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i think while being specific could help, i also don't want people to not respond if I became specific. So that's why I gave some ex. of anime/manga i have enjoyed in the past and left it at that.
I mostly want to know what people are into as well and i'll just sift through it on my own and pick out what I think looks good.
I loved samurai champloo! Thanks for the recommendations everyone.
Yeah naruto is ultimate popularity tho shippiden has let me down especially with the orochimaru bullshit seriously I fuckin love that guy. Anway bleach is seriously popular too but the anime has waaaaaay too many fillers. But it's ridiculous cuz the filler animation quality is superb sometimes better than the main arc.
Feel like I'm being really cynical lately, but ever since somebody laughed at me for saying Cowboy Bebop was better than Bleach, I'm finding it harder and harder to keep in with the 'popular' anime & manga crowd at the minute, personally...
Stuff like Soul Eater is okay I guess, but it's just too cartoony and zany for me to buy the DVD boxed set or anything. It's just totally missing that 'second layer' stuff like FLCL had. I can totally see what Torn means by saying things have become more youth-oriented.
Do other people actually feel this way too, or is it just me being a pretentious weenus? :/
Bebop is one of the greatest series of all time, crap like Bleach is just fillers for better stuff like Bakuman or great stuff like Champloo.
Every now and then I think to myself that Naruto will forever be more popular and profitable than Ghost in the Shell S.A.C.Quote:
Originally Posted by Regantor
Then I think to myself "fuck this world and everyone in it."
Persons are smart, people are stupid.
Ah good. I guess this means my weenus is weak... No wait. :o
Seriously through, I guess this and the whole family video game thing currently going on just go to prove that anything that becomes too popular too quickly will naturally begin to suck, due to fatcats piling onboard the bandwagon.
However, positive note! This might also mean that the door is open for one of you American buggers to shine and start a new underground like Vasquez did with 'goth comics' before the manga wave. ;I
The reality is that Vasquez is going to be a niche and Naruto is going to be popular. There are many of good artist and writers who are known in a "underground community" or stuffs like that, but they can't compete against Naruto.
They basically got killed by the emo thing, but yeah. I'm not even that much of a major fan or anything; I'm just saying they had the opertunities to sell out and never really did, hence obscurity. The fact that they got the opertunity at all I'd call a success.
But yeah. My hope is that as long as there are fans dissapointed with the industry, there will be room for a little guy who actually cares about what he is working on. So things do have an upside, as backward as it sounds.
You still have mall goths. I don't think the goth subculture was killed by emo. If anything I think the goth subculture, here at least, kind of subsumed and assimilated emo into itself, like some kind of strange, teenage, Borg.
At least, judging from my experience during trips to malls and the continued existence of Hot Topic - or as Jhonen Vasquez was wont to call it "Goth 'n Go."
The problem with anime is not mainstreamness. It's actually, ironically, the opposite. In some ways, you see a degree of this with video games - at least with some, like Bioware. Rather than trying to appeal to as many people as possible, anime these days tends to try and appeal as hard as it can to certain niche demographics. That is why you get a billion and fucking one moe anime and increasingly creepy shit in general. Rather than trying to broaden their audience, they just single out a subtype of otaku and pander as hard as they possibly can.
Granted, it's still the same underlying problem as the mainstream thing - desire for money superseding a desire to create something of artistic merit. But, hey, capitalism.
But really, I think anime has always had a pretty horrible signal:noise ratio, like most things. I mean, look back on the 90s and 80s. Sure we had Gundam doing its thing, but on the same token we had a billion and one terrible ultra-violent-for-the-sake-of-ultra-violence shitty OVAs like Mad Bull 34 or Angel Cop. You know. Angel Cop. Where the villains were literally the fucking ZOG.