>>883 i know akihabara in the 2020s is different from akihabara in the 2000s, god knows i could do without seeing the place littered with shitty chinese/korean phone games, but has it gotten to a point where it died out? it could be that i'm relatively new, but i don't think this kind of otaku culture ever really died, not to the point where i'd say i "miss" it... if anything, i'm upset that it never quite caught on outside of japan, otaku culture still seems despised/enjoyed "ironically" or constantly subverted here in the states...

>>884 ever heard of the leetstreet boys? the otaku power pop group? theyre basically an american version of 2000s akihabara culture, and completely unironic

>>885 >2008 y-yeah...quite relevant...and not at all the first time i've ever heard of them... it's a cool find, but still...

>>886 GUITAR HERO HERO EVERYTHING WE'RE FIGHTING FOR

>>887 note: i am referencing a leetstreet boys song (guitar hero hero)

>>884 the gentrification of "anime" globally is a big reason shit shows like sousou no frieren is rated #1 on most anime sites. I could at least understand when it used to be FMA followed by some stupid shounen like One Piece.

>>1147 Totally agree. The modern take at anime is disastrous, makes me think they employ AI and analyze huge amount of data to develop strategies to make people comfortable eating shit. They make 80% of seasonal anime absolute worthless garbage, fill the social media with memes about it (probably, I don't use social media, but I skim some youtube channels once every one or two months), then roll frieren. Back in the 2000s and even the beginning of 2010s frieren wouldn't be anything but another slice of life for those who like it, but now, among piles of stinky shit and carefully crafted advertisement, frieren looks like it's something special and cool. No it's not.

>>1147 because frieren is good. >>1150 take that back right naow >>1150

>>1151 >take that back right naow I know you're upset because I attacked your favorite anime but you need to let it sink it that frieren isn't as great as they arbitrarily made it to be. Frieren's popularity is mostly due to advertisement, I don't know what exactly is happening behind the scenes, but it is 100% crafted. I'm not saying it's bad, but it is unfair that frieren gets so many love and attention when there are so many great anime out there that nobody talks about at all. Look, I didn't watch frieren, so I'm not going to judge its contents, but in the light of aggressive advertisement frieren appears offputting to me. So to actually watch it I need to be impressed. I've seen a lot of scene cuts from it and screenshots and none of that impress me at all. Just cool visuals, that's all. Now, anyone talking about Eve no Jikan? Anyone? Anywhere? It is unfair that such interesting and unique anime as Eve no Jikan is ranked #667 on mal. Noir is #2868. Frieren is #1. Just what exactly did frieren do to deserve it? There is nothing unique about it at all. Even atmosphere looks generic and visuals good but boring. Go fuck yourself

I know I look very aggressive, but if you don't want to overuse your brain and can't comprehend the meaning, here's the short version specially for you. Frieren Is Good But Overhyped

>>1153 i avoid advertisements. i didn't see advertisements for Frieren. i read the manga then the anime when it came out. >go fuck yourself holy shit why are you mad lmfao >>1154 >here's the short version: waaaahh the anime i like isn't popular enough!!!! now that your needless crying is out of the way, i can't really say if it was overhyped or not. i don't think the advertising was as big as, say, JJK or My Hero which i personally find both to be pretty mid, but like i said i try as much as possible to block out advertising. My Hero had an Overwatch collab and JJK is in Fortnite which is about as norman as it gets. i enjoy Frieren because it's a good show, whether or not it has "hype" is pretty irrelevant to me. you should adopt this mentality and be less angry over things that don't warrant the energy.

>>883 can't say i was able to experience it. my first ever anime was SAO when i was 13- around 2014. i went to Akihabara this year and there certainly was a lot of Blue Archive advertisements and other gachaslop. i can't say for certain (because i didn't experience it) but i kinda get the vibe that Akihabara is losing some of its charm now that anime is popular and normal. becoming less stylized i guess? i still had a fun time though.

>>1156 >holy shit why are you mad lmfao my default state, enjoy what you like, i never claimed to be more clever than the consumerism culture

Frieren is not bad, but it's normie shit. Sorry.

>>1208 Sony buys kadokawa for the world to grovel before

Otaku culture sucks. Otakus are like domesticated cattle. Sure, I love anime, manga, and otaku media, its an addiction that like herpes never goes away. Its just slavery for mass produced garbage. So no I don't miss it at all or like the aesthetic. Some of the shows and games were better back then and that's all.

