Wholesome Anime Trads

[Kasarix]

Hello!
I wanted to make this thread to document the culture of the "Wholesome Anime Trads," which I  believe to be a distinct group or type of person, in an attempt to better understand their nature, origin, and behavior.
I'm not an oldhead (I really only got "online" during ~2018,) nor have I been able study the development of certain internet cultures like early Twitter for example, so I'm open to critique on my theories and how these people came to be.

Wholesome Anime Trads began proliferating on Twitter, at least since 2018 with the rise of "MoeBibleVerse," who is one of the most popular if not the progenitor of the WATs, since they all ape her style and personality (which I will detail later.) They may have some influence from imageboards due to their adoption of Chan-OC characters like Christ-chan, and the AnimeRight MAGAhat Momiji avis, however they diverge in that they are much less vulgar than people you would expect from imageboards or the AnimeRight. Currently they relegate themselves to their own Discords or flee to alt tech like Gab or Poast, seemingly content with conservative echo chambers, rather than respawning on Twitter every week to quotetweet trannies. Some of them are still on Twitter, but they don't interact with our "spheres" that much. Mostly because they are not so politically-fixated, nor do they care about having cutting-edge takes: they care more about "spreading the message" of how porn is bad rather than heiling Hitler.
[Image: https://media.gab.com/system/media_attac...970ec1.jpg]
I'll now go on to detail some of the core traits that affect how WATs act:

-Universally Christian. Following the trend of Atheist/Protestant converts to Catholicism/Orthodoxy since 2018, many WATs crossover into that demographic of converts, but not completely (MoeBibleVerse herself is a Southern Baptist.) Some WATs are low-church Protestant, high-church Protestant, and I've even met a couple Mormon WATs. Regardless, "general Christian morality" occupies the headspace of all WATs: these are the people who tell you to go to church (or mass) every Sunday, have a nofap channel in their Discord, and talk about the evils of premarital sex and homosexuality. Although you can rely on them to believe in white wellbeing and even the JQ, they for some reason simply don't think about those issues as much as their Christian positions.

-They, ironically, are split on support for Nick Fuentes. As aforementioned, WATs care first for Christian morality, and thus should align with AF which also brands itself this way. But some WATs either don't care for, distance themselves from, or even outright disavow Nick Fuentes and AF, with their own twist on why: they don't care for the negrolatry, far from it. Rather they disdain Nick's egotism, the vulgar and roudy (AKA black) behavior of many AFers, or have some perceived moral outrage with some degenerate thing AF has done and thus cannot support them on Christian grounds. Some WATs are in AF, but they've largely gone underground and disappeared after the Gloyper (a term for AF interns) edrama that happened on Gab during Spring 2022.

-Highly puritanical. While this varies from circle to circle, they exhibit the bible-thumping prudish culture of folksy normie Christians. You'll never find a WAT posting "lewds" of anime girls, some going as far to say that you shouldn't post anime girls with either their thighs or chest exposed (a reference to Pope Pius XI's decree on modesty.) Among other issues of purity like profane language and posting NSFW, this has led to a culture of users policing each other lest they post anything too "extreme." For this reason I suspect a lot of WATs are teenaged or have a level of naivete with browsing the internet: they - like me - were never exposed to gore, goatse, liveleak desensitization stuff, and as a result try to maintain that innocence among others. "Keep it wholesome!" 

-Going off of their puritanical trait, this influences their taste and fascination with anime: they prefer (or at least post about) more "wholesome" animes, leading them to watch a lot of SoL, and leaving shounen/action as a secondary interest. They're actually fine with people posting lolis, provided the images do not provoke eros (they react with shock and disgust to such things,) seeing the loli as "cute and wholesome." Indeed you can find them watching "tfw-no-gf-type" animes, self-identifying with Tomoko Kuroki, and fawning over all-girl-cast animes like Love Live, Gochiusa, Non Non Biyori, Lucky Star, Little Witch Academia, and the Touhou project (don't forget the wholesome fumos!) Unfortunately, the closer you inspect this, the more ACK!ed it seems... indeed, some WATs struggle with sexual sins and a couple on occasion are ex-troons, a very bad sign. My psychoanalysis is that in foregoing the brutish and vulgar side of humanity, they instead only end up embodying the opposite error of sternness: internalizing and identifying with meekness and softness.

-Fusing Christianity with anime. MoeBibleVerse popularized this by posting hundreds of anime girls right next to bible verse quotations, and the tradition still lasts today. Whether it be editing anime girls praying in a church, posting anime nuns, screencapping anime girls saying "based" things, or even making their own "Christian anime art" (like that infamous anime-icon of Mary and Jesus, which spawned a thousand quarrels on trad twitter.) This usually leads to them fawning over animes with "Christian morality," the champion example being Spy X Family. You could also lump some various RomCom animes revolving around marriage like Tonikaku Kawaii into here. These are often the same people who today spread the meme about "Christianizing Japan" which was debated earlier this summer. Most trad Christians are content to have anime that simply promotes pro-civilization values without any added sexual perversion, but WATs still fantasize about a Christian Japan making Christian anime girls.

