So in another topic someone said im a newfag to anime, because i talk about the most mainstream anime Frieren a lot and listed off the most mainstream anime as something right wing normies would like, and then said that to know who are the more experianced anime fans you need to ask them what the mid anime are that nobody else really knows about and he listed of Buso Renkin.
Little did he know ,i've read the Buso Renkin manga decades ago.
So how many people here are "elite otakus" that have seen the anime, watched the manga or even heard of Buso Renkin since apparently its now a metric for "elite otaku" status?.
if anyone wants to question my otaku credentials more, I'd also like to list off another obscure manga called "Hoshin Engi" that i read which that most people probably haven't heard of. Hoshin Engi is pretty popular in Japan but not well known in the West,
I've been watching/reading anime and manga since 20 years ago, im not a newfag to it
I'm not sure that I was watching it as it aired, since I was doing whole series bingeing rather than week to week at that point, but it wasn't too far removed from when it aired that I saw it, in its entirety. I will maintain that it was pretty mid.
I do miss some of the old fansub sites. I think it was animefansubs.tv I was using at that point. It felt more homey than the sterile torrent sites I have to use now.
The best part of having anime subbing divided across dozens of sites back in the day was you were exposed to a lot of series you'd never watch if you had the full spectrum of options at your disposal.
So you if someone was uploading a bunch of different series to Veoh, you'd probably watch whatever they were posting rather than only sticking in your specific lane like people do now.
You also got a bunch of different fansub groups to choose from, and because someone would drop a series midway through and someone else would pick it up you got to pick up on the translation differences and over time you kinda keyed in on when someone was taking liberties with the translation. That and the boatload of cultural insights from translator's notes.
But yeah, there was a lot of obscure stuff I sampled back then that I probably wouldn't have bothered with today. That reminds me, I still should try to carve out some time to watch Kemono no Souja Erin one day. I'm pretty sure I've still got the whole thing on my harddrive, just never got to the end of it. That's one that falls into that category of "I probably wouldn't have picked this up if I could choose from literally everything."
If I had my old harddrive from my weeb days still I'd be able to pull up nonsense like Hanaukyo Maid Tai or Nagasarete Airantou (which the manga is still fucking going somehow) that I'd almost certainly not watch these days.
Which aren't some hella obscure "elite otaku cred" shows, but literally the only reason any of us watched them was because we just typed something like "anime" in the search bar and it came up back in the day.
And yeah, I miss having multiple options available for some series. But the industry is producing like triple or more the amount of works these days, with a massive number still not even getting touched (shoutout to JUM for trying to pull from those lost series even if they mostly suck), so its certainly not worth having a double up when you could be having multiple series instead.
Sure the industry is producing a ton more shows now, but is it producing proportionally more good shows or is it just an ever expanding mass of rubbish to fill the gaps between those handful of good shows that come out each year?