No sooner have I started enjoying something it's like the world conspires to take it all away from me. There have been some 'okay' anime lately that are at least watchable but it's remarkable how even by anime studio standards the amount of utter shit that's being pumped out by the people looking to milk isekai anime in particular for all it's worth as if there aren't a myriad of other genres for them to at least try and see if something sticks.
At least I can instantly dismiss the ones with awful animation that look like it was hacked together by an intern or worse an Indian in a couple of months in blender but what's more surprising is there have been anime with good quality artwork that gets flushed down the drain due to shitty unimaginative writing and it's pissing me off.
Anime often operates on tropes don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting that much from them. However the tropes lately aren't even subtle and are being smacked in your face repeatedly as if you're supposed to enjoy it, it's so bad even the obvious die hard anime fans who spam the comments pages are bitching about it all.
We're used to the 'MC is a loser' tropes, but now it's very much like they're picking out a bingo card of extremely shit MC tropes like 'MC is OP insecure loser and constantly doesn't know his own strength' even people with a single IQ point can see it's a retarded plot point. Or worse they try and use it as a gag but it falls flat when they repeat it every five seconds.
It's so bad now that I will watch anything as long as the male character featured isn't a massive retard. Even Kazuma from Konosuba the king of insecure virgin tropes gets some degree of confidence and can deal with women who give him shit. You don't drag the whole thing out several episodes because it's complete cringe and prevents character development.
Am I missing something here? Is it some asian thing about saving face so they can't ever have MCs that have any kind of degree of confidence in themselves? Or are things really that bad in Japan now all the mangaka are suffering severe depression which would make sense unfortunately.
TL;DR
No, it's that you have abominable taste.
lol
Are we in the same universe?
I'm not making a quality comment on any of these but just last season off the top of my head:
How about you provide a couple of recent examples of the series you're talking about? Are you only watching the mandatory couple of "In another world but stuff" that come out every season? I'm just not seeing the "loser MC" thing as that broad of a trend lately.
Oh I've watched the other stuff and I'm watching slime, dropped Irregular because it was filled with teenage angst even by teenage angst standards. Misfit of the demon king academy I may binge watch if it's half-decent but apparently it's a bit of a mess according to commenters so I'm on the fence, seems I was right with the bizarre scheduling problems to wait for it to finish. Weirdly didn't even notice Loser Ranger so may poke at that.
How to love your elf bride was very meh, it wasn't terrible as this season but all I can post is meh to it. Of course I'm having a look at other genres that might be okay but I've just been surprised by the lack of quality lately.
Don't go further than the first part of season 2 on Misfit of the Demon King, the CGI is WARCRIME level bad, we're talking 7 deadly sins level of awful.
Oh fuck that then animation work it is lol
Putting it lightly. SoctaticMethod1 is right. If I wasn't already this far in, I would have bailed. Irregular also had a really weak season. Which is a shame because it started out as an interesting universe.
I liked Loser Ranger, but was pissed off by people online constantly comparing it to The Boys as if they invented the idea of public-facing "heroes" being the bad guys. The key difference here is that it has a protagonist instead of "everyone is bad" navel-gazing. D's a fun MC.
Isekai/regression/transmigration are super popular due to the escapism they offer, but they also end up being painfully derivative. So much of it is copying what other stories did, but lack the creativity to do something new with it. It's like the Human Centipede of anime.
Since anime runs behind the manga/manwha/manhua, I would say you are experiencing anime that pounced on Konosuba's popularity and are running "loser MC haha" into the ground.
Even this was originally considered to be a fresh spin on the typical MC, at least from a few years ago. It's sort of like how bog standard harem MC dudes were very bland losers (think Love Hina, etc.) so the male audience could project themselves onto, but then once light novels started to pick up the MCs started to become competent and a little angster (think Sword Art Online, etc.).
I've fallen off a lot of anime since isekai is so prevalent. And one of its major pitfalls is the determination to make the MC such an OP as fuck character that the story is incapable of producing a compelling villain character. When the MC does nothing but steamroll over any opposition he has, and antagonists all have to be incompetent and stupid, shit just gets boring.