-Their memetic development is in the stone age. They never left 2019 in some ways: They still post yes chad. To them, Gigachad is the guy who hates porn and fast food, self-improves, and is racist (but is somehow tolerant of brown people, how crazy!) All of their culture seems to be downstream from Twitter, which is to say that WATs inherit a lot of the iFunny fallout from 2020 (gif captions, neco arc, when I'm in a schizo competition and my opponent is a K-on avi with the patrick bateman gif.) Anything that trends on Twitter or can be posted on Orwell & Goode's account can be expected in their memetic output. Their ability to "intuit insight" is virtually nonexistant, just recently a few WATs were baffled at the "Professors are priests of democracy" headline, even though this has been a generic take in our sphere for years, with Owen Cyclops (who I'm aware is outdated) writing about that phenomenon way back in 2019. Rest assured that "incel" to them means nothing more than a porn addict (because they are volcel), and "simp" only means someone subscribed to an e-girl's onlyfans.

[Image: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/9...24_948.jpg]
There are a few other things to mention. One of the more prominent WATs is Pax Christus, who grew to relevance due to his constant feuding with leftists on Twitter and his Youtube channel. His subculture is a bit unique in that it's more influenced by tradcats than anything else, and is more political focused, but again Pax doesn't doesn't really conceptualize issues that deeply. He memorizes information about how porn destroys the brain or whatnot, rather than looking into ideas like Great Man Theory or understanding just how deeply the feminist zeitgeist affects men today.
I hope this thread may have served to be of interest or at least entertainment, I would like to hear any thoughts about what influences these WATs or why they act the way they do, they're very similar to usual "internet normie" types, but with a fixation on "cuteposting" that makes them different from other groups.
They're not the most politically ambitious nor do I put a lot of stock into the quality of their users, which is why they both aren't too relevant nowadays and they don't write that in-depth on any subject other than perhaps some theological topics that interests their particular denomination. But I do find them interesting to observe at a distance. 
[Image: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/8...221643.jpg]

[anthony]

Are these still a thing? Seems like a complete cultural dead end to me, but I could believe they're still around. Probably happens a lot on the internet.

[Guest]

animes

plural of anime is anime btw.

I think that a lot of these people are millenial normalfags who were kind of radicalized by Gamergate. You'll see them harp on and on about classic Gamergate topics like "forced diversity" and "wokeism" or whatever without considering why and how the "SJWs" etc. came into power and how they're staying in it despite a lot of failing. They don't really have the intelligence to move beyond this, so they jump on the next meme conservative trend, which is converting to Christianity, while keeping the anime baggage. You could see people like this when there was some kind of split in the r/Animemes subreddit (as shit as it sounds) over the word "trap".

In terms of origins, I doubt they ever posted on imageboards. They're the type of person to actually shudder away from going to imageboards but say shit like "4chan is the most awful place on Earth but it also has some of the best people". They will ape imageboard memes but their circulation will always be a few months/years late because of how long it takes one to get out. I think what really these people are are vaguely more online lumberjacks.

[Chud]

I love these people and would lay down my life for one of them in an instant.

[JohnnyRomero]

In terms of origins, I doubt they ever posted on imageboards. They're the type of person to actually shudder away from going to imageboards but say shit like "4chan is the most awful place on Earth but it also has some of the best people". They will ape imageboard memes but their circulation will always be a few months/years late because of how long it takes one to get out. I think what really these people are are vaguely more online lumberjacks.

I see these types as a sort of mirror of the lumberjacks. While the lumberjack feels insecure in his masculinity, and thus must ape a cartoonishly and exaggerated version of it (but one that is entirely socially moderated, "moral," and conformist, i.e. "be a fucking man and marry the single mom of the mulatto child, goy"), the wholesome conservanormie (with whom I would also include many Apu Apustaja posters, people who talk about "frens," people who post about getting married and having a family as if it's some great achievement and not the normal human baseline, people who complain about porn & sneed oils, etc. - the W.A.T. is an archaic form of this) instead feels insecure about being an immoral weirdo, and thus adopts a cartoonish version of "goodness" to reassure himself. He feels deep shame over having once been a porn-addicted 4chan "incel" and/or "edgelord," and thinks that if he role-plays the image of "traditional living" which has been jizzed into his brain by outside forces, he can finally become normal and happy.

[NuclearAbsolutist]

In terms of origins, I doubt they ever posted on imageboards.

