If you draw women like children, and then give them high pitched voices, like children, and have them act girlish and foolish like pre-teen girls, and then sexualize them…There is something very very fucking wrong with you. Anime “purists” can deny it all they want, but it’s inherently tied in/related to fake waifu girlfriends and lonely neckbeards drawing naked waifus all over DeviantArt.

It’s skeevy as shit and I refuse to pretend otherwise.

Youre mistaking indifference for hatred.

I wouldn’t say I hate it, but I can’t watch it.

I used to love it. I was obsessed in the early 2000’s. Then I went to college for animation, and learning about how that all works absolutely ruined all enjoyment for anime.

I don’t hate it but I think a lot of japanese anime and video-games have an awful pacing that make it so boring for me. The stories make too much time to move on. So slow.

I have tried a lot of anime (Myazaki, the titan’s thingy…) and videogames because fans don’t stop talking about it but it’s just not my cup of tea.

I’ve always felt like anime requires a huge time investment to enjoy it; so I’ve always avoided it.

I just don’t like soap operas, whatever the form. My kid does though.

I guess we just grew up and Japan still mostly treats and creates anime as media for kids and teenagers, not unlike how cartoons are still mostly “for kids”.

I don’t “hate” anime, like many people here, but some stuff just doesn’t entertain me anymore. I’m too old to find Dragon Ball Z and every other similar shonen even minimally entertaining. Hell, I was probably too old for that shit back when I was 19, I remember checking Bleach and giving up on episode 7 or whatever, though I think it was Naruto that “woke me up” when I was 16, I was watching it but wasn’t enjoying it for quite a while, until I just dropped it around ep 120, “this shit ain’t going nowhere”.

I’ve only watched Evangelion the first time during covid years, and it was clear it was two stories in one: the one they wanted to tell, which was kinda interesting, and their struggles with budget and how that affected the product.

The thing is that the anime that reaches mass appeal is meant for the masses, much like movies with mass appeal are the ones that require you to shut down your brain. The last 2 anime that I watched, enjoyed and wouldn’t mind watching again are Legend of Galactic Heroes and Taxi Driver, both are low on nonsense and bullshit.

More often than not, it’s just better to read the manga, when the anime’s based on one. Slam Dunk is a much better read than watching the anime, plus you end up knowing about the author’s other work, Vagabond, which is amazing.

Edit: I’m sorry for the lack of tl; dr. There’s a general drop off of quality, weird social media garbage, a lot of systemic problems, etc. What I’m trying to say here is hard to summarize

Aside from the fact that it’s mass produced garbage, I can actually say that I’m old enough to have experienced a period of anime where the production values, writing, and dialogue weren’t exactly terrible.

I think a good example of my gripe with anime today is watching something like Fate Zero and then following that up with Heaven’s Feel. The distinct drop in quality between those 2 adaptations is pretty stark.

The original Yu-Gi-Oh anime was absolutely wild. It’s dumb in a uniquely entertaining fashion. There were so many sequels that were produced for Yu-Gi-Oh and every single one of them was completely terrible.

Watching Tenchi Muyo’s OVA part 1 and part 2 was fairly enjoyable. Part 3 is so much worse for seemingly no good reason.

The third Tenchi Muyo film was abjectly terrible. It’s quite possibly one of the worst films that has ever been made.

FLCL season 1 was legendary. Season 2 and 3 were substantially worse.

The new Evangelion films weren’t exactly great.

Even as far back as Pokemon season 1, that season was pretty okay. Almost everything past the first 2 seasons were… really bad…

There have been some bad adaptions for Berserk that have been mentioned from time to time.

Dragonball Super is weird. Nobody really seems to like Super. Even people who watch Super regularly treat it as some kind of Frankenstein monster.

Gundam has been pretty consistently not good for well over a decade. Gundam Wing was pretty insane. It started off with some super questionable writing and poor voice acting, and then it ended off being probably the best thing Gundam has ever been. And everything that followed was… not very good…

Naruto was followed by Boruto. It’s pretty bad. A large chunk of the 2nd half of Naruto was just not good.

