Pet Peeve (1954 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Okay, to kick this whole thing off, I’m going to start with one of my major pet peeves from the anime community which falls under the ‘reasons why such-&-such doesn’t like such-&-such show’ category.
Besides people in general confusing their subjective opinion with objective fact; i.e., “This show sucks!” vs. “I don’t like this show”, and only one of those is the proper way to put things most of the time (another post for another time), one thing I’m getting sick of hearing is someone not liking a show, like InuYasha or Darker Than Black, because it’s “too cliche” or “it’s like every other show I saw.”
…NO. F*CKING. S*IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Although I’m not hating on when people dislike a show/manga, I get that and I’m not one of those prudes that no comprehende when somebody doesn’t like my beloved show(coughcoughGankutsuoucoughcough), it’s just that I rather hear somebody just out-and-out say they don’t like the show just because than give such a B.S. non-reason as ‘the show’s not original.’
Do you understand how long anime/manga has been around? Quite some f*cking time, and it’s somewhat formulaic and has been for, again, quite some time. This not only applies to this genre, but every form of media, whether it be music, television, books, movies, etc., chances are if it has a plot/lyrics/the like and came out this century, it sounds a lot like something else prior to it, and when you put that s*it on a global scale the proof of this theory becomes even more overwhelming.
This sometimes can literally be predicted before you even see the show based on the studio that did it, the genre, the author/manga-ka, and a few other tell-tale factors, but it’s not like this just suddenly started happening, it’s been like this for a while. Great example, if I or someone else says a show was done by Gainax or CLAMP, if you’ve been in this clusterf*ck of a hobby long enough, you know almost exactly what that entails. Obviously you don’t know the details of the show, but you can picture at least what the ending is going to be like (coughcoughmindscrewcoughcough), yet most of the shows they produced are considered ‘works of art’ by a majority of anime fans the world over.
So, yet another infringement on my pet peeve of inconsistency/unfair bias, why would you use the “too cliche” excuse for one show and not the other, which tends to be a bigger perpetrator of this?
If you don’t like an anime, just say you don’t like it and leave it at that. If someone, like me, asks you ‘why’ just say you just don’t like the show or the genre, which is also way more understandable than “It’s too cliche”, but don’t give such a non-reason that would contradict any show you like, that’s just being childish, puerile, and narrow-minded.
F*ck Everybody…The Life of a (Slight) Misanthropist 