Incorrect(It must be said imageboards in of themselves have nothing special to offer in terms of not becoming a stagnant waste like the rest of the internet now nor creating such communities as OP wonderfully described) in fact I have reason to view they did originate on one of the most infamous image boards of recent memory good old H8Chan. 4chan itself having dulled to such a state where these types are common as well but on 8chan it was all contained mainly with some spill over to /pol/ and /v/ on the board /christian/.  At the very least /christian/ is where alot of these memes such as Christ-Chan developed new reaction images and illustrations now popularly and endlessly re shared on twitter and discord today.
I'll leave you with some choice illustrations reposted across 8chan in my time, expressions of the sites culture without question.
[Image: https://i.imgur.com/sraHdlB.png]
[Image: https://i.imgur.com/dPnCuVo.jpg]
[Image: https://i.imgur.com/d0TEgBV.jpg]
All these tropes like much online prototyped on a image board.

[Asvka]

I like them, even thought they're just rw midwits

[Datacop]

I like them, even thought they're just rw midwits

This is honestly the only way to look at them. Any attempt to read into their culture seems useless, they are as facile as they seem. At risk of sounding too edgy, WATs are really our equivalent to useless idiots. They agree with most every RW point as long as it conforms to the Christian meme structure they're used to.

[anthony]

This issue seems to have woken up on twitter just recently. The issue taken I believe is the suggestion that every expression of virtue or quality is being interpreted as an inherent christian character emerging in a thing. From here of course the thinking goes that the way to more quality is to become more completely Christian. By suggesting that anime is good because it is essentially Christian one is of course painting the japanese as something like imperfectly developed westerners rather than people with their own independent cultural tradition which also succeeding in cultivating a great deal of virtue. And more than that, appears to be doing better than ours right now.

https://twitter.com/LoliCongress/status/...7722062848

[Kasarix]

Late reply of course, but I was thinking about the commandment to revere sacred things (the 2nd or 3rd commandment depending on your numbering) and I think I found a key in analyzing why they care so much about fusing Christianity with anime, although this makes the topic a bit more theology-oriented:

WATs seem to be a wholly American phenomenon; I think a lot of WATs are spiritually descended from American folk protestants, which is the culture that produced Christian rock, Christian bluegrass, Adventures in Odyssey, and Veggietales. They also like Weird Al, but I digress.
Anyway, when it comes to their theological worldview, American folk protestants (or as I endearingly call them, Veggietales Americans) have a different understanding/misunderstanding of reverence. That is, they find it acceptable and even right to infuse Christianity, heavenly things, and even sacred things, into media, mundane objects, and all facets of life: Christian-themed music, Christian-themed clothing, Christian-themed Minecraft servers. This mindset that everything must be baptized seems to have been inherited by WATs, which is why they guard so jealously all of their "Christian" anime, and why they care so much about propagating this meme.

Unfortunately, this is imprudent. To inject my own theological bias, I must add that it's a misstep to so hastily intermingle holy symbols with created things: to take this mindset to its extreme, you may create Christian-themed food by inscribing holy symbols onto it. This does not lift up the food to the high level heaven, but rather brings heaven down to the low level of food. In the same vein, intermingling anime with Christianity like anime nuns for example only devalues the symbol of nuns rather than "purifying" the medium.

I must state that there is a distinction between supernatural and natural virtue, and that it is perfectly fine if media only contains natural virtue. I'm by no means a philosopher, but Aristotle was capable of discovering the existence of the dimension of virtue by reason alone, unaided by revelation. This is why Christians find beauty in seemingly secular tales, for it is possible for a medium, like anime, to be perfect in the natural sense of displaying virtue and true morality, even if it is missing explicitly Christian themes. Lord of the Rings is a thoroughly Christian story, replete with virtue, themes, and morality, and yet Tolkien did not feel the need to inject so much overtness into it. There are of course the supernatural virtues and moral values, which are hard to show in secular tales, and it is well and good to expound upon those in media, but beauty in media seems not to be restricted by overtness of its subject matter.

On an unrelated note, I'd like to state that I discovered a Muslim WAT. He is a white American, and although he is not Christian, he still enjoys imbuing generic religious or "traditional" morality with anime.

[anthony]

The problem I see is that these people have baseline assumptions on the nature of good, sacred, whatever, which they're unwilling to change no matter how much contact they have with things which feel good that aren't that. The problem is this forced chasm between known goodness and actual experienced, felt, phenomenal goodness. Recognising incompatibility or incongruence here is quite disturbing, so we get this conscientious correction of affinities, desires, and pleasures to match to the learned but not felt baseline.

Internet religion is a neurotic, oversocialised condition. Spawned by lots of thoughts in clouds. Unanchored thinking.

[Corvid]

[Image: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1...witter.jpg]
[Image: https://images.fineartamerica.com/images...aphael.jpg]