Comment by prmoustache
1 day ago
I don't know, I used to like some anime and mangas when I was 14 in the mid 90's.
Nowadays it seems everyone is interested by "anime style" of content but all I see is terrible in term of quality. It seems quantity increased so much in the last 30 years it only made quality stuff more invisible and we are inundated with animelike trash.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean good things aren’t being made today. In fact, plenty of recent shows are better (in every regard: pacing, animation quality, character development, themes, …) than most popular stuff we had in the 90s. Heck, they’re better than many live action shows today. Quality from the 90s era looks skewed in the West, because we had such limited access that what even crossed the barrier were outliers in their own right.
YouTube channels like Mother’s Basement help picking out something to watch. Geoff has routinely pointed how he literally watches anime for a living and it’s still hard to watch everything worthy he finds.
Video titles are pretty self-explanatory. If you want to find something to watch, fire up one of “The BEST Anime of [season] [year]” and you’ll get plenty of recommendations, nicely ordered and with some short explanation of what it is about and why it’s noteworthy.
https://youtube.com/@mothersbasement/
The percentage of anime I like is low and has always been low. I find a new anime I like comes along about every three years (I have to dig for it though.) In general, I care about the writing and story more than the visuals. So with a great increase in the amount of anime a single writer can create, shouldn't this allow for more well-written sloppy-visuals anime to exist? I'm excited to see.
How do you typically find anime you end up enjoying now?
Not my experience - as someone generally not interested in anime I only tend to be aware of the cream of the crop.
And in fact we seem to have a once of a decade alignment of talent (starting in 2023 with Season 1) with Frieren.
This is absolutely correct. The quality has nosedived so hard in the first three months of 2025 that there wasn't anything worth watching whatsoever even if you were in the target demographic.
If success is not a function of quality (in general), then producers have an incentive to produce a lot of cheap stuff. It's like playing lottery more often.
In the end, there will still be quality content but it will be much more expensive, available only to an elite.
Then the elite will now what's good quality and will be able to produce more good quality. Those will be hired.
The vast majority, only exposed to bad quality, will not be able to produce quality anymore. And won't be hired anymore.
And so here is your great quality divide.