Why were there so many deep and meaningful anime in the late 90s and early 2000s compared to later on...

Why were there so many deep and meaningful anime in the late 90s and early 2000s compared to later on? Particularly in 2003-2005. This was back when the anime industry was artsier and less dominated by shonen slop. Sure you had Naruto and Bleach but it wasn't until the late 2000s when you got shallow kiddie trash like Fairy Tail and Brotherhood.

Back then they didn't try to cater to normalfags.

Looking at this, frankly it makes me sad that newfags will never get the joy of living through this era of anime and classic after classic being released. Now they all onions out over garbage like Demon Slayer and Solo Leveling.

L-Look at me I have such refined taste in cartoons

Shut it, bitch!

Honest to god answer? A lot of really talented Japanese writers and artists couldn’t get careers due to japan’s 2000s recession so they had to compromise and make media for children that gave them reliable jobs
/thread

threading your own post

Yeah... we don't do that here.

Probably it was dvd market, it looks like the world didn't recover after finance crisis 2008

It was just a better time.

Figures, that's when all the MAL-core trash that redditors worship started being pumped out

Because these types of show will be deemed "shit taste" if it get released now. Anime becoming more mainstream so studios are learning toward normal, easily digestible show than these types because it makes them more money.

So you're saying because slang changed in the english speaking world, literally not the target for anime in the first place, that means anime has changed? You quite literally just sound like an old man complaining about the fact that children use different words than you did at their age.

I dont even consider hype or aura (in the context of this discussion) legitimate words.
They are buzzwords.

People always try to pin it on normalfags when around that time normalfags in Japan where who those "deep" and "creative" anime where supposed to appeal to and cater to, them and techbros that inhabited Akihabara. It's only when anime otaku actually started to become prevalent and the dominant consumer and spender of anime did you actually start to see more moe blob shows and power fantasy shows meant to cater to them, around the same time Akihabara changed too because anime NEETS spent more money than techbros at the time.

I got more of a emotional response from Violet Evergarden than all those shows combined

I'm saying that these shows have nothing to commend them beyond providing some superficial excitement. The fact that modern shows are talked about in less depth and capture people's attention for a shorter period of time is enough to show that the quality has significantly declined.

i don't even think the problem is otaku
At least not the older type, its the new ones (the Japanese kids new ota) they are infantile and this is reflected in the anime they consume

explain all the ossan isekai then

No, it's entirely on 2000s otaku who embraced "healing" works and drove out everything else.
"Otaku" don't really exist as a cultural force in Japan anymore, they've pretty much abandoned it the medium and consume nothing but gacha games. Modern anime is made for a much wider audience of manga and webnovel readers.

Ok maybe im wrong
Good point

Anon you do realize shonen shitters existed in all decades right? Or will you try to tell me that any of these shows where as popular as DBZ in the 90's or One Piece in the very late 90's but mostly early 2000's going forward? Don't watch mainstream shit if you are expecting actual discussion and thought put into a show.

One, don't call me Anon.
Two, you're either being intentionally obtuse or completely missing the point because you don't actually remember a time before anime streaming services. Shounen used to co-exist with late night anime written by adults for adults who expected mature storylines and themes.
Now, entirely is entirely for children and manchildren, and the rare occasion when a studio tries to make a mature seasonal anime, whether it succeeds or not, is enough to turn head. But if you look at OP's college, you can see that there was a time where this was the norm, not something out of the ordinary.

I can't really blame them as much to a large extent, I mean when the 2000's otaku essentially neutered late night anime and demanded everything fit their tastes, which is a large reason why we had so many iyashikei and battle harems in the 2000's, you can't really fault the children who had to grow up watching essentially only iyashikei, battle harems or shonen with the occasional slice of life or gag series maybe sometimes showing at the times they'd have to watch anything after school.

"Otaku" don't really exist as a cultural force in Japan anymore, they've pretty much abandoned it the medium and consume nothing but gacha games.

Be nerdy techbros in Akihabara

Make a space where you can enjoy your favorite things as well as some anime, manga and video games but mostly tech

Anime Otaku come in

Change it to fit them and only them

Everything is now moe anime and coomer shit with maid cafes everywhere

Anime otaku leaves to go play gacha

How do you think they'd have felt if the 80's and 90's Akihabara techbros of the olden days could see the future?

Shounen used to co-exist with late night anime written by adults for adults who expected mature storylines and themes.

So it was written for normalfaggots then? Yeah makes sense, it's what most people here are saying anon.

Now, entirely is entirely for children and manchildren

Yeah, otaku ruined anime. Thank you for understanding and agreeing with me anon.

Why’d they remove my portrait?

The medium was peaking in maturity but hadn’t yet been ruined by the internet and especially internet based advertising and merchandise sales.

Otaku didn't watch shonen shit, shounen's popularity comes from an entirely new audience of normalfaggots, fujos and children.
You don't understand the history of anime.

So it was written for normalfaggots then? Yeah makes sense, it's what most people here are saying anon.

Okay you're obviously trolling.

