Am I getting old or anime is even cringier now?

I'm experiencing what you are but I think we're coming to vastly different conclusions about why.

I stopped watching anime cold turkey after my weaboo ex and I broke up. She just watched so much anime and her life revolved around Japanese consumer culture; I couldn't stand it. Twelve years later, I decided to give it a whirl again. A lot changes in over a decade.

All of the original tropes are still there with fresh takes. It's much more popular and socially accepted than before, so there's greater demand and accordingly more options. There was a lot of garbage, just absolutely mindless filler material of shows, twelve years ago. There's a lot of that same garbage now. There's also a lot of good material now, more than before simply because there's just so much more of everything being translated and sent abroad.

I changed in twelve years. I became acclimated to the much more subdued style of Western media and forgot how comparably over-the-top anime and a lot of Japanese media is (thanks, kabuki!). It seems weird and cringy now, so I snagged a few copies of what I used to watch pre-weeb ex and watched them. You know what? It was pretty over the top and cringy at times too. The animation style has changed, but it's largely the same otherwise.

Sorry but your post feels like someone saying "nowadays cinema is shit" and then ranting "it's just Marvel and Pixar movies".

You don't even have to look for niche things, just this year we already got Frieren, Dungeon Meshi, A Sign Of Affection, Spice and Wolf 's remake, Kaiju No 8, Oshi No Ko season 2, Metallic Rouge, ... All of different genres, kinda mainstream and are nothing like what you said.

And we are only halfway through the year.

Don't be some bitter old person, every mass media mostly market meh things that are easy to produce and sell, but just like every other media, just a quick search for "best anime 2024" get you most of the names I gave you in the 3 first lists.

its like all other media. its flooded. there is still good stuff being made though. spy x family, frieren, the duke of death and his maid, doctor stone, cells at work, chainsaw man, bungo stray dogs, tokyo revengers, the ancient maguses bride, goblin slayer, miss kobayashis dragon maid, attack on titan just wrapped and my heor academia is apparently still going but I have not seen a recent season. even some in the genre you mention I have found to be decent like overlord and jobless reincarnation. They are so stereotypical of the genre but somehow I find them better. Something about the characters. There is one where a guy is like an accountant helping the kingdom get better but i forget the name but got to get back to it. lesser but interesting to me is classroom of the elite, assination classroom and shy.

There's a lot of crap out there pandering to the lowest common denominator, that much is true. But this is just Sturgeon's Law in action. The industry is getting a lot bigger, which means there's a lot more trash to filter through, but it also means there's plenty of good stuff being made too.

I think it’s a mixture of survivorship bias (20 years ago 90% of the crap anime didn’t leave Japan because there was no market for it) and some genuine quality decline. There’s a lot of money to be made in anime, so the safest bet from the corporate perspective is to make the thing that’s been successful a thousand times before. Over time this flattens character design and makes stories progressively blander.

Independent studios can also pump out trash of course, but at least it tends to be weirder, more interesting trash.

There's still good stuff occasionally but the anime industry has produced a lot more trash this past decade. There was an article that explained exactly why but I can't find it.

Basically, the anime industry is falling apart on itself. Harsh deadlines and low pay means everyone is rushing everything and prioritizing quantity over quality. Even the most popular anime like Jujutsu Kaisen have had controversies on how they abuse their staff.

Also the reason most animes have a similar artstyle is to make it easy to onboard new animators and hire freelancers. If everything had a different style it'd be difficult to train animators to keep it consistent.

Considering OPs response I don't expect actual discussion, but as a person that doesn't like most anime tropes what would people consider a good anime that doesn't fall into the usual trappings? Even if it's a popular answer my experience is very limited and would love to find the diamonds in the rough.

Definitely getting old. That's just how it goes.

No…I think understanding you may not be the target audience for the shows you are seeing is a good place to start, if you wanna watch anime, check out a different genre. I will watch a couple of genres and skip the rest. There were some real nice ones this season as others have said. A sign of affection was very sweet, apothecary diaries had a fun lead and was a nice historical setting. I’m not sure if it was this season but Somali and the forest spirit, the girl from the other side, the fire hunter…etc.

Anime has gotten quite popular and with the uptick in new shows you end up with a lot of similar things. I wouldn't say anime has gotten more cringe because it's had a lot of cringe as far back as I can remember. Hell, Dragon Ball is pretty pervy and that's from the 80s. The best shows tend not to have a whole lot. But there's a lot more series now so all the cringe stuff is just easy to find.

Finding the good shows among the muck isn't any different with anime than it it with regular TV or movies. There's tons of reality TV, crime dramas, medical shows, etc. How many of them actually stand out or stand the test of time. Far fewer than what is produced.

As much as I hate the term "cringe" when not being used in its literal sense, anime has always been cringey, but it's easier to ignore when you're younger, and the anime itself is older.

Not all of it is, but the series (as opposed to movies) are really prone to some horribly cringey things.