But the whole "people just can't see HOW POWERFUL I REALLY AM" is slop that 13 year olds eat up and once they get sick of it there is always the next back to 13 year olds to get in line. Which has made isekai almost impossible to get stale at this point. It's frustrating because there is nothing stopping people from writing better, but why make the effort when you're going to get rich all the same?
It depends as you might be looking at the low hanging fruit Isakai area than the ones that stand out more. I'm reading a lot of Manga and Manwha nowadays and Anime is at least 1-2 years behind that and that trend for the 'weak MCs that have no backbone' has run out and we've gotten more what I like to call 'the quiet kid MC Isakai'
By that I mean they're actually nearly psychopaths that have a 'well you tried to kill me so fuck you' mentality. Current one I can think of is Failure Frame: I became the strongest and Annihilated Everything which I've also read and by end of episode one he's gone full no mercy and pretends to be a weak MC just to lower guard and mercilessly kill someone.
If you don't want to deal with that at all you're best off with Manga and Manwha at the moment as they'll eventually get adapted as Omniscient Readers Viewpoint is getting an adaptation so it'll only be a matter of time till Mercenary Enrolment/Teenage Mercenary gets an adaptation plus Season 2 of Solo Levelling is coming soon.
Not a bad idea, I think I'm going to start doing some animation autism though of my own to keep me occupied these days as at least I'll be able to rely on that for consistency while I work on my main project. Yeah, when it comes to the other stuff it seems it's better to watch the anime that is deservedly going to be getting new seasons because they're watchable and solo levelling is one of those.
The next season of anime looks a bit more promising, I've just found it remarkable the absolute crap that's come out of the industry lately. By comparison reincarnated as a vending machine was downright wholesome and well written even though it contained quite a few shameless Isekai tropes at least the MC wasn't massively cringe and they somehow managed to make him being a vending machine work surprisingly well.
It does really depend on the writing quality of the authors, I've seen so many that have a good premise go to shit because they just don't make it interesting enough.
While I've seen literal meme shows keep my interest because of the writing quality, like I'm enjoying My Deer Friend Nokotan just because both the author and studio KNEW which direction to take the show.
I had this exact thought like a year ago when i started Campfire Cooking in another world. I pivoted away from it since I was tired of all the same fantasy isekai, but eventually I got around to it and it was pretty fucking good. Demon Slayer is still good, Wind Breaker was sick, and kaiju no.8 wasn’t bad but it definitely wasn’t animated great either. Damn, just remembered Frieren too. Fuuuuuck, hate to say that Dungeon Meshi hasn’t been bad either. I dunno, dude.
I recognise some of the titles and those are the ones I've watched that have good writing, which is what separates them from the absolute crap that's been coming out lately.
Watch Apothecary Diaries.
Well, since you are new to it in your own words, You should be aware that there is such thing as ebb and flow of things. Anime has almost always worked like this and is the same with most things, the populate thing will be milked until all creativity has been drained from it and new popular thing is created. Unlike old games in which you need to tinker quite a bit with getting the it to work on modern hardware from time to time you could move towards some old classic anime instead of the all of the new stuff, then again nothing will save you from your poor taste.
lol you've wildly misinterpreted my post, I've been watching anime a long time and watched plenty of classics. More recently though I've been favouring anime a lot over anything else because it's been mostly reliable to at least be somewhat interesting. Hopefully the industry will pick itself up again soon but I'm getting quite fed up at how many people are squandering the opportunity they have in the market.
So basically I have to write like a lawyer in order to keep people happy on the internet.
No, and I sincerely doubt that you could accomplish such a feat even if asked. But if you want to ensure these is done in a more legal process we could go through your history and previous statements and thus see how much they concur or not with your new statement. Personally that seems dreadfully dull even for me, since you never use words as intended or care about context except what is in your own head. There is a reason for why you got your reputation.
You're describing yourself, it really isn't my problem if you decide to go and interpret my posts however you like, I just simply stop bothering responding to people who decide to take that attitude with me as I honestly have better things to do than have a reddit-style argument justifying myself for several pages to somebody who's obviously not interested to begin with and just kicking shit off for no reason.
