Forum - View topicThe Worst Anime of Winter 2024
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YourNameIsMitsuha
Posts: 61 |
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Little girl forcing others into fetish fantasies isn't sexualizing that little girl? Is it possible that you have not watched the show, or perhaps you haven't understood it? I have watched it. I enjoy aspects of it. And I have gotten a fair helping of "ick" from it. And if cartoons don't count, then it follows that by your standards all fiction should be watchable by all audiences of all ages, because hey, it's not real, right? Not right. Wrong. Age restrictions and advisories are put on media for a reason. This particular anime is one that I could not possibly tell anyone else to watch because anyone could and probably should be disgusted by it. And for that reason it is 100% the worst of this season. This anime could have been made about people of any age, but they chose very young characters. I don't support that. Was this anime enjoyable once you filter out all of that? Yeah, i watched it the morning after its release all season. I am deeply disappointed by their choice to tackle every fetish they could, because they are all wildly different, so I only was really interested in one or two episodes before being put off by the rest. But yeah the humor was okay, nothing special, and it was decently well written. Not the worst anime of the season by MOST of its components. BUT, the age thing is pretty major, and that alone is enough to make it 100% unrecommendable. |
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Philville
 Posts: 158 |
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I'm honestly fine with you disagreeing with me and critiquing my point (because I don't really take these things personally), and I'm glad we can have this important discussion in a thread where it seems relevant, but you'll forgive me for saying that it's honestly somewhat lazy of you to call others lazy without doing your homework, especially since you are claiming that language isn't being using precisely here. "Judging things based purely on whether you liked them or not is not criticism, it's an opinion." -- The word "criticism" comes from the Greek kritikos—krinein, which means "to judge". If we're going to play the linguistic accuracy card, then yes, criticism is, by definition, an opinion. Art "critics" have been acknowledging this since well before "criticism" became a professionalized field (arguably from the seventeenth century onwards, in the Western tradition, although criticism has obviously been an integral component of the field of aesthetics since Antiquity). "You can have objective standards as to whether a show is successful (or "good") or not. Most obviously, it's only valid, except in the most extreme cases, to critique a show based on how successfully it achieves what its own goals are." -- OK, I'm willing to roll with this as a thought experiment. Now my questions are: (1) who defines these "objective standards"? (2) How do we know what a show's "own goals are", bearing in mind that these series involve many people and different creative visions? (3) How do we measure objectively "whether a show is successful"? (4) What does "successful" mean? (5) Does all of this apply to a painting, or literature, or a film by someone who has been dead for a long time, and whose "intentions" we may never know? I mention these examples because you brought up "Art" with a capital "A". I'm not suggesting that there is no such thing as commonly accepted criteria that critics can agree on when evaluating a work of art, only that personal opinions will necessarily factor in (we are persons, after all). EDIT: Because I take these matters seriously, I looked this up after my original post, and I think this paragraph from the Encylopedia Britannica article on "Art Criticism" (https://www.britannica.com/art/art-criticism) gets to the heart of the matter:
Last edited by Philville on Wed Mar 27, 2024 12:42 pm; edited 5 times in total |
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Jabootu
Posts: 74 |
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YourNameIsMitsuha:
Obviously, and moreover obviously I'm not going to argue that your personal take on the material is subject to being called "right" or "wrong." You are 100% correct that you got a fair helping of ick from it. Fair enough. I'm just noting that your reaction isn't universally held. What can I say? It's a cartoon. I have no belief whatsoever that watching a cartoon is going to turn someone into a sexual predator, just as I don't believe that, say, playing D&D is going to make you a Satanist. And I was around when that idea was being bandied around. (Or that horror and crime comics will make you a homicidal maniac or juvenile delinquent, or that rap music will make you a cop killer, or that....) I'll also say that the characters in no way act like middle schoolers, especially Tres Magica. They aren't designed to look like them in the main part, they don't act like 13 years olds, and the vocal performances definitely don't comport with the characters being that young. To the extent that "coding" is an actual thing, the characters are not coded as children. Save Alice, of course. Also, again, it's a cartoon, man. Is Alice sexualized? Well, Alice isn't ever stripped or herself subjected to anything. The mommy play / diaper stuff was so boring to me that I fast forwarded past it, although again not because I was offended but because I was so thoroughly uninterested in it. I guess if that's your thing it might be read as sexualizing her, but far less directly than the other characters are. Even then Alice never seems to derive sexual satisfaction from it. She's just playing with dolls on a grander scale. Betsy Wetsy in this case. I'd say content warnings can be more often useful than age restrictions, which aren't really restrictions. Many parents let kids under 18 watch R rated movies, though. And even with content warnings, now that basically every single non-animated movie made before the 1980s has a "smoking" warning attached to it...well, you're kind of undermining what a content warning is with that stuff. |
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Jabootu
Posts: 74 |
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Key: Sincerely sorry to serial post after your warning, but I'm carrying two discussions on at the same time here and as you can see, I tend to write long. I hope nobody finds my commenting style disruptive.
