Jose Lopez

4/2/23

English 110

Persuasive Speech

For a long time anime has been given a pretty bad reputation depending on who you talk to. Many say it’s cartoons for kids, many call it weird, and a lot of people make fun of the fanbase for their likings. But anime is more than what people see at first, it has been something that I’ve watched since I was a little kid and it holds a special place in my heart. I grew up watching Dragon Ball, Sonic X, Pokemon, and Attack on Titan. These expanded into more and the messages and lessons I’ve learned show how important it is for people to see the good side of anime.

For starters, I want to address one of the biggest and frequently used tropes in anime, this being the constant idea of never giving up. In almost every anime you will almost always get a main character who no matter what keeps moving forward. Their main goal is to keep fighting until they’re out for good. It can always have different motives but for me I always took those messages and turned them into something good for me. No matter how bad things seemed to get and how impossible it felt to come back from bad times, the idea that if I stop now I’d be losing a fight I can win if I keep going. I’ve always thought back to the characters I’ve grown up with and I see how their pasts and their lives have changed them for the better even though they had to go through many hardships. Some characters lost their parents and are rejected by society but they never let anger or vengeance overtake them and instead choose to help all even those who rejected them in the first place. Some choose to keep going to get stronger for the sake of themselves and others. And some choose to keep going just because they wanna be the very best or the strongest being ever. 

There are many lessons to be learned and people should take these lessons to heart. Many people even use some of these and make them goals for themselves. While it seems childish to want something like being the strongest, the amount of people who go to the gym and work out is because of characters like Goku who fights to get stronger. Characters like Naruto teach people to be kind to others and be more understanding. Characters like Tanjiro from Demon Slayer teach others to forgive and forget and seek out redemption in people even if it is too late while acknowledging there are those who cannot be redeemed. The collective idea that these characters bring to people and the impact they make is massive. All this is undermined by the amount of hate and criticism people give without even giving it a chance all because they see only one side of anime. While yes there are styles of anime that are inappropriate and have almost no moral value, that doesn’t mean we should ignore the side that does have lessons. Even those with no lessons that are there just as a slice-of-life anime, a genre that mimics real life with much more toony ideas, can be more than that. Some may stick with people and they can’t forget the ending no matter what. There is so much to unpack and for me I’ve experienced all of these and I know others should too.

The reason I believe this is a good topic is because many people should see that anime can be good for lessons and should be seen as more than just weird or strange only because it’s different. This is especially because a lot of the people who judge anime have never even watched a single episode of anime in their lives but only saw a clip out of context or some of the communities who do “cringey” things. While I cannot deny sometimes I find myself doing the same, it’s not like it’s far out of the realm of possibility seeing people doing things that seem strange. So I want people to see beyond that and give anime a try and if they don’t like it then that’s just not for them, but don’t judge others or anime for being different.

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