Why so little interest?

It’s because the writing and characters are terrible, no one wants to watch a series about a group of 12 to 17 year old narcissists with the personalities of supervillains.

Combination of factors

1: The original aired in 2001. I highly doubt the zoomers are there.
Even myself, I've "only" watched about 120 eps, and to be honest I dont remember most of them.

2: There are so many eps is daunting.

3: Most of the fans are probably watching silently and/or not using animelist

4: Honestly the quality went downhill after the nationals. 2012, Genius 10, U17WC, its been really tough. 2012 was over 10 years ago as well.

5: Style choices. The anime is the anime.
What I mean is, even if you like tennis in real life, the anime is very different from real life tennis so it wont really translate/carry over very well.
So naturally this makes it kinda difficult for people who are expecting "realistic" tennis

6: Sequel syndrome. Sequels naturally have a falloff. Between all the factors, the nationals (24 eps), 2012 (12 eps), genius 10, and u17wc (12 eps)? Thats a LOT of eps.

(7): cast is basically entirely boys

I certainly get that many people aren't quite expecting the level of ridiculousness that PoT offers in relation to other sports anime, though I feel that would (and probably has) deterred a lot of viewers of the original show, even if it started off a lot more grounded than it eventually ended up becoming. That's partly why I said above it's a huge mistake for people to be jumping into this stuff without having watched the initial series first. Though I tend to like starting from the beginning anyway, I don't know why people just nosedive into a new season of a series without getting the context first...


Yeah, especially newer anime fans, like me for instance I only began watching in 2020, the only reason I know about it is because my brother who has watched far longer than me watched and liked PoT back in the day. Still, you'd expect even a modestly popular series to retain a little more popularity. I suppose one could argue that the most popular series are more prone to attracting the crazed fans who like basically everything they consume uncritically.


This is true, though in practice... sometimes they tend not to be :P It is certainly subjective to an extent though.


Agree, I might even find it on the whole better on average than the original series, although the original series did have higher peaks. I liked the whole part where "the losers" thought they were getting sent home but actually got sent to the rougher training camp and came back stronger, even if it was telegraphed pretty strongly that they weren't actually gonna leave.


I mean I don't remember a lot of the matches either, even from the previous series. I thought there were some cool ones, though maybe that was in 2012, but I tend to forget about them after some time unless they really stuck out. I liked it while I was watching it though.


Ah, yes, the one where I share a pretty distinct opinion from most of MAL, apparently. TBF it's probably the worst out of the three, certainly worse than 2012. From what you've said there was certainly some missed opportunity and it focused quite a bit on other teams, but even though I don't remember much of the matches in this one either I still think I liked most of them. Even the horse one, of course that would never fly IRL but tons of stuff in the series wouldn't either, particularly the BS where you're just allowed to injure your opponent with the ball and even declare your intent blatantly and the judge has zero problem with it...

I do resonate with that one negative review that said there's too many that start from 5-0 down though. That's just lazy. And omitting the Sanada match was cringe.

Maybe it was partially an expectation thing, I expected the anime to fall off HARD given that most anime of this rating on MAL, especially if they're now, suck pretty bad, but even u17wc is certainly far better than most anime rated this low...

Sequel bias means, on average, they are Expected to have higher score
Having a same score on the sequel, is already a disappointment

And having a negative score means the sequel is really bleh...

Its hard to say. A bit of biases here and there, and animelist does slightly make changes here and there.

I dont read the manga, from what im told a fair bit of s1 is anime original and/or they made changes, particularly I believe ryoma vs sanada.

Like some time ago I rewatched s1 and its not nearly as great as I remember. Nostalgia bias and cherry picking for sure, on top of the fact that s1 is just old at this point, and a large quantity of matches and pacing means its not aged as well.

Even say the nationals, not all matches are equal, out of the 20 matches

The main problem with u17wc is it just feels very rough. The ryoma match felt kinda mediocre all things considered, and the others were like eh.