This applies to any medium of any genre. The mainstream has shit taste.

100% used to love anime in the 90s, since then the market has been oversaturated with isekai and tsundere and a billion other tropes that it all got beat like a dead horse.

Any anime with a whiny male protagonist, American, Japanese or otherwise, is pure cringe, though. Can't even get through a single episode.

Anime back in my day was all about sexualizing underage girls and had pedos as main characters. Any different now?

I think there's probably the same amount of good anime that there always has been. The industry in general has become more profitable, so now there are more corporations that want to squeeze all the money they can out of it, which means a higher volume of trash as well

being the same “I’m a loser yet I fell inside my toilet and discovered a new world full of breedable elfs” type

Isekai?

Isekai (Japanese: 異世界 transl. 'different world', 'another world', or 'other world') is a subgenre of portal fantasy. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, anime, and video games that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe with or without the possibility of returning to their original world. Isekai is one of the most popular genres of anime, and isekai stories share many common tropes – for example, a powerful protagonist who is able to beat most people in the other world by fighting. This plot device typically allows the audience to learn about the new world at the same pace as the protagonist over the course of their quest or lifetime.[1] If the main characters are transported to a game-like world, the genre can overlap with LitRPG.

The concept of isekai started in Japanese folktales, such as Urashima Tarō. However, the first modern isekai works were Haruka Takachiho's novel Warrior from Another World and Yoshiyuki Tomino's television series Aura Battler Dunbine.

I mean, I reckon "breedable" would be an adult sub-genre...

When you cut budget on studio, you get anime worse than decade old era, simple as that.

Also they ALL LOOK THE SAME character art style wise, you know the same pretty clean “digital” style made popular probably by No Game No Life 10 years ago. Yes, I’m sure there’s a hidden 💎 there, it’s always like that but I’m not talking about that 0.5 percent.

Some of anime's style and conventions developed due to practicality, like colored hair making it easy to identify characters. I'd guess that those are probably gonna hang around.

But I am going to make a prediction that hand-drawn animation is going to dramatically change in appearance over the next decade.

Doing hand-drawn animation, even with stuff like computer assistance (as it's been used in the past), is labor-intensive. And one thing that Stable Diffusion and similar latent diffusion systems do really well at is generating a variant of a work in a different style. They aren't well-geared up for doing animation, not yet. But people are already banging on the problem. And if they get there, my guess is that it will make it much easier to produce variants of a work in different styles. Lot of room to explore the long tail there, target smaller groups of people who like more-specific things, maybe even possible for individuals to get video in a style that they like. My guess is that this is one concern that probably is going to take care of itself before too long, just due to technical change.

You can get good media, or you can get mass-appeal media.

Sometimes they cross over, usually not. Unfortunately, a -lot- of horny men really like the (especially self-insert isekai) horny stuff. And they pay a lot for it, especially merchandise. So so much money in anime merch, especially horny anime merch. It’s so profitable there’s an anime merch store at my local rural mall in Wisconsin, and it’s full of super questionable hentai-adjacent stuff.

There’s a lot of good stuff out there that isn’t that, but it is definitely an actual slog to find any of it because there’s way more low quality samey horny junk.

This is how I’ve felt about anime forever. No hate if you like it, it just isn’t my thing so what you describe is what it’s always seemed like to me since I was a teen in the early 00s.

I just miss the intellectual depth of anime like the Patlabor, Macross Plus, Ghost in the Shell, Akira movies. The last show I loved from beginning to end was Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. Macross Frontier was alright. I was also one of the odd(?) ones who enjoyed Naruto when it over explained ninjitsu. The art, I understand overhead costs, So I can be more forgiving - so long as art quality isn’t trash. There was a time when anime was ahead of its time. You just don’t see that much anymore 😭

The first 5 episodes of Cobra Kai season 6 are out on Netflix. Best anime that's come out in a long time

I rewatched Desert Punk (from 2005, I was a teenage boy) recently, and while its ecchi, the punk is actually confident enough to win over the girl.

I think you're right on the money.

Hell the only modern anime I recommend is bookworm. Everything else Ive checked out is garbage. Maybe theres gems Ive missed, but theres so much garbage, especially in the ecchi side of things.

Bro we only used to get the best of the best before the tik tok era. Now it's all just what the Dr pedo pervert influencers and greedy studios are pushing onto the Edgar cut kids.

Am I getting old or is anime even [worse] now?

Yes anime and other cartoons tend to follow a theme instead of creating an interesting story to begin with

cringier

Can't help you with that

Title.

The title is already attached to the post. This is useless

Money is spent on things where profit is to be made. Which leads to let's make that popular thing, but with X.

Bleach: Dragonball with Swords.
Digimon: Pokemon but they can de-evolve Card capters: Sailer moon but younger ( it has been nearly 2 decades since I saw either of those so I could be mis remembering)
Death Note: ...... Not sure.