I'm a 80s and 90s anime guy and being old I think everything new sucks. Except unlike previous gen, this is with cause.
isekai is the fucking worst, no real conflict, op protagonist, just an endless parade of success, like watching someone play video game with game genie on.
I assume given its popularity that isekai is fulfilling something missing in modern japanese society and youths in general and they're getting some kind of satisfaction or even a dopamine hit of seeing someone else living a fantasy life on easy mode.
As for MC being a doofus? That's always a thing, worse now, I don't have an answer (to anything ever) but if I were to make a guess, dumb loser MCs are easier to write for anime mills, and identification, makes the readers relate or even feel they're better than the MC in some ways.
In general, it is harder to write a smart character than a dumb character, because a smart character has to be capable of solving problems in smart ways. If you aren't careful and skilled, it's very easy to either end up with a "smart" character that's actually kind of dumb because he misses solutions and clues and details he should figure out (ex: many episodes of Doctor Who), or a "smart" character that's really just magic (ex: many versions of Sherlock Holmes, basically every scientist in superhero fiction. Also many episodes of Doctor Who).
No character can be smarter than his writer. Most people are average, so most characters should be average.
To a certain degree. That said, there are ways you can fake it; the writer has hours or weeks to solve a problem and can then have a character divine that same solution in a few seconds, for example. You can use a computer to do complex calculations, then have the character perform them mentally. You can consult and research with people that are smarter or more knowledgeable than you, then have you character use their knowledge.
Isekai was never meant to be anything amazing, I personally like them in spite of things if they have decently written characters and they can even make a nice filler sometimes when I just want to relax. I'm an anime watcher so I also understand the point of an insecure MC character among other things but especially with the way they react to women it's so unbelievable because even the most insecure virgin out there is not going to run away if a hot girl is literally sitting on top of him and sticking her boobs in his face, it would just never happen. The only time it would make sense is if he was promised to another which would make it more wholesome instead of cringe.
Even if you're somebody who considers yourself a loser, you still want to be that guy who eventually makes it, it's only people who have actual mental problems that go full black pill and incel to the extreme.
Anime protagonists tend to be on one end of a spectrum or the other; either over the top horn dogs who are constantly get up skirt peaks and grabbing titties (almost always followed by the tsundere punching them), or pathetic socially paralyzed virgins who get the 'nose bleed' if a girl so much as touches their hand. And the second does seem to be way more common.
I can think of maybe 2 or 3 protagonists off the top of my head who don't fit that mold and actually act like normal guys. I don't know if it's some weird Japanese cultural thing that's highlighting something real, or if it's that they're not allowed to show more guys acting realistic because it's broadcast on TV in Japan or what.
I'm genuinely curious how much of it is a reflection of real life and how much of it is just tropes being written in because they are easy or because the writer is simply writing stuff that he saw when he was just a reader or watcher of anime and manga and these things were tropes long before he started. Are indirect kisses really that big of a deal in Japan? Is holding hands really this monumentally sexy and intimate moment that has guys shaking in their boots?
Last anime season was kinda okish maybe 2 really good ones and 2-3 mediocre ones I could watch. This season tho has only like 2 mediocre animes I would even give a chance. Not that they kinda run out of ideas. Guess this season I will have rewatch some older ones.
I've had quite some fun watching Anime i the past months and will make a list soon, but anything Konosuba after S2, I didn't like.
I do get you on that, I do like Konosuba generally but I did think as well that the newest season was pretty meh, they're clearly fleshing out certain characters' backstories quite a bit now they've got the backing from the industry to do it. We saw this with Megumin's episodes so people who really like her character would enjoy that and then they expanded on Kazuma and Darkness' relationship a lot more.
Even with that though, at least the story was coherent and had believable human interactions. My main beef with anime these days is they insist on throwing this crap out there even when it's obvious that audiences don't like it very much because I doubt that the Japanese do either, the anime with really shit writing are only getting 1 season max.
your shit taste aside, I do feel like anime is starting to get formulaic. art styles feel like they are converging, and the stories don't feel so crazy anymore. maybe it's just that I've gotten desensitized.
Anime is and always was mega gay.