Poll: Anyone an Ex Anime fan?

[Canadish]

Yeah, I was never a big fan to start with, but a few shows held my interest (Death Note, Full Metal Alchemist etc).

Now that they're all finished, I haven't heard about any other great new ones lately. Just randomly clicking a name on an anime site seems to yield a show about underage school girls getting naked while fighting demons about 80% of the time. No thanks Japan. Though I still love the shit outta ya.

There's the long runners as well I suppose (Bleach, Naruto, One Piece), but they all seemed to get boring after a while. Maybe it was just me getting older.
Either way, I only occasionally update myself on them if I've got a free day, and I'm finding myself laughing at them more then anything.

 

[Gaiseric]

Nowadays I'm "meh" in regards to anime. I used to watch quite a bit years back, then I stalled and couldn't find any that I liked and my interest faded.

I still enjoy the occasional anime and some favorites from my past(Berserk, Akira, Outlaw Star, Trigun, Gundam, and Desert Punk) but that's about it.

edit: Personally, DBZ killed a lot of love I had for anime with the talking for 20 mins, fighting for 5, and then the preview for the next episode. I know I'm exaggerating some, but that's just how it felt for me.

 

[Navvan]

I'm the opposite really. I was never much into anime when I was younger besides Pokemon. Once I hit 17 and was able to get my hands on high quality anime the medium peeked my interest and I've been a regular viewer of various anime every since.

That said I do dislike, and always have, many things people do with the medium. For example fan service is so overdone that it has lost all meaning in the majority of anime

 

[Kae]

Never been a fan I like some animes but I don't really care dor most of them

 

[Cheery Lunatic]

I think I'm inbetween "Meh" and "Like it".

I don't consciously look for anime, and I'm reluctant to start new ones, but I've liked my share of 'em. A good majority of anime is just way too freaking weird for me though, and I don't really label myself as an "anime fan".

 

[airrazor7]

I still like anime, I just like less of it. When I was first exposed to anime, everything I saw I really enjoyed. My first anime was ZOIDS: A New Century and soon after that I came across Inuyasha, Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Ghost in The Shell, Fullmetal Alchemist and Gad Guard nearly all at once. After that, I went looking for more and found out that I wasn't into anime as much as I thought I was. Some anime that is supposed to be comedic just comes across as being too silly and too many action anime(s) have whiny, clueless protagonists. I also became tired of overused narratives and memes and anime that are basically not-so-cleverly-disguised soft core porn.

I can't say I grew out of watching anime because I still like anime I have previously enjoyed and every now and then I'll find an interesting series to get into such as Darker than Black, Black Cat, IGPX, Soul Eater (last episode was disappointing), Murder Princess and Samurai Champloo to name a few.

 

[G-Force]

Good anime series for older audiences

Baccano
Darker than Black
Gungrave
Bartender (personal fave)
Ghost in the Shell
Legend of Black Heaven
Berserk
Cowboy Bebop

 

[The Wooster]

During my grade school years I used to be obsessed with Anime, manga, and Japanese culture. From things like Pokemon, Tenchi Muyo!, Dragon Ball Z... generally anything with an anime-ish look. Now when I try to get into a series, I can't stand it. Not that it's socially embarrassing or awkward (a lot of my friends are still into it) but it tends to make little to no sense to me. Other than the aesthetics, it utterly lost its appeal. Same goes with JRPGs. The plot line can be solid, but the journey from point A to point B is too filled with nonsense for my taste now.

It was just a phase to me, but I never thought it would end. I'd place it above gaming on my level of interest back then. I don't think it was a maturity thing to be honest, but it could be. How many of you went through Anime as a phase and what are you reasons for not liking it so much now? Also, I'm willing to give it another chance, so if you have any recommendations for me, please tell.

Kind of. I still adore animation of all kinds but my views have both widened and become more selective. On the one hand, I enjoy animation from any country and any background, on the other hand, I have very little tolerance for shittiness which rules out a big chunk of current anime.

 

[Syntax Man]

Since with a few exceptions I almost exclusively watch senien series (with a few exceptions in the shounen genre and that one shojou series that everyone and their mother has watched [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OuranHighSchoolHostClub]) I doubt very much that I'll ever stop watching anime. On one level at least, its a part of who I am.

 

[scorptatious]

I still like anime. Only certain kinds though. Fullmetal Alchemist is pretty much my most favorite anime of all time. Meanwhile anime such as Lucky Star, I couldn't get into. The art style is very attractive, but the first few episodes had very little going on. I think half of the first episode was focused on that one conversation about eating. It just felt boring to me.

