What's the Worst Thing About Anime?

[korp]

What do you think is the worst thing about anime?

Your unbridled hate can be anything from terrible American voice actors.. terrible Japanese voice actors.. specific bad plot lines (powering up for 15 episodes)... to the way the guys always have spikey hair. Whatever you hate.. no matter how nitpicky.. go ahead and voice it. I am curious.

Cite specific examples please. I don't like blanket examples without knowing the basis for them.

By the way, the plural of anime IS anime.

 

[Random Person]

What I hate about anime is the fan service. I can't tell you how many times I'll be enjoying a show with a good plot or decent comedy and then body parts are thrown in my face. If I had wanted to look at porn, I would have looked for porn. When I find great anime without fan service I rejoice because its so easy to find good anime with fan service. I also love when good anime's grow up and stop showing fan service (Naruto) but until all anime does that, that is my biggest pet peeve with anime.

 

[VembersWind]

probably how cliched most of it is. you have a kid who's WAY too young to know how to fight, the female lead who's in love with the hero which never goes anywhere, then they and their friends (who aren't much older) are the ONLY ones who can save the world, then after a lot of fighting, the kid hero defeats the big bad with his super-secret-special-awesome ultimate technique that he learned 100 episodes ago, and then they all live happily ever after. there, i just summed up about 90% of shonen animes. that, and how many emos there are in anime.

 

[ケンジ]

=w=....


Good question Korp.
One thing, another person's hate, is another person's interest. Anime is too broad, and to wide. Anime encompasses a lot of things,Light Novels, Manga, eroge, Visual novels, Doujins, etc. And many of them go into anime because people want to see it in action.
All what people hate in a certain anime may be it's plot or how the characters are acting or treated. Anime can be treated like any other fiction and any other thing, but the treatment of it is at a far deeper degree than a mere fanfiction or fantasy.

Here's a brief overview on it. READ ALL OF IT

There are a lot of genres in anime, Shounen Ai, Shoujo Ai, Bishounen, Bishoujo, Harem, Reverse Harem, Comedy, Ecchi, Mecha, Magical, Drama, Military, etc. And there are many Mangaka who may draw and write them ever so dearly, or Gensaku-sha who illustrates those who write the plot of a Manga. The most common is what Erebea said. It can also meld with secondary genres like Mecha or Comedy or Drama. Seinen is scarce and the least common is Josei. But Josei type works are slowly multiplying.

And again, Manga, whether the manga be a 4 panel or a complete chapter by chapter type, is not the only thing where Anime is limited too. Visual Novels and Eroges are also part of it, and it's where most of the fanservice come from. There are a lot of normal mangas around in Japan, (Which are sadly obscure to the normal average anime fan), like Kaichou wa Maid-sama, Ouran Host Club, 100% Strawberry, K-ON!, Nichijou, Ga-Rei, Suzumiya Haruhi no Yutsu, CardCaptor Sakura, Hunter X Hunter, Flame of Recca, Kure-nai, Bokurano, I could go on. None of them are harmful, but are fun to read, and they contain fanservice. I'll explain that in a bit.

Other animes such as Otome wa Boku ni Koi****eru, Oretachi Tsubasa wa Nai, Hoshizora e Kakaru Hashi, Higurashi, Happiness! were based on Adult Visual Novels, and hence the anime may or may not depict scenes from the said game. Higurashi though, was completely depicted in the Anime, since there's too little ecchi in it. The rest I said however, had some ecchi in the game, but the elements of it were removed from the anime. Or some of it.

SOME animes may come from unexpected places. One of them was Sengoku Otome--Pink paradox was based on a Pachinko Game. No it did not had the manga, nor anything JUST a pachinko game! Other animes like RIN ~Daughters of Mnemosyne~ are completely made first, followed by a light novel and manga adaptation. That goes with Occult Academy, Soranowoto and Senkō no Night Raid.

Now that's out of the way, here's my main point:
Everyone may hate the plot or the jokes or the slapstick because that's been a norm in a manga. The Mangaka or writer will make jokes or take jokes and will put in on the anime, they will take suggestions from the anime studio. The Light Novel or the Manga or the Video Game where the anime came from always will make more sense than the anime, yet most people are only after the anime for eye candy, to see it in action.

Why do animes get cancelled? Monetary issues and other factors like illness, business, ratings. A normal anime is shown around 11 to 13 episodes. If the DVD sales or if they make a lot of money out of it, then a second or third season won't be a problem, and it's not only the issue about money, it's about the fans expectations and reactions.

Fans tend to gather around social sites like Mixi, NicoNicoDouga and forums and blogs to discuss about the anime they like. Word can spread as fast as soon as you typed it. If they like it, then they will make it, but fan power and money issues are only why a second or third season will happen. The creator may refuse to create another anime season since making anime is VERY expensive. They earn very little than what they earn when they were drawing and writing the manga light novel. All the money the anime makes, goes to the anime studio. The anime studio makes the anime move, work and so on and such which.