Anime Otaku come in

Change it to fit them and only them

Everything is now moe anime and coomer shit with maid cafes everywhere

Anime otaku leaves to go play gacha

Damn when you put it like that.....
They sound kinda shitty

It’s literally because these are made for young people and young people were angst, tortured, filled with existential ennui back then, whereas now they’re just mindless apes who don’t really feel anything too significantly and don’t really think about anything too deeply because they’re full of skibidi brainrot.

The audience was still human.

Otaku didn't watch shonen shit

You're right, they watch iyashikei, moe blob and hentai.

shounen's popularity comes from an entirely new audience

Didn't know that the DBZ audience was new, didn't that come out in the late 80's? Also, you do realize Weekly Shonen Jump has been the highest selling manga magazine in Japan for like a couple decades now right? Before that it was another shonen magazine.

new

fujo

Fujo's where around from since Mobile Suit Gundam

new

children

Children where always the target of a majority of manga and anime, it's why shonen and shoujo magazines exist in the first place.

Okay you're obviously trolling

Okay, so you said

Shounen used to co-exist with late night anime written by adults for adults who expected mature storylines and themes

Yet now you claim that normalfags weren't the target audience? I am getting very mixed signals here anon, do you actually think otaku where the target audience when they where barely even a thing around the time these shows where created?

There was plenty of shonen slop back then too by the way. It’s just that there was also sort of deeper, more meaningful, hold it close to your heart sort of stuff as well that doesn’t really exist anymore. The last generation to not be completely throughly brainrotted was older Gen Z, who had Attack on Titan, which isn’t what I would call really deep but is definitely deeper than run-of-the-mill shonen slop. But since Attack on Titan aired and thag audience has aged out of the main demo, and a new audience which has absolutely no interest in or tolerance for this stuff has aged into the main demo, the stuff has disappeared completely. The fans don’t want it. They want brain rot shit. The deepest you’ll get is like Chainsaw Man, which, coincidentally, is schizo brainrot shit.

All I'm getting from your post is schizophrenia.

I accept your concession

why do these people keep coming here

noooo you have to go round and round in circles with me forever!!!

Take your meds.

I dont know man maybe im just getting old, all i do nowadays is re-watch old anime i have no interest in new one.
Maybe you are right i shouldn't be here, i outgrew it a long time ago.

The change you've described is older than AoT.

muh muh anime in the past was made for mature people!

What! No they weren't made for normalfags, normalfags only watch shonen! They where made for obviously otaku manchildren of course!

I accept your concession

It’s been changing since before Attack on Titan, I agree. What I’m saying is that Attack on Titan is like the last hurrah, the last anime made for a generation of a young people who weren’t through brain rotted. It was a trickle at that point. What OP is alluding to is that there were a lot in 1990s, a bunch in 2000s, a few in 2010s (AoT among them), and basically none now. I’m explaining how that’s happened. It’s because the audience is more brainrotted and retarded.

Otaku used to be a much broader term. A military Otaku might not be the same as a car otaku or a sci fi otaku etc. There was probably a significant amount of overlap but generally people where into a kind of thing and wanted to make or watch anime based on that kind of thing. People were raised or interested on outside of material that influence the anime they created. Now anime fans are only anime fans. They're people who are raised on anime. Their influences are other anime. It's all become a insular, self referential nightmare were people don't know anything about anything unless it's specifically anime.

You don’t really think the skibidi toilet generation of teens really wants to engage with anything that even tries to be deep, serious, or anything other than an ironic schizophrenic mess do you? These people live completely externalized lives centered almost exclusively around internet memes and content with no real internal monologue, long periods of self reflection, fleeting moments to really think about much of anything or feel much of anything. They’re completely dumbed down and numbed by 24/7 exposure to content and social networks. They don’t particularly want to think about much of anything let alone anything particularly existentialist or angsty or anything like that.

Attack on Titan is like the last hurrah,

Oh wait you're serious?

I dread to imagine the kind of legacy these kind of short attention span retards are both gonna leave behind and bring up.

you could argue the reduction of anime from 50+ episodes to 24 to 12 is a legacy already.

Going outside of anime a lot of Netflix and streaming shows are even less. And I know OVAs were often short, episode count doesn't really mean anything to quality, but this is really different, It's all meant to be blitzed through faster than you can think about it in time for the next one.

You're taste in anime should have grown with you. If this is not the case, then yeah, you definitely outgrew anime. In fact, I'd argue you never liked anime, but instead something I like to call "retard oriented media" for people who think Breaking Bad and the Sopranos is "deep". Time to go.

I feel like a lot of people these days don't really like a lot of what they claim too if not for it given them some fanbase to belong too. It really does seem like the hobby has changed from being people gathering around it and now the fandom itself being the end all be all. It's why you get so many people looking to pad lists rather than watch things they themselves like in order to fit in. They ask which installments to watch instead of trying them for themselves. They try to get cliff notes and skip lists.

Yes. You don’t think it’s a good layer deeper than run-of-the-mill slop?

None. There won’t be one at all.

