Things That Bother You About Anime

[gunswordfist]

We won't know until it happens.

[VLordGTZ]

Many people are always going to assume that something is better simply because it's more faithful to a source.  One of my favorite anime is Slayers Try, and it used to be hated by "fans" for not being based off the LNs like the original and Next anime.  Honestly, I've started to just ignore the whole "old anime vs new anime" argument. 

That being said, I still want to see a Trigun Maximum anime, and it would be a pretty good idea currently considering the success of Blood Blockade Battlefront. 

[gunswordfist]

Also, I hate when fans whine about changes during actual adaptations. I've heard someone go on and on and on about a change made to a Juza fight in Fist Of The Northstar. It was so annoying.

[Spark Of Spirit]

The only changes that ever annoy me in adaptions are when OOC moments are added during filler scenes or whatever. As long as the adaption is thematically similar and the characters are on point I can usually forgive any other changes.

[gunswordfist]

*sighs* Too many My Hero Academia fans are still bitching about the first issue being split into multiple episodes and are claiming the anime has pacing issues.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I've rewatched the first two episodes several times now and I have no idea how it could be done faster without wrecking everything. The fact is that Horikoshi's pacing in the manga is too fast for an anime. I have never seen anyone complain about the pacing who wasn't a manga reader.

Still, these complaints are minor compared to the MHA haters.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Modern anime production in a nutshell: https://youtu.be/bpQK9SA9Hhw

[Spark Of Spirit]

Modern anime production in a nutshell: https://youtu.be/bpQK9SA9Hhw

That's pretty dead on.

Thankfully some good shows slip through the cracks, but boy does it sure feel like it's a fluke accident when it happens these days.

MAPPA was the best. The only sane one.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

This has bugged me for the longest time, but I have to know, am I the only one who's kind of sick of how the hardcore anime community tends to have this overly negative attitude towards Dragonball as the go-to example of how not to do a shonen series, along with making many similar comments about countless other shonen series, while praising the hell out of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and Hunter X Hunter as flawless masterpieces that are above criticism?

To be clear, I am a big fan of both. JoJo's was more of an acquired taste but by Part 4 I was hooked, and anyone who's known me since TV.com knows that Yoshihiro Togashi has been one of my favorite writers of any kind for almost as long as I've been a fan of anime and manga. That said, I'm also a fan of a lot of shonen manga and anime, and there's this really stupid and at least somewhat ignorant mentality among most of the community that because some really popular stuff like Naruto and Bleach (along with a number of bad clones) turned out to have a lot of shit material after being so heavily hyped by so many people new to the medium that by law shonen series are inherently shit, unless they either go bonkers out of control like JoJo's or have pseudo-deconstructive qualities like HXH (and I say it's false because as much as I love HXH, I don't personally consider it a deconstruction in the traditional sense of the word). Like, because Fairy Tale is a piece of garbage, somehow over fifty years of material, including those from renowned and influential mangaka with a lot of historical significance in the industry, are also tainted by it. Like, you know, all of those decades of history to shonen publications that predates any of that stuff. Fuck it. Incidentally I wonder what it would be like if something like ASBAR or Ultimatum was popular enough to give people a negative enough impression of nearly a century of Superhero comics in general.

Going back to that habit of putting a select few series on a pedestal though, particularly JJBA and HXH, the fact of the matter is, that both writers are just as flawed as the other big leagues of the genre. Araki is brilliant at coming up with creative powers for his characters and even more interesting scenarios to put them in to keep his work interesting, but that's also compensation for his weakness toward telling a straightforward cohesive narrative, which is why much of his story-telling becomes reliant on villain of the week formulas while shaking up the formula with different ways in which his characters deal with them. However, for all of that, he does have his issues, and one of them is how he's arguably even worse than Toriyama when it comes to plot-holes and inconsistencies in his work, and his ret-cons and ass-pulls are just as present as they ever were in a series like Dragonball. Anyone remember Giorno's Requiem Stand that he got from using a magical arrow? And as for Togashi, for all of the brilliant ideas and nuanced characters that he comes up with, it's like I'm strangely the only one on the planet who realizes how bad he is when it comes to blatant exposition dumps that are boring to read and grind the plot to a halt, or how later parts of HXH have some pretty unnecessarily obscene moments for no other reason than poorly done shock value. Yet, I'll constantly see people reviewing these series' resort to examples like "JoJo's is so excellent because the battles are clever and have well thought-out strategies unlike the typical shonen series such as Dragonball which are all about power struggles." On the one hand, yes, JoJo's is very cleverly written with how Araki sets up your expectations than goes with an option that you never even considered. On the other hand, he often cheats to do it, using information that you didn't previously have available, which is actually fine from a narrative standpoint since it's still executed in a way that feels engaging to a reader, yet it can't be denied that he constantly sets up rules that he breaks on a frequent basis. Meanwhile, Dragonball DOES have issues with things such as power-ups and transformations, particularly in its later story arcs, but it's like everyone forgets that there's still a huge chunk of fights both early AND later in the series that completely contradict the statement that it's all power struggles. Like, anyone notice how with the exception of Goku defeating Freeza as a Super Saiyan (and Future Trunks doing the same early in the next arc) that all of the major battles have the heroes disadvantaged to the villain in some way and they have to overcome him by some other strategy?