Philville wrote:
First, I'm glad tossing ideas back and forth doesn't offend you, because gads, imagine the sort of life a person would be living if it did. Second...I have to admit, by the time you start tracking down the etymology of words you might be working at this harder than I'm willing to. You seem to be going towards abstraction, while I'm trying to go in the opposite direction. So it's possible we're just talking past each other here. I don't think artistic intentions are nearly as opaque as you make them out to be, at least in the vast majority of cases. Solo Leveling and Demon Slayer want, in the main, to be exciting kick-ass fighting shows. Romcoms want to evoke warm fuzzies. Comedies want to be funny. Slice of Life shows want to relax the viewers. Dramas want to tug at the heartstrings. I believe you're straining a bit too hard to muddy the waters here. Yes, there's a certain amount of subjective play in any artistic work, but in the main the goals of the vast majority of them are not difficult to decode. Works by people a long time ago? Sure, you can figure them out in most cases. It's not like Shakespeare's motives in his work are that hard to for a modern viewer or reader to discern. Just as as I have no doubt Frieren will be understandable to viewers several hundred years from now. Indeed, the recent explosive success of anime and manga (and K-dramas and...) in the West all inherently suggest that viewers and readers can readily discern the motives of works from people from very different cultures and experiences. The anime K-On! (and K-On!!), a philosophical comedy by a young Japanese woman in her '20s about high school girls in a band (and I've never particularly been interested in music), struck me to my core when I first watched it. It's now as engraved in my soul as pretty much anything I have ever watched or read. To be frank, I think the idea of cultural barriers or any other barriers in Art is more hooey than anything else. Indeed, one core thing that marks Art from Entertainment (not that Entertainment is necessarily a lessor thing) is that people from different cultures and time periods can understand the work because it speaks to them generally as humans rather than just commenting on or representing the contemporary cultural zeitgeist. Shakespeare wrote of love and murder and sex and politics and a myriad of other things that we understand hundreds of years later and that will continue to be understood hundreds of years from now. |
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Spastic Minnow
 Bargain HunterExempt from Grammar Rules  Posts: 4613 Location: Gainesville, FL |
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They should probably just surrender the bulk of this article to someone else, some independent voice that makes an effort to really look at the actually worst shows, Like Jeff from My Mother's Basement or like that. The regulars can also briefly list these "worst of what I watched" choices.
It's all I could do myself. Dr. Elise has a great concept, but can't even bother to ever tell you what she did in her past life that made here the sole scapegoat of a country's demise. Strongest Tank was aggressively bland and I sometimes got it confused with... Banished From The Heroes Paty(s2) which drove me crazy focusing on the questionable hero too much, dropping the more interesting plot (runes inscribed on monsters) and, according to spoilers, ruined the best parts of the source's conclusion with the hero. But yeah, are they the actual worst? I actually got through them all, how bad could they really be? |
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Lily Garden
 Posts: 32 |
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[quote="YourNameIsMitsuha"][quote="Jabootu"]
Given that Gushing is parodying magical girl shows, which tend to have a very young cast, and is parodying Precure specifically, which has a middle school cast, I don't think the creators could have made the characters differently aged without making the allusions less apparent. You could argue about how that makes you feel but I don't think the statement "well they could have just made the cast of Gushing a different age" fully takes into account how the creators of Gushing were trying to craft a particular parody with very close allusions to Precure. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now to forestall serial posting I will go directly into my worst of: I did not truly have a worst of the season; My Instant Death Ability was stupid fun poking at isekai tropes and Undead Adventurer was decent fantasy fare if a bit generic in places I did drop Tis time for torture simply because I ran out of time in the week to watch things and episodic series are the easiest to pick up and put down. I might go back and finish it when I have the time. |
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Vanadise
 Posts: 498 |
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Well, I'll just throw in my two cents and say that while this article was entertaining to read, it definitely should be "Most Disappointing" rather than "Worst". I can't blame people for not even bothering to watch the actual worst shows, since there are plenty that are obviously bad right from the outset.
