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Anime's gotten kind of a raw deal the last 20 years
Between the annoying weeaboos and the angry blowhards who complain about them all the time, whatever qualities anime itself may or may not have kind of get lost in the crossfire.
Comments
The other raw deal is that the OVA industry is practically dead--all the OVAs made now are sequels to already-popular series, while back in the day OVAs were a valid venue for things that would otherwise never have been adapted, like the Salamander games, or for original stories like Tenchi Muyo.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the value of the medium's total output over the entire lifetime of any given reader of this thread isn't nullified by some stigma and the people who get passionate and stupid about it.
If that's all it takes to declare such a broad swath of materials invalid, I can't think of a single thing you could really enjoy.
I do agree with wannabeotaking that anime has gotten less interesting over the last few years, but then so have a lot of things. Cartoons aren't as good now, video games are rarely good, nobody can churn out a decent novel anymore, and the movie industry is in such a rut that they had to bring back 3D glasses just to try and make it interesting again.
"Are we really unsatisfied consumers and longtime fans with valid complaints and reasonable expectations which just aren't being met, or are we disgruntled man-children with embittered perspectives eschewed by childhood nostalgia who desperately need to move on and accept the fact that our time as the target audience of our favorite developers has come and gone, that our childhood's over and that those magical moments are gone forever not because the world has changed, but because we have." (a user summing up the end of Pitchfork's Final Fantasy XII article)
Just saying.
We'll see more original works when the economy gets back on track.
And that ends my
bullshit guessesarmchair hypothesis.Stop the presses.
wat.
To be honest, I've heard all the stories and theories--we're not the target audience anymore, childhood nostalgia, the magical freshness of when something is new etc.--and while all three have some valid points, for the most part they are loads of bullocks.
If it was all childhood nostalgia, then I would like Sailor Moon just as much as Ranma 1/2. I don't, so that has to be bullshit.
If it was a simple issue of not being the target audience, then I wouldn't like the older stuff any more than I like the newer stuff. Since I do, that has to be bullshit.
If it was the magical freshness of when something is new, then I'd have to hate Ranma and DBZ now. I don't, so that has to be bullshit.
The only conclusion that makes sense is that stuff isn't as good as it used to be.
> If it was all childhood nostalgia, then I would like Sailor Moon just as
much as Ranma 1/2. I don't, so that has to be bullshit.
So that's if it were purely childhood nostalgia and nothing else. What if it's childhood nostalgia plus something else?
> If it was a simple issue of not being the target audience, then I
wouldn't like the older stuff any more than I like the newer stuff.
Since I do, that has to be bullshit.
So that's if it were purely a simple issue of not being the target audience--an issue that itself isn't pure and simple because different people within a given age group like different things anyway.
> If it was the magical freshness of when something is new, then I'd have
to hate Ranma and DBZ now. I don't, so that has to be bullshit.
Why would you have to hate it? Why couldn't you just, say, like it less, or be indifferent?
And how are you so sure that there are no other possible reasons? I can think of one myself: As a child you are less receptive to complexity in plots, but more modern production have not kept pace with your cognitive maturity.
I'm not, I'm just answering the ones that have specifically been stated (namely in that HG101 post Abyss quoted--though I'll admit the magical freshness part was something I inferred rather than actually saw stated).
I'll admit it's not always that cut-n-dried, but see that's actually the problem with these "its not the media, its you" theories--they're the ones trying to make it look like something simple when its actually not.
I've lately found myself way too genre-savvy with things like JRPGs and then playing them with an expectation of things like lost forevers, vandalizing containers for fun and profit, and such.
So basically, the Import Filter is breaking down?
Nowadays, its the exact opposite: they know there's a market so they demand a premium. That means that the only stuff that gets licensed is deemed fit to print. Unfortunately, part of the problem is that it was often the "crap" that turned out the most interesting. A movie like Gall Force or Golgo 13: The Professional might have never gotten licensed in today's culture.
You might almost say the import filter is the worst thing to ever happen to anime.
The only conclusion that makes sense is that stuff isn't as good as it used to be.
No, the only conclusion is that, for whatever reasons, your favourite series are older.
Except that's only true from a certain point of view. Not everybody knows about Bittorrent, knows how to work it, knows how to find torrents. Even if they do, whenever I go to a site like Animesuki or whatever, all I see is lists with titles, no actual information, so while availability might not be an issue, you're basically shopping blind and can only find out about shows by downloading an episode of all of them to see what they are (or looking at the Wikipedia article--and if one even exists, it probably spoils the series anyway so why download it?) Finally, bittorrent is slow as hell.
Do you really have something if most of the world doesn't know they have it and the parts that do may or may not find it inaccessible anyway?
Admittedly that's true, and its hard to make an all-encompassing case all at once. That's why my approach has always been to talk about individual works and/or individual aspects several works have in common and hope that readers eventually put the pieces together to see what I'm saying, see if they can spot a pattern in my complaints.
Granted, I've been trying that on TV Tropes, where people are more prone to spot imaginary patterns than real ones, but still.
Looking up a series on something like AniDB gives you far more information about a series than you could ever get just by looking at the VHS/DVD/whatever box...
Also, bakabt has summaries and screenshots for almost all of their torrents, and they have pretty much any series that is subbed and not licensed by Funi.
The other day, I downloaded a 3-hour movie in like 20 minutes. That is far faster than I'd ever be able to get it by other means.