I feel bad to bring up Frieren again (it was a discussion from last year, after all), but I feel like it/my feelings towards up sum up current otaku culture well. It's not a bad show, Frieren is cute and relatable, the cast is generally likeable, the animation is spectacular, the OST had some cool tracks here and there... But as an affront to all of this, it's so empty. It's watchable, though I did drop it myself kek, but that to me is not good enough. The show starts heavy with it's philosophy and attitudes towards friendships, love, life itself and what it means to both live and die. And what does it turn into? A hollow shonen-slop shell of what it could've been. There's nothing wrong with mindless action, especially when that action is accompanied by some glorious animation. But sacrificing what could've been AOTY, at the very least in terms of themes, for it? Sacrilege, bordering on evil. Things weren't always like this. Things don't have to be like this. But because so many anime watchers are either normies or accept whatever companies throw at them, things are and will continue to be like this >TLDR; Anime nowadays isn't hell-spawn tier Netflix garbage, but it's empty, lifeless. This is bad and I don't personally like it desu

>>1157 >i kinda get the vibe that Akihabara is losing some of its charm now that anime is popular and normal. anime was clearly always big enough of a thing in japan if it warranted taking over part of a city lol i think the problem there is that (foreign) gacha is taking over, which reminds me... >>1233 i think it's silly to imply that one anime speaks for the quality of literally everything on the market, but frieren does make me think, i think the biggest problem with otaku culture currently (and this probably isn't specific to the english-speaking side of things, i don't know for sure, nihongo dekinai) is just that a lot of it is so based on trends and fads. everyone's into the same handful of shows, some current, most of them older because 90s/2000s/2010s nostalgia is what's accepted now, all of them "safe" because english speakers have the dumbest attitude towards fanservice everyone has to have some justification as to why they like something instead of just enjoying it, and this justification leads people to automatically writing off everything that's not within their already narrow view of the medium as "trash" everyone's into the same handful of games, all of them chinese and korean gacha because they all already have big fanbases and have very low barriers to entry because nobody can be arsed to give actual games that have time and effort put into them their time, let alone their money my problem isn't with anime as a medium, some of my favorite anime ever have aired relatively recently, it's that most anime fans outside of japan are stupid, and the ones in japan seem to really like blue archive for some reason. everyone's so ingenuine these days. how do we fix this? idk lol

not a fan of shitting on things, but i'm truly baffled by how frieren was received in the west. i can kinda understand fmab being #1 on every single anime website because nostalgia and because when it came out it definitely raised the bar of tv anime adaptations, so whatever (spoiler: it's also mid). but then frieren cames out and ok, it got a very big marketing "boost" because of the 4 episode dump, same as other anime like oshi no ko for example, so it shot up to #1 on mal as literally every single fotm does. but then it finished airing, almost a year has passed, and it's STILL top 1 EVERYWHERE in the western animesphere, not only on mal. so this can't be an external intervention by bots, no way they are that thorough. my point is, there's clearly a lot of people who unironically think frieren is a masterpiece, and i literally can't grasp how that's possible. even if you consider a big influx of gen alpha or whatever starting anime with frieren because of whatever shill campaign (in that case it would be their first anime so it would make sense consider it "the best" out of 1 watched), but numbers don't add up. i can also understand older shounenbros eating it up because well, it a decent shounen, but even pseuds on anidb liked it (it's above LOGH now, what a fucking joke), and i LITERALLY have no idea how that happened... the only websites that rated it "properly" (or at least understandably) are the japanese anikore and chinese bangumi, where it's around 8.5 on both. and while that's also debatable, it's definitely less offensive that calling it the best anime of all time. also for reference: i watched fmab, frieren and logh

>FOGH I wanted to watch it for a while but 110 episodes are beyond my current capacity. I really don't handle long series well.

>>1236 it's actually officially split into 4 seasons of 24-28 episodes, mal just lists them all together for whatever reason

>>1237 It's still 110 episodes though. I don't feel ready for such campaign. And I was never a big fan of shounens so I don't have much experience watching 1000000 episodes long titles.

>>1238 frieren might be more down your alley then

>>1235 i've been thinking about this quite a lot since it's been brought up on here a few times, and i guess i'll give my opinion. i'm personally a big fan of Frieren, and i"m not exactly a newcomer to watching anime, but i can agree that it's kinda normieshit. nothing wrong with watching normieshit in itself, but regardless i can recognize that it's broken into the anime "mainstream". i really think it's due to the type of people who watch anime now. anime is normal. zoomers love anime, and it particularly exploded with normans during COVID. it's gotten to the point where even anime conventions are getting kinda watered down and normalized. these nu-watchers get brought into anime from My Hero or JJK or other shounenslop, and i think Frieren is the first breakout series since the COVID explosion that takes itself seriously. if Cowboy Bebop were to have been released instead of Frieren i think the same thing would have happened. Frieren has a semblance of maturity that nu-watchers hadn't yet experienced and i think that's why it exploded so much. not to say Frieren is some big-brain adult only show, but compared to, say, My Hero or JoJo or Baki, it does have a layer of seriousness and maturity that stands out in recent years. it also has basically no ecchi which normans surprisingly care about quite a bit. i will say though, hopefully the success of Frieren pushes more companies to make interesting shows instead of That Time I Was Reincarnated As A Retarded Loser Season 15.

