the sad state of modern anime

@TheSuave We all desire the return of those days.

Nah there's still way too many anime for me that I want to watch but I can't follow them all.

Yeah, I've felt this and coincidentally have been really feeling it as of late. There's still good stuff coming out. I'm not going to say anime has completely gone off the deep end, but more and more I feel a disconnect especially when it comes to the anime fandom. Maybe it's because more people became anime fans over the pandemic and have been flocking to what's newer that I'm not that into that has caused that. Mainstream stuff that gets praised that I check out I'm rarely impressed by. I'm at point now where I'm wanting something different from anime than what's being popularly drawn to. Art style and storytelling are major reasons why. I think anime can be better and sometimes something new stuff comes out that is and anime has proven itself in the past, but there's a magic that's been lacking. Also, I know this is subjective, but often times when I watch an older version of a series and then check out the newer version, I'm usually thinking to myself that the older version was way better. Really a change in times I guess.

On a related note: Just yesterday I was looking through the manga section of a nearby bookstore and was constantly feeling underwhelmed by what I saw.

@hime-tsubaki how can you be so sure that you won't like more modern anime if you don't give them a try? I know that there's no time to watch every existing anime, that's why I watch the first or first few episodes of a bunch of seasonals and complete only the most interesting ones. I ended up liking a lot of anime I didn't expect to.

Even if you blacklist isekai and battle shounen, there's still a lot of stuff left.

@Hitagi__Furude the problem is ive seen all the old stuff (most of it anyway) all the new stuff is all the same

Anime does seem to have far more of outside influences effecting them nowadays. It is why we do not see darker stories generally like with how the my villain academia arc was adapted. Exceptions do exist though. I also noticed a lot less ecchi anime nowadays despite series like Ishizoku Reviewers and NGNL performing amazingly well in popularity. Likely since some companies want blackrock funding.

I'm through with comparing my early animes to the recent ones. Perhaps, it's true that we've run out of good materials and had overused it but also maybe you've seen too much- it's the same case as "I'm too strong that it's getting boring". My joy only in the this year's releases is that there's significant decrease in ecchi, it's the best thing that has happened for me. I don't really have anything to complain, maybe I just learned to enjoy it while keeping my standards the same? As a fellow fan, I'd advise you to do the same, your gem is just around the corner, it will come.

I agree and I'm particularly sick of people who have completed very little anime (usually just a couple hundred, almost always >1k) entries trying to lecture others otherwise. That's not to say that you need to be an otaku neckbeard to have a worthwhile opinion on the matter, but the literal premise of the argument is quantifying how much you've seen and making a judgement based off that. I don't think it should be so easy to dismiss the point entirely, especially if you yourself have seen such a limited variety of anime.

It's hardly valid to constantly dismiss it as "nostalgia" when I (and many others who make this argument) didn't even live through the era which I'd argue was the peak of anime quality, or at least didn't even watch anime then; late 90s to early 2000s in my case, though I think you can make a good argument for the late 80s or mid to late 2000s being the peak also. I have no rose-tinted glasses, yet, like a lot of "boomers & nostalgiafags", argue that anime used to be better and that it particularly dropped off in quality during the mid to late 2010s, which actually is when I kept up with contemporary releases the most.

@Gazz Well, I'm being honest, I clearly know more about anime than you, and I still disagree with you. Why do you think that is? Is it because you're misinformed in your conjecture, or is that fact unrelated?

It's almost always the same type of person making this point. Them, or people who have only seen more than a couple hundred shows by virtue of keeping up with seasonal releases for around a decade.

Just because people used to make this argument too much in the past that hardly means it's always going to be incorrect. Obviously, at the end of the day, it just boils down to opinion and personal taste, but what is easily observable is that anime used to draw from a wider range of influences in its narratives and visual directions, and in the past decade or so has become more homogenous than ever. Yes, much more stuff per season is currently being released but the average quality has clearly plummeted, and the industry becoming more centralised in its collective "creative" attitude is a valid reason to point to; this is hardly a matter of debate - the vast majority of anime from the last couple years has become so homogenised in not only its content but particularly its presentation; the same handful of base concepts are recycled every other season or so. It's not just Isekai and battle shounen, but also the glut of lonely-teenage-boy pandering waifu-bait nonsense, power fantasies, and many other things. That's not to say those productions should never exist, but they're displacing actually worthwhile adaptations/original scripts from getting a chance. The diversity in style and theme offered by the earlier eras is drying up, and most contemporary anime that tries something interesting it's content/style gets very little attention from both the public and its creators (barring the potential 15 minutes of fame).

