I typically hate anime. There are a few (Elfen Lied, Battleship Yamato, etc) that I have enjoyed over the years. However, despite honestly trying to be more open-minded about it so as to have more common ground with some of my friends, a lot of it still bothers me because many of the common tropes (i.e. protagonist who is a clueless moronic incel) also tend to be pet peeves of mine when watching/reading a story.
As someone who watched a lot of anime recently after about a 20-25-year gap, I will say they're getting a bit better on this bolded point, but they've still astonishingly failed to eliminate it. Most anime heroes are relatively good or even great people (c.f.
Jujutsu Kaisen,
Demon Slayer,
Vinland Saga - though it kind of plays you out a bit for most of S1,
Delicious in Dungeon,
Frieren, etc. etc. - the big recent ones), kind, empathic, good-hearted, brave, etc. rather than most of them being awful edgy wankers, even those who are wankers it tends to be understandable, because they now behave like actual teenagers, not 4Chan edgelords (c.f. Chainsaw Man). There are also anime where it looks like it's going that way, but it's basically a bluff or more complicated (Code Geass, albeit that is from 2007).
But then you have your Death Notes and your Tokyo Ghouls and so on. Ugh.
What's still a major issue with modern anime for me is that a lot of it is just randomly
extremely sexist. Like out of nowhere, boom right in the face, ultra-sexism which wouldn't really have even played in the 1980s in the West, and everyone is acting like nothing screwed-up is going on. A good example is the very popular
Demon Slayer anime, which just like, seems "normal" for a while and them BAM huge boobs and huge completely unnecessary cleavage. BAM oh look his little teenage sister turned into a grown woman with huge boobs and tons of cleavage (sure she's also very fierce but do we really need bouncing cleavage?). One dude has three ninja ladies who work for him as scouts and infiltrators! Their defining trait? Huge boobs and tons of cleavage even though it makes no sense. Oh here's a super-skilled female demon slayer, who is genuinely a badass? One of her main aesthetic traits - well you guessed it... Oh and her power comes from "love" (and what's still really sad is - she's a pretty good character despite this!).
Another real killer here is
My Hero Academia, a show I'd love to recommend to my friends who love superhero stuff (because I think it does a lot of quite clever things and shows how much a cooler a non-DC/Marvel but well-developed superhero universe could be), but goddamn, I cannot recommend a show where, for example, one female character's costume is inexplicably entirely absent from just below her nipples to just barely above her genitals (and I do mean just barely). Is this is a silly or weird character? No. They're super serious and the sidekick of another serious character. No explanation is given. And what's really weird is, the show actually deal with sexism a bit - the female characters know they're facing sexism, particularly in leadership roles, and it argues against that, saying it's bad and showing them to be very capable, whilst dressing multiple female characters up incredibly revealing and impractical outfits, and making it so only female characters have "sexualized" powers, personalities and the like. It's bizarrely self-contradictory or just totally lacks self-awareness.
I have said this before, perhaps even in this very thread, but I really, really don't like the pop-culture monetization of D&D right now.
Well said either way, it's really getting gross.
