(I will do a new round every week. The winner will challenge the next and there can only be one left standing in the end. Remember to vote every week.)
Vote even if they’re not your main #1 because this is a knock out. Also keep in mind this is not a favorite character competition this is the local hottie beauty pageant.
Down with seasonal anime down with overconsumption down with every series regardless of how complex needing to be boiled down to fit into 12 episodes
there’s just too many shows
too many shows and they’re coming out at such an unprecedented rate that we can’t even fully appreciate them. and I KNOW that people are slaving away in unethical work conditions to make them, all so that nobody can even remember them, no matter how lovingly crafted or beautiful they really are
here are some numbers from wikipedia that make me want to scream so everyone can see exactly how correct OP is!
in 1983, during the 80s anime bubble, there were 35 anime TV series.
In 1993, the aftermath of the 80s bubble popping, there were 15 anime TV series.
In 2003, during the early days of digipaint (which reduced the workload need to make an anime series), there were 48 anime TV series.
In 2013, there were 143 anime TV series.
In 2023, as of today (July 18), there have been 151 anime TV series premieres, with a further 46 shows set to debut for the fall season.
I’m a big fan of retro anime so trust me when I say that there have always been absolutely hot garbage anime series, but the number of garbage shovelware shows made to be forgotten have increased every year, and even the hit series are virtually forgotten within months as the studios promote the next hot thing that you have to see and watch and buy merchandise for and cosplay before all that gets left behind for yet another new franchise. OP is entirely correct; animation takes tons of effort, and this much animation cannot be made without severe labor abuse.
In 1998, the show “Lost Universe” became notorious for being the first show to have to fix the animation for the home video release; it was considered a colossal failure to the point that particularly bad animation is still sometimes referred to by the name of the most infamously fucked up Lost Universe episode. By 2013, instead of “we’ll fix it for home video” being a horrifying production failure, it became the absolute norm to the point it’s one of the main ways companies market Blu-rays. In the last five years, we’ve had more than one production go so far off the rails that the staff started soliciting extra animators on Twitter. I don’t know enough about the Japanese labor market to say whether or not a strike or union would solve these problems, but this industry is clearly not doing okay in the slightest.
