I love anime, but so much of it is complete unwatchable dogshit.
For every Attack on Titan, Cowboy Bebop, or Vinland Saga, there are ten shows with titles like That Time I Was Reincarnated as My Underage Stepsister’s Panties.
A lot of shows have stiff, lifeless animation where all the budget seems to go toward fat yiddies. Instead of expressive character acting or interesting visual direction, you get endless shots of bouncing tits and characters standing around explaining the plot. You just get shots reversing back and forth, and sometimes a single panning shot over an unmoving image with dialogue in the back to make it seem like there’s movement. I know mappa mistreats their workers, and I’m not defending that remotely, but how many flatly shot schoolgirl shows do you need? They’re all indistinguishable from each other.
Archetypes in anime are some of the worst things ever, and they’re no substitute to actual characterization. The tsundere. The emotionless girl. The pervert best friend. The overpowered blank-slate protagonist. The childhood friend who exists only to lose. These aren’t characters half the time. They’re caricatures. They’re the same in everything. Hey Demon Slayer fans, what’s the point of making Gyomei Himejima blind if there’s no real point to it? I don’t dislike the guy, he aura farms hard as shit, but he interacts with the world and people without any issue. His fights basically identically to everybody else in the show aside from like his weapon and powers. So why is he blind? What purpose does it serve?
Most anime comedy does absolutely nothing for me. It blows. I never do anything beyond one of those quick nasal exhales. There are exceptions, obviously, but so much of it is just accidental groping, screaming, nosebleeds, or a girl beating the hell out of the main character because he saw her change clothes. It’s the same shit over and over, and it’s never funny. It makes me feel gross.
The dialogue might be the worst part. Anime characters often do not talk like human beings. They monologue their feelings, overexplain things the audience already understands, or spell out themes instead of trusting the viewer to pick up on them naturally. It’s almost like mangaka and anime studios don’t expect audiences to pick up on themes. So much of my hero academia is just yapping about whatever the immediate theme is. So much unsubtle, repeated drivel about whatever it means to be a hero. So many over-delivered lines about friendship from so many average-at-best voice actors (regardless of what language it’s in). So many sloppily-juggled or contradicted themes about morality from the villains or side characters. Yucky. Stick to developing your main cast first beyond the three or so characters with all the screen time, THEN get into whatever you think is deep, but really isn’t if you think about it for more than thirty seconds.
A lot of modern anime also feels engineered for fantasy wish fulfillment. Shows like Classroom of the Elite try so damn hard to appear profound or psychologically complex, but often come off like power fantasies for socially awkward teenagers who think being emotionally detached and quiet makes them look intelligent. Characters like Ayanokoji end up with fans trying to imitate their behavior in real life, which is one of the corniest things imaginable. You’re not a master manipulator with unseen brilliance, you’re a stump who can’t talk to people. Ayanokoji gets away with it because his author sucks his dick all day, and writes every character surrounding him to be a bumbling idiot. He’s not some 200 IQ hidden genius. Everything just happens to work out for him without payoff, and people just eat it up. Solo leveling is a fun watch if you turn off your brain, and don’t think about how flat and uninteresting Jin woo is. I don’t think you could pay that dude to smile or crack a joke.
And honestly? Consuming nothing but media built around escapism, parasocial fantasies, and emotionally artificial characters can absolutely warp people’s social instincts over time. Not because anime itself is bad, but because some fans start treating these exaggerated fictional dynamics like substitutes for real human interaction.
Don’t get me started on isekais or harems. 90% of those shows is just power fantasies for creeps, sex fantasies for creeps, or some combination of both. Or someone gets made into a vending machine for some reason.
I don’t wanna sound like a Debbie downer here. Some of my favorite stories ever are anime. I love a lotta shows in spite of their flaws, like Naruto, JJK, Dragon Ball and Jojo’s. That said, being a fan doesn’t mean pretending the medium isn’t flooded with lazy tropes, bad writing, shallow “deep” characters, cheap fanservice, and dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone who has never had a normal conversation.
Whenever I’m scrolling Crunchyroll, I just pass by a bunch of samey-looking shows with a generic looking dude on the cover surrounded by underage girls with multi-colored hair. Ick. Where’s the infinity castle movie? What do you mean it’s not on Crunchyroll yet? Hold up, it’s not on ANY streaming platform? What the hell? It’s May, that shit came out in September of last year, where is it?
Also internet culture these days just kinda ruins shows. Have yall been watching JJK? Lobotomy Kaisen has taken years off my life, I swear to god. Everyone who just misses the point of the narrative to push agendas. That shit is so fucking dumb. Some of it’s funny, but it was funny back in like 2023. The potential man meme has done irreparable damage to anime fans, and it’s bled into shows like invincible. Goddamn. Leave me alone. It’s all I see. Chill on the slander. Let me watch the show. Fuck. Also I like Kashimo even though gege kinda blew it in execution at the end. Yeah he’s a farmer, but that lightning shit pretty cool, I’m not even gonna lie.
Edit: Lotta you guys are saying sturgeons law like it means something. Am I wrong? Did y’all even read the post? I’m not saying anime is uniquely bad. I’m saying it has a ton of uniquely repetitive problems. Trope characters, fake-deep power fantasies, awful dialogue, and fanservice slop show up constantly. It’s everywhere.
Edit 2: yeah you guys are kinda right. This does apply to a lotta stuff outside of anime. Especially Hollywood these days. It just feels way worse in anime’s case imo. What makes bad anime feel uniquely exhausting to me is the specific kind of pandering a lot of it leans into: endless wish-fulfillment, sexualization of underage characters, emotionally vacant self-insert protagonists, “loner genius” fantasies, and fanservice designed to keep socially isolated viewers emotionally invested.
A lot of mm modern anime doesn’t feel like it’s trying to tell a meaningful story. It feels algorithmically engineered to appeal to escapism and parasocial attachment. Not every anime is like this obviously, but the industry absolutely has a massive market for “you are secretly special and desirable despite never growing as a person” fantasy slop.