Probably the most disappointing thing that I stuck with for too long was Metallic Rouge, for the same reasons other people have listed. It's got a cool aesthetic and the leads have great chemistry, but pretty much everything else about the show ended up being a complete mess. I am also glad to see that I'm not the only person who didn't really enjoy Delicious in Dungeon. It's not bad, but I gave it three episodes and it just completely failed to hook me. I just don't care about food porn. Maybe I'll watch more later if I'm bored, but I don't really get why everybody else I know is raving about it. An honorable mention for me would be Bang Bravern, which I do want to say, I am enjoying--it's consistently hilarious and a great love letter to classic super robot anime--but I was hoping it'd have some strong character development and a serious story to go along with it, and it hasn't done that. The concept of "super robot in a real robot show" feels pretty underutilized considering that the real robots have hardly mattered since the first episode, and the human cast outside of Isami, Smith, and Lulu are all entirely forgettable. It's fun and I'm sure I'll finish watching it, but I'm disappointed that my opinion is "funny and clever mecha show" when I feel like, with more time and development, it could've been "all-time classic masterpiece." |
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killjoy_the
 Posts: 2460 |
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As someone who didn't think the first three episodes were good either, it gets better. I know how unconvincing these types of messages usually are, but to me it gets significantly better at around episode 5, and has been on a trend for getting better still. I've never cared much for the cooking aspects of the manga either, but really liked how fully realized the world felt and the characters (though at the start I definitely feel like Senshi and Marcille are quite one-note) |
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Wack Sage
 Posts: 31 |
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Surprised to see DungeonMeshi listed since I see everyone hyping it up. Felt like I was the only one who didn't get the hype. I don't hate it or anything but it just seemed like an "alright" show to me.
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Philville
Posts: 158 |
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I'm not a critic by profession, but I had the etymology handy because I'm a scholar and there always seems to be endless debate about whether criticism is objective or subjective. I was secretly hoping you wouldn't bring up Shakespeare, because that's actually a perfect example of us not being able to definitively make out the author's original "intentions" (please trust me on this, I personally know people with PhDs on Shakespeare who have spent the past years reading through literally thousands of books on the topic). Yes, we can arguably detect "universal" values and appeal in his art, and a study guide like Sparknotes will tell you all about the "themes, motifs and symbols" in his plays, but the fact is that scholars who have devoted their lives to studying his work still can't decide if he was Catholic, heterosexual, or even a glove-maker's son from Stratford-Upon-Avon as we are taught in school, since some seriously claim that he didn't even write his own plays, as I'm sure you're aware (all of which can influence the way in which you read a particular play). The fact is that there is very little we know about the man himself, so it really takes a lot of confidence for anyone to claim with certainty that we know exactly what he "intended" with all of his different works (which were obviously also written to make a living, unless you buy into the theory that his plays were secretly written by an aristocrat). His writing is also a pefect example of how art can also be entertainment, since people attending his plays ranged from merchants and prostitutes to the king and queen, and I'm pretty sure that, whoever he was, he never expected his plays to be read in a classroom or to be discussed in an anime thread. I don't want to go further off topic, but the fact is that "authorial" intention (or "goals", or "motives") is tricky business, and that isn't just the case for artists who died half a millenum ago. Hell, plenty of mangaka contradict themselves in interviews, or change their minds about their own work (Akira Toriyama is a great case in point, and make no mistake, I have nothing but respect for the man). Sometimes, creators can choose to be deliberately elusive regarding their art, like David Lynch, who doesn't like answering questions about the "meaning" of his films, or David Chase, who famously refused to explain the final scene of The Sopranos. The point is that it isn't "lazy" to say that criticism is subjective, simply because "criticism" is a fluid historical category, and something performed by people, who necessarily have varying perspectives and prejudices. There may be prevaling standards of "taste" which provide some sort of consensus regarding the criteria for something being "successful", but as I'm sure you realize, tastes vary from person to person, and can change significantly over time (just think of all of the painters and musicians who were only appreciated after their deaths, or the many anime series that were considered masterpieces in the 70s or 80s that no one really talks about anymore). I'm not trying to muddy the waters, or to defend the title of this article and how it's advertised. I am simply pointing out that it isn't humanly possible to have an "objective" opinion on something. Your point about romcoms, shonen, and slice-of-life is valid, but that's arguably a matter of target demographic, and thus marketing (let's not get started on genre mashups and the arbitrary way in which a lot of series are categorized). The intended audience isn't the same thing as artistic intention, and by extension, criticism is always a matter of interpretation (hence the irony of people arguing about this or that critic being "too subjective"). Personally, I do think that "art" can transcend time and cultural barriers. I wouldn't be watching anime (in Japanese) if I didn't believe that. And for the record, K-On! is one of my favorite series of all time -- so I'm with you there.
