Other people that share my hobby believe that anime has raised them like a third (or second) parent. However, I have discovered that most of these people do not realize that, like their parents, anime is far from perfect. It can be disappointing, repetitive and just plain bad. This kind of ignorance can have very negative effects on a person's capability to understand what is good and bad in terms of social encounters and comedy. Very similarly to a child who believes his parents are good when in fact they are abusive, watching a modern anime fan is like watching someone who was not brought up right.
Many of those who are around me that share my interest in anime have a hard time accepting that just about every single piece of anime that has been released in the past decade has been complete and utter trash. I will not name names because this is not that kind of discussion. Anime has been plagued with over used characters, trends and stereotypes that it has gotten to the point where people watch anime like they shoot up crack. They watch these obviously terrible shows because they need their fix.
Japan knows this. They do not try to fix this. They fill every single time slot with fan service and moe. They do this because anime don't realize that they saw this same show 10 years ago, but with less panties.
Anime has become nothing but a trope. A one word explanation about what you can expect from the show. This makes my job hard because I try my hardest to defend anime. I try to defend anime because it has in the past to show magnificent story and character development that very few "real" TV shows/movies could do as well. I defend anime because it is the physical manifestation of potential. Unfortunately, anime does very little to make my job easy.
I have explained this to several people that "Anime, some of it is good, all of it is bad." Now, if I were to say "the rest of it is bad." or "most of it is bad", you would get the idea that the ratio from bad anime to good anime is about 1:5 or so. This is incorrect. A more accurate ratio is 1:100 at least. Therefor, the first quote "all of it is bad" is a far truer explanation than the others.
Among my large group of friends, only two will go out of our way to sit down and watch an anime. The rest of our group waits for us to watch it so we can tell them if its worth their time. A perfect example is when my friend Tony tried to recommend Rumbling Hearts to ALL of our friends. Of course, only my friend Eric and I took the time to see what all the fuss Tony was giving was about. Being 14 episodes long, I took an afternoon and marathoned the entire series. When my friend John, who is not into anime that much, inquired about said anime, I simply responded "Watch the first four episodes then I'll tell you how it ends."
Rumbling Hearts is a serious romantic drama for the first four episodes with a heart breaking plot twist at the end of the 4th. The anime then spends the next 10 episodes to tell what it could in four. Thats right, they spend the equivalent of six episodes, that is haft a season, on random anime shit that contributes little to nothing to the plot. Why do they do this? Cause anime fans love it when they see a "17" year old girl in a maid outfit yell at people telling them to step in cat poop...
It was from this anime that I coined the term, "It would be a great anime if it wasn't for the fact that it was an anime."
Luckily, my friends enjoy watching anime with me. This is only because I see through their eyes and recognize when bad things are bad. In fact, I fucking call out when the bad is bad. If you are ever in the same room as me and I am watching an anime that I do not consider to be good, you will get an endless amount of entertainment from said anime solely on the fact that I am non stop tearing it a new one. This is the only way I can get my friends to watch Bleach past episode 15.
Thus I have coined the term Anime Yeller. I believe this best describes what kind of anime fan I am. I yell at bad anime while watching it because making fun of it is the only way I can get enjoyment out of bad anime, and since all anime is bad, I tend to yell at every anime I watch.
I love and respect anime to death, but god damn it is it hard to defend it.
I could probably agree with all of that. There is the occasional gem, though.
ReplyDeleteGems in a mountain of shit has always been the agenda for anime. It has just gotten to a point where the few good animes don't outweigh the enormous amount of bad ones like they used to.
ReplyDeleteso much bad anime, SOOO much. heavy is the burden of sifting through it dense bog of crap to get to watchable shows. but i'm going to disagree to say it is definitely worth going through the voluminous amounts of bad to get to the good.
ReplyDeletei just recently finished watching cross game, and that was a show i stumbled upon just through boredom and i would have to say as a person who really enjoys tv and story-telling i would have been sadden if i had never seen it. pretty sure i would feel that way about a good amount of shows i've come across the same way.
i will admit though some of those shows even though i thoroughly enjoyed might actually be shit. like right now im watching b.gata h.kei, what the fuck is wrong with me?
also, about rumbling hearts i think you need all that filler because it merely adds time and frustration to let you really see what a fucking indecisive moron that dude is and literally years of agony and most of the problems that occurred during that show could have been solved if he could ever make up his mind.
For Rumbling Hearts I could get behind that reasoning if they found a better way to kill time. God, I hated those waitress chicks.
ReplyDeleteB.gata h.kei is pretty funny I will give you that.
One thing that I may point out is a lot of "good" anime these days is what I like to call "Anime for anime fans." K-ON is probably the best example I can give for this category because one of its main selling points is that all the characters are moe and look like chipmunks.
i feel so lucky. i've never seen more than a couple of episodes of an anime that blew (though it may have been decent, and i was getting the bottom of the barrel in terms of what the show had to offer). it's kind of easy to tell the shitty animes, though, you know? excessive chibi style animation is almost always bad. being set in a high school is a bad sign. a really good first episode really makes you wonder (like tokyo majin-- the first episode is amazing and the rest is boring as piss). elfen lied's first episode is almost too badass for the rest of the show (though i like the whole thing anyways, though it's not as good as the manga in some ways).
ReplyDeleteit's not like anime's the only form of media that suffers from dumb stereotyped problems though. every law show besides boston legal is exactly the same. all the crime shows are the same. even shows like Dexter and Psych that try to do something different end up being swallowed up by the same dialogue drivel that kills every show. nothing happens in the episodes, there's needless, nonsensical drama, it's all idiotic. all the paragon shows are the same: house and lie to me are just about total badasses who are even more badass because they're surrounded by really boring people.
whatever. Dragonball Z is the best thing to happen to the universe. It redeems everything else. It's actually the Jesus of television shows.