Deago's Blog

Anime Relations: Metallic Rouge

Anime Relations: Synduality: Noir

Anime Relations: Jigokuraku

Anime Relations: Revenger

• Interesting: Ambitious or cool premise, try it.
  
• Meh: Passable premise, try if desperate.
  
• Video Games: Try if interested in the game.
  
• Sports: Try if interested in the sport.
  
• Horny: Try if horny.
  
• Ignorable: Try if it becomes a 'must-watch peak-fiction'.
  

Anime Relations: Shinseiki Evangelion, Koukaku Kidoutai, Serial Experiments Lain, Hunter x Hunter (2011), Kill la Kill, Chainsaw Man

How to spot a pretentious overthinker

Have you ever engaged in a discussion about an anime with someone and they told you "It was 2deep4you.", "It went over your head.", or "You failed to see the bigger picture."?
If so, you've almost certainly encountered a 'pretentious overthinker'. And, in order to avoid making the same mistake of encountering another member of this species unready, I've created this quick and easy guide to identifying pretentious overthinkers.

1. Pretentious overthinkers will accuse you of oversimplification by using phrases like "you are oversimplifying it.", "your take is reductive.", "you are narrow-minded.", or "you are superficial and shallow." There's nothing wrong with being brief and simple when describing works, as long as your summary covers every concept, message, or other information explicitly stated within the work itself.
   
   
2. Pretentious overthinkers, on the other hand, enjoy making simple concepts appear more complicated through verbosity in their speech or writing; they fail to express their opinions concisely or succinctly because, in their minds, a wordy description implies a complex idea, hence they try their hardest to write as much as they can about a simple idea.
   
   
3. Pretentious overthinkers may use "headcanon" and "fanon," as well as fan theories and other imprecise information, as facts to support or elaborate a position regarding the work.
   
   
4. Pretentious overthinkers confuse 'ambiguous' with 'subtle'; ambiguous means it's impossible to understand or reach a single conclusion and is open to multiple interpretations, whereas subtle simply means not very obvious but still explicit.
   
   
5. Pretentious overthinkers are more concerned with subtext than with the text; they overanalyse simple concepts to the point where they fail to notice the surface; they fail to recognise that the presence of heavy subtext such as symbolism does not automatically make the work profound, and the absence of subtext does not always imply the absence of profound messages.
   
   
6. Similarly, some pretentious overthinkers are more concerned with lore than with the storyline; lore should always be an optional secondary complementary element to a story, lore should not be the focus, and the viewer should not evaluate a story based on the lore; a notable example of this is Souls video games or Bloodborne, which heavily rely on lore, but have almost no plot, yet the pretentious fans claim it is well-presented and well-executed story.
   
   
7. Although it is true that pretentious overthinkers thrive on theme-heavy works such as Lain, Evangelion, and Ghost in the Shell, this is not always the case; they can also be found in fanbases of plot-driven works that don't rely on themes and aren't difficult to understand, yet they overanalyse the crap out of them and claim it went over your head, Hunter x Hunter, Kill la Kill, and Chainsaw Man, are just a few of the many notable "victims".

To summarise, pretentious overthinkers overanalyse with their verbosity, "sesquipedality", and made-up theories in their so-called analysis, they can't tell the difference between 'subtle' and 'ambiguous', they ignore the storyline in favour of looking deep into the work, and they care more about finding hidden concepts than evaluating what's on the surface that is important. Finally, pretentious fandoms are not limited to thematic works; they can exist in any fandom, regardless of how simple the work appears to be.

Anime Relations: Urusei Yatsura (2022)