 

[badmunky64]

I've recently lost a lot of interested in anime. I got tired of the same old pattern that runs wild in most anime like the plot that just keeps throwing most sci-fi/fantasy crap that was never mention prior just to drag out the plot (bleach) or a girl with big boobs who is obsess with sleeping with a spineless dweeb. Some of those stories objectify women almost as much as 50 Cent

I don't think that "we're getting mature" is the only reason, more like were getting more refined with our tastes. The more I think about it the more basic anime is like basic cable programing. They seem great when we're young or new to it and don't know any better, but afterwords you want better stories and they don't deliver as much.

As for great recent anime I'd suggest Baccano!, Spice and Wolf, and Kino's Journey. They all offer something amazing that are hard to find in both anime and regular tv.

 

[Princess Rose]

During my grade school years I used to be obsessed with Anime, manga, and Japanese culture. From things like Tenchi Muyo!

First off, as an anime fan in my early 30s... ahem...

When I was in grade school, we didn't have Pokemon or Tenchi Muyo! - we had Robotech, which was Macross and some other stuff that got chopped up, edited back together, badly dubbed, and released in difficult to find locations or on insanely expensive cassette tapes, and maybe some badly dubbed Speed Racer if you were lucky. When I was in High School, Pokemon and Tenchi Muyo were being released in Japan, along with Ranma 1/2 and Sailor Moon - in the US, we had some 80s animes like Bubblegum Crisis, Dirty Pair (the original, not the remake), Project A-Ko, Gal Force (again, the original), and Lum. Do you realize how hard up we were for quality anime when we were watching Lum (aka Beautiful Dreamer)?

Then, at the very end of high school, some real anime started to come out - if you knew the right fan-subbers. Sailor Moon even made it to the US, albeit with a bad dub - but better than Robotech or Speed Racer. Actually, it was one of the best dubs we'd ever seen (yes, at the time, that was considered a good dub). We got Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo! on fansubs, and then Pokemon showed up and did what nothing before it could do - it made people care about anime enough for companies to start dubbing it seriously for fans.

And it was AWESOME. Undergraduate college was this hey-day of great anime flooding the market. The best anime of the late 90s came over, got good dubs or - shock - subs! - real, commercially released subtitled anime that didn't cost more than your monthly rent! And the late 90s moved into the early 2000s, and the hits kept coming. We're talking about shows like Cowboy Bebop, Escaflowne, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Outlaw Star, Trigun, Inu Yasha, Serial Experiments Lain, Key the Metal Idol, Tenchi, El Hazard, Ranma, Noir - the shows that made anime great.

So when you say you were watching Tenchi in grade school, I shake my head. You had it great, kid. You didn't have to work for it like we did.

However, there is one point I'll give you. I don't think it's a phase - I just haven't seen a lot of good shows coming out recently. There's one or two per year at best. My most recent anime purchases are boxed sets from that golden era - the mid 90s to mid 2000s - when we were practically tripping over great shows all the time. Sometimes I assume it's just my nostalgia, but then I hear younger fans like yourself drifting away and I think I'm on to something. Since about 2005, not much good has come out. There's something good every so often - the recent Unlimited Bladeworks movie was excellent - but they seem to be fewer and father between.

Anyway, I hope you take my ribbing with the fondness (and irony) intended. ^^

 

[mitchell271]

Ex Anime watcher (I wouldn't say fan) here.
I loved stuff like DragonBall and YuGiOh, but for some reason I can't watch Anime any more.
I only watch TV series (and ocasionally some nostalgic cartoons) nowadays.

Try watching Fullmetal Alchemist. Great anime(brotherhood follows the manga) and manga, good place to start watching quality anime. Yu-Gi-Oh was actually pretty terrible looking back on it. Same with original pokemon, but I still love them.

 

[UTclass2015]

I used to watch episodes of zoids and DBZ everyday.. Then I just stopped as i reached middle school...

 

[derkis]

I was president of the Anime club at my highschool, but after studying an illustration at a fairly good art school for a couple years and then attending a real university I realized that it (generally) had little merit artistically or intellectually. And when it does make a pass at one, it tends to drop the ball on the other side.