Like, whenever I see anyone talking about the Freeza arc (which is really the Namek arc, but everyone just calls it the Freeza arc), all they ever talk about is the admittedly dragged out battle between Goku and Freeza. But, am I living in some alternate parallel Universe in which there was, I don't know, a whole story to that arc before that final battle? Like, how in Mistare Fusion's retrospective of the arc, much of the first half had brilliant world-building that didn't rely on heavy exposition but managed to convey a lot of new information without excessive dialogue (a skill that even Eichiro Oda sometimes struggles with despite being so renowned for One Piece's world-building), or how an entire huge portion of the arc was a well thought-out three-way mind game between Vegeta, Freeza's forces, and Gohan and Krillin, in which each party had to keep the others from getting all of the dragon balls while also trying to stay alive, even though Vegeta could only selectively fight certain people while having to avoid others, Gohan and Krillin had to completely avoid fighting and constantly hide unless they were forced into confrontation as a last resort (which forced them to completely rely on their wits), and the worst villain of all had all of the power in the Universe (at that point in the series) at his disposal? Does anyone ever comment on how brilliantly plotted the mystery elements of the early Artificial Humans arc is before Cell comes in, or how Toriyama temporarily returns Dragonball to its glorious comedy routes in the Majin Buu arc while also still trying to combine it with the sensibilities that he picked up in the Z-era of its run?

I mean, don't get me wrong, Dragonball is definitely a heavily flawed series. I don't deny it for a second. But it's like people only ever remember it for the bad aspects of the series from the latter years of its run, and even then it feels as though everybody on the planet somehow only seems familiar with the version that's a bad dub of a relatively flawed anime adaptation, because apparently nobody wants to pick up a book and read words or something. It doesn't bother me that people criticize the series for the parts that completely deserve criticism. It bothers me that somehow that's all a lot of people seem to remember it for despite the negative aspects arguably taking up less of the series than what most people realize. I mean, by all means knock something for what it does poorly, but why can't we also get more videos like this one that praise it for things that it does legitimately well?

So yeah, I guess this is a bit of a personal little issue I have with a general consensus on the Internet, and I don't exactly expect anyone to agree with me, but as fans of series like JoJo's, Hunter X Hunter, Magi, and other highly-regarded shonen manga and anime that buck the common trends of the genre, while also being a fan of relatively more traditional stuff that handle the core values of the genre well such as Dragonball or Yu Yu Hakusho or My Hero Academia, among others, I feel utterly annoyed to see some series put on an untouchable pedestal while others are only ever seen through badly mucked up lenses that block out anything genuinely good about them in favor of using them as a negative point of comparison to elevate the perceived status of other series.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Dr. E-k, I'd give you a high-five if I could because that is one of the most cathartic rants I've read in a while. I've been frustrated with how the anime fandom at large talks about Dragon Ball for a long, long time. Almost all the common criticisms about Dragon Ball are overstated memes parroted by people who haven't watched the series in years or never did at all but want to pretend their tastes are superior so they bash the easiest punching bag just because it's the one everyone knows. It's futile to get mad about it because all these pretenders don't actually know what they are talking about because everything they know about DB comes through cultural osmosis and vague memories of watching it as a kid. Like, when Gigguk made a video about shonen tournament arcs he used the tournament arc in DBZ onscreen when he was showing an example of a bad tournament arc, yet completely ignored and failed to mention the three tournaments from the original DB, which still stand as some of the best tournament arcs in the genre. Or when he used a clip of Goku turning SSJ3 at the beginning about his video on the problem with power levels and increasing escalation in shonen series. DBZ is frequently used as a negative example because everyone "knows" that it has pacing problems and has the most famous use of power levels, but the examples are taken out of context and when you see how things actually played out (especially in the manga) you realize they aren't as bad as people make it out to be. The problem is that the only people who actually remember what happens in Dragon Ball are actual fans of the series who have re-read and re-watched it more than once since they were kids and have gained a better understanding of its strengths and weaknesses, while everyone else only knows vague ideas of things that are wrong with it or its famous for, like the increasing grades of Super Saiyan, power levels, filler, long power up sequences, 5 minutes on Namek taking up 10 episodes, etc - memes that misrepresent the actual series as a whole.

