The World Belongs to the Nerds

Anime’s reputation in the West went through an ugly decade. The nineties were good—One Piece, Dragon Ball, Pokémon—and then sometime in the early 2000s the whole genre retreated into a particular kind of basement, associated with a very specific type of guy who spent real money on body pillows and got defensive about tentacle porn. The broader culture wrote it off. Honestly, some of that was deserved.

Then things shifted. Your Name hit theaters and made grown adults cry in public. Wolf Children and The Wind Rises accumulated quiet prestige. Kill la Kill and Attack on Titan found audiences on Netflix and Crunchyroll who’d never previously considered anime as a category. The revival wasn’t manufactured—it happened because the work got genuinely great again, and because the generation raised on those nineties classics grew up into the people now making culture.

Which means the classics are back in the conversation too. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Spirited Away. Sailor Moon—the one where a clumsy blonde teenager keeps transforming into a warrior of love and justice and somehow keeps saving the world through a combination of crying and sheer determination. Tobi Lou, born in Nigeria, raised in Chicago, has loved her enough and long enough that he made an entire song about her. The track is called "Sailor" and it’s one of the most sincere things released that month, which in the context of hip-hop in 2018 is its own kind of courage.

Nerds inherit the earth. They always do.