Wiezzen said:
I don't think it's coincidence that a large majority of the people I've known who have watched Anime have been socially awkward.
If I let fanbases define my liking of a thing or medium, I'd forcefully purge the world of anything Warhammer40k-related and cease listening to most genres of music. On topic:
Like: Nanoha A's, what with me being the official fanboy on The Escapist and all. Any explanations would have to be left to TV Tropes.
Hate: Bokatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan. Saw the first episode out of curiosity, and hated it not because of the gore (of course not) or lolicon (look at my liked series), but because it felt so
soulless. I don't mean in the typical cash-in sort of way, I can just ignore that, but in an oddly horrifying way.
Let-down by: Shakugan No Shana. When I first found it on TV Tropes, it seemed like an awesome action-romance with an interesting concept and aesthetic. The promotional art, openings, and glimpses of some plot points lured me in further. Unfortunately, the concept was more a backdrop for your typical shonen-fare. That would be OK on its own; there have been very good shonen series like the Negima manga and Yu Yu Hakusho, but it didn't have the charm or interesting characters (there will be a slight rant on the latter) to make it work, and the world building, while working with the interesting concept, fell flat. The villains were pretty lame (the first villain was your typical floating bishonen guy, hardly memorable for anything, and he's one of the better villains), and the series seemed to consist of few-episode long conflicts with said villains, interspersed by fairly typical high-school stuff and the surprisingly-decent romantic bits that got me through 2/3 of the series. Again, that basic shonen structure isn't the problem; plenty of good series more-or-less fit that go to school, save the world pattern, this just didn't do anything with it. The students and teachers were all pretty dull, making the whole thing a filler backdrop to the kinda-decent romance. The same seems to go for the supernatural stuff; any characters who appear won't leave a real impression on you (and Shana's flashback really should have been one episode).
Cutting this short (I just realized this isn't user reviews), the series isn't outright bad, it just didn't have much of anything to its shonen structure, as I explained. Considering what I've heard of other series made by the animation studio (J.C Staff) and that the best part was the romance, perhaps the action was essentially filler that distracted from the studio's strengths. For all I know, the light novels were fucking awesome and the action parts were mishandled in the anime. Since I rather enjoyed the first episode of Tora Dora, a series that's allegedly very similar in many non-action respects, maybe my idea about the action is correct.