All in all Anime is too complex. So did I stand off the beaten path? Maybe.
As to the plot of some animes. You may have seen a joke, but it will always appear. Cartoons in the US are more cliched than most animes, or the animes you see are "gimmick" animes to promote something, like Sengoku Otome which promoted the Pachinko game. Or Higurashi where it promoted more of the Games thanks to the anime which made more people know about it.

Fanservice is not ALL BAD. You heard me. I like it.
Fanservice may split into a few kinds, the Eye candy Fanservice, aka the ecchi you see, or the Shoutout fanservice where references are made numerous times throughout the episode either as part of the background or a line a character said. An example of type 1 is Sekirei, To Love Ru, Ikki tousen, Rosario + Vampire, Seikon no Qwaser etc. Type two would be Lucky Star, Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei, Seitokai no Ichizon, Seitokai Yakuindomo, etc. Most people I've shown type 2 NEVER get the references, which could attribute it to people not knowing what is going on, because Anime campaign happens while an Anime is currently airing, hence some jokes or references will never see the light of day.

Type 1 is what is hated the most in Fanservice.

 

[Master Kokiri 9]

Excessive filler is by far my biggest pet peeve with Anime. You can have the greatest series of all time suddenly come down with a bad case of filler and then it just dies. I understand that filler will inevitably happen when you adapt an ongoing manga into an anime, but more than just a five episode filler arc or filler scenes (ie adding scenes into a canon arc, similarly to how One Piece handles most of it's filler) is just too much.

Bad dubs (this can range from anything from bad VA's, excessive mistranslations, too many localization changes) are a close second, though, as they are (obviously) very annoying. I always prefer to watch a show in my native language, and having a bad dub just annoys me to no end as it's not very easy for me to get into a show by reading subtitles at the bottom of the screen.

 

[Azure Sage]

Filler, bad American voice acting, combining filler with the actual plot, entire seasons of filler... Yeah, I'm talking to you, Bleach.

 

[misskitten]

I dislike dubbing in other languages. For me it feels wrong to watch animé in something other than japanese. Usually it's very poorly done and it just ruins the whole viewing experience. This is not exclusively to animé tho. I dislike all forms of dubbing. I watched shows in Swedish, English and French when I was merely a toddler (I'm Norwegian) and that was not a problem, in fact it did me a favor. My nieces who are 5 and 8 watches everything dubbed into Norwegian (even things in Swedish, which is very similar to Norwegian is dubbed into Norwegian and it's such a waste of resources and frankly is a major disservice to children in Scandinavia) and I feel they are missing out on so much. I really hope that once they are both steady readers I can convince them to watch shows and movies that have subtitles rather than dubbing, it will really help them with learning other languages.

 

[FLUDDzone]

Sometimes the voice acting is actually good if the anime is good too.
What I hate is when the show is super addicting but only lasts 16 episodes...
Another think I hate is how Funimation overrates there shows to MA when they deserve to be rated PG or PG-14. Like this hilarious anime called Hetalia which barely has any violence or language but just has a few racial stereotypes.:/
The fourth thing I hate is how it takes forever (or sometimes never) for a show to be english dubbed...Naruto Shippuden is already finished in Japan and it's barely done in English including the manga.
The final thing I hate about anime is that some shows are freaking awesome and then some shows are just lame. Lamer than this smilie. It doesn't even animate the eyes rolling!D:

 

[Ghosi]

What I hate about anime is the fan service. I can't tell you how many times I'll be enjoying a show with a good plot or decent comedy and then body parts are thrown in my face. If I had wanted to look at porn, I would have looked for porn.

Exactly this. My friends and I just ignore it when we watch anime. It does really get annoying after a while, so we would make comments like " Look who isn't wearing a shirt again today." basicly just because we are not really caring. For example, my friend and I just finished watching this great anime called "Karin". The opening and story line was filled with a lot of fanservice stuff, but the overall story was great and we really liked it. Of course if it would happen in a funny situation, then that is a different story...

I also hate the English and Hungarian voice actors. Not really the English, but mostly the Hungarian voice acting for all movies/cartoons/etc... they would reuse a voice so many times that you can't meet a new voice actor anymore, and you could watch two totally different movies and still end up with one person voicing two different people in the two different movies. That isn't really the anime itself's fault though, but the localization's.

I'm also grumbling about cancelled anime; like the one they did with Fire Emblem. They only made two episodes, and they never finished it. Also, I hate it when I just don't understand some parts of an anime. For me as a Westerner, some things do seem strange to me that seem normal to Easterners. Like the whole idea of: "When you sneeze, it means that someone is talking about you". I didn't get many jokes because of it, until I read the idea in a book.