Similarly, the people who praise JoJo's and HxH as innovative or deconstructions haven't actually read or watched many shonen series to begin with. I find that whenever people place them on a pedestal they're often just drawn to the style, dark subject matter, and ambitiousness of those series and think that makes them somehow better than everything else. I'm not a fan of Naruto and Bleach as a whole but its baffling how people seem to forget how dark those series were at the beginning and how their early arcs stood out as different from what other shonen manga were like at the time (which is why they originally became popular to begin with). Because of poor writing and safe storytelling they became what we associate as negative examples of the genre today, but content-wise JJBA and HxH are not as removed from those series as people make them out to be, especially when you're comparing the early arcs. It's the same thing as people who thought Madoka Magica was a deconstruction even though dark magical girl stories had been a thing for years and it wasn't actually criticizing the genre (the original ending of the tv anime even reaffirms it). People who get into these series want an excuse to justify why they like something from a maligned genre that's been characterized as being "for kids and casuals," so they do that by saying that what they like is better than those other shows for some shallow reason, and pick the worst attributes of the most popular shows to compare them with because everyone knows about them even if they haven't watched them so they can easily jump on the ideological bandwagon.

Thankfully, the DB community itself has evolved to look much deeper at the series' actual problems (of which there are a fair many) alongside its innumerable strengths that are sadly ignored by the anime community at large. It's just too bad SuperEyepatchWolf seems to be the only general anime youtuber who actually knows what the strengths of DB are and acknowledges them.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Dr. E-k, I'd give you a high-five if I could because that is one of the most cathartic rants I've read in a while. I've been frustrated with how the anime fandom at large talks about Dragon Ball for a long, long time.

Thanks!

It means a lot to know that at least someone else shares a similar opinion to me on this. It got to points where I was honestly questioning if I was just crazy and was the only person in the anime community who felt that Dragonball as a whole, even the later Z-era stuff, got an unfairly worse reputation than it actually deserved, especially compared to some of the stuff that the community loves to praise. Like, I seriously believe that most of these people are strictly only going off of what they remember from when Dragon Ball Z aired on Toonami well over a decade ago.

Like, when Gigguk made a video about shonen tournament arcs he used the tournament arc in DBZ onscreen when he was showing an example of a bad tournament arc, yet completely ignored and failed to mention the three tournaments from the original DB, which still stand as some of the best tournament arcs in the genre.

That bothered me as well. And it's especially kind of a bummer because I do usually enjoy Gigguk's content and the video was mainly about how My Hero Academia successfully did its tournament arc, and I'm all for giving one of the best currently running Shonen Jump manga its due praise. But it always kind of distracts me when I see people come at it from the angle of how its only good because it does it better than average, which they follow up with by listing a lot of examples of other popular shonen series which they don't think do the same aspects as well. This in and of itself wouldn't be a problem if they could clearly explain their points, but in Gigguk's video, like many videos that use Dragonball and other shonen series as negative examples of something, none of those points were actually explained. He just went off of memory and threw Dragonball in there as an example of a bad tournament arc (despite the fact that the tournament in the Buu arc hardly even qualifies as a tournament arc since it's merely just the set-up for the main story arc; and is interrupted after only a handful of chapters/episodes). It makes me question whether he actually remembered anything from the show or just remembered the fact that it had some tournament episodes from one of its less popular arcs and just threw it in there as a cheap negative example to boost up the series that he was trying to praise. I mean, I'm a fan of My Hero Academia as well, but if I were to go about praising the Sports Festival arc, I would have personally focused on what it does right, and if I were to compare it to something negative, it would actually be to a dedicated tournament arc from a series that completely fails at it. Not a series that happened to have a tournament set-up in an arc that wasn't even the main focus of the arc. I mean, you might as well have used the tournament in Dressrossa from One Piece as an example in that case, even though the same thing applies to that as does to the one in the Majin Buu arc from Dragonball.