I’ve seen people defend Hunter X Hunter’s Chimera Ant arc so brazenly. And still, it’s genuinely not good. Which is amazing, because almost everything prior to that arc was crazy good.

To be fair, a lot of these problems stem from the fact that the work being adapted is also consistently worse. It’s not just anime. A lot of this coincides with the same drop in quality in the manga industry as well.

The nearly universal drop in quality across the anime and manga industries has been… frustrating…

Even more frustrating is the overwhelming number of fake reviews, shilling, bot spam, etc that are meant to hide negative reviews about anime and pretty much anything involving Japanese media.

The amount of weird shit that gets posted to review sites and social media in order to hide the general negativity towards the anime industry is just gross and weird.

Another poster, Ace T’Ken, brought up a lot of specifics about the problems with anime in general. It’s a pretty good write-up, imo.

My take is, I think that these problems are more “noticeable” in modern anime. But, almost all anime have these kinds of problems to one degree or another, new and old.

It’s pretty systemic. I still think that these issues became a lot more noticeable coinciding with a general drop in quality across the whole industry.

I would like to say, it’s not like I dislike anime “inherently”. But, there’s just so much bad anime.

I used to get Cartoon Network as a kid. I watched Outlaw Star and really enjoyed it. However, in one of the later episodes they crowbarred in a topless jacuzzi scene for no reason.

That sums up my anime experience.

I watched Dragon Ball Z and a bit of Gundam Wing but never really enjoyed them.

I bump into Dragon Ball Z fans occasionally and they’re pushing 35 and have themed pillows etc. I think that is mad but I’ve met more than one person like that.

I have no themed things in my house nor would in buy any.

P.S. I enjoyed Samurai Jack and often say “Long ago in a different land” randomly to my partner.

Any recommendations based on the above?

Chiming in as someone who actually owns a few different anime on DVD/blu-ray.

My whole thing is that I like good media. Anime is a medium. There’s good anime out there. As many have already said, those’re few and far between because the vast majority of people working in the medium seem determined to pigeonhole it as genre trash and perv shit.

I kinda stopped watching anime early in my 20s. The late 00s into the 10s seemed like the absolute worst period of time for worthwhile anime being made. I’ve sat through a few more current big-name ones since then and shit hasn’t improved.

So yeah, I don’t hate anime as a medium, I just hate like 99% of the medium’s content

I wouldn’t outwardly say that I hate anime but I definitely assume the worst when I hear a show is one. I automatically start thinking it’s going to be style over substance with unnecessarily long fight scenes, unrelatable characters, gross sexualization of female characters (if not child characters), and awkward dubs.

There are obviously exceptions to this. Serial Experiments Lain was my PFP here on Lemmy for a while and it’s one of my favorite shows ever. Within the past month I binged all of Chainsaw Man in two nights and thought it was great. But it was great in spite of the fact that it’s also an anime

Oversexualization. Panty shots, ass shots, boob physics, the same old jokes from the ‘80s about a guy “accidentally” groping a woman, guys peeping into a girls’ space, suggestive poses, barely-disguised fetishes (included, but not limited to, harems, incest and pedophilia).

It got to the point where a friend would recommend an anime, I’d watch it, and walk away halfway through the first or second episode because it was just unbearable. Friends would tell me to turn a blind eye, but why the fuck should I put up with sexualizing minors in a show? I’d rather spend my time doing something that doesn’t make me feel sick.

It also attracts the wrong kind of audience. Since the medium is so keen to produce oversexualized content, that’s all people look for and talk about. Any anime discussion thread degenerates into gross memes about “flat is justice”, “twincest is wincest”, people patting each other in the shoulder while calling the other “man of culture” for sharing their kinks, and shit like that. It’s so extenuating that, back when I was interested in the medium, I still actively refrained from interacting with fellow fans because I felt grossed out by them. Fun fact, I had a female classmate back in highschool who was interested in anime, and I thought that I could find common grounds with her, but no, it was the same thing, just reversed (she would only watch anime with sexualised boys).

