I gotta recommend One Piece, my all time favorite. It’s about goofy ‘pirates’ who sail from island to island liberating them from fascists or stopping attempted coups, or fighting the CIA. The biggest problem in the one piece world is that everything was built to support a ruling class of disgusting inbred billionaires who do things like take slaves. There is a literal revolutionary army named “the revolutionaries” lead by a guy based on Che (he looks like che, his boat was named after che’s boat) who’s main goal is to destroy that billionaire ruling class.

The beginning of the show (like first 4 arcs) are more about introducing characters, but every arc after is about the above. The tone is like if Tom & Jerry had a plot. Despite how it might appear it’s not like a typical power scaling battle shonen, the fights are not the main point, though later on they do end up emphasizing fights a lot (in the anime, the manga is better at keeping fights secondary).

The show isn’t without issue though. It portrays trans, gender fluid, and queer people in a very mean way. They’re all still part of the ‘good guys’ but a lot will be drawn as like hairy men wearing dresses. There are better portrayals like one inspired by tim curry or one inspired by Jim carry (with the best voice actor ever if you watch it subbed). This issue gets a lot better later on though. This story has been going for 25 years, in the last 5 years or so it’s gotten much much better.

Another issue is it’s portrayal of women. Almost every prominent woman looks the same. They have the same-ish face and exact same body. They’re frequently scantily clad. No matter how important they are to the story, no matter how well fleshed out their characters are or how heartbreaking their story is, the author will still find a way to make them dress in underwear or something. I realize a lot of this was because of his editors. It doesn’t become a problem till later on when he gets editor after editor pushing him to draw them as scantily clad as possible. The author has warned other authors that the publisher is full of perverts. The anime makes things more gratuitous than the manga.

I do recommend reading it over watching it due to pacing and artwork though. They are remaking the anime right now even though the anime is still ongoing. The remake is supposed to address the pacing and art.

As a Chinese-American, sadly I can confirm that in my experience, most Chinese-Americans are pretty brainwashed by Western propaganda and hate/are ashamed of China or being Chinese at some level. Personally, I love and support China and the government but I’m afraid to openly admit that. Once I just simply said “I got friends in China” and a (History) teacher whipped his head around and screamed “WHAT!?!” And gave me the most evil glare. I’ve had a college professor literally tell the class that Chinese people have no concept of love.

I don’t know how internalized the propaganda actually is for Chinese Americans, or if they’re just simply afraid of vocalizing support of an “enemy” country while knowing that every person surrounding you has an insane irrational hatred of China and all chinese people and literally want blood.

The plea deal probably: agree to be an imperial propagandist or die in a mysterious accident.

It sounds like they’re not just admitting to this, but admitting to creating thousands of accounts on all US controlled social media platforms since 2001 to influence everyone.

Why are they admitting this?

Why is Reuters claiming that propagandizing Americans was not allowed when, I believe, the patriot act gave them permission to do just that? And it’s very obvious lots of users on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube etc all glow so bright you could light a city?

I feel this is sort of a damage control thing. Admitting to something they perceive as less horrible (with lame justifications) in order to continue hiding the larger campaign being performed on the English speaking internet. Like a sort of “ok we’re bad, we did this thing and we admit it, there is nothing else we’re hiding ok?”

I recall operation songbird (?) was this exact thing?

I don’t have any sources, just what I remember. So please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Also why is the military the ones doing this? Does the CIA outsource their dumber operations to the military?

And once again why are they even admitting to any of this?

I won’t survive and that’s fine with me, I’ve lived long enough. I want to take a couple formerly-rich parasites out with me though. Leave the place better off than when I arrived.

If I could, I would move to a communist country though.

Honestly surprised Hawaii is so low. Maybe it’s because so many of the native Hawaiians and locals got pushed out.

I don’t want to be in this country

Same here, Jerboa crashes when I try to login.

If you like dramas I’d say ‘better days’ is good, it was pretty popular in China on release. I had to pirate it and download subs from some website but it’s doable.