My theory, formulated after wasting a very excessive amount of time watching anime and even more time actually thinking about it, is that the reason why anime was good in the first place was because it was a relatively insular and small industry of auteurs: when I've asked fellow anime fans why they enjoy it so much, one of the most common reasons cited is the conceptual uniqueness and artistic creativity it has relative to other visual media (the same qualities which, as we have established above, are diminishing). However, this principle of creative realisation is not inherent to anime and simply no longer holds the same respect it used to. After all, creativity is not inherent to any medium, and it's the same reason why so many people prefer films from certain "scenes" which allowed for that artistic expression, like the French new wave movement in the mid 20th century, or why some particularly enjoy 90's black metal over other eras, whilst being critical of the state of French cinema or black metal music as a whole.

Not only is this attitude of respecting and pushing artistic boundaries becoming rarer in the anime industry, but even if it continued then that still wouldn't change the fact the talent seemingly doesn't exist anymore (or at least is untapped, there's plenty of creative student anime shorts being made these days). This is the case for a variety of reasons, the first one being that a lot of the best people in the industry are literally dying out and nobody is replacing their places: who is todays Miyazaki? Oshii? Dezaki? Morimoto? The best we have are Imaishi, Shinkai and Yuasa, and the latter two have completely shed the qualities which prior made them stand out as creative figureheads, whilst Imaishi's consistency has been waning.

This feeds into the second reason: It's not that creative people no longer work in the industry, but they lack the senior support necessary to convince producers to do something actually interesting and new; as the industry gets larger and more distant from those roots, the more difficult it will be to lean on those precedents. I'd like to remind everyone that Evangelion singlehandedly convinced producers how profitable an edgier and artistically divergent variety of TV anime was; without it, anime would have progressed down a very different path that likely would have not appealed to Westerners nearly as much as it does (which isn't a bad thing one way or the other, just interesting to think about).

That brings me onto the third reason, which is that anime in the past to some degree always had a creative influence external to anime itself - Obviously, in the early Tezuka Productions days, Disney and general western kids media was an influence, but even all the way into the early 90s writers, directors and animators commonly cited live action films as influences (not that they needed to, it was pretty obvious from the anime itself - the 80s had a lot of pulp and action influence, can you guess what live action films were popular at the time?). Even after Gainax led the winds of change within the industry with their whole "anime, for anime fans, by anime fans" attitude you could make a list, at least a hundred entries long, of anime which takes visual influence either from Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey alone. Nowadays, since the mid 2010s or so, be it the source material being adapted or an original script, a significant amount of anime is written as an insular and self-referential product that orbits around the "anime" medium as the source of its general identity and creative content. As previously stated, this attitude has existed since at least the 80s but it wasn't nearly this incestuous nor ubiquitous. In my personal opinion, this equilibrium was perfect during the late 90s when a lot of "anime" tropes and attitudes had been solidified and gave the end products a unique identity without the conceptual variety suffering nor relying too much on those aforementioned tropes or attitudes.

TL;DR I agree that modern anime is provably less varied in its influences, both narratively and aesthetically, and therefore "worse" to many people who enjoyed it in the first place for that uniqueness and variety, but, unless you have looked at the "data" and watched a lot of stuff, I think it's impossible to have a balanced opinion on this.

@bucciest so you feel it too huh. The reason i flocked to anime was this incredible medium of variety and uniqueness. Which now feels lacking. I keep seeing the same poses, character archetypes and more keep repeating. Which could be due to age and exposure, but ive talked extensively it before. Mainly though I find surprising is the amount of praise these samey shows seem to garner season after season.

The anime culture has changed, in my opinion not for the better, i keep seeing "man of culture" in my nightmares. Miyazaki is right on this one.

@Hundred_Knight Define "we all". Doesn't seem MAL likes lolicon or incest at all.

@TheSuave MAL forum these days have at best 300 people, that is an insignificant amount of people compared to the complete fanbase.