The State of Anime Today

[RobinStarwing]

So recently we got stupid at the Xbox forums for World of Tanks seeing as PS4 is getting Girls Und Panzer stuff and people want it on Xbox too. This has led me to wonder...what is the current state of anime today compared to when we started to watch it? What is it's current state in how it and it's fans are perceived by those outside of it.

My take as an Anime fan is this...there has been a slow march towards blandness/sameness in Anime. Way too many Harems and the studios seemingly trying to one-up each other with their offerings in some way shape or form. But this is based on someone who has been a fan since the DiC Sailor Moon Dub (earlier if you want to count Voltron).

So NPF...your take on this?

[phil_]

Originally Posted by RobinStarwing

What is it's current state in how it and it's fans are perceived by those outside of it.

I wouldn't know, not being on the outside and not having any perception of those outside. Nerdy hobbies have become so connected to mainstream culture that there's really not a dividing line anymore. I say this pretending that mainstream culture even exists anymore in this world of infinite on-demand entertainment choices on the TV and internuggets. I'm not sure if the previous zeitgeist of culture being the stuff on TV was a better culture, but it probably wasn't. I didn't participate in that culture much either, so again, I don't know.

Originally Posted by RobinStarwing

My take as an Anime fan is this...there has been a slow march towards blandness/sameness in Anime. Way too many Harems and the studios seemingly trying to one-up each other with their offerings in some way shape or form.

Then don't watch stupid crap you won't enjoy. More anime is being made now than ever before. Even if I cut out not just "I won't like this" but also "I might not like this," I still end up with more than a dozen new shows every three months, plus watching old stuff. To take what is probably a cliched example, let's cut out every show in the Fall season set in high school, because who wants to watch yet another high school show, amirite? (I still watch high school shows if I think I'll enjoy them; Euphonium was great). Out of fifty new series, FIFTY, actually half of them have even a slight connection to any school (counting magic and middle schools as well). That's still twenty-five series that escape that filter. So even the most arbitrary filter still leaves more to watch every four months than Japan used to get in a year and America used to get in half a decade. And you can (almost) get it all for free, legally if you're so inclined.

So, to sum up, the anime's pretty good right now if we can be annoyed about getting GuP skins on one platform and not another. Looking forward to the movie. I am a hermit who cannot speak for the social consequences of watching anime while being a member of society.

[Tev]

The wife and I picked up a Crunchyroll account a few months ago and I've been getting to sample the newer generation of anime. Overall it's not that different from where we started in the 90's. If anything, things have gotten more interesting as the shows have gotten more niche. As examples:

Food Wars: This anime is born of every cooking competition that my wife and I already love to watch on TV with the added anime spin of overdramatizing all of it and wrapping it up in a high school anime package. The content is pretty relatable to us, but is also very exciting.

Is it Okay to Pick up Girls in a Dungeon?: My wife found this one very sweet, and since we're both RPG gamers and just came off of devouring Sword Art Online, this anime resonated well with us and had a fun and light hearted quality to it.

Cute High Earth Defense Club Love!: This is pretty much ironic popcorn entertainment for us. It's formulaic as shit, but no worse that any random episode of Sailor Moon was, with the added bonus of the main characters being guys who mostly want nothing to do with being forced into being "magical girls" while at the same time having fun with the absurdity of the situation by calling out how rediculous it is and even just making up random attack names on the fly. It's a sort of subversion of the magical girl genre that we can get behind.

Kamgami no Asobi: This is straight up a reverse harem. Girl gets kidnapped by Zeus and dropped into a divine high school surrounded by hot young gods who, for some silly reason of another, end up loving her to death. The wife eats this stuff up because the gods are hot. It's about what you'd expect from any other harem anime but tailored to the female gaze. It is good to see the industry tailoring to females more now with stuff like this.

The Fruit of Grisaia: Another subversion of the harem genre. This time everyone in the show seems to be aware that they are supposed to be in a harem anime and are trying their level best to avoid that plot train like the plague. Also it's really dark. Everyone has psychological issues and people get burried alive by the people they trust while their cat dies in a traffic accident.

AMNESIA: This entry is strictly here to discuss how the art has gotten better over the years. This show is gorgeous in every way. The character designs and outfits are amazing.

Anyway, there are way more shows to comment on than I have time for right now, but my point is this: things are getting better, not worse. There is so much diversity out there right now that I am frequently amazed at the new and novel things that get made, even if much of it isn't really for me. The stuff that is for me however has been top notch.

[Gregness]

Originally Posted by Tev

Food Wars: This anime is born of every cooking competition that my wife and I already love to watch on TV with the added anime spin of overdramatizing all of it and wrapping it up in a high school anime package. The content is pretty relatable to us, but is also very exciting.

I checked this out on a whim 'cause I've been getting into cooking myself recently (i.e. over the last few years) and I haven't regretted it even a little. Well, except maybe when I had to explain to some friends of mine that it wasn't just a food fetish anime (and these guys are anime watchers, mind).

Originally Posted by Tev

Is it Okay to Pick up Girls in a Dungeon?: My wife found this one very sweet, and since we're both RPG gamers and just came off of devouring Sword Art Online, this anime resonated well with us and had a fun and light hearted quality to it.

Have you seen Log Horizon?

Edit:

Originally Posted by phil_

...To take what is probably a cliched example, let's cut out every show in the Fall season set in high school, because who wants to watch yet another high school show, amirite? (I still watch high school shows if I think I'll enjoy them; Euphonium was great)...

I know this was mostly just as an example, but if School-live (Gakkou Gurashi) ran afoul of that filter, you really should give it another shot. Watch all of the first episode, and you'll know whether you want to stick with it.

[phil_]

Gakkou Gurashi might be my favorite show I'm currently watching. It ticks a lot of boxes that normally don't get ticked at the same time. Kind of like Garupan which started this thread, except completely different. It's also a much more competent zombie story than High school of the Dead was, in that it rides the literary aspects of good zombie stories (struggling against hopelessness, ambiguity, isolation, etc.) rather than just sticking the aesthetics of a zombie movie onto an action cartoon . Please no one read that if you plan on watching School Live but haven't yet.

[shiney]

Overlord!

[Gregness]

Originally Posted by shiney

Overlord!

About all I know about that one is it's another 'trapped in an MMO' thing. How is it?

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Take my endorsement for what it's worth since tastes vary from person to person but I typically can't stand most anime and would rather read a manga any day. With that said, Overlord! is very much worth watching.

Sure the trapped in an mmo thing isn't anything new but what I like about it is it doesn't try to make it seem like a novel concept that hasn't been done before. That and there hasn't been any really fuckin' annoying characters thus far, so it's got that going for it.

[shiney]

The shortest way I would explain it, piggybacking on Skweeb's biz there, is it's a trapped in MMO game where instead the guy trapped is the Boss, and also kind of the bad guy in a way (but not really). And hilarity ensues.

[phil_]

Bit of a sharp veer in subject, but I keep reading things online that make me feel like I missed out on some kind of possibly life affirming experience by not watching the Love Live! movie. I'm not sure what that speaks to the state of more. Anime movies (of the non-Ghibli variety) are still a big event when they get an US release, but no longer so much of an aberration that I'd have had to drive more than an hour to watch it. I totally could have gone. So that's definitely a state of anime thing. But then that's also a state-of-phil_, "What am I doing with my life?" thing. So yeah, torn.