With one notable exception that I can recall (FLCL) anime shops discard any semblance of visual uniqueness in favor convention, machining the same handful of environments and character designs and dressing them up in accessories which exist either end of the "drab and unadorned" / "completely impractical and gaudy" dichotomy. The tendency for female characters to forsake clothing in the interest of attracting a sexually-repressed male viewership falls within the latter category. The technical demerits of anime art "style" include, but are not limited to: ignorance of line quality/thickness as a tool for establishing depth, novel proportion as a meaningful aspect of character design/personality superseded by rigorous adherence to an unwritten, universal standard, color scheme falling into the category of either desaturated pastels or straight tube pigment, et cetera.

As far as characters and story go, the archetypes are tiresome and often offensive. For males you have the willful hard-headed youth, enigmatic loner, confidence-lacking boy, sage old man, and females are either wild and free-spirited, deferent and weak, or strong and collected (probably the only inoffensive stereotype I can think to enumerate). Female characters also have a tendency to gush over the most pathetic males possible, I wonder why...? Stories tend to be pretty run-of-the-mill, you know: power-escalation, school story, hero versus impedening cataclysmic event/doomsday figure. I'm sure there are more exceptions here than anywhere else, but whether or not they're worthwhile exceptions is another thing entirely. Cheap, hamfisted religious "symbolism" is prevalent and seems to be often misconstrued as depth (looking at Evangelion here) and character development means traversing the list of archetypes.

I've been out of the game for a while, I'm sure there is a series or two which has broken enough of the molds to reach an acceptable narritave or artistic level, but I've never encountered one which considered both halves exceptionally. And the fact of the matter is that you're going to get a hell-of-a-lot more from a good novel or live-action film than you are from the paragon of anime-quality, so what's the point.

 

[Thistlehart]

I wouldn't call it a phase. Anime is something I got into and stayed into. I'm not crazy about it as there are certain tropes in it that aggravate me to no end.
1) A character spending three episodes screaming and ruining the local landscape while another character stands watching and reflecting on his past, a la DBZ.
2) Cut out transformation scenes that are consistently repeated and serve no purpose but to fill time.
3) Calling out techniques as they are used (this one doesn't bother me as much if it's reasonable, short, and doesn't contain "mega", "super", "heavenly", et cetera ad nauseam).
4) Plot that contrives to drag on and on for no other apparent reason than to fill out the season.

Since you asked, here are some of my favorites:
UtawareRumono
Deathnote
Guren Lagan (this one can be forgiven #3 for having only rare instances)
Hikaru no Go
Fairy Tail
Outlaw Star
Ouran High School Host Club
Full Metal Alchemist (and Brotherhood)

 

[electric_warrior]

I'm not an anime fiend, but am an epically big fan of Studio Ghibli. I think anyone who likes all anime is a bit of a fool, because its really more of an animation style than an indicator of quality. i guess what I'm saying is that I like great movies, some of which are anime, more than I love anime, which i don't.

Its like how I love Pixar, but I don't necessarily love CGI.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

During my grade school years I used to be obsessed with Anime, manga, and Japanese culture. From things like Pokemon, Tenchi Muyo!, Dragon Ball Z... generally anything with an anime-ish look. Now when I try to get into a series, I can't stand it. Not that it's socially embarrassing or awkward (a lot of my friends are still into it) but it tends to make little to no sense to me. Other than the aesthetics, it utterly lost its appeal. Same goes with JRPGs. The plot line can be solid, but the journey from point A to point B is too filled with nonsense for my taste now.

It was just a phase to me, but I never thought it would end. I'd place it above gaming on my level of interest back then. I don't think it was a maturity thing to be honest, but it could be. How many of you went through Anime as a phase and what are you reasons for not liking it so much now? Also, I'm willing to give it another chance, so if you have any recommendations for me, please tell.

Kind of. I still adore animation of all kinds but my views have both widened and become more selective. On the one hand, I enjoy animation from any country and any background, on the other hand, I have very little tolerance for shittiness which rules out a big chunk of current anime.

Out of curiosity, what sort of animation piques your interest the most? Lately I've been drawn to more European animation. Canada's stuff is fine, but I recently watched two films: The Secret of Kells, and L'Illusioniste (The Illusionist). Despite the big style differences, I was amazed at how well they flowed. The combating artistic styles in SOK gave it a very unique look, while L'Illusioniste just had an extreme layer of polish on it.

 

[loc978]

Eh, I pretty much still like the shows I used to... and occasionally a new seinen series comes along that's good enough for me to pick it up. To me, anime is just another medium. There's about the same ratio of crap to watchable stuff to mind-blowing genius as in Hollywood or television... which is to say that 90% of it is crap (in my opinion, anyway).