Anime fans are complaining that the latest season of anime comprises little more than a series of painfully derivative rehashes of overworked themes coupled with rigid adherence to genre templates.
The diagram below accuses Gosick, Infinite Stratos, Freezing and Merry of being rehashes based on three near identical elements – “a harsh heroine, lame protagonist, and a school setting”:
Other disgruntled anime fans complain that all anime of any quality now merely focus on the “three pillars” of anime – “battle, romance and school.”
Fans unkindly speculate that the popularity of these inescapable elements is based on “a need to compensate for miserable otaku childhoods.”
Add to this “moeblob,” “slice of life” and “incest” and a fairly complete picture of contemporary anime is arrived at (a few other equally staid tertiary genres, such as mahou shoujo, mecha and harem also continue to be regurgitated).
Whatever their exasperation at being endlessly presented with the same formulaic drivel season after season, unfortunately it seems few fans actually bother to buy anything original when it does get made, rather suggesting a significant portion of anime fans may merely be reluctant to admit their endless hunger for schoolgirl dating fantasies and imouto fetish material.
Except this is the premise for all comics and stories pretty much anywhere…bar perhaps the strange plethora of fetishisms that manga will extend. Even so-called classics in Books and Western Literature will inevitably fall into the three categories seeing how basic they are (try to tell me what Crime and Punishment, Beloved, Shakespeare, Wuthering Heights, Invisible Man are about without using any of these three). That doesn’t mean you won’t find some insightful manga plots or characters every once in a while, but that doesn’t mean that everyone goes to manga looking for that. This seems like a typical esoteric and elitist critique on yet another media medium to me.
Cliches are the hammer and nail of human storytelling; I’m not sure where this intense premium on “originality” is coming from but it seems pretty close to hipster-dom to me. Maybe its frustrating to see that humanity is at its core the same, and cliches are a subconscious reminder that our progress may not really be progress?
Seriously, manga or classic literature, you need to mix the general things that people can relate with to a semi-original display of them,otherwise you will just lose your audience. Violence, Sex, and “daily life” are arguably the philosophical centerpieces of humanity.
Gw Bilang!
So what gitu loh!!!
Well at least last year we had Tatami galaxy. I’m counting on the noitaminA shows to be the only source of unique, thought-provoking quality this year too.
Well, I hate to admit that I need those compensation for my miserable childhood, but I don’t accept rehashes.
Don’t they have any sense of being made fun of when they see obvious rehashes? I mean, c’mon you can almost predict what’s gonna happen!
I’m surprised people still have an attention-span to speak of these days.