Pronatalist Propaganda in Animeļ¼ Grandpa and Grandma Turn Young Again
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Summary
In this episode, we discuss Code Geass, an anime that I think is really interesting for a number of reasons, including its pro-natalist propaganda and the fact that it's a slice of life slice of anime. We also talk about why I think this anime is good art, and why I don't watch it.
Transcript
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But now I want to talk about some of the prenatalist propaganda in it as well.
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And I would say it's almost to the point where it takes you out of the plot as a viewer.
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There's one scene where the old lady goes to an old store that she used to frequent in the train station.
00:00:18.600
And the store owner, Mark, they're probably going to be going out of business soon.
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This is just the way it is with changing demographics.
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And the old person turns around and gets one of those black miasma anger things around them.
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The show is meant to encourage you to not like normal anime, thirst after young women.
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But make you thirst after a long and happy relationship.
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Because this is a thirst trap for getting married and having a long, happy relationship and being intergenerationally invested in your family.
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And we are going to be doing something we haven't done in a while on this podcast, which is discuss anime.
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But you're very good to lean into the culture and everything like that.
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Like you used to dress up for conventions and everything, right?
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I was president and founder of my high school's anime club.
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I've been to numerous anime conventions across multiple countries.
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I just don't watch it because I don't have time.
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And I had a day free and there was an anime convention.
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I'm obviously not going to go to the British Museum.
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I'm going to go to an anime convention because that's how people spend their time.
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So this last year, we were in the U.K. for ARC, which is like a conservative convention.
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And you were wearing one of your traditional outfits, which you often wear similar to this.
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And a bunch of anime goers, because there was an anime convention at the same time.
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I was actually wearing my fascist outfit, not this one.
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But we are going to be talking about in this episode an anime that I think is really interesting
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So I'll break down the reasons why it's interesting to me.
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One is the pro-natalist propaganda, which is put throughout the anime and is very heavy
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handed and I think very effective because it paints the reality of Japan as it is today
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or rural Japan, which is depopulating right now, in this very stark term.
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Two, it is an anime that is incredibly simplistic in terms of the characters it presents and the
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But yet, despite being in the plot structure more broadly...
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You could say it's very cookie cutter in many respects, and yet I think it is incredibly
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effective as a piece of art, which is really worth highlighting about this show.
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As to why it's effective as a piece of art, I'll just quickly go into this because I
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think that this is useful to talk about and it can bring us into the plot of the show
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Despite being very generic in almost everything it lays out, and I'm like, okay, if I'm judging
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art by art's quality, right, I'm judging it on three metrics, okay?
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The first metric, is it able to invoke the emotional states that it is attempting to invoke
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Two, and this is a personal preference thing, are those emotional states positive?
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Um, I do not want to watch shows that just make me cringe or make me sad or-
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Yeah, I find that unpleasant in a show, and this is-
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Oh no, I really like all the strategy in Code Geass.
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So you found it intellectually stimulating enough where all the dark sadness didn't get to you.
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Yeah, no, it's a power fantasy, and it's my kind of power fantasy because I identify
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Anyway, we have another episode where we talk about Code Geass that people can go check
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But anyway, it very effectively makes me feel an emotional set.
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It does a very good job of conveying what a good marriage is, what it feels like to be
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in a good marriage, why you would want that from an emotional perspective.
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But I also think the feeling of real love, it conveys very well.
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So you're going to, after this huge buildup, are you going to name the anime?
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Yes, I'm going to name the anime and describe the plot.
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So the name of the anime is Grandpa and Grandma Turn Young Again.
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But the anime is incredibly, this new way of titling anime titles, where it's like a
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long title and it's just descriptive of the plot of the show.
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It's become this recent thing in anime in like the past two to three years.
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I think it makes sense because when you do internet searches for streaming shows, you're
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often just searching by what you know of the plot, like what you've seen in AMVs, what
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It's, oh, what's that anime where the grandpa and grandpa turn young again?
