I wouldn’t outwardly say that I hate anime but I definitely assume the worst when I hear a show is one. I automatically start thinking it’s going to be style over substance with unnecessarily long fight scenes, unrelatable characters, gross sexualization of female characters (if not child characters), and awkward dubs.

There are obviously exceptions to this. Serial Experiments Lain was my PFP here on Lemmy for a while and it’s one of my favorite shows ever. Within the past month I binged all of Chainsaw Man in two nights and thought it was great. But it was great in spite of the fact that it’s also an anime

Oversexualization. Panty shots, ass shots, boob physics, the same old jokes from the ‘80s about a guy “accidentally” groping a woman, guys peeping into a girls’ space, suggestive poses, barely-disguised fetishes (included, but not limited to, harems, incest and pedophilia).

It got to the point where a friend would recommend an anime, I’d watch it, and walk away halfway through the first or second episode because it was just unbearable. Friends would tell me to turn a blind eye, but why the fuck should I put up with sexualizing minors in a show? I’d rather spend my time doing something that doesn’t make me feel sick.

It also attracts the wrong kind of audience. Since the medium is so keen to produce oversexualized content, that’s all people look for and talk about. Any anime discussion thread degenerates into gross memes about “flat is justice”, “twincest is wincest”, people patting each other in the shoulder while calling the other “man of culture” for sharing their kinks, and shit like that. It’s so extenuating that, back when I was interested in the medium, I still actively refrained from interacting with fellow fans because I felt grossed out by them. Fun fact, I had a female classmate back in highschool who was interested in anime, and I thought that I could find common grounds with her, but no, it was the same thing, just reversed (she would only watch anime with sexualised boys).

The medium also forgot what its name stands for. I haven’t seen “animation” in “anime” in years. It’s just still frames and more still frames and whenever there’s an action sequence, the characters will constantly interrupt them to explain or think about the thing that I’m already watching and needs no explanation, or having flashback sequences, because it’s cheaper to animate. The fact that Ghost in the Shell and Akira from thirty years ago had better and more fluid animation than the shit they produce now is just sad.

I don’t think people straight up hate anime, nobody is going to pick up a remote and turn of the TV if they see somebody else watching it and angrily leave the room.

It’s just, for the most part (and this is also true for non-animated movies or series), you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

There are only so many times you can tell the story of boring guy gets put in fantasy land and is not boring anymore, or mysterious things happen at school and the afterschool mystery club has to solve them.

So what do you do? You cling to what you know is good. Studios, directors, etc. If Miyazaki makes an anime movie you watch it, if Quentin Terentino makes an action movie you watch it. This is also partially why anime’s are less popular than mainstream movies and series. You can watch a movie solely because you like an actor/actress, regardless of whether they play the same character or somebody else. In anime, each new series has a new set of characters, so each time a new personal connection has to be built.

Other than that, a good measure of “is this worth my time?” is pop cultural representation. Rule of thumb, if an anime spawns memes, it’s usually half decent.

But just like with movies and series, there are timeless classics. Like, who hasn’t seen or at least heard of Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion, Trigun, Dragon Ball Z, etc… Even my parents know Pokemon. Those have been around for so long and been shown on mainstream western channels during prime time slots, that they were impossible to miss. I think people who aren’t familiar with those are just not that interested in motion picture as a whole, regardless how its presented.

I’d say without overeaching, anime’s can be put in just a few categories:

• Artistic, Philosophical, Experimental, Parodies: Those are your Miyazaki films, Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, One Punch Man, Full Metal Alchemist, Attack on Titan, etc.

• Long running: Like, Pokemon, One Piece, Naruto, Dragon Ball, the Fate Series

• Trying to sell you something: Again Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Gundam, Beyblade, etc.

