The Death of the Tsundere | A Retrospective

picture this you're watching anime doesn't matter which one you see a girl in the show that's obviously in love with the main character but doesn't want to show it she calls him an idiot punches him in the arm and otherwise abuses him but nonetheless she keeps blushing anytime he talks to her that is aundre a character archetype in anime that has officially existed for years now and has unofficially been around for far longer they are increasingly common in nearly every piece of anime related media nowadays they have their di hard fans and their devout haters and I have a problem with them but the problem isn't actually with tndr it isn't even with character archetypes or anime in general I have a problem with the way we consume media one that I want to talk about by talking about the death of the Sundre but before I do any of that this video is sponsored by web novel the number one Community for reading and writing web novels Comics mana and more have you ever wanted to read about magic reincarnation and Powerful Heroes well web novel has a great selection of system stories featuring protagonists with special abilities that cultivate their powers to become the best my favorite is reincarnated with the strongest system in it the main character William is reborn into a Fantastical world and given a system that lets them increase their level much higher than everyone else with this power they set out on a long journey trying to find the meaning of happiness in their new life and with over 1,400 chapters currently out this is a story you can easily get addicted to reading there's also tons of other great picks on web novel 2 like my dragon system Advent of the arch Mage and God rank upgrade system but no matter which one you want to read first you can do all that and more on the official web novel app for both IOS and Android just click the link in the description or head to the App Store download the app and search for the word system thank you to web novel for sponsoring this video back to the episode tund kudre dandre yandre these so-called de archetypes are all over the place in anime so much so that I think it might actually be impossible to watch anything in the medium without stumbling into at least one of them you see they all stem from the term D de which is used to describe someone who looks like they're in love all of the words that are put in front of De are then just meant to represent the different ways that characters can express that love so if someone acts calm and emotionless that's a kudre stemming from the Japanese pronunciation ation of the English word cool if they act shy and timid that's a dandre stemming from the word danari meaning silence though if they're deranged and prone to violence that would make them the incredibly popular and Infamous yandre stemming from yanderu which means to be mentally ill and then you have tsundere which comes from tsun a sort of mimetic word that's used to describe someone being grumpy in a way that usually has them turn away from you in disgust which naturally combines with de de to mean a girl that initially comes off as is mean but eventually falls in love much like a lot of tropes in anime the tsundere had existed for several decades before we made up a term to describe it characters like Sapphire from Princess knight monsley from Future Boy Conan or seaka Yumi from mazinger Z all fit the bill for the first Sundre though if you want to be pedantic and prove a point you could easily trace the lineage as far back as you want I mean the [ __ ] Epic of Gilgamesh technically has a tund in it however unsurprisingly to anyone who's seen my previous video on anime wuss the girl to popularize the archetype and bring it into the mainstream was none other than Lum The Invader girl from AA yatsa highly suggest you watch that video if you want more information on all this though something I didn't mention in that video is that lum's status as a suere seems to be an accident you see the original version of the Ursa yatsura manga was a five chapter Omnibus that rimo Takahashi hadn't planned to continue beyond that every chapter would feature ataru the main character meeting a different strange alien with their own story going on lum The Invader girl the princess of this Alien Planet being only the first of several he was supposed to encounter so as most people know the first chapter features ataru being challenged to beat Lum in a game of tag which he wins by stealing her bra this royally pisses Lum off however when ataru yells out a marriage proposal to his girlfriend after winning Lum thinks he's talking to her and says yes it's a great joke well executed punchline and that was supposed to be it the next chapter then had a completely different alien show up and annoy ataru him and his girlfriend don't even acknowledge the alien princess or the fact that he's engaged to her it was entirely a oneoff bit and the story moved on however the fans liked Lum and the manga so much that it continued to run for 360 more chapters featuring The Invader girl as a main character in love interest her reintroduction of the story is even caused when in Universe fans of Lum kidnap ataru and beg him to bring her back which Takahashi says she did out of spite in what might be the least subtle audience call out of all time but because of this change in the story something interesting happened to lum's character she was originally written in that first chapter as hating ataru bickering with him and cursing him out up until that marriage joke at the end but with her reintroduction in chapter 3 onward she's written fully in love with him calling him darling and wanting to be his wife a lot of the jokes that come out of her personality even come from the fact that she's too into him most of the time and most of her abuse towards him from that point on comes from him rejecting her or being unfaithful so out of all this we get a character that was originally just antagonistic and abusive to now being entirely romantic and still abusive and doesn't that sound familiar well it should because it's the exact reason why so many people cite Lum as one of the first Sunder and whether intentional or not this archetype definitely stuck with Takahashi would go on to write much more explicitly tnd characters like aan tendo from rma2 money fast forwarding a bit this type of character who's initially cold but warms up to the lead would get picked up by more and more authors and incorporated into more and more stories it would continue to grow in