I dropped it too for lack of time but I didn't find it disappointing, which is a relief given the other disappointments of the season. I sometime wonder whether series with an "episodic" format like this have it easier or harder, but it definitely isn't easy to keep audiences invested week in, week out. |
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cutslo
Posts: 63 |
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I don't think nobody actually expects a scientific investigation into what is objectively the worst anime of the season from an article like this. I mean, the closest you'll ever get to that would be just to point out what rated the lowest on MAL or something, and everyone can just look that up easily (it's Delusional Monthly, by the way). Something like this will only ever be "here's some things we personally thought were pretty bad in this season and we want to write about", only with a more catchy title.
It's just that it's pretty eyerolling when every writer feels the need to drop the same disclaimer up front instead of owning that their "worst of the season" might possibly not actually be the one everyone agrees on. If you're going to do that, you might as well just change the title too. By the way, worst show of the season is Metallic Rouge. Disappointment matters to me more than something that was never going to be good in the first place actually not being good. And when it occasionally doesn't suck, that's not a point in its favor, only a reminder that it didn't have to be this way. And that's not "but surely some isekai is worse and Metallic Rouge's OP is good tho", no, I honestly think that to me there is no worse show in this season than Metallic Rouge. And That's a fact. Last edited by cutslo on Wed Mar 27, 2024 7:56 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2314 |
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I can understand folks not getting into Dungeon Meshi. It wasn't, like, generally transcendent, or anything? It just had an unusual hook that it explored with way more passion, attention to detail, and polish than most shows, and it executed on character fundamentals decently besides. If its unique(-ish; food themes are getting more common I suppose) hook didn't appeal to you, especially after a few episodes, I can't imagine any of the rest of the show changing that. Watching what crazy way their party'd dig into the dungeon's ecology next really was core to its appeal IMO.
"It's hard to figure out the author's intent; we can only guess" doesn't imply that (all of?) criticism is subjective, just that you have uncertainty -- maybe great uncertainty -- about what the author's goal was. If someone's throwing darts at a target, but a curtain hides the target from you, the target hasn't disappeared. There are of course plenty of cases where authorial intent is murky even to the artist or constantly shifting or something, and maybe even rare cases where it's just straight-up ill-defined, and there are plenty of components of most criticism that are quite intentionally "just, like, my opinion, man". However, anyone who has set out to create art knows perfectly well there are many occasions where you have a pretty clear vision and simply fail to execute on it; where failure is a 'skill issue', not a difference in artistic vision. That kind of failure can be objectively, albeit with uncertainty, inferred and commented on. This seems largely irrelevant to this thread, though. People are mostly complaining that even the reviewers themselves disavow the goal stated in the piece's title; in many cases they're not saying they interpret "worst" differently, but that they explicitly don't plan to write about what they felt was worst. That doesn't personally really bother me; it almost feels like a cheeky tradition of the ANN writers at this point to play pretty liberally with this kind of ranking assignment, I guess? But, I can see why maybe people feels it's click-bait-y, or why it might bother people who are new to ANN more, or some such. I do kind of wonder if there was a time period where it wasn't so common to be so playful with the assigning of 'worst'. I have the vague impression that a half-decade ago it wasn't, but that's as likely a false memory on my part as a real one. Might be fun to dig up some of the old columns and try to get a sense if it sort of became more fashionable over time to play with the idea of 'worst' more. |
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Covnam
 Posts: 3666 |
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I'll echo this as I really didn't care for the food porn aspect either (hard to get enticed with fantasy food you can't make), but if you enjoy fantasy creatures, ecology and the like, then stick around and you might enjoy yourself 
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Takkun4343
 Posts: 1504 Location: Englewood, Ohio |
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Personally, I second whoever suggested renaming it from "The Worst" to "Our Worst". Rolls off the tongue better, fits the end product better, and still technically correct!
It's okay if you disapprove of Gushing Over's approach to ecchi, just don't act like you're morally superior because of it. At first it saddened me to see Hokkaido Gals make the official list, but I can't stay annoyed at the decision knowing why it's on the list. 
Personally, my worst of the season is Ninja Kamui. The action animation is solid, but it's a little too excessive on the murder for its own good. That and it's really running Higan's angst about his family being dead into the ground. |
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ThrowMeOut
Posts: 260 |
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It's a shame there's not more reviewers digging around in the trash here. Consuming and dissecting garbage shows can be quite fascinating. My partner and I have had more in-depth conversations about the bad shows than good ones. Where they went wrong, what they could have done instead, what their intentions were, where they ran out of money, ect. ect. Though I understand that time is limited and an article about popular shows will get way more clicks than an article about why Fluffy Paradise imploded, or whatever.
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