• Mass produced trash: All the ones where the title spreads 3 lines and tells you 90% of the story

• Otaku soap operas: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, the Monogatari series, Nagatoro, Komi-San

But those categories are not evenly spread in appeal, quality and quantity. While the first 2 categories have barely any presence but arguably the most cultural impact, the later ones have the most presence but are individually culturally insignificant. But quality is harder to judge than quantity is to see. So people tend to see the mass produced trash and ignore the good stuff that is being overshadowed. With classical film, a movies intention can usually be discerned with just one look, if for example a modern movie is black and white, its usually artistic. But looking at things like Evangelion, or the Ghost in the Shell Series, you couldn’t guess the deep philosophical implications on first glance. People tend to see cutesy anime art style and associate it with either the mass produced trash, or shows made for children. What makes a film/series good is the intention and execution, if it happens to be animated this usually doesn’t take away from the underlying message. See old animated Disney Movies - Lilo and Stich is about Family Values, Monetary Struggles, Loss and Friendship. Adult topics packed in a medium that both children and their parents can enjoy.

People tend to hate anime for the same reason they hate superhero movies, they see the overarching medium, but not the individual pieces. You can’t compare the significance of Iron Man 1 with Thor 2, or Infinity War with The Marvels, some of these movies are good in a vacuum, without the whole Cinematic Universe attached to them. Same goes for anime, some are simply good stories regardless of them being animated.

I can’t stand fight scenes where people are flying through the air at each other doing stupid poses and making sounds. They usually have some special power, and it’s all so meh.

I really liked Pantheon and then cringed when it resorted to that near their end. There’s lots of exceptions, like princess mononoke.

I don’t but I hate anime that rely on awful tropes like exploiting underage girls or the typical sister incest stuff (I would say brother-sister but this also applies to sister-sister)

I also find powerfantasy isekais boring

The facial expressions and the constant noises. It’s like a food dish with too much salt, doesn’t matter what the other flavor is once you decide you can’t stand the overpowering vibe of the thing.

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.

Because most of it uses overly simplistic characters. There’s no depth to them. They’re good because they’re good, they’re bad because they’re bad.

No nuance!

The stories are overly simplistic too.

Not all of them are like this, but enough of them are that I’m just tired of the genre.

Not enough propane or propane accessories (except for King of the Hill, best anime ever).

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.

Considering most anime is low effort schlock that contains episodic plots that get nowhere (and even linear narratives tend to progress at the speed of molasses), if somebody tells me they “like anime” without elaborating, I think less of them then if they told me they “like music.”

Not in the “hate” camp, but I’m very picky with anime. I recognize it’s a wide genre with tons of legitimately great productions.

There’s a lot of anime stuff that just irritates me for reasons I’ve not been able to put into words other than “it makes me cringe from embarrassment.” Female characters that are less an interesting or fun character and more like an endless void of cutesy vibes and nothing more, the anime pratfalls to punctuate a joke, weird creepy stuff towards women, laughably edgy characters, changing art styles to something tonally clashing for comedic effect (only example I know off the top of my head is in Hellsing Ultimate, which I’ll admit I’ve only seen in the form of the abridged series), overtly blatant fan service, all the characters being teenagers, etc. Tropes like these tend to irritate me to the point of getting in the way of my enjoyment of a show and it kills a lot of anime for me.

Tropes, filler, sexualization, the need to categorize or name things and stick to that strict hierarchy (ie. power levels), and laat but not least, the surrounding culture. Probably some other stuff I’m not thinking of as well.

Notably, the anime which doesn’t include these problems can reach some pretty high highs, because anime excels at motion and emotion.

I get asked this question a lot, because I love many traditional Japanese cultures, but not anime. First of all, I don’t hate it, I still respect it, but it’s simply not my cup of tea.

I often find it to be overstimulating and sexualized. someone said it’s like food with too much salt, that perfectly describes it for me. It’s just too over the top sometimes. The sexualization is also off putting. It’s a constant distraction from the plot and undermines the rest of the characters and story.

I also don’t like the voice acting style, where it is again overbearing, especially for women characters. That’s not what people sound like. It’s way too high pitched and trying way too hard to sound “cute”.

I never got into it and people online make it seem cringy. I know there’s probably good stuff out there but weebs are just so weird to me. Love Studio Ghibli and Akira. And used to love Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon - but as an adult never got into the shows.