Or when he used a clip of Goku turning SSJ3 at the beginning about his video on the problem with power levels and increasing escalation in shonen series.

The funny thing is that this video was meant as a response/follow-up to the one that was made by Reality Punch Studios. The RPS video is actually a genuinely good one, IMO. While I don't necessarily agree with every point made in that video, it offers up legitimate criticism that (and this is important) is backed up with SPECIFIC examples. You can tell that the RPS video is written by someone who does genuinely like and care about shonen, and thus those criticisms come from a place of experience rather than just trying to coincide with popular opinion. For example, he does use Dragonball as a negative example for power escalation, but if you pay attention to how he does it, it's not done in a way to make the series look bad or just about that, but rather to highlight power escalation as one of the weaker aspects of the series despite its great influence on the genre at large, and how many other shonen writers at the time took the wrong lessons from this. When he specifically brings up the example regarding the final battle between Gohan and Cell, he doesn't just say "this is a boring power struggle and that's why escalating power levels doesn't work." He instead phrases it as an interesting question to both highlight a negative aspect of the series as well as directly compare it to a positive one: "Which means more to you; the fact that the world could be destroyed or Gohan finally realizing his full potential and surpassing his father to defeat Cell?" In this regard he highlights his point expertly in that the escalating stakes don't really mean that much while the personal stakes are what makes the confrontation interesting, and that Dragonball and other similar shonen are at their weakest when they focus too much on the former rather than the latter. THAT'S HOW YOU CRITICIZE SOMETHING LIKE THIS THE THE RIGHT WAY! Like I said, I don't mind criticism when it is something worth legitimately criticizing and when it comes from a place of genuine understanding of any particular work's strengths and weaknesses, including Dragonball. I just don't like it when it's used as a throwaway bad example of something both out of context and with very lazy scrutinization of the actual content like in Gigguk's video or other similar ones.

Also, one other thing that bothered me about that Gigguk video is how he mentioned endless filler as a problem with most shonen anime, which honestly makes me wonder what shonen shows he has even watched from this decade. With the exception of older shows from the 90's and 2000's that are still going on (and many of those have already ended, with stuff like One Piece being among the few remaining), anime filler hasn't really been an issue for several years now, making it a rather dated and pointless complaint to make. I mean, just look at how every other shonen manga adapted into an anime is now being released in contained seasons rather than endlessly airing until it either finishes covering the manga or gets canceled in the process.

DBZ is frequently used as a negative example because everyone "knows" that it has pacing problems and has the most famous use of power levels, but the examples are taken out of context and when you see how things actually played out (especially in the manga) you realize they aren't as bad as people make it out to be. The problem is that the only people who actually remember what happens in Dragon Ball are actual fans of the series who have re-read and re-watched it more than once since they were kids and have gained a better understanding of its strengths and weaknesses, while everyone else only knows vague ideas of things that are wrong with it or its famous for, like the increasing grades of Super Saiyan, power levels, filler, long power up sequences, 5 minutes on Namek taking up 10 episodes, etc - memes that misrepresent the actual series as a whole.

It's why those basic stereotypes of the franchise as a whole is the only "criticism" (and I use that term loosely, here) that you'll ever see from people only relying on vague memories of the show or from only having seen bits of it and relying too much on what they've heard from people who only have those vague memories of the show. For a point of comparison, Mistare Fusion actually has a lot of genuine criticism for the series, but he'll touch on actual issues with Toriyama's writing like his frequent plot-holes and inconsistencies as well as his tendency to set things up for lazy and formulaic things to happen with his characters. For example: like when he criticized how the Ginyu Force were ultimately pointless in the grand scheme of the Namek arc as they only served to give Goku a chance to come in and look like a bad-ass in front of everyone as he easily took down opponents that even Vegeta was having trouble with. That's a completely fair criticism based on the actual material given within the context of the series itself. And on top of that MF is able to compare how this scenario is a repeat of the exact same scenario from the Saiyan arc, but how that arc handles it much better while in this scenario the repeated trope falls flat because the writing has to be a lot more contrived to get the characters to the point in which Toriyama wanted them at, rather than being due to the natural flow of the story.

