No More Anime

There was a phase in my life where I would sit down in my free time, kick my feet up and watch some anime. Didn't matter if it was dubbed or subbed. Anime was just an easy way to just relax and escape the world for 20-26 minutes at a time, but not anymore. I think I'm done with anime forever. There's just too many things going on that ruin it for me.

For starters, one of the first anime I ever watched was One Piece on the Fox Kids Saturday Morning cartoon block. That's right, my introduction to anime came in the form of 4Kids dubs of One Piece and Ultimate Muscle. Can we look at One Piece for a moment, it used to be full of quality animation. However, it's recently begun catching up the manga at a rapid pace. Because of this, there have been ridiculous drops in quality, along with incredibly long scenic cutaways and obviously repeated frames. In one recent episode, they even managed to feature Zoro twice in the same shot. He's just standing there watching himself fight. Quality animation isn't the only thing, because there are still plenty of anime with beautiful animation.

Can we talk about filler for a moment? Notice how the Naruto anime still hasn't ended? That's because of filler. Filler is made up of content not featured in the source material used to pad run time. Naruto has no shortage of this and has literally added hours of content that wasn't in the manga. It's a cash cow, their top money maker, and they refuse to let it go. Naruto isn't even the only anime suffering due to filler.

Then there's the fan service. You can't even watch anime in public anymore. How are you going to explain upskirt shots and breast that react to the slightest breeze as if they had just been electrocuted? It's not even just the women now, so you have to come up with an explanation as to why the last 30 seconds was just a slow panoramic of a guy in a speedo or of a guy's butt cheeks as he showers, I'm looking at you JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. You can't say "I watch for the plot" anymore because for a lot of anime this is the plot now. Just about everything turns into a harem or magic girl anime at some point.

Additionally, the fan base grows stranger and stranger every day. I don't mean the quirky kind of strange. I mean the dinner with a body pillow in the middle of the campus cafeteria strange. I mean the kind of strange where you're rejecting potential partners because they don't like the same anime. I'm talking, real life fist fights over who claims what waifu strange. I don't really want to be associated with a fan base that is willing to go to Temucula over the rights to a stained and crunchy body pillow. Some of you are too old to be throwing hands over anime when you should be throwing resumes, no shade.

Now, I know what your're saying, "there's plenty of good anime still out there," and you're right, there is. I still enjoy the classics like Cowboy Beebop, Paranoia Agent, FLCL, Samurai Champloo etc. There's even some newer stuff I enjoyed recently like Erased and Log Horizon. for some reason. But, for the most part, I really just can't sit down and view anime the same way as before. It can't be treated as an escape any longer. One day you'll be watching and you'll see something ridiculous, then you say to yourself, "who watches this stuff?" That's when you realize that you're Boo Boo The Fool for watching.

You can hear Darrell on the CP Time and Powerbomb Jutsu podcasts. He also plays classic arcade games on The Cabinet
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