Why do a lot of people who only watch newer anime seem hate on the fans of old school anime?

romagia said:
raaaaaaawr 13 episodes of gay boys is better than the 110 ep classics i hate anyone who claims otherwise

Dishonest said:

rawwrr
I like donuts with either chocolate or caramel, all the fruity stuff kinds suck.

ahoyanen said:
When I watched anime in 1890s they were much better than any later shit.

romagia said:
reeeeeeee those taste like dough
it's the fruit jam that makes the donut good

FreshPrinceofMAL said:
I'm not necessarily referring to MAL but in general it seems like your "modern" anime fan tends to hate on the OG fans and say that they only like the older anime for nostalgia and that new anime is objectively better than the old stuff.

Lestat- said:
How anyone claims it is the other way around is beyond me. The amount of individuals complaining about how they will purposely not watch anything "fossilized" from before their birth-year is absurd when compared to those who had rather not watch new series. You see this in any discussion that praises cell-shaded anime and hand-drawn art — and those are standalone conversations non-related to the comparison people make between old and new. There are countless of statements in any art-form where people dismiss anything three years or older because of how "outdated" and "unpopular" it is, because this is essentially, all about popularity, a matter that drives our modern society, especially when it comes down to art-forms. People everywhere around the world are dismissed for enjoying purposes on smaller scales than what the majority gets served on their platter. Music, fashion, television, film, you name it — as long as artists or creations are "fresh", they instantaneously become the news of the day because of their supposed innovational new discoveries, as the masses blindly oblige and abide. As @Pullman said, living in an age where "new is better" by standard, you can hardly believe that there is a majority of people who disapprove of the new. Aren't we —the ones who enjoy the past over the present— the odd ones out, after all?

Pullman said:
Yeah it's a common occurence for people to outright dismiss anything before 2xxx, calling anything old ugly and outdated (except Dragon Ball of course!).

Partly it's the general new-is-always-better mentality that apple & co have cultivated, especially in younger generations. And partly it's blatantly untrue prejudices and misconceptions. Psychologically it might also be less overwhelming to have a smaller part of the medium to explore so people who are just getting into anime are willing to jump on any excuse to disregard 75% of the medium, especially when it's backed up by a vast majority of the community. Makes it easier to keep at least a bit of an overview.


And to the people in this thread saying 'isn't it more often the other way round?' - no, it isn't. It might seem that way because of various reasons that I'll try to explore, but looking at sheer numbers there is no way old anime fans aren't a drastic minority.


The first, maybe most important reason why people think there are many 'modern anime haters' out there despite them being a very small minority, is because there are countless threads about people expressing their disdain for recent anime seasons and anime going downhill etc. BUT most of these people are still 'newfags' and just mean 'when I started anime and everything was still exciting 2-4 years ago' when they say 'old'. They don't really have a preference for older anime and usually haven't watched anything from before 2000 like most people. You can hardly see those people as fans of old anime just because they tend to bitch about the most recent seasons. Don't use them to define your image and the popularity of 'oldfags' because they do not belong in that category. If 2012 is your favorite year hating on the most recent seasons, projecting and jumping to conclusions doesn't make you a 'modern anime hater' or oldfag. It just makes you a retard. Please keep in mind that most rants about anime going downhill are not instigated by actual oldfags who only watch 70s, 80s and 90s stuff.

Secondly you encounter people who prefer old over new while discussing a modern series and seeing them hate on it. On the other hand people who hate old anime don't hate on any specific shows that made them dislike that era because they'd never touch anything old with a ten foot pole from the start. So you won't be seeing them linking their dislike of certain series to their dislike of the period in any series discussion boards or anything. They aren't taking basing their generalizations on real, negative experiences with shows from that decade and interact with the fans of those shows, but rather pull their generalizations out of thin air before ever watching anything from that time period. So naturally you'll see less of them in that regard, but that's because they have an ounce of logic left in how they acquire their preference.

