blending Japanese storytelling with Western pop culture
This is literally what most good manga and anime creators used to do in the 80s and earlier (just look at pictures of Akira Toriyama's desks). The industry just shifted to primarily market works by people whose only media diet was manga and anime unfortunately (edit: the success of stuff like Macross and Evangelion are big examples of this in the scifi anime genre specifically, but there's obviously others). Varied media diets are good for you - don't just read stuff from one genre, country, medium, etc!
) who you share this with. Knowledge that Japanese cartoons take inspiration from western anime is a mindkill agent for a large subset of the community. Especially those with a conservative bent.