NTA, but I am the anon the previous anon was responding to and yeah that's the case. A large part of why a lot of older anime where heavily tech or sci-fi focused and futuristic was because of tech otaku as an example. Same thing was true for older fantasy anime ect. When people started to mainly be "anime otaku", or rather, when mainly anime only otaku started to be the main audience for anime, and drive tech otaku out of places like Akihabara for example, simply because they spent more money you started to really see the problems start to form. Kind of the same thing with isekai, the first few modern isekai where genuinely pretty good but once people on Shosetsuka ni Naro started to realize that they got more views when they wrote isekai they started to flood the website with isekai, then users of Shosetsuka ni Naro, mostly teens and young adults, grow up on that and start writing more isekai which are somehow even more basic and self referential as well as watered down versions of the original stories with just new gimmicks. The Kadokawa comes along and realizes that they can license these isekai for cheap and make the anime for these isekai cheaply to pad out their goal of 50 anime a year.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Don't ever reply to me again.

Personally I'm too disillusioned with AoT and Isayama to consider it a genuinely smart anime, but it does speak to the fact there was still an audience for anime that at least gave the appearance of being mature and having a deeper story than your average shounen.

Lots of people in this thread are quick to blame zoomers without recognising that anime and manga aren't just for teenagers in Japan, and it's not as though people in their 30s have suddenly grown out of anime. Even in the West most of the people I know who watched anime in their teens still watch it now.

Every generation has been saying this about the generation after them since the actual Boomers.

And every passing generation it gets more true

This

You don’t think it’s a good layer deeper than run-of-the-mill slop?

I think it IS run of the mill slop.

You don’t have to like it or think it’s exceedingly intelligent to admit that there is some kind of real substance and depth to it.

Unfortunately, your explanation doesn’t make sense because anime and manga should still be made for the 90s generation that liked this stuff if that was the case. I think the hard truth is it really just a more unthinking unfeeling audience. I mean, young adults today don’t even really have these mono no aware moments in their real lives anymore. That’s actually when the smartphone comes out. Young people don’t ever really spend time with themselves, just themselves. That’s kind of a requirement for introspection, angst, all that.

Well that’s retarded because you don’t have to like it to admit that’s obviously not the case. Pic kinda related.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

I wasn't vague. Also no.

Fairy Tail and Brotherhood

Better than most of your pseud 3x3.

I feel like everything got too hung up on labels and distinctions. I'm not gonna say a certain website made everyone trope obsessed to a point where it broke their ability to look at things with immersed context but it does feel like after a certain point people have begun to look at the formula rather than the result. Go back a bit and shit like "isekai" wasn't even a term, it was barely distinguished from normal fantasy in a general sense. Maybe it had something that made it stand out as irregular but it was a lot less paint by numbers. At least intentionally so. But it doesn't just apply to "isekai" things like the various forms of deres, spring to mind. We certainly had this archetypes because they are archetypes but there was less overt glib self awareness about them. It feels like so much modern anime is including things out of an assumed necessity or recipe with any gimmick mostly just serving as something eye catching that isn't really meaningful or thought through.

to admit that there is some kind of real substance and depth to it.

Isayama himself said that he gave up on writing something deep, he was just copying what he saw in other works that got taken seriously for being dark and mature.

Unfortunately, your explanation doesn’t make sense because anime and manga should still be made for the 90s generation that liked this stuff if that was the case.

They still make stuff for the 90s generation, it's just that their tastes have changed, and they want feel comfort anime instead of something introspective or that confronts big themes. Yuru Camp and MONO aren't written for zoomers.

people thought they were going to die in the year 2000 so people got very introspective and pondered death

i blame the economy for all of this

This is a combination of several things: the works that don't fit your narrative getting memory-holed, a movement in that Y2K period to create "challenging" works, and general fads.

For every Monster or Lain there was a Nurse Witch Komugi-chan or Bomberman Jetters, but since you weren't around for that time period (and somehow don't seem to realize that really popular Jumpshit existed before 1999), you have a distorted idea of what was being made. Being zealous about 3x3core also belies the deep insecurity of someone who doesn't actually have taste, but clings to works that they can use to virtue signal.

During the time period you speak of, there was a strain of mangaka and animators who wanted to show that what they did was serious and not just for (man)children. This came from boomer editor nostalgia over the gritty, political gekiga of their youth and a Japanese inferiority complex towards their media on a burgeoning world stage. Hence something like Chiaki J. Konaka saying he wanted Lain to be incomprehensible to foreigners while owing a lot to Western cyberpunk, Gnosticism, and conspiracy theories.

Finally, it was a fad to be introspective and morally grey back then. Sekai-kei was all about moody navel gazing, which was also popular in Western works due to post End of History anomie. Eva showed that it was possible to be commercially successful with it, and the otakufication of the anime industry was already underway, so you had a lot of people playing follow the leader.

can the otakufication of the industry be reversed please
It was a mistake
Go back to zero again and redo it please

It's weird because at the time i supported it but looking at what it did...
If i went back i don't know if i would agree with past self.