Cosplay Complex

mostly comedy (whether it’s good or not) featuring brain dead anime girls

electric air wave

As far as I'm concerned there's an anime about pretty much everything if you look hard enough: diving, underwear design, insurance investigation (yup!) and don't even get me started on cooking. So there, picked titles with main characters directly involved and at least some focus on whatever they're doing for a living or a hobby or both.

Part two^ https://myanimelist.net/stacks/30206 (it's a work in progress though)

Bygone days spent as an otaku, often captured in OVA format, have been lost as trends shifted. It’s undeniably melancholic to see the evolving portrayal of otaku in a meta-sense and slowly watching the dwindling importance of Akiba-kei.

This will serve as a continually-updated list of anime that I feel are representative of "otakucore" being a type of show that promonently features otaku characters as one of the main characters, and depictes the zeitgeist of otaku culture/Akiba-kei during the time of airing. Some are less obvious as otaku-oriented, but still contain many elements that are appealing to databasing-types (computers, figures, video games etc.)

Genshiken, Daicon IV and Otaku no Video are the essentials :3

(Still adding WIP)

This is a weird concept for a list, but I think it's worth putting it out there. These are anime which I consider help understand anime better because of their referential humour, commentary on otaku culture (whether it's anime or gaming), exploration of the industry and twisting of classic tropes in self-aware ways that put them in perspective. Also included a couple shows which are not necessarily meta or referential, but they are here for being aggresively "anime" in nature, if that makes sense. With how over the top they are and/or how stereotypically otaku their concepts are, I think they give a good idea of how anime has developed.

Note: If you truly want to understand otaku culture and anime history, I think an absolute essential is a short show called "Blue Blazers". It is live action however, so it can't be added here. I strongly recommend you check it out, even if the humour can be cringy, because of how deep of an insight it gives into the history of anime and the industry.

ADV Films, the former incarnation of Sentai Filmworks, produced most of their English dubs in Houston, Texas. However, from the late 1990s until 2005, ADV also employed a secondary studio in Austin, Texas, known as Monster Island.

Monster Island could be considered ADV's "2nd-string" studio, as many (though not all) shows they dubbed were lesser-known and perhaps lesser quality. Shipping them to MI may have been a cost-cutting move, as many of the dubs are marred by fast-and-loose scriptwriting, questionable name pronunciations, and a general sense of roughness and inexperience.
Still, a lot of them had their own sort of charm, and some are well-regarded. You can find some comments about the dubs from me on some individual entries. Some may be approaching "lost media" status, or are not commonly available online by legal or illegal means.

So if you've encountered an ADV dub from the early 2000s and wondered why the cast was full of names you hadn't heard of, or why it felt different from the average ADV dub, chances are it was a Monster Island show.

*Note: some related/sequel titles dubbed by MI are noted only in the comments, in order to stay under the 50-item limit.

Anime that either has a lot of fanservice, or is classed as ecchi or erotica.

Mostly includes OVAs and Movies.

Part 1 here : https://myanimelist.net/stacks/37307