And thirdly, since they are so much more numerous than people who prefer old anime they don't even recognize each other as people who hate on old anime. It's seen as the normal thing, to avoid old stuff based on prejudice, not as 'hating'. It is accepted that some people have a tolerance for it but to actually prefer them is seen as going so radically against the 'common sense' that new = better that it's seen as weird at best, and spiteful at worst.

Being the minority makes you stand out, especially when people will usually make a spectacle out of every single user who prefers old anime and talks about it. That's probably why it seems to people that it's usually 'the other way round'. Those experiences are more memorable than the thousands of times people casually looked down on anything old and its fans, implying noone could ever like it for the visuals or without nostalgia glasses and whatnot.

You only realize how deeply seated this general, arrogant attitude towards old anime and their fans is when you're on the receiving end of it. People take having an aversion towards old anime for granted. 9/10 times when I give old recs for a request that has no age specified they will still reply with 'no old shit pls', being grumpy that I made them specify what they see as common sense.

So yeah, just because a communist would cause more of an uproar in nazi germany than a nazi doesn't mean there were more communists than nazis in germany. So no, I don't think there is any possibility that 'modern anime haters' are more common than 'old anime haters' just because only one fraction has a handful of threads dedicated to them. That's mixing up cause and effect.

There might be more loud outcries of people making threads about not liking modern anime and preferring old than vice versa, but that's to be expected, it's the 'anti establishment' opinion after all. If you share the opinion of the vast majority of the community, that old anime is inferior, you don't need to go out and make a statement out of it. You just keep interacting with people who mostly think the same and it's never gonna be an issue most likely.

But if you feel that your preference (for old anime) is seen as some kind of absurd taste that goes against common sense and can probably only be based on biased nostalgia glasses or you being a pretentious tryhard elitist, you might feel more pressure piling up, eventually exploding into one of the rant threads about modern anime we all know.

But it's precisely because old anime fans are such a dwindling minority that you regularly find individuals who feel the need to be very vocal about their opinion among them. The constant community hum of 'new=better' doesn't require vocal individuals to be heard. There's no way around it.

Paul said:
I honestly rarely see any new viewers intentionally bash on old shows. They say it doesn't interest them or they're not interested in its visuals but that's not bashing. Hell, if anything, the people who bash on new anime while only constantly only praising older ones are far more notable during the time I've been on MAL.

Lunarian said:
I thought it was the other way around lol, old school anime fans are are pretty much elitists from what i've seen

_Ako_ said:


Or you can just get @JustALEX 's short version(possibly). I mean it all boils down again, to what other refer to as "taste". So we done here now since I guess post #1 said it, post #2 expanded on it, post #3 and etc... And now I'm just posting it again.. Which is... Yay!

EcchiLordMamster said:
um, i find that the opposite tends to be the case and not just in anime, think about how many people claim that:

"the past was better"

"modern media is shit"

"the world is getting worse"

"i miss the good old days"

"people are getting dumber"

all that garbage


reading the comments most people agree its the other way around


i find anime to be pretty much the same as its always been, its just that with new technology animation is much better although theres old anime that still look great even today

Jonouchi-Katsuya said:


What are they praising though? 2011 anime? That doesn't count as being an oldfag. That isn't the Bluray split. If they were praising things from before Haruhi and saying oh things after Haruhi sucked, yeah that would be one thing, but no, people just miss what they watched when they were a teenager. That is it. It is not about genuine artstyle changes.

Modern anime fans will watch things post 2006. They wont watch even Chobits because it looks gross to them... it seriously confuses an oldfag like me... like they just... I think Chobits looks fantastic and I think it has aged amazingly well. But they think it looks really really old. :( They wont watch it.

Paul said:


I'm not talking about people who like think 2010 is considered old, cause it's not. I'm talking about those who keep bragging on about shows from like 1980's and 90s while bashing everything modern. In comparison to that, I rarely see any modern day viewer openly bash on old anime without being taunted or baited into.

Shoryu said:
I'm over here like, "Mmmm, so many anime to watch from both spectrums... so little time..."