I don't even entirely agree with all of his criticisms about the Ginyu Force portion of the Namek arc, but I can at least respect his opinion of it as a detractor to the story based on actually scrutinizing the material and giving valid reasons for why it doesn't work for him. Compare that to others who just kind of mention in passing "the problem with Dragonball is the ridiculous power levels and long drawn out fights," which is not only stereotypical of specifically the anime version, but also comes off as completely hypocritical. In regard to the powers being ridiculous, while Goku and company do get absurdly powerful, and while I do personally prefer the relatively more grounded action of the early arcs, that doesn't mean that the fights are mindless or without thought put into them. Just like any good shonen, Toriayma still establishes a set of rules with each encounter, and as powerful as a character like Goku or Vegeta may be, they are usually facing off against opponents who are just as powerful if not more-so, and it's hardly an easy win. Nobody in Dragonball is like Kirito from SAO and just comes off as absurdly overpowered within the context of their own series winning any given fight with ease just to make them look like a bad-ass. Furthermore, it's actually cleverly made clear in some scenarios that the extreme power that they wield can be a disadvantage since they can't go all out in certain areas, like how Goku wants to get the Androids out of the city to fight them since he's worried about harming innocent people but also can't afford to hold back against his opponents. And in regard to things getting ridiculously unrealistic with how powerful characters are, even if they are all on the same level playing field in the grand scheme of things which allows for interesting fights, is that really as much of an issue as people make it out to be? If that's the case, couldn't you also then knock down JJBA for the powers being too weird and ridiculous and awfully over-convenient in many situations? Or, couldn't you say that TTGL has a really bad ending because we have characters literally flinging galaxies at each other in the final major bout? And even the longest fights of Dragonball in the manga only take up a handful of chapters, with many other series (including JJBA and HXH) having their average fights be just as long if not longer than the average length of a fight in Dragonball. Shouldn't people be complaining about those as well? But nobody does that because those kinds of fights are both the charms of their respective series and executed in a way that makes them interesting to watch within the context of their respective Universes. Dragonball is hardly all that different in that regard, IMO.

Similarly, the people who praise JoJo's and HxH as innovative or deconstructions haven't actually read or watched many shonen series to begin with. I find that whenever people place them on a pedestal they're often just drawn to the style, dark subject matter, and ambitiousness of those series and think that makes them somehow better than everything else. I'm not a fan of Naruto and Bleach as a whole but its baffling how people seem to forget how dark those series were at the beginning and how their early arcs stood out as different from what other shonen manga were like at the time (which is why they originally became popular to begin with). Because of poor writing and safe storytelling they became what we associate as negative examples of the genre today, but content-wise JJBA and HxH are not as removed from those series as people make them out to be, especially when you're comparing the early arcs. It's the same thing as people who thought Madoka Magica was a deconstruction even though dark magical girl stories had been a thing for years and it wasn't actually criticizing the genre (the original ending of the tv anime even reaffirms it). People who get into these series want an excuse to justify why they like something from a maligned genre that's been characterized as being "for kids and casuals," so they do that by saying that what they like is better than those other shows for some shallow reason, and pick the worst attributes of the most popular shows to compare them with because everyone knows about them even if they haven't watched them so they can easily jump on the ideological bandwagon.

In general I think you could sum that entire paragraph up as the main problem with the hardcore anime and manga fan community on the Internet (much like many communities on the Internet) being that people tend to have this strange obsession of wanting to seem smart and thus want to specifically endorse works that are seen as intelligent while lambasting stuff that comes off as dumb or childish. In this regard, ironically enough, many people have this idiotic mentality of pre-conceiving material based on what kind of outward reputation it seems like it will have as opposed to the individual content itself. It doesn't matter to a lot of people in the community whether they really have that much of a personal love or connection with stuff like Akira or Ghost in the Shell or any number of works from Gen Urobuchi or Satoshi Kon or Hideaki Anno. What matters first and foremost is that these names are immediately associated with a sensibility of being intelligent material for intelligent people. And, granted, these are the names of intelligent works and intelligent creators. That said, simply liking them for that reason doesn't actually make people look as smart as they think, and I've seen far too many badly written blogs or video reviews of people praising works of this nature while clearly not understanding any of the material and in fact completely missing the point of their intended message, yet they'll never fail to remind you about how smart those things are.

