Limzz said:
I promise I'm not trolling. I have a hatred of all anime. Why? I think it's because it all looks the same, but maybe the real reason is something far more ominous. A good analogy would be cheese. Blue, swiss, american, and cheddar cheeses for example are all very different from one another but on a broader level it's still cheese. I won't lie I haven't watched much anime but just about every other person on the internet talks about it and I'm aware of the varied themes and such. Despite this I'm pretty sure it all looks roughly the same and uses the same art style that I find akin to lemon juice in my eyes and makes me FUUUUUUUUUUU. *OR* am I a natural xenophobe or something but since racism is socially unacceptable do I turn this on Japanese cartoons? (EDIT: Yeah the former sentence doesn't hold together too well but I really don't want to fix it and you probably know what I mean anyways) Does anyone else share my hate? Oh, actually, I dunno if this is anime but I liked that spider guy in Spirited Away but I was also probably 10 when I saw it.
EDIT: Oh, and creepy anime avatars really bug me out.
Limzz said:
I promise I'm not trolling. I have a hatred of all anime. Why? I think it's because it all looks the same, but maybe the real reason is something far more ominous. A good analogy would be cheese. Blue, swiss, american, and cheddar cheeses for example are all very different from one another but on a broader level it's still cheese. I won't lie I haven't watched much anime but just about every other person on the internet talks about it and I'm aware of the varied themes and such. Despite this I'm pretty sure it all looks roughly the same and uses the same art style that I find akin to lemon juice in my eyes and makes me FUUUUUUUUUUU. *OR* am I a natural xenophobe or something but since racism is socially unacceptable do I turn this on Japanese cartoons? (EDIT: Yeah the former sentence doesn't hold together too well but I really don't want to fix it and you probably know what I mean anyways) Does anyone else share my hate? Oh, actually, I dunno if this is anime but I liked that spider guy in Spirited Away but I was also probably 10 when I saw it.
EDIT: Oh, and creepy anime avatars really bug me out.
Well not every bit of art is for everyone, and anime is heavily stylized in a specific way. There are plenty of people who hate say Picasso, or Neo-Cubist art, and others who swear by it. That's why there are so many differant styles.
Differant anime artists do things differantly, but it does follow a general stylistic format, and if you hate it, your not going to really care enough to pick out the differances. Personally I don't mind the stylization and in general tend to pick on specific takes on it.
I'll also say that I think attitudes towards Anime have a lot to do when you started watching it. To be honest I started waaaay back in the day before it was "cool" with things like the original Bubblegum Crisis, and few people knew what it was. When companies like ADV started releasing fairly prolifically but it still wasn't mainstream, companies were very selective with what was brought over and localized. In general anything that made it here during this time period was going to be pretty high quality for the time. However as Anime became more mainstream, demand increased, and fanboys started screaming for anything that seemed remotely cool, more distribution companies got involved, and started looking to bring over anything and everything they thought they could sell. All arguements about the cost of translation and import aside, the bottom like was when people were willing to pay $30 for a VHS tape (or later a DVD) there was major money to be made. Inevitably we started to drown under a constant tide of crap.
Right now I'm nowhere near as much of an Anime fan as I used to be, in part because of a sort of "reality check" involving Japan and some of their attitudes, in part because while Anime is currently falling off having the "mainstream" on one side, and radical "Otaku" talking IRL in pigeonhole Japanese and stuff on the other began to annoy me, and in part because to really get an impression of how good this stuff is you need to see it, and I got tired of dumping a decent wad of cash on something that had become so hit or miss, with an increasingly large number of misses compared to hits. What's more with the increasingly mainstream recognition, Anime ceased to move under the radar, and we started seeing the censorship of the sex and ultraviolence which helped get me interested to begin with, a medium that was cool in part because it was not pulling any punches became less so when the censors got involved. Sites like the "Anime No Editing Zone" chronicled these changes fairly religiously and had a lot to do with my increasing annoyance. Gone are the days when you could get a subtitled version and guarantee it was uncut (and to be honest, that was one of the big reasons for getting it subtitled, at least for me, it had a lot less to do with being 'hardcore' for listening to it in the 'true' Japanese... and admittedly in the beginning the dubs did blow chips, but then again they also got a lot better when companies got more used to doing the localizations and found decent people).
I guess the point is that it's not for everyone, and I can understand why a lot of people don't like it at all, especially now.
On the other hand though, I also think you can dislike something without having to rush right in to become a full fledged hater. Not liking something does not mean you need to rush right in and tell the fans of whatever it is how much you hate it on principle. There are plenty of things I don't care for, and I don't generally make topics to express that displeasure, or go seeking out sites dedicated to it in order to make some kind of point.