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What's that anime where the character is a main character and overconfident?
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No, that's not as good because demon slayer actually sounds like it.
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So the show is about an old loving couple in Japan that eat a magical apple and become, they
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gain the ability to transform into their younger selves whenever they go to sleep.
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And actually the final thing that a show needs to do to be good art, it needs to make me think.
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It needs to make me have new ideas that I've never had before.
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You need to come out from watching that show a different person fundamentally than who you
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And I would argue that anybody who watches this show, and it's an only one season show
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and I don't think they're going to, I haven't watched the last episode yet.
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I am on the last episode right now, but it's pretty heavily foreshadowed that the couple's
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So it's not like you're going to get another season.
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The last episode, by the way, I've since watched it, is incredibly strong.
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It's a short, tight, really high quality show that's going to make you have new ideas.
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But the thing is, how does it get people to have new ideas?
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And how does it push like positive themes about relationships and stuff?
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So the first thing that it does, just over and over throughout the show, is it's made me
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realize by having the couple be young, attractive, like the anime protagonist looking, but then
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doing things that you see old people do all the time, it humanizes those actions.
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And I realized that I hadn't considered just how kind most old people are because I saw them as
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like this different class of human that has different expectations around them.
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But also the brilliant thing is simultaneously they are modeling and creating an attractive
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aspirational model for a functional, happy relationship, which is beautiful because that's
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People don't have a good model for what a healthy marriage looks like.
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And so it's brilliant to take an old person relationship and subvert it into a young person,
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And it does a great job of elevating the values of earlier generations by making them young and
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hot and in a modern context, but still living with those older values.
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Having made sacrifices, having lived with austerity, having, yeah.
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And we should talk about some of the austerity that's constantly, so I'll go over a quote
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from the show right here to give you an idea of the type of values that they teach.
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But there's a line here where they go, extravagance is the enemy, wanting things is wrong, the
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mentality of restraint that was drummed into us during the show on era.
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And it also shows a lot because there's occasional flashbacks to their early relationship, what it
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was like dating during World War II and the environment that created for them.
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But it also recontextualizes the point of marriage.
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Here's like an action that was recontextualized for me in the show, is in the show, they're
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constantly trying to hook up their grandkids with other kids so that they can have great
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And it is, as a young person, when you see this action, it feels like somebody is being
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That is the way that people contextualize parents hooking them up and stuff like that.
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It's seen negatively these days, like meddling.
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And in the show, you realize, oh God, it's not meddling at all.
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It's that families are intergenerational units.
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And this is the way that old people relate to new relationships.
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What kind of people are my kids going to marry?
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Honestly, most of the friendships that we establish now are established in an effort
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to build a friendship and dating and professional network for our children.
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And it cannot be overstated just how much of a role parents and extended family used to
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play in matchmaking and how much of this absence of this matchmaking contributes to
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And even back in the past, I think younger people used to complain about it or whinge about
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And people who watch Bridgerton can totally see this.
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While Bridgerton is not very accurate in its costuming or plot or anything like that,
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it is still pretty accurate in the involvement of parents in the matchmaking of their children
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and the huge amount of effort that they put historically into finding good matches for their kids.
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And it also takes a pretty hard anti-life extensionist stance, which I find very interesting and
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For example, in one scene, and this also shows like the way it gives you better models for
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relating to your parents and other people in your life.
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So there's one scene where the son who has become a doctor so that he could care for his elderly mom,
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you know, because she had a chronic disease and that's what motivated him to become a doctor.
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And he feels like he's been a failure because he hasn't been able to cure her disease.
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And it shows this misaligned expectation that you can sometimes get,
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which is what does the grandmother, what does the mom want from her son?
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It's to be successful and to have a family of his own.
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And he is unaware that he has already fulfilled all of the expectations she may have had of him
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and done the kindest thing he can for her through achieving his own success and stability.
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He doesn't need to solve her problems to have served what she wants of him.
