applicable) "wow, what a deep and powerful message these guys have!" instead of being repulsed by the boorishness and idiocy behind each of those things. Metal fans seem oblivious or perhaps just accepting of the fact that Metal is cheap, shallow, kitsch, artless garbage and generally in bad taste. I'm sure the thought processes that go on in the minds of 13 year olds who are obsessed with Naruto are the same as in those who actually think Burzum is good, and I hope that in my life I'll never relate to either.

In the defense of anime at least it has some eye candy sequences that might impress you visually with the quality of the animation, while in metal, even the shreddiest of shred metal is boring and uninspiring. All the "thinking man's metal" bands (and there are a lot of them, keeping in mind that one camp's "intellectual" metal is the bane of another when ironically they both suck) are meaningless and lacking in depth, delivering exactly the transparent attempt at "smart ppl music" that you might expect from a metalhead. Whether you listen to Dream Theater, Fates Warning, Agalloch, Opeth, Enslaved, Burzum and other bedroom black metal shit or Gorguts and Morbid Angel, it all sounds like an intellectually limited attempt at trying to mold a pile of shit into something more than it is (in the case of the black metal, not even getting past the pile of shit phase). That's not to say that each of those bands is equally bad; Dream Theater are easily the best of that bunch and have some good moments, but they're entire orders of magnitude below Gentle Giant, Gryphon and what might be described as good music.

But I digress; I could go on about the how both metal and anime are redundant as fuck but whatever, I've spent enough time writing about worthless childrens' pastimes. Instead I'll leave you with a site that showcases human idiocy at its greatest, providing a display even more pathetic than anything you might see at an anime convention. Enjoy.