Dear anime industry,

Can we, one day, stop releasing entire seasons of anime when we know that they are not ready to be released? Can the animators/directors/studios unionize, choose to do in-house animation, or just stop taking up jobs with hellish schedules? There's a limited amount of time that we have to live, and if we're going to be idiots who waste our 11% of our lives watching anime could we at the very least get some quality in return? I'm not asking for anime to look and feel like Akira, Redline, or a KyoAni work 100% of the time. In fact, it shouldn't, since I believe that having a tiny margin of terrible anime would be beneficial in the long run, but not when that terrible anime comes as a result of poorly payed, overworked animators who are being coerced into animating just because of their passion for the medium. I would want for every 30 amazing shows airing each season, at least 5 of them could be absolute dog-trash. I wish that we had a sweet ratio of 85% AoTY contenders airing each season, for every 15% ironic and unintetntionally funny terrible anime.

But no. Instead, the numbers are reversed – and if I were to be even more pesimistic and “elitist”, I would say that we don’t even have 5 amazing shows airing each season, most of the time there’s barely anything that’s above watchable – so that we are constantly bombarded with visual mediocrity from a medium that gave us Akira, Nausicaa, or Riding Beam, all in the 80s. Nowadays, we get generic, under-animated isekais that milk the worm infested carcass of a cow. And isekais wouldn’t even be a problem, if they all had the level of animation and actual good writing of Mushoku Tensei, an isekai that does what the genre is supposed to be doing: actually address the MC’s previous screwed-up life and then have him grow into his new life by acknowledging his shortcomings. But no, every isekai is just the same uninteresting Kirito copy that does the same uninteresting hero’s journey and gets a harem.

Nowadays, we get the same reused stock animation and art-style for 99% of seasonals, the same reused character designs but with minor twists. Where’s the originality in a medium that should not follow any rules of “this is how you anime 101”? Where’s the freedom of expression of artists that have grown up wanting to work in the same industry that gave them Gundam when they were kids? They are replaced by inhumane working conditions and exploitation that makes them collapse from overwork. And sure, there are exceptions. Great Pretender was, aside from the ending, a fantastic show last year. It was visually/aesthetically pleasing enough in order to attract the more avid anime fans, while also being engaging and fun enough in order to appeal to other audiences. It also had the “Great Pretender” by Freddie Mercury as the show’s ED, so some fans of the artist would be incentivized to give the show a try, especially since it was on Netflix. Hmm, this reminds of that time when another anime had an interesting visual style that pleased older fans, an engaging story that would attract new fans, and an ED song by a famous artist. Too bad that people glorified the last 2 episodes of Evangelion and completely missed the point of the show.

I can accept having to waste almost 4 hours of my day just to get 36 minutes of amazing fighting from an anime. But when even those 36 minutes of what should be Yutaka Nakamura levels of animation are instead some of the most boring and uninteresting camera panning and bare minimum of effort, that’s when I have a problem. Record of Ragnarok is among the worst things I’ve wasted my time on. Hey, anime, remember when you told a coherent and poignant story through Gon and Hisoka’s fight? A fight that dragged you in with every punch thrown by Gon as he struggled to reach Hisoka. A fight that was the pay-off of episodes of build-up You clearly seem to have forgotten, since Record of Ragnarok uses all of the cheapest tricks of animation in order to deliver some of the most cheap-looking fights put to screen. “How do we make this fight feel fast and devastating?” Record of Ragnarok answers that by incorporating those oh-so-fabulous lines that make it seem that there is a lot of movement going on, when in fact there is nothing moving. Don’t get me started on the times that the show downloaded a .png from Google, booted Photoshop, selected “Free Transform”, held Shift and just rotated it around. And even when there’s the slightest hope of a watchable fight, the show just has to cut away to some random characters just standing and commenting the fight, giving us information that even a 5 year old can pick up from the fight.

Maybe I’m not even harsh enough on how this show delivers under-mediocrity on a plate when it comes to the fights. Maybe I should be since the fights are - or should be – the only saving grace of this series, since the story is utter garbage, and if you can’t tell that it is terrible from the beginning of the first episode, then maybe you should stop just consuming and start thinking about your media. I am convinced that this is how God of High-school would have looked like if it didn’t have Mappa’s talented workforce behind it. At least GoH’s fights at the very least were animated in a way that was above average, which roughly made up for the terrible writing. RoR has neither the animation to cover for the writing, nor the writing to cover for the animation.

I am tired. Tired of having to watch my favourite medium of visual-audio storytelling undermine itself by constantly shooting itself in the foot. Tired of witnessing the legacy of talented animators be watered down by corporate greed, underpaid and overworked staff. The medium that gave me Gurren Lagann, the anime that told me that the impossible it’s possible by digging its cast on the surface. The medium that gave me K-On, the anime that made me cope with ending the chapter of my life called “High-school”. The medium that gave me Millennium Actress, the anime that showed me that I should pay more attention to the journey, rather than the destination. The medium that gave me Angel’s Egg, the anime that made me see anime as a fully-fledged art form capable of questioning the essence of existence. That medium is the same medium that now gave me Record of Ragnarok, the anime that had to use CGI in order to animate some dudes beating the drums, and that made me waste 4 hours of my life.

I love anime, I sincerely do. I think it’s the most unique and ambitious art forms out there. But I completely despise the current state that anime has been in for the past couple of years. But it boggles the mind that this medium that has become readily available at the press of a button continues to handicap itself by still abiding to the same rules as 30 years ago. I hope that one day will come when the industry will realise that the current business model is in a terminal phase, but one that drags itself down.

Sincerely yours,

Just an anime fan.

Edit: As of 23rd of October 2021, I have removed the "We Have Accepted Mediocrity" video since Trixie has mentioned on her Twitter that she doesn't share the same feelings as she did back in that video.