Otto von Bismarck invented anime.
Okay, you’re just going to have to hear me out on this one. This goes a lot of places, so just stick with me.
If you don’t know, Otto von Bismark was a Prussian politician in the late 19th century who just about singlehandedly transformed Germany from a loose confederation of small states led by Austria to an empire considered one of the Great Powers led by the former king of Prussia, now German Emperor Wilhelm I, by bamboozling Europe into three wars, cleverly managing the complex new system of government, and somehow managing to keep all the major powers in Europe for allying with France.
While he was fired by Wilhelm’s successor, William II, Bismarck’s empire faced challenges and problems that wouldn’t have been issues under his leadership, but it stayed together to take a leading role in WWI.
After Germany lost WWI, it was forced to dismantle most of its military and pay a STUPID amount of money in reparations. This drove Germans to form the National Socialist German Workers Party, led by move other than everyone’s favorite asshole, Adolf Hitler, who, as you may know, began WWII.
With all the Europeans busy fighting in Europe, Japan realized that it only had the US to contend with in the Pacific. Seeing this, they decided to try to subdue the US, which they failed to do, as the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor only led to a long, bloody, drawn out war in SE Asia.
Not wanting to sacrifice anymore American lives, President Truman made the impossible decision to drop two newly developed atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which quickly ended the Eastern Theater of the war.
After the war, Japan fell into a depression. Life was hard, and art had been censored and controlled by the government during the war, but a young artist by the name of Osamu Tezuka had high hopes, and a brightly colored, light heated style that culminated in his work Astro Boy, which gained him the title Father of Manga.
Manga, if you don’t know, it’s the Japanese equivalent of a comic book, and manga is eventually what led to the creation of anime, an easy step to make that just moved the drawings from a page to a screen.
So there you go, Otto von Bismarck invented Anime.
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