And of course, naturally, the reverse is true. It doesn't matter how good or bad the actual content within a work is. For a lot of people, if a work has any kind of reputation as being childish or dumb, regardless of whether that status is really deserved to be associated with it or not, its just a nail in the coffin for it because naturally, as you'd expect, people worried about the appearance of something rather than its actual content will condemn it from that point onward for no other reason. Thus, Dragonball doesn't even have much of a chance of having anyone's perception of it changed in the slightest. For the vast majority of the anime community, that status is set in stone. So, even if I could praise it for stuff like how Toriyama is an absolute master of the weekly format and knows how to keep his work engaging as a page-turner in a way that makes it hard to stop reading, a genuine skill that very few mangaka can boast, it wouldn't matter. If I explained how Toriyama is a certifiable genius on the art of how to do visual gags from both a structural and content-based standpoint, and how his ability to create a constant flow in his panel-work and panel-framing is down to such a perfect science that very few currently active comic book artists on the planet could be compared to his level of brilliance as an artist within the medium, it wouldn't matter. Nobody cares about that stuff. All they care about is that at the end of the day it's essentially a long running series in a publication that was (and still is) primarily targeted at a younger audience from kids to older teenagers/adolescents, and thus it's not adult or mature and thus that means it's not smart and by default that makes it dumb and not worth anything other than being used as a negative example of something.

If Dragonball's massive worldwide popularity works to its benefit, it can also equally work as a detractor. So many people are convinced of whatever their mindset is of the franchise, either good or bad, that very few are ever really willing to reassess it beyond that point, so the appearance that it has to them at a certain point in time is what stays with them forever.

And, you know, I wouldn't really be all that bothered by it, but then some of those people either write blogs or make YouTube videos or comment on those things or in discussion threads, and when they refer to that series under a strongly biased and heavily misinformed awareness of it, then it really irritates me in a way that's hard to just shake off and ignore.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Only tangentially related to anime. And it's not even that bothering, but I have to ask: Why do almost all of these Japanese live-action adaptations of anime and manga


have

to

star

this

guy?

[Dr. Insomniac]

A recent tweet thread where I found out the 2003 FMA isn't legally available anywhere is leading me to feel my age. Because I remember when that show was everywhere, and now it's just a footnote in anime history. I'm sure if I rewatched it now I'd enjoy it significantly less, but that's beside the point. Maybe I sound like an out of touch boomer longing for simpler days, but that revelation reminded me of how distant 2000s anime culture is compared to the place it is now. From the communities to the trends in shows coming out. For instance, I've been rewatching Paranoia Agent lately, and I can't imagine the series receiving the same appraisal it did back then if it came out now. Even with Kon's name attached, I imagine the reception would either be quite muted or viewers would heavily disagree with the themes. Sure, there are some 00s shows that still receive just as much excitement and acclaim now as they did in the past like Death Note or Gurren Lagann, but I have the hunch that if you showed newer anime fans the series that were popular in 2004 or 2005, most of the time, they'd just look at you thinking what the big deal is. I'm sure even many early 2010s anime face the same problem.

And there's nothing immediately wrong with that. Plenty of TV, movies, books, songs will have a limited time where they're seen as valuable works of art, but then the clock strikes twelve, and they become old hat with only a meager few new audience members. Not everything is evergreen. But to see shows that used to seem like hallmarks of the medium become the equivalent of forgotten books on a shelf covered in dust and cobwebs, once vibrant fandoms becoming ghost towns, I can't help but feel disoriented. Especially when it seems like the shelf life of the average anime keeps getting shorter, the biggest shows of the season can seem obscure just a few months later, and there's no room for the community to take its time and savor a work because 50+ more shows come out as soon as the next season starts.

I want to think this is all a matter of perspective and no more than feeling the generation divide in pop culture, and this is the same sentiment 70s/80s anime fans had when the 00s came along, and a couple decades from now, the 10s/20s anime fans will express that same disconnect. Everybody feels the malaise at finding out a film or a song they love is becoming the equivalent of Dad Rock. And in many ways, it's good for the medium to keep shifting. We don't need more pedestals as Lum and EK said years ago in this thread. But I still have my doubts.

[Dr. Insomniac]

So, I assume Mappa's production woes are basic news at this point. And it sucks, because I've been catching up with JJK and liking it more or less.