Always been picky about what anime I watch. Haven’t watched any anime in the past few years, though, my life has been hectic the past few years. I guess I don’t like ‘anime-esque’ anime. Ones with an endless parade of episodes and filler, or over-the-top fighting or magic.

Highly recommend Jin-Roh.

Canaan was a somewhat guilty pleasure.

Anything by Miyazaki.

Black Lagoon was hit-or-miss, but when it hit, it was damn good.

Ghost in the Shell - preferring the movie over SAC, but both were good.

Cowboy Bebop naturally, and, on a lighter note, Space Dandy.

Pop Team Epic is hilarious.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure I like despite its other qualities. It’s an absolute fever dream that makes no apologies for itself, and I respect the hell out of that.

I wonder if there are any that I’ve liked but forgotten? My memory is like a sieve…

Well, most anime has always been trash… like all media. The majority of it is trash, and there’s diamonds in the rough.

Back in the day Cowboy Bebop was a fluke, an exception, not the rule. There’s plenty of easily forgettable anime from the same time period.

I’ve just gotten more picky about my media as I have gotten older, but I also have become more open to watching bad things for the sake of mocking them as I do.

I haven’t watched the Nier Automata anime, but if it’s anything like the game, its a rejection of anime tropes and subverts and overthrows them. The game is very anime-in-style. Most deeply humanist game I’ve ever played and I cried at the true ending.

I never really watched anime but I can speak for a friend of mine : they stopped watching anime because they got tired of the same tropes over and over again, and especially of the unhealthy/toxic relationships portrayed

Well an incredible amount is released every season, but just like in the 90s not all is watchable and then only a few titles will appeal to you. Freiren is a new one that I think is up there with the greats but maybe you should try watching some comedy ones instead. Have you seen asobi asobase, uncle from another world or the remastered ranma 1/2 yet?

I sometimes skip shows that I don’t feel I can mentally handle at the time and come back to them later. Part of mental health is adjusting your life to help get your mind back in shape.

I’m at a place where I still like anime in theory, but I’ve become almost unreasonably picky. I will sit down for the Boy and the Heron, but I have a hard time taking a chance on anything I’m not 100% on.

I have watched a couple in the past but anime tends to over-explain plot points to an extent that really irks me. Something will clearly happen on screen and then follow through with a plain language recap of what happened. Give the audience some credit!

I’ve honestly stopped watching most scripted television. I also feel like, outside of something GitS:SAC, I’m not as interested in most themes in anime.

I would like to think that I have outgrown anime. But in reality anime had outgrown me. The type of shows I like have ended in the 2000s. I can’t stand today’s anime themes and styles.

I used to around 20 years ago. Some, anyway.

But I was always picky about the ones I watched. I had a few friends who liked Naruto and other types I didn’t like. I always found that these two types basically boil down to either:

• Combat centric plot, where each episode revolves around some new antagonist that luckily can be defeated by this new trick the protagonist learned earlier in the episode. Example: Naruto, DBZ.

• Awkward guy spends time with attractive girls. Example: Ichigo 100%, Love Hina.

I really liked Monster, GTO, Elfen Lied, and Chobits. And there was this one drama whose name I cannot remember. I kind of lost interest after having seen those, because it felt like there were too much low quality anime compared to the ones that actually were worthwhile.

EDIT: I remember the other one, Kimi Ga Nozomi Eien. Also, honorable mention: Nana. Great soundtrack by Olivia Lufkin and Anna Tsuchiya

All the anime I’ve watched for years now are reruns of anime from before I was born. Anime as of late has been so sucked into its own style that it’s starting to feel like that, in order to appreciate anime, you have to separate tropes between “everyone else’s style” and “anime style” or “humor you’d expect from everyone else” and “humor you’d expect from anime”. I think this is what one calls a subculture. However, to put it one way, if it’s an acquired taste, it has unacquired me in being one.

The only exception to this is Pokémon Horizons (someone who knows my artist side may notice this series has been an enormously recurring part of my art), and a part of me thinks they’re actually trying to pull the anime equivalent of Pokémon Red/Green saving Nintendo (there was a time when Nintendo thought of just going back to selling cards again like they did in the 1800’s because games pre-Pokémon were failing in sales) and save anime with it.

I, of course, am not unaware of other modern anime, and you may find art of them from me, but my main source for these is second-handedness in some form. These anime are not always bad in my mind, but they’re all “just there”. Which as an artist of such anime I’m aware rubs many the wrong way, that I may do things pertaining to a fictional world but at the same time not talk about it with the same enthusiasm (the art equivalent of inventing baseball and not liking to play it, the horror). It’s just too distinct with so large a subvariety it’s difficult to fully appreciate it.

I haven’t watched it or much by way of movies in general for a while. Moved away from fictional TV series before that.

I’ve been kinda tilting away from fiction for years. I like a number of fictional video games, still enjoy that, but novels or movies or such are kinda…I dunno. Just don’t get much of a kick out of them.

EDIT: I think that maybe, part of how much you enjoy something links into how much other stuff you can mentally connect it to. So, like, maybe if you’re super-big into the Star Wars universe, say, or some big franchise like that, then new material connects to lots of things that you know about there.

But fictional stuff tends to only tie to other stuff in that fictional universe, so in each work of fiction in a separate universe, you kinda “start over” from scratch.

Where with real-world stuff, you can mentally connect to other things that you know about in the real world, and your body of knowledge there grows over time, so there’s more to connect to. I do definitely think that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve shifted towards non-fiction. And while I don’t have anything to quantify it, I kinda get the impression that the same may be true of a lot of older folks out there.

Now, okay, anime is just a medium. Anime doesn’t entail being fictional. You could, theoretically, make an anime documentary on something…but it’s not usually used for that purpose.

Nope. I watch stuff whenever I can and I don’t even care that much what it is. Watch series over movies though with both normal shows and anime.

I watched so much when I was younger but I pretty much stopped 6 or 7 years ago. I’ll watch a Miyazaki movie if my spouse grabs it, but I won’t seek them out.

There was just too much fan service, filler, and melodrama. Not enough substance to make it worth it. My last attempt was My Hero Academia. It was all the tropes I was tired of and I couldn’t get into it. My friend who was watching it with me said it was satirizing those tropes, but I had given up.

I’m sure there are some incredible shows I’m missing out on, and I definitely don’t judge those who still enjoy it. I just don’t line up with the grooves anymores.

I ride off of friends’ suggestions just as equally as my own discoveries; Sword Art Online has been interesting.

I don’t like when things end most of the time.

My friend, let me introduce you to the sprawling hit video game Noita.

I watch a lot of anime and the vast majority doesn’t have an ending yet (and tbh a lot of it never will) because there’s usually far more source material than they’ve animated.