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And there's also a great scene there that you'll probably tear up when you see it,
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where the father turns old again because they don't realize that they can control this early on.
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But she's still in her young body and the doctor's son is crying over this because he's,
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okay, so this is the temporary thing and now she's going to turn old again and she's going to die.
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And in the other room, she is also crying and very distraught.
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But it is because she now believes that she's going to outlive her husband
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And I think that this shows this contrasting, that he sees the horror as her dying and yet she was totally okay with dying.
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That is something that is made clear throughout the show.
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Yeah, death is not a failure scenario once you have kids.
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There are a few times, there's another scenario where she begins to become worried that they might live forever
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and she is consoled when the husband points out that, no, it's a metaphor in the show, hourglass.
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But he has seen that the sand's coming out of the hourglass and eventually they are going to die
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and that they only have maybe a year or two of this.
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And then there's the other part of the thing there where he finds out,
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this is after the part where you were watching, that she only has a couple days left to live,
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And so he secretly, without her knowing, of course, makes a deal with a shrine.
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To trade his lifespan so that they can die at the same time.
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I would, man, if only we could die at the same time.
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Yeah, no, I feel so much better if I could do that.
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That to me, when that happens in the show, he keeps it secret from her because he doesn't want her to know about this.
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Yeah, me as a person watching this, you would understand and I would understand.
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I would want, if I knew I could just trade a portion of my life to extend your life
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and then we both die at the exact same time, that's like a win across the board.
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As long as that's happening after our kids are sorted out.
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We both agree that if it comes down to both of us would die before we could get our kids in order,
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then we'd just have one of us survive long enough to get them in order.
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I was actually really surprised by her lucidity on this point.
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And so I went to ask her, you know, to elaborate on her position on this later.
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And she's just like, you know, knowing both of us the way she does,
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that both of our quality of life would be so low without the other one,
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that it would only make sense for one of us to trade part of our lifespan for the other person.
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And when I heard that, I was like, yeah, that shows real, you know,
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empathy and understanding of my perspective. And it really made me appreciate her.
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Yeah. But I thought that was really interesting in terms of contextualization,
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because usually when people do this life exchange trope in a show,
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Oh, yeah. Like it's so tragic, et cetera, et cetera.
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But when I saw it in this show, it was it's not played like that.
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It's played as obviously this is what you would do.
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Like, why would you do anything other than this?
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This is just such the obvious choice when you are in a happy relationship and you like being with someone.
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So it does a very good job at and showing the purpose of these people's lives is their family,
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But now I want to talk about some of the pernatalist propaganda in it as well.
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And it's I would say it's almost to the point where it takes you out of the plot as a viewer.
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You're like, oh, wait, OK, we've got to the point where there's propaganda.
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I liked it because it was a major theme of the show and it was a theme of the show that the show is meant to encourage you
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to not like normal anime thirst after young women, but make you thirst after a long and happy relationship.
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It's a thirst trap for getting married and having a long, happy relationship and being intergenerationally invested in your family.
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But to give you an idea of like how dystopian it's framed as.
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So two of the young people in the show who end up getting together and deciding to take over the family businesses,
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the young girl actually from the beginning, Simone, she ends up deciding that she wants to take over the family's apple orchard.
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And she is obviously slated to, you can see they like each other, become married and have kids with a young boy whose family also has an apple orchard,
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not an apple orchard, a different type of farm in the area.
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And one, the show paints this is this enormous sacrifice that these kids are doing this for their families.
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Yeah, because all of the old people just expected to shut down all the farms.
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That is the expectation in these communities these days.
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And when the two young people were talking because they plant a tree together and they're go,
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And then they're imagining what that area of the country is going to be like in 50 years.
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And they comment that they might be the only people left living in the area.
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And it's made very clear in the show that they probably will be the only people left in the area.
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There is a, one of the first episodes is on a sporting competition and the conflict was-
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Yeah, between two little villages in the countryside.