I don't want normalfags. I want my ecchi, lolis and unconventional sexual jokes with mentally ill characters, weird supernatural drama, soul crashing brutality and so on. All of this seeming absurdity is what used to define anime as unique. Normalfags ruin it by turning anime to slop. SLOP. Fuck them. We don't even have worthwhile lolis anymore. And black bullet isn't THAT old.

>>1241 I don't want normalfags. I want teen girl friendship, "EHH", "HYAHHAHA" and so on. All of this seeming absurdity is what used to define anime as unique. Normalfags ruin it by turning anime to slop. SLOP. Fuck them.We don't even have worthwhile teen legs anymore. And Lucky Star isn't THAT old.

>>1242 God bless you

>>1241 i understand. i share much of your sentiment. i am increasingly annoyed of creatures crying on twitter all the time over some random shit like "waaah this character's boobs are too big" or "waaah this character is a loli" like man tourists fuck off. normans ruin everything.

>>883 At first I didn't, because I'm a total tourist. But then I played Chaos;Head last year, and now I do. (Still a tourist btw)

Play steins;gate and feel the pain.

>>1245 >I played Chaos;Head last year grim anime "fans" are now mostly invasion wave i guess. Cant imagine doing anything anime related now with post 2016-2020 normalfag wave. Crazy to think the average anime "fan" are soc-drones following the latest consumption trend. Corporations figured it out spend millions on ads (memes) slap (x) anime girl on (y) product and you will have a millions of consumers trying to fit in buying it, helps that anime is acceptable brand worship as-well. The same people who complain about muh old Otaku culture are likely the same people who killed it truing it into another cheap aesthetic to consume and spoon-feed for social credit.

>>1247 Based I wonder why exactly things went so askew with anime but back when normalfags were not invading it the ecosystem was much cleaner. What saddens me however is that normalfags are the fuel for the embrace extend extinguish model, and that they are also characterized by a strong lack of persistence. Since anime fell in their hands, it means it inevitably is going to become shittier and shittier with time, and at some point I think normalfags will move to something new. But after they do, anime won't be resurrected. Another scenario, anime will become the same thing as videogames. Either way, I see little hope ahead. In recent years, decent anime simply doesn't exist. Well it's possible to hunt down something watchable once in while, but it's nothing compared to 00s and the beginning of 10s.

>>1247 this is kind of unrelated but I don't think that image really makes sense for most imageboards, this is, communities that made their name raiding, creating lolcows and ridiculous stunts to troll the media (and become popular). it isn't hard to stay isolated now that most of the internet has been reduced to maybe 10 platforms >>1249 I have been consuming anime since the 00s but I never felt the need to talk about it or interact with the "community" at all so I don't care about that. however, I don't think the rise in popularity has produced any significant change in the content. the trends have changed, the tropes and cliches are better defined now and the animation styles have changed, but none of it seems to be related to the change in demographics one thing that surprised me when I looked into it was that normal people are discovering stuff like yuru yuri and loving it; I naively thought they would prefer "teen dramas" like chainsaw man and such, or romcoms. those genres are more popular, but I don't think the "ratio" so to speak has changed. there has been a decrease in moe shows, with almost not kirara magazine adaptations in the last 8 seasons. hopefully the rise in popularity will reverse this trend and I will have more moe anime to enjoy

>>1251 >but none of it seems to be related to the change in demographics why then exactly it looks like shit? it's been ages since i saw anything new that would put effort both in production and in plot. it's either well drawn bullshit or shittily drawn semi decent plot. fuck! i don't demand world tier suspension or whatever just make it look fucking coherent or whatever so i don't feel like watching slop

>>1252 the low animation quality comes from cost cutting, not popularity. if anything, cheap shows are made to promote the series' manga, novel and associated paraphernalia (the real money makers) to the "real" otaku rather than to the general public, and maybe wouldn't exist if animation was as expensive as it used to be as I see it, the genres that get good quality animation now are more or less the same that did so 15 years ago. for example, compare the animation of bakemonogatari to any other show from that season. compare the number of shows per season back then and now too one change that does bother me is that comedy shows are less frequent now, I don't think there has really been anything similar to szs or joshiraku lately, but even back then, the otaku were much more interested in school dromance (like bakemonogatari) so it probably has more to do with publishing houses and editors losing interest in the genre rather than a demographic switch. I imagine it is because it's harder to sell merchandise when the audience doesn't self-insert and isn't made to feel emotionally attached to the characters

