I enjoy watching anime and reading manga, manhua, and manhwa. If one reads the description before one watches and reads, one can avoid inappropriate videos or publications. Actually, the same is true of any type of media that one may watch or read, whether it is from the Far East or from here in the USA.
But, because the media named above come from the East Asia area (Japan, Korea, China), I find it interesting to watch and/or read how they handle Western religion. The main religions in the area range from Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, Shamanism, and Buddhism. There is also folk-religion present in many rural parts of China.
Christianity is a minor part of all but one of those countries, ranging from 1-4% of the population. South Korea is the exception, but nearly 30% of the population being Christian. When I say Christianity, I mean all groups that call themselves Christians. In Japan, where Christianity is about 1%, this means that portrayals of Christians in either anime or manga are almost always wrong.
No, I am not asking that all Christians be portrayed as saints. Rather, whether the Christian portrayed in anime/manga is a saint or a sinner, the content of the portrayal of Christianity is usually so mistaken that it is obvious that the writers had little contact with Christians of any type. For instance, one manga had a Catholic priest who had to go somewhere and left his high school-age son as the priest-in-charge. This priest-son was actually portrayed rather positively as a helping and caring person. However, this appears to be a conflation of some ideas about Catholicism and the older hereditary Shinto priesthood.
No, I am not angry about this lack of knowledge. Rather, it shows and reminds me of how poorly Christianity has penetrated all the countries named earlier except South Korea. Despite centuries of Christian missionaries, not only has Christianity not taken root (with the exception of South Korea), it has not even been understood in any meaningful way. Thus, what is often portrayed is part of the very outer shell of Christianity, and most often of Catholicism with no knowledge beyond that outer shell. Even the outer shell is often misportrayed.
We who are Eastern Orthodox are fortunate that the USA has a high percentage of people self-identifying as Christians. In this country, we make up only about 1.5% of the population. And, we do regularly have encounters that show how little people in this nation know about us. But, at least we often have common experiences that allow for better communication than the Christians have in the Far East. People here know what a cross is. Many, if not most, recognize a cassock. All Christians basically know a reasonable amount of information about Jesus, the Twelve Apostles, the Bible, etc. Thus, at least there is some commonality in our language.
Even so, even with the commonality, even with the presence of a reasonable amount of common language, explaining ourselves to someone who has never heard of the Eastern Orthodox before is a difficult task. I shudder to think what a video or comic book authored by a non-Orthodox that included us would contain. What these thoughts have done is to lead me to wonder whether there are better ways to communicate who we are to this culture. I have to leave Far East culture to the Christians who live there. But, here in the USA, how do we communicate about ourselves such that people will have a reasonable idea of whom we actually are? I do not have a good answer to that.
I’ve always been fascinated by this (for some reason all the anime nerds I know are also religion nerds, too). It struck me because I actually do draw a webcomic with major Orthodox characters while not having an Orthodox background myself, and it’s been a fun and challenging scramble to make it accurate as I can.