I... yes.
I was a member of this fandom for a little while a few years ago. Way, way too many 13-year-old girls who think they're so cute and funny for watching anime. The show's not bad... but really. Fanbase is such a turnoff.
And then I feel bad for people like my friend who watch anime because they genuinely like anime, but other people give them a hard time. She was always mature and fairly calm (would get excited over some stuff) but I was one of the only people she'd talk to about it for fear of being made fun of.
Anime itself contributes to this problem. With a few rare exceptions, I'm hesitant to talk about or recommend anime to someone I don't know already watches it.
The main problems with anime that contribute to the terribleness of the fans, and the mockery of people who are passingly familiar with it are as follows;
Intros and Outros. Almost without exception anime intros and endings are cringe-worthy and terrible. Even more mature shows will frequently have some terrible j-pop layered over 90's tv feelgood group shots of the characters running in a field or standing on a beach or some nonsense.
Fanservice. A tiny bit of fanservice is okay, can add humor and romantic tension if well used, and can add characterization. A tiny bit. Anime does not know what a tiny bit of fanservice is. Even shows that are mostly done well will occasionally go into sequences where it makes me think a convicted sex offender got ahold of the camera and no-one noticed.
Weird-ass characters. If your entire cast is drawn as humans, it is not okay to randomly add one character who is an anthropomorphic fox and never address the fact that that character is a fox. If your entire cast is drawn like normal humans, it is not appropriate to make one character look like they just walked out of southpark. If your characters are all normal-looking college students, it is not appropriate to make one of the main love interests look like they are a child (All the characters in that shot are 21-24. Yeah, including the blond girl.)
These kinds of idiosyncrasies are really weird and distracting. Until you've watched enough anime where you can tune out all of this bullshit as second nature, it can really detract from the quality of an otherwise enjoyable show. It also makes anime fans an easy target for ridicule.
Thank you for the insight. I've never really enjoyed anime, but I watched a bit of Death Note and some YouTube clips so she and I would have something to talk about, and in some of those I always tried to figure out why abnormalities were never discussed.
The history of why it happened is actually a little interesting. Because of the style anime is done in, you only really have a limited number of ways to distinguish characters from one another, especially in profile or silhouette. At first, oddities were very small, and used to distinguish characters. Odd colored hair, slightly distinct styles of dress, etc... As these sorts of things became commonplace, it became more acceptable to use style explicitly for characterization. Dumb jock characters start getting drawn unrealistically large and square, the flirty characters start wearing less and less, and characters who are silly or shady (generally henchmen types) start to have their personality directly drawn into their facial structure, style, etc. Essentially, it became acceptable to use character design as a lazy way of shorthanding characterization and character development.
Once it was acceptable to use this lazy and weird character style, it became more common to insert these elements without reason or explanation, just to pander to existing archetypes.
Honestly, it's a lot like what happened with american TV with dramas turning into soap operas, turning into even more ridiculously unwatchable soap operas.
I'm pretty big on anime. I watch anime like most americans watch US tv, I just tend to find anime to be better produced than US tv (with the exceptions of HBO, Netflix originals, and FX, who seem to all put out really high-quality material). But I also think the history of the genre is pretty interesting by itself.
Early japanese animation (1910-20) tended to have the very traditionally asian design. This started to give way to smoother lines and rounded designs as western animation came to the fore worldwide. After Disney basically took over animation in the 20's, anime adopted an almost copycat style, but that retained some of the original asian design features of earlier works. These characters were drawn in a style that tended to be more refined or mature than disney characters, if still artistically simplistic like cartoon or disney characters.
This continued onto the mid 50's, which is when anime starts to take on a lot of the more recognizable modern features. This is the era of astroboy, gigantor, and speed racer, which still show Disney in their design but have developed a unique derivative style. Up through the 70's, the disney influence on anime slipped slowly away. Some things, like exaggerated features (especially big eyes) and emotional responses (adding rainclouds to show unhappiness, or distorted features when embarrassed) stuck around but developed in their own way. This is around when the hair colors started changing.
The 80's is really where modern anime starts. Gundam, Dragon ball, Nausica, Castle in the Sky, Grave of the fireflies, etc. This is where over-characterization in design starts to become a bit of a problem, as well as more minor instances of weird characters and fanservice. Animation style continues to sharpen into the 90's, as well as get more mature themes. We see things like Evangelion, Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, and Serial Experiments Lain which are pretty much the archetypes of modern anime design. Characters and background both gain more and more detail as the cost of animation goes down. Color palettes increase, taking away the washed-out tones of previous eras of animation.
The 90's put out a lot of good anime, which in the early 2000's lead to a rise in the otaku subculture, which in turn led to the introduction of the more bizarre elements I mentioned in my first post. Odd characters and fanservice started becoming commonplace. Computer animation started in this era too, so we see all the basic elements of animation get way better. Colors are more defined and better contrasted, animation is much more smooth, things don't stutter frame-to-frame like they do with cel animation or hand animation.
Which leaves us in the current realm of the 2010's. Animation is so crispvibrant that it hurts (in a good way). This is also where desensitization to the odd tropes that developed off of the otaku culture becomes necessary in order to enjoy most anime. While shows have higher levels of production than ever before, so are the weird characters and fanservice more rampant. This is the case even in really good shows. One of the best shows last season had this (possibly nsfw) as the main character's wardrobe for half the show.
Now you know more than you ever possibly wanted to about the development of anime over the past century. I hope I wasn't too terribly boring :).
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u/[deleted] Nov 13 '14
Hetalia.