If you draw women like children, and then give them high pitched voices, like children, and have them act girlish and foolish like pre-teen girls, and then sexualize them…There is something very very fucking wrong with you. Anime “purists” can deny it all they want, but it’s inherently tied in/related to fake waifu girlfriends and lonely neckbeards drawing naked waifus all over DeviantArt.

It’s skeevy as shit and I refuse to pretend otherwise.

I generally don’t talk about it, but because you asked, I have seen a lot of anime and hate most of it. I have seen Hellsing, Hellsing Ultimate, about 9/10 of the OG run of Fullmetal Alchemist, a lot of Ranma 1/2, Serial Experiments Lain, Akira, some Death Note, La Blue Girl, some tennis one I can’t remember the name of, Castlevania, a few Studio Ghibli movies, Attack on Titan S1 & 2, random episodes of Samurai Pizza Cats, all of One Punch Man, Interspecies Reviewers, Slayers, some DiC Sailor Moon, some early Pokemon, and a few Dragonball, YuGiOh, Digimon, and Naruto episodes.

I don’t count early GI Joe or Transformers even though they’re technically anime, but I didn’t like those either.

Of those, I liked Interspecies Reviewers, about 1.5 seasons of OPM, 1 season of Castlevania, and Hellsing Abridged (because it’s fucking hilarious).

Here’s a random top 10 of reasons:

1. Anime has a horrible habit of having a great premise, a lot of repeated setup, and then zero payoff followed by a new season escalating with the same. In short, great at premise, poor at developing it into a story. And endings? They have no idea how to end a series except for fighting bigger bad guys…
2. And that’s IF they can even be arsed to finish a series. I’m aware of the timeframe dynamic between manga and anime. It fucked over Game of Thrones too. Maybe we just agree not to start a show before the source material is done?
3. Much of the animation looks abysmal and the “serious” ones seem to have an awful habit of just… panning over a background or frozen characters in a scene for fucking ever to fill time. I made note of this during Serial Experiments Lain to my friend who was making me watch it and it basically ruined the show for him. It completely wrecked the pacing and was done CONSTANTLY. There were 45 second pans (which I would start audibly counting after 10 seconds) while the main character just monologued “I’m 12 and this is deep” bullshit that was nearly completely disconnected from the plot. There was no reason to do this. Even recent shows like Castlevania did this.
4. Shit just happens that doesn’t make any sense in context of the world they’ve set up. This is endemic from anime I’ve seen. Anime fans think that randomness is “creative” instead of just “throwing shit at a screen because the writer had a fever dream and it doesn’t matter at all if it makes any fucking sense”. Spirited Away is basically just this. No, randomness is not creativity, Katy the Penguin of Doom.
5. They’re just a different set of tropes than American cartoons, many of which I find to be nonsensical, twee, or cringe-inducing. Bloody nose when you get a boner trope, I’m looking at you.
6. I fucking hate Japanese voice acting (and often for the most part the Americans who dub it, especially in kids shows). This started when Sailor Moon came over and I wanted to kill everyone in the immediate vicinity whenever most of the characters spoke. That shrill panic screaming that was in SM and Pokemon was awful.
7. In the same vein, I also can’t stand constant “reaction sounds”. Someone saying something mildly surprising that you should have easily realized 10 episodes ago isn’t an excuse to stare blankly and make an “AH”, “OH”, or “UH” noise (sometimes followed by a small choking sound) roughly four hundred times per episode. Humans don’t do this.
8. They make movies that just do random shit and don’t have anything to do with the show (if not outright contradict the show). Dragonball is especially notorious for this.
9. A really weird number of them throw in Nazis seemingly at random, appropriate time and setting be damned. Need a bad guy? Fucking Nazis!
10. I am constantly inundated with friends that like anime telling me that I should watch whatever their new anime obsession is despite it conforming to 3/4 of bad things on this list because obviously I just haven’t watched the right anime.

Youre mistaking indifference for hatred.

I wouldn’t say I hate it, but I can’t watch it.

I used to love it. I was obsessed in the early 2000’s. Then I went to college for animation, and learning about how that all works absolutely ruined all enjoyment for anime.

I don’t hate it but I think a lot of japanese anime and video-games have an awful pacing that make it so boring for me. The stories make too much time to move on. So slow.

I have tried a lot of anime (Myazaki, the titan’s thingy…) and videogames because fans don’t stop talking about it but it’s just not my cup of tea.

I’ve always felt like anime requires a huge time investment to enjoy it; so I’ve always avoided it.

I just don’t like soap operas, whatever the form. My kid does though.

I guess we just grew up and Japan still mostly treats and creates anime as media for kids and teenagers, not unlike how cartoons are still mostly “for kids”.

I don’t “hate” anime, like many people here, but some stuff just doesn’t entertain me anymore. I’m too old to find Dragon Ball Z and every other similar shonen even minimally entertaining. Hell, I was probably too old for that shit back when I was 19, I remember checking Bleach and giving up on episode 7 or whatever, though I think it was Naruto that “woke me up” when I was 16, I was watching it but wasn’t enjoying it for quite a while, until I just dropped it around ep 120, “this shit ain’t going nowhere”.

I’ve only watched Evangelion the first time during covid years, and it was clear it was two stories in one: the one they wanted to tell, which was kinda interesting, and their struggles with budget and how that affected the product.

