WatchTillTandava said:Uutama said:There was a time when people talked about it. It wasn't crazy popular or anything, but in most anime circles everyone at least knew about it. Nowadays, a lot has tried to copy its style and it has mostly faded away as an anime whose popularity was lost to time.
Think about it for a bit and recall all of the popular shows from each season/year from many years ago. There was a time when things like Yu Yu Hakusho and InuYasha were talked about endlessly; nowadays, not so much. What about Beyblade or Tokyo Mew Mew? At one point, whether you or I would consider them good or bad, were extremely popular.
Time changes everything. We're just getting old.
Then there are some of us who, at least speaking for myself, really feel out of place, because we didn't watch either this series or many other now considered "older" shows until long after they aired, which is an interesting space to occupy. For example, I didn't even know Higurashi existed until shortly (like days or weeks) before I ended up watching it, which was in the spring of 2019. Didn't really ever give serious thought to anime as a concept or know it existed beyond some vague abstract notion before 2016. In 2006, I was very much alive and consuming plenty of TV series, films, and other media, but not anime and was completely and wholly ignorant of anime as a thing.
And that experience and others like it always makes me wonder what percentage of those talking about the series today or any now "older" series are newer fans compared to the original viewership and fanbase some of whom may have inevitably gotten sick and incapacitated or died, lost interest, busy with other things in life, etc. Most series will probably never be as popular as when they first air as televised seasonals, but 2006 isn't exactly the silent film era and like trying to recover a reel from the early 1910s. There's nothing really holding anyone back from discovery of and exposure to it other than lack of general awareness. The mixture of genres may be offputting or too weird and novel for some, but it's definitely not a quality issue as much as it is just a "Is this put in front of people's faces at this current moment or not through advertising and well-known mainstream online streaming platforms" issue and how that skews the perception of accessibility.
That's actually a very interesting topic. I watched Higurashi back in 2008 or 2009, back when I was 13 or 14 years old, and I have loved it ever since. That's why I always try to keep my avatar as something related to Higurashi since it meant so much to me and still does. In 2011 Madoka Magica came out and I watched it once the Tsunami hit Japan because I wanted to feel like I could support them somehow. I instantly fell in love with that too. Gurren Lagann, however, I did not watch until I graduated high school in the summer of 2014. Despite it being 7 years after it came out, people were still talking about it, so I guess I was lucky to find yet another piece of media that inspired me more than anything else.