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Yeah, and between two little villages in the countryside is their village no longer has any young men to attend.
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And the other village has this, it's seen as this super advantage,
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like the almost the mean kids trope they play it as.
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And it's one of those brothers who ends up dating the girls.
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So it's one of these, everyone's nice in this, everyone's sweet, everyone gets happy endings in this.
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You really don't need to worry about any negative emotions from this show.
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But that's like what they're showing is they're imagining a completely depopulated region.
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Whenever there's a side plot, like the Sun's company is failing and doing layoffs.
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And they say they're failing because of changing demographics and because the people are disappearing.
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There's one scene where like, this is what really took me out of it for a second,
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where the old lady goes to an old store that she used to frequent in the train station.
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And the store owner, Mark, they're probably going to be going out of business soon.
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This is just the way it is with changing demographics.
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And the old person turns around and gets one of those like black miasma,
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And it's like a sign of, and it's what this show is,
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which is to look starkly at the reality of demographic collapse
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And you fight this with love and happiness and wholesomeness.
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Just be happy and wholesome and understand that happy and wholesomeness
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But that's not like a focus of the show, right?
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Here I need to note that in the first episode of the show,
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there are two or three jokes that are rather lewd about the grandchildren
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thinking that the grandparents' younger forms are attractive.
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This is not a theme that goes throughout the show.
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And I guess they did it just to try to catch some horny young people
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in an attempt to trick them into watching a wholesome show.
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So yeah, did you have thoughts on the show that you wanted to elevate?
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I'm just thrilled that old people are getting some airtime.
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I feel like old people don't get enough of it.
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trying to humanize this population that is going to be
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And it's an element of the pronatalist conversation
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and demographic collapse conversation that actually isn't being had as much.
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Originally, when people talked about demographic collapse,
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they talked about who's going to take care of the old people.
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And I haven't really heard that in any of the current discussions.
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It's more like what are people of childbearing age going to be doing about this
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instead of what about people who are retired and who need help
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from an increasingly dwindling younger person population.
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And so I appreciate the extent to which this also elevates the experiences
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and worth and humanity of people who are more advanced in years, as it were.
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it does a very good job of showcasing why a good marriage is desirable.
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And I think that if you ever struggled, like, why would I get married?
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In this show, both of the people heavily compromised for each other.
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It's actually made it pretty clear that when they got married,
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but also had many reservations about the marriage.
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And then in the present time, she's, oh, yes, he completely melted it
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She says in response to what's happening in the flashback.
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But it's made clear that wasn't something that happened,
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like, on their marriage day or something like that.
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It was something that happened after a lifetime of dedication to each other.
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when they've been too steeped in the urban monoculture,
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and she said, before they get married, she goes,
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that all of the other emotions that I'm being barraged with
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And I think that's the way most happy married couples feel
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one, I feel like there might be some legislation in Japan
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that is encouraging a certain amount of pronatalist propaganda
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or demographic collapse propaganda more widely,
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Other people I know have said that this is an amazing show.
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I just feel like this is not the only anime that's throwing in,
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laying, it's spreading it on thick, as it were.
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And I think this is one of the most effective forms
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So that's another reason why I'm thinking Japan's doing it,
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I don't think those are effective interventions.
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What's that other one that's super pronatalist?
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and I'll do some research before this goes live,
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and add, have I been able to find any of these?
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that the Japanese government did not sponsor this,
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This seems to be a totally grassroots movement.
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I will say that they have sponsored some anime before,
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to try to get people to sign up for the military,
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or to try to make them look good to other countries.
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when they are sponsoring anime for military purposes,
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if they were doing it for pronatalist purposes,
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But I suspect it's more just that it's gotten to the point
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realizes that this has become an existential threat
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to be fighting this from the position that you have.
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progressives try to insert the quote-unquote message
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And that's something that's also talked a lot about
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is the idea of the sort of intergenerational duty
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one of the things that they always complain about