The thing is that the anime that reaches mass appeal is meant for the masses, much like movies with mass appeal are the ones that require you to shut down your brain. The last 2 anime that I watched, enjoyed and wouldn’t mind watching again are Legend of Galactic Heroes and Taxi Driver, both are low on nonsense and bullshit.

More often than not, it’s just better to read the manga, when the anime’s based on one. Slam Dunk is a much better read than watching the anime, plus you end up knowing about the author’s other work, Vagabond, which is amazing.

Edit: I’m sorry for the lack of tl; dr. There’s a general drop off of quality, weird social media garbage, a lot of systemic problems, etc. What I’m trying to say here is hard to summarize

Aside from the fact that it’s mass produced garbage, I can actually say that I’m old enough to have experienced a period of anime where the production values, writing, and dialogue weren’t exactly terrible.

I think a good example of my gripe with anime today is watching something like Fate Zero and then following that up with Heaven’s Feel. The distinct drop in quality between those 2 adaptations is pretty stark.

The original Yu-Gi-Oh anime was absolutely wild. It’s dumb in a uniquely entertaining fashion. There were so many sequels that were produced for Yu-Gi-Oh and every single one of them was completely terrible.

Watching Tenchi Muyo’s OVA part 1 and part 2 was fairly enjoyable. Part 3 is so much worse for seemingly no good reason.

The third Tenchi Muyo film was abjectly terrible. It’s quite possibly one of the worst films that has ever been made.

FLCL season 1 was legendary. Season 2 and 3 were substantially worse.

The new Evangelion films weren’t exactly great.

Even as far back as Pokemon season 1, that season was pretty okay. Almost everything past the first 2 seasons were… really bad…

There have been some bad adaptions for Berserk that have been mentioned from time to time.

Dragonball Super is weird. Nobody really seems to like Super. Even people who watch Super regularly treat it as some kind of Frankenstein monster.

Gundam has been pretty consistently not good for well over a decade. Gundam Wing was pretty insane. It started off with some super questionable writing and poor voice acting, and then it ended off being probably the best thing Gundam has ever been. And everything that followed was… not very good…

Naruto was followed by Boruto. It’s pretty bad. A large chunk of the 2nd half of Naruto was just not good.

I’ve seen people defend Hunter X Hunter’s Chimera Ant arc so brazenly. And still, it’s genuinely not good. Which is amazing, because almost everything prior to that arc was crazy good.

To be fair, a lot of these problems stem from the fact that the work being adapted is also consistently worse. It’s not just anime. A lot of this coincides with the same drop in quality in the manga industry as well.

The nearly universal drop in quality across the anime and manga industries has been… frustrating…

Even more frustrating is the overwhelming number of fake reviews, shilling, bot spam, etc that are meant to hide negative reviews about anime and pretty much anything involving Japanese media.

The amount of weird shit that gets posted to review sites and social media in order to hide the general negativity towards the anime industry is just gross and weird.

Another poster, Ace T’Ken, brought up a lot of specifics about the problems with anime in general. It’s a pretty good write-up, imo.

My take is, I think that these problems are more “noticeable” in modern anime. But, almost all anime have these kinds of problems to one degree or another, new and old.

It’s pretty systemic. I still think that these issues became a lot more noticeable coinciding with a general drop in quality across the whole industry.

I would like to say, it’s not like I dislike anime “inherently”. But, there’s just so much bad anime.

Never watched it because the characters all look creepy to me. I remember other kids watching “Speed Racer” back in the 70s, so I referred to as “that crappy Japanese animation style” until I learned the name for it when it really took off in the US after around 2000.

I know that makes me something of a Philistine. I’m aware that it has a rich history and millions (billions?) of devoted fans.

It still creeps me out, though.

I used to get Cartoon Network as a kid. I watched Outlaw Star and really enjoyed it. However, in one of the later episodes they crowbarred in a topless jacuzzi scene for no reason.

That sums up my anime experience.

I watched Dragon Ball Z and a bit of Gundam Wing but never really enjoyed them.

I bump into Dragon Ball Z fans occasionally and they’re pushing 35 and have themed pillows etc. I think that is mad but I’ve met more than one person like that.

I have no themed things in my house nor would in buy any.

P.S. I enjoyed Samurai Jack and often say “Long ago in a different land” randomly to my partner.

Any recommendations based on the above?

Chiming in as someone who actually owns a few different anime on DVD/blu-ray.

My whole thing is that I like good media. Anime is a medium. There’s good anime out there. As many have already said, those’re few and far between because the vast majority of people working in the medium seem determined to pigeonhole it as genre trash and perv shit.

I kinda stopped watching anime early in my 20s. The late 00s into the 10s seemed like the absolute worst period of time for worthwhile anime being made. I’ve sat through a few more current big-name ones since then and shit hasn’t improved.

So yeah, I don’t hate anime as a medium, I just hate like 99% of the medium’s content

Hate is a strong word. But I have never really cared for it. The content I have watched felt like it was the trillby wearing “um actually” kid writing his own edgey story. And something about the yelling outbursts I have seen a few times make me want to curl up and die.

Even though I kinda like the aesthetics, especially for AI image generation, and I’m a kind of a nerd (it’s popularly said that nerds like animes), I don’t like nor hate, I simply don’t care to know and watch animes. Not only animes, but also animated movies and series, as well as mangas.

Americans fetishizing Japanese culture is gross enough without the awful, verbose, melodramatic storytelling. Also the Japanese language is fucking hard and I’m not particularly interested in learning it. I’d watch the fuck out of Korean anime if their storytelling wasn’t just as thick, though.