The medium also forgot what its name stands for. I haven’t seen “animation” in “anime” in years. It’s just still frames and more still frames and whenever there’s an action sequence, the characters will constantly interrupt them to explain or think about the thing that I’m already watching and needs no explanation, or having flashback sequences, because it’s cheaper to animate. The fact that Ghost in the Shell and Akira from thirty years ago had better and more fluid animation than the shit they produce now is just sad.

I don’t think people straight up hate anime, nobody is going to pick up a remote and turn of the TV if they see somebody else watching it and angrily leave the room.

It’s just, for the most part (and this is also true for non-animated movies or series), you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

There are only so many times you can tell the story of boring guy gets put in fantasy land and is not boring anymore, or mysterious things happen at school and the afterschool mystery club has to solve them.

So what do you do? You cling to what you know is good. Studios, directors, etc. If Miyazaki makes an anime movie you watch it, if Quentin Terentino makes an action movie you watch it. This is also partially why anime’s are less popular than mainstream movies and series. You can watch a movie solely because you like an actor/actress, regardless of whether they play the same character or somebody else. In anime, each new series has a new set of characters, so each time a new personal connection has to be built.

Other than that, a good measure of “is this worth my time?” is pop cultural representation. Rule of thumb, if an anime spawns memes, it’s usually half decent.

But just like with movies and series, there are timeless classics. Like, who hasn’t seen or at least heard of Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion, Trigun, Dragon Ball Z, etc… Even my parents know Pokemon. Those have been around for so long and been shown on mainstream western channels during prime time slots, that they were impossible to miss. I think people who aren’t familiar with those are just not that interested in motion picture as a whole, regardless how its presented.

I’d say without overeaching, anime’s can be put in just a few categories:

• Artistic, Philosophical, Experimental, Parodies: Those are your Miyazaki films, Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, One Punch Man, Full Metal Alchemist, Attack on Titan, etc.

• Long running: Like, Pokemon, One Piece, Naruto, Dragon Ball, the Fate Series

• Trying to sell you something: Again Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Gundam, Beyblade, etc.

• Mass produced trash: All the ones where the title spreads 3 lines and tells you 90% of the story

• Otaku soap operas: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, the Monogatari series, Nagatoro, Komi-San

But those categories are not evenly spread in appeal, quality and quantity. While the first 2 categories have barely any presence but arguably the most cultural impact, the later ones have the most presence but are individually culturally insignificant. But quality is harder to judge than quantity is to see. So people tend to see the mass produced trash and ignore the good stuff that is being overshadowed. With classical film, a movies intention can usually be discerned with just one look, if for example a modern movie is black and white, its usually artistic. But looking at things like Evangelion, or the Ghost in the Shell Series, you couldn’t guess the deep philosophical implications on first glance. People tend to see cutesy anime art style and associate it with either the mass produced trash, or shows made for children. What makes a film/series good is the intention and execution, if it happens to be animated this usually doesn’t take away from the underlying message. See old animated Disney Movies - Lilo and Stich is about Family Values, Monetary Struggles, Loss and Friendship. Adult topics packed in a medium that both children and their parents can enjoy.

People tend to hate anime for the same reason they hate superhero movies, they see the overarching medium, but not the individual pieces. You can’t compare the significance of Iron Man 1 with Thor 2, or Infinity War with The Marvels, some of these movies are good in a vacuum, without the whole Cinematic Universe attached to them. Same goes for anime, some are simply good stories regardless of them being animated.

I can’t stand fight scenes where people are flying through the air at each other doing stupid poses and making sounds. They usually have some special power, and it’s all so meh.

I really liked Pantheon and then cringed when it resorted to that near their end. There’s lots of exceptions, like princess mononoke.

I don’t but I hate anime that rely on awful tropes like exploiting underage girls or the typical sister incest stuff (I would say brother-sister but this also applies to sister-sister)

I also find powerfantasy isekais boring