There has been a constant assault on Anime/Manga from all sides of the aisle in the world, mostly centered around the objection to "loli" content, teenager main characters, and dark themes in anime.
Why?
Because Anime as an industry has gained mainstream cultural relevance globally among the youth around the world, and legacy industries like hollywood and mainstream media are desperate to gain that relevance back. Anime has broken the cultural stranglehold of the anti-humanist narratives that the left has been pushing for decades in the West.
Institutions like hollywood forgot that entertainment should be entertaining, instead of being political or pushing an ideology. So many of the recent "popular" high-budget movies and TV shows have been contaminated with so much depressing messaging, with boring girlboss tropes, anti-male sentiment, as well as overt anti-white racism. The powers that be want the populace to be beaten down, hopeless, and without any goals in life.
Anime, Manga, and alternative entertainment shows our youth a different path. No matter how dark things get, no matter how hopeless and insurmountable the odds, there is always a way out if you work hard enough. In many of the popular shonen anime, that messaging is the core foundation throughout most of them that has the most impact on the youth around the world.
Work hard, train hard, plan meticulously, study, and expect nothing from society. The world can be evil and dark, and no matter how young you are, you can make a change in the world...
That messaging terrifies the would-be dictators, authoritarians, communists, and socialists... and pretty much every other system that would impose top-down control over the population to maintain their own power. They want people under the thumb of state control, welfare, Medicare, and all kinds of entitlements that make you dependent on the state.
And then there is the other side of the aisle that wants to control people under the thumb of theocratic rule, where Anime is also being attacked from the boomer cons... by theocratic fundamentalists like Islam, and the more orthodox-literalist factions of Christianity and Judaism. They see the "edge" in anime and entertainment and see it as a "sin," while they forget that the narratives in the bible can be very dark. These people think that humans can subsist solely on the message of hope and prayers, but they forget that without the darkness, there is no light.
Either way... the liberal left wants people to be mindless vassals of the state, and the conservative theocrats want the masses to be medicated on the opium of mass religious indoctrination.
Anime and alternative media's messaging is clear. People have self-agency, with a profound message of personal relationships with "struggle" itself.
In a similar way, people should have a personal relationship with god, not subsume their existence, their soul, to a government or to corrupt preachers and extremist imams.
Fiction isn't reality. You have agency; the world doesn't owe you, grind or die trying.