popularity and become more ingrained in the culture until we' finally get the girl who coined the term you probably already know who I'm talking about they should be the first thing that comes to mind when I say the word cindere that's right I'm talking about I dauji from kiman noan oh and also Asuka from Evangelion I guess anyways the visual novel The Eternity you desire also known as kimoo also known as rumbling Hearts released in August of 2001 was a fairly successful bishojo game put out among a sea of similar titles at the time the 9s and early 2000s were a boom for the anime inspired Adventure game genre and titles like Canon two heart and the tokim Mei Memorial series were all massively successful but what none of those games had that rumbling Hearts did was a Tere actually that was a lie most visual novels had Synder in them as the format of dating Sims and bishojo pretty girl games often necessitated breaking down characters into easily distinguishable tropes there would often be half a dozen or more girls that you could pursue in each game so you had to be able to pretty easily understand that this specific girl had this specific character trait basically from the get-go in order to be interested enough in her to play through her route so more so than even similar anime at the time like love Hena in aasha or fruits basket bjo games would condense and distill their character's elements as much as possible resulting in most of the official de archetypes as we know them today and one of the more popular archetypes in these games would always be the girl that's initially cold and abusive who eventually warms up to you because if you're playing the game as the main character you're the one she's warming up to it's through your actions alone that she starts to open up so to a lot of people it's inherently more rewarding to pursue that type of girl than someone who might be more receptive from the outset you are literally just playing on hard mode and because of that suere type girls would become a staple of the bishojo game genre though it wouldn't be until August 29th 2002 on the now defunct aashi World Forum that we would see the first recorded combination of the terms tsun and de de in a thread talking about characters from rumbling Hearts from the information I found the thread actually starts off with an argument over the character aayu dauji who in-game is the daughter of the CEO of the restaurant you work for and who is very rude and unfriendly to you until you get to know her in response to this argument a user writes don't ask me if I prefer tsun Deere or not I prefer Mayu Mayu being another girl in the game this combination of tun and de would then continue to be used on aashi world to describe certain characters eventually getting shortened to just suere over time until a two channel user would then post about how the term seems to have been coined there and the rest is history cuz I don't think you have any idea how nice a restaurant this is I know more than you think I do you're an idiot from 2002 into the late 2000s the term would then slowly increase in popularity as anime and visual novels would both expand and continue to develop the Trope the term itself would be used more prominently online even in Western spaces the Engish Wikipedia page being created in 2005 and on October 30th of 2009 we'd see a massive spike in popularity on Google which I have no explanation for this is a tangent but I spent an incredible amount of time trying to figure out where this one day popularity Spike came from even though it's not relevant to the video if someone has any idea please leave a comment about it here's my list of leads so far anyways after this rise of the suere in the early 2000s and the several decades since then they've had to grow and change you might have noticed a certain kind of online discourse pop up surrounding them while there are still many people who adore the cinder Trope and eat up whatever character they find in new anime that has it there's also an Ever growing list of people that hate it they find it annoying yet the type of character they find annoying isn't usually the girl who slowly warms up to the protagonist rather they hate the girl that blushes around him gets mad and then says this so where did that girl come from you see even one of the first official definitions of tsundere described by Patrick GB in the otaku encyclopedia specifically notes that it is not a character type but a developmental process where in an icy character shows their warm side over the course of time yet that isn't what modern Sunder are at all there is no process there is no warming up they're just like that they bicker with the main character while having a crush in them why what [Music] happened several years ago seemingly by pure happen stance something incredibly strange would happen two Scholars on opposite ends of the world speaking two completely different languages and studying two completely different forms of media would publish two books at the same time that both covered the same topic Lev manovich's the language of New Media and heroki azuma's animalizing postmodernity both see seemly independently of each other introduce the reader to something they call the database in manovich's book they describe the database as this new way we've started thinking about media much in the same way that we now create content digitally he says we also think about it digitally things are no longer enjoyed as part of a hole part of a narrative but rather as individual pieces that you can pluck out of the hole and plug in somewhere else in manovich's own words many New Media objects do not tell stories they do not have have a beginning or end in fact they do not have any new development thematically formally or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence instead they are collections of individual items with every item possessing the same significance as any other really basic example but the background music for all of my videos is often from video game soundtracks many of which are from games I have never played in using this music I am ignoring the narrative that it was once a part of the whole experience of the game and how the sound track ties into it and I'm instead taking one element putting it into a literal database of files on my computer and pulling it out to put into the background of this video and in manovich's book this is how they argue all new media exists in oa's book however the database is described in almost the exact same way except instead of computer programs