2d animation: Link Click - I cannot recommend this enough. Its touching, it’s emotional, it has intrigue. It doesn’t fall into typical annoying anime tropes. There is a 2nd season but I haven’t watched it yet. This is a series but I feel like it’s episodic enough that you could kind of view them as short interconnected movies. They have complete story arcs in the episodes.

To be hero- I think this was made for Japan(?) I believe it’s a Chinese production but everyone speaks Japanese in it. It’s goofy and entertaining and touching. This is a series too buts it’s very short and the runtime of all the episodes combined is basically the same as a movie.

Legend of Hei is cute and has high paced action.

Big fish and Bagonia is beautiful like watching a painting. Some people love it but personally it put me to sleep. I still recommend it if you read the synopsis and it sounds like your cup of tea.

If you like 3d animated movies I’d suggest White Snake, I liked it far more than its sequel Green Snake. Green Snake is on Netflix but white snake I had to pirate. The movie does have strangely fast pacing but I love the story. Its action packed and has touching moments while looking beautiful.

I can loosely recommend that one nezha movie on Netflix that looks like some final fantasy thing, it was ok. I’m not really into super hero type stuff so portraying nezha that way felt kind of weird.

Jiang Jia I think was made by the same studio that made a different ne zha movie or maybe white snake? Not sure, but it’s competent. The thing is, they made it feel like an origin story for some future super hero team up thing similar to that ne zha recommendation above.

Sci-fi like others mentioned Three body problem is good but I think the books are much better paced. The show just drags on and on.

Pirate pimsleurs. It will not teach you to write or read but it’s pretty descent at teaching you to speak and listen. I speak a dialect of Mandarin but cannot understand a lick of Mandarin. Pimsleurs got me listening and speaking Mandarin at around a children’s level in a couple months. I think writing and reading come easier once you can listen to it and speak it, at least it does for me. Make sure you’re in an area where you can actually speak out loud.

36 here

Hawaii (an outer island), from when the pandemic started to now bougie alt-right and lib mainlanders have been moving here en mass and gentrifying everything.There is a lot of brain drain as kids leave for college on the mainland then are unable to return because everything got so gentrified. It feels like the native Hawaiians are somewhat making a comeback culturally and economically, but all the big native Hawaiian institutions seem to bend the knee to their colonizers and be 100% lib aligned and pro imperialist. I used to hear more chatter about Hawaiian independence and anticolonialism, but those voices seem to be gone lately. My coworkers have been going further and further right and are now openly racist, homophobic, and transphobic. They used to be apathetic. It’s crazy since all of them are minorities and one is closeted.

Every day I daydream about moving to China. There are too many barriers to making that dream a reality though. I wouldn’t want to make my SO feel isolated and illiterate. If only there was a socialist country that primarily spoke English.

They’re priming their audiences. They’ve been suggesting that a Chinese economic collapse would directly cause an American depression.

That’s what they’ve decided to go with to deflect blame once the panic of another American depression hits. The bourgeoise knows the general audience is racist enough to accept those evil Chinese commies are causing their problems no matter how many backflips the logic has to do for it to connect. They’re scared to accept blame, they’re scared it won’t work out like 2008 where they all got off scott free so they need to sow the seeds of their alibis before it happens.

I expect them to publish a bunch of totally fabricated stories about China collapsing and pulling America down with them once America sinks into a depression. Better to scapegoat an entire country and allow citizens to take out their rage on the Chinese ethnic minority living in America than to take an ounce of blame. Hmmm sounds familiar.

I hope I don’t come off as stupid and naive, but I support the antiwork/workreform movements on Reddit. Yes, most of them are American redditor neoliberal reactionaries, however as a whole I think they have some small material effect on destabilizing the system. America is like a collapsing building with a few crumbly pillars holding the whole thing up and antiwork/workreform types are at least wacking at those pillars and I feel like a ton of them are voicing M and ML ideals without knowing it. I think a ton of them could eventually be brought to the left with some guidance.