This is going to be similar to the last post I made, where I mentioned how the “average consumer” seems to just want comfort and stability in their entertainment. I wanted to circle back on that a little bit to answer a question that I keep seeing pop up online. When did anime get so bad?
Now, I think an overlooked part of this conversation in general is how streaming services, if I may be dramatic, fucking ruined everything.
You can blame this on Sword Art Online in 2012, but on my part, you don't start to notice a real hard shift until "Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?" in 2015. And remember how nerds were floundering to try and cite "Re:Zero" as a refreshing take on the tired isekai genre in 2016?
Okay, well, that's not unusual, you would think. Trends happen in fiction all the time, right? And these are just the signs of a popular trend in it's late stages! We're all gonna see the trend die and the "monoculture" will move onto the next thing like it always does, it happens all the time.
Nope! In 2017 and 2018 it doubles down, swarming in like bees in full fucking force. And in 2019 it starts to go off the rails and gets wilder. And then in 2023... Frieren happens. The problem? Yeah, it took over a decade for there to be one that isn't viewed as complete ass.
It's difficult to talk about this sort of thing because if your brain has turned to mush, you'll probably try to argue that anime wasn't always, like, the best. Before 2012, objectively speaking, they simply ranged from "decently fun" to "charmingly ambitious". And of course, fanservice vehicles aren't new.
But modern technology and the internet has a role to play in this. It's gotten easier to just shovel out content for the lowest common denominator. And it's also why they have absurd names like "I became Reincarnated as my Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’s Tampon And Now I Wander the Dungeon?!", it's to signal to an audience scrolling through a platform.
See, now that you don't have to compete for valuable airtime, you can just fart out a dozen or so shows and throw it up on some website! And if you make sure to pay your workers as little as possible, you can make reliable money off of, erm... let's just say 200,000 or so middle schoolers and basement dwellers. Hell, they’ll even do the subtitling for you for free if you wait long enough!
And it's not just anime that this is happening to, it's happening to most things. Books are also being flooded with cheap, assembly line slop chasing algorithmic keywords. This is just what the streaming model was always going to turn into, unfortunately.