and American Cinema as examples OA specifically refers to anime and otaku culture saying that otaku don't approach a work just as a narrative they also break the work down and focus on its elements these can be elements of the production such as characters and settings or aspects of the design all the artwork and key frames as consumers they want to know how the work is produced so that they can break it down and reconstruct something else so the way that people consume anime as well as most media for a long time has slowly shifted to being focused on database elements over entire narratives if you've ever seen someone post a single clip of bad animation from a show and call the whole thing dog [ __ ] you've seen an example of this the suere then is one of the clearest cases of this so-called datab basification characters like Lum Asuka and aane were all narrative cinderes their cindere was directly tied into the character arcs which were tied into the entire plot of the show you couldn't remove that Cinder element without removing their entire story but with visual novels condensing these elements into more recognizable tropes and Anime reincorporating that that back into popular characters that Cinder became defined entirely as a database element as a single personality type that you could stick onto a character and enjoy outside of the context of the story and do you want to know the crazy part this entire argument this entire Revelation that I'm having right now is about 15 years too late first do we comprehend the true meaning of the qualities of a cinder no unfortunately the word cinder has suffered misuse and Decay and one could say that the definition has evolved to begin with the word syndor was born in the year 2002 an internet term but the original definition was a character who starts off sunsun and eventually becomes dar dar yes in other words it was supposed to describe a change over time and now it's used to describe the multiple faces of a character in other words sunson on the outside and dar dar on the inside I declare here this is plainly a mistake we must bring back the tree meaning of Sund and restore this depraved Nation rise up citizens so everyone in front of the TV yes you try to come up with a new word to describe characters like kogami and rewrite the modern lexicon we'll call it the complete syndor debate lucky stars post episode companion segment lucky channel in its 10th episode had one of the characters get into a heated argument about the definition of tnder one that may seem eerily like exactly what I was just saying this whole video yet this episode aired in 2007 way before I was making videos and before anyone was really talking about this on YouTube at all really and those books by Lev manovic and heroki ozma detailing how people think about media in the digital age those were published in 2001 the internet still sounded like this in 2001 so this transformation was taken place over two decades ago and in the time since 2001 the internet has so thoroughly spread out and sped up everything we consume that the idea of datab basification itself is old news the Sunder as it was originally defined is long dead because the narrative is gone all that's left are these independent elements all of equal importance all fighting for your attention more than ever and this hyper datab basification as I'll call it applies to every piece of media today take comic book movies for example Cinema for the longest time was an entirely narrative product yet Marvel movies are now entirely filled with interchangeable Heroes and interchangeable stories that get swapped around to fit whatever the audience will best recognize Not only was no way home a movie constructed entirely of different parts from other movies without context but people watched the movie on Tik Tok in a bunch of one minute clips that were given to them out of order by an algorithm if you look at the way people enjoy anime on social media you'll see people break down entire shows into animation and voice acting and singular characters they like so often that you'd forget there was a story holding them all together even the ride of AI image generation and the cult around it is one entirely born out of the database when you strip away The Narrative of a piece of Photography or art or animation and just consume that piece as lines and shapes on a screen then of course you're going to be impressed when a computer can replicate those lines and shapes it can't replicate The Narrative the emotion and Humanity of creation but that doesn't matter to me the story of the Sunder is one that is incredibly complex and interesting but it also represents something much larger the death of the Sunder parallels the death of narrative media people didn't just change the definition of the term because of certain authors or Trends or tropes they changed it because media changed the way we consume things changed and that's important to recognize so the next time you're watching an anime doesn't matter which one and you see a girl that's obviously in love with the main character but doesn't want to show it think about the long journey we took to get there think about the Trope that was popularized by accident the term that was coined in an argument and the changing media landscape that was predicted over two decades ago by two different authors at the same time because that is a [Music] [Applause] [Music] cinder thank you so much for watching uh this is a bit of a shorter Deep dive video from me and it's actually a companion piece to my anime waifu's video that I made almost a year ago now so if you liked it go check that video out it gets way deeper into the histories of a lot of these anime and talks way more about a lot of the scholars I mentioned here this is only a tangential subject in a much broader conversation I've been having with these videos though if you want to see the full ad free versions of this video or any other go check that out at [Music] on YouTube in any case thanks again for watching thanks again to web novel for sponsoring the video and I'll see you next time

Channel: Lextorias

Views: 284,534

Keywords: lextorias, tsundere, tsundere retrospective, the rise and fall of the tsundere, what happened to the tsundere?, tsundere lum, tsundere asuka, tsundere akane tendo, the death of the tsundere, tsundere term origins, history of tsundere, who was the first tsundere?, the first tsundere, tsundere history, The Death of the Tsundere | A Retrospective

Id: D4p6Zivu0Qg

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2023