There was a camping anime some years ago that was sponsored by a group of camping and outdoors sites in Japan, and it was a pretty big hit. They even saw an uptick in campers, especially first-timers, after the show started airing.

This was also a period where there was a weird amount of anime that had, like, newlywed couples and couples with young kids, slice of life stuff. People put two and two together and started making jokes about the Japanese government covertly sponsoring anime studios to adapt material that depicted a positive image of family life to encourage people to have kids. Abe, being the Prime Minister at the time, had his face plastered all over the memes about it.

I swear to God all his comms dept people just read Twitter all day and can only parrot back their base's posts on Twitter at them.

YOU ARE THE PRESIDENT. YOU ARE THE PERSON WHO DOES THE THINGS.

Oh yeah whoops I accidentally left out the bit about them being "left-adjacent at best" when I rewrote my reply, but yeah you're right.

it wouldn’t surprise me if Thiel money has made its way through the leftist podcast scene

I think there was a scoop yesterday that some Thiel acolyte tacitly admitted that Anna K and Red Scare have received Thiel money to fund their podcasts, along with some other people in that sphere, so it's not much of a stretch.

a lot of cringe “The Empire is super evil but it’s the only thing stopping humanity from being wiped out” bs

Which would still work fine if done with a satirical bent, if the overall theme of these stories was a kind of fatalistic "we could have stopped this" angle, rather than the cynical, psychotic banality of the worst evils mankind can inflict on the universe being the best we could have ever hoped to do.

Gotta inject the unnecessary pedobait character into EVERY SINGLE FUCKING SHOW so that you can sell all that pricey merch and $200+ blu-ray sets to desperate weirdoes.

Oh, sorry, I'm talking about the anime industry of like five years ago. Nowadays they just greenlight shows about guys getting isekai'd into worlds where they can act out their pedo fantasies, and get a bunch of weird fucking nerds on the internet to defend them. I legitimately think that entire industry is on a crash-course with The One Show that gets the entire industry so stigmatized that it never recovers. They've been really fucking pushing it as of late.