Huh, I saw this thread on 4/jp/, I guess I'll chime in my thoughts, In my opinion I think there's kinda no point in being an Otaku/Weeaboo in today's society. Not because it's shunned or anything like that, but because I think Japan's best days are behind them. Now this is coming from someone who got into the anime scene a little late so take what I say with a grain of salt, I do miss that 2000s era of otaku culture and 2010s mainly because thats where I got my start in posting on 4chan. Nowadays it doesn't feel like there's anything worth looking at anymore or special. NND is dead in the water, Akihabara is a shell of it's former self, Most animus out right now ok-ish but nothing really special comes to my mind. The only thing I can really enjoy is newest episodes of Kamen Rider. It might just be me but this feeling has been aching at me for the longest time.

>>1252 >en ages since i saw anything new that would put effort both in production and in plot. Vivy

>>1236 The altchan LOGH watchalong will commence in 3...2....

>>1245 chaos;bros UNITE (still waiting on those love chu chu TLs)

>>1255 >Nowadays it doesn't feel like there's anything worth looking at anymore or special. NND is dead in the water, Akihabara is a shell of it's former self, Most animus out right now ok-ish but nothing really special comes to my mind NND and Akiba are relatively relics now, but I think the content creation from otaku scene is still here. It moved a lot to youtube, twitter, pixiv, booth, dlsite, ... Actual creative events like comiket, reitaisai (or bofu for something online) are still alive and kicking. Anime I kinda agree though, it feels like a lot of the recent anime only have other anime as inspiration, so besides changes in technical aspects of anime, the industry is stagnating

>>1335 > it feels like a lot of the recent anime only have other anime as inspiration Tbh this kind of applies to otaku stuff in general.

>>1334

>>1255 >>1252 This is true for all modern media. Just watch/read older stuff.

The old otaku culture to me had an emphasis on 1) making things and 2) being a place for outcasts. now every normalfag loves animu and it feels like those dedicated creative outsiders just are not visible the same way. Think the ability to make serious money out of otaku "fandom" killed it being anything with soul. Probably the mainstream success of otaku-produced works like Fate/Stay Night and Umineko flooded the culture forever with those looking to make a profit cynically pandering to otaku tastes.

>>1366 >The old otaku culture When was that exactly? I feel like you would have to go back in the late 70s-early 80s to reach what you are describing.

>>1367 He is confused by hacker culture and others where a lot of talent was (is) otaku losers, but otakus have always been vidya losers outside of their distraction

>>1366 it would all be fine if women and unvirgins were banned on all imageboards. reading sushichan threads where women are allowed to talk about their sexual experiences and other shit openly really put my misogynistic feelings on full throttle

>>1419 dweeb

>>1420 i don't mind if the girl was two dimensional though

>>1421 2d girls are cuter but 3d girls are soft and smell nice... i wish anime was real

>>1419 that's based as fuck. women and those who worship them are the worst sort of people who inevitably do nothing but bring ruin

>>1423 i think the only people who say shit like this are those who didn't get attention from women growing up. you can have normal friendships and relationships with women and not worship them. it's a strange reflection of deal with it.

>>1424 you can't. you'll always come and ruin everything because women live rent free in your head. having a woman excludes a possibility of being dedicated to anything else, so you're naturally incapable of sustaining any meaningful hobby. that's why there needs to be a clear separation between loners who care about what they do and sex havers who care about farming validation. i don't mean to disparage you or whatever, there wouldn't be any problems at all except that you ruined everything we ever valued

>>1425 >women live rent free in your head. having a woman excludes a possibility of being dedicated to anything else, so you're naturally incapable of sustaining any meaningful hobby. respectfully, i think you're projecting, hikarin.

>>1426 i speak facts you have nothing to prove them wrong, because it's pure facts

>>1424

>>1423 Spending money on 2D angels paraphernalia is spending money on whores. Especially if the 2D angels are voice acted by voice actresses.

>>883 >the "i hate 3D girls" kind of otaku Unironically I was never "I hate 3D girls" otaku back then. Now at 2025 I am "2D cuties > 3D hoes" otaku.

>>883 I have nostalgia about the 2000s. At least about the good parts of 2000s. The last good decade for me. 2010s and 2020s are trash. And there is nothing nostalgic about 2010s besides 3DS.

Me on the middle left

I don't like 3D

ITT zoomer virgin webdevs trying to milk boomer otaku to CTS SEO conversions