State of the Subreddit - Looking at r/anime heading into 2026
Howdy folks, hope everyone has had a great 2025 and is looking forward to the new year. As we wrap up the year, we wanted to put together something of a meta thread discussing notable changes to the sub in the past year, and just generally get a sense of what people are looking for in r/anime as we head into 2026. So let's dig into the meatier topics of the past year!
# [We've got a quick survey to get a sense of what the community is looking for out of r/anime](https://forms.gle/64irZkVDE6jNBYLr5)
# The Anime Specific Rule
While nothing has changed on this front in quite some time, this year definitely brought the most substantial discussions on the matter in quite a few years. For anyone unaware, r/anime is specifically a subreddit for animation produced by Japanese animation studios. This year did bring a couple discussion points though, so we might as well run through them:
First off was *To Be Hero X* which has Aniplex involved as a producer, but the primary animation studios were all Chinese. There was a not insignificant amount of Japanese involvement in other avenues, and the series debuted with a Japanese dub that Crunchyroll had incorrectly labeled as the original for some time. Second was *Lord of Mysteries* which was a Chinese series through and through, but was again on Crunchyroll and has an established audience that wanted to discuss it here. And third and least notably was *Who Made Me a Princess*, an isekai series based on a Korean webnovel with a Chinese animated adaptation which came with a Japanese dub. Again on Crunchyroll. Not as big a name, so we didn't see as much discussion about it, but still worth bringing up.
Right now, the view of the mod team is that anime is a distinct culture of Japan, though it has prominent influence on animated works produced around the world. We don’t view anime as an aesthetic, an art style, a set of themes/genres, where it's streaming, or anything else. With the sheer volume of anime that has been (and will be) produced, we currently have a truly massive scope, spanning thousands of movies, series, shorts, and music videos. We aren't currently looking to expand that even further. The community is also generally more focused on the 70+ seasonal anime airing at any given time. Any expansion of scope inevitably gives less priority to the seasonal shows that are already niche.
There were a variety of ideas presented about ways we could potentially expand the scope of the subreddit, but the bulk of these tended to feel less like genuine ideas targeted at improving r/anime, and more as ways to justify one or two shows being added to the subreddit because people wanted to talk about those ones specifically.
For now, we’re pretty content with the scope of the subreddit and aren’t looking to make changes. That said, we’re always keeping an eye on the community in case something else makes sense.
# Engagement on r/anime
[Based on comments per month, we can say that activity on r\/anime is down at the present.](https://preview.redd.it/revzk9mfzt9g1.png?width=1130&format=png&auto=webp&s=7020fc23aa50aa009c1bf69b6eafe23ddaaf4c0d)
Part of this is that we’re inevitably tied to the relevance of whatever is airing. With Frieren S2 and Jujutsu Kaisen S3 both airing in January, I suspect we’ll be back up. We’re also at a time when text based engagement is broadly down as people move to more consumable platforms rather than ones they directly engage with. That said, there’s certainly a lot of room to look at what is and isn’t working on the sub and consider what options might be available if we’re looking to make the subreddit more engaging.
This is always a balance. More comments just for the sake of them isn’t something that we want to do. The priority from the mod team’s perspective is that we want to have varied and meaningful discussion on r/anime. We want r/anime to be somewhere that people can go for a sense of community and for things that are interesting and engaging within the context of anime at large. But that's not something we can just do on our own. We can provide the canvas for people to operate on, but without people doing interesting things with it, we won't see improvements in engagement.
# Fanart and Cosplay
A few years back fanart and cosplay were allowed to be posted as images again, and overall the tide has never fully turned back to the absolute glut we were seeing circa Spring 2020 when the frontpage was, on average, 50% fanart at any given time. Overall it’s been mostly a net positive now, as it’s cool to see, but it hasn’t been killing everything else. That said, we definitely had seen some users try to monetize our community in various ways, and were looking at what we might want to do about it.
And then the cosplay wave came in. This was never that much in terms of total numbers, but they tended to shoot straight to the top, and they tended to be NSFW. Most of these were specifically advertising OnlyFans accounts, and that definitely drew some ire from a lot of people. While some of it was well intentioned, a lot of it was not.
In the end, the decision was made to disallow promotional content from fan creators whose accounts we determine to be “primarily centered around advertising goods and services will have their posts removed if they advertise (directly or indirectly)”. This does not apply to say, a YouTube channel or website that also has ads on it. Overall, this change seems to have worked out pretty well. We’re still getting fanart and cosplay, but now without as much of a financial incentive.
That said, I think there was a bit of disappointment on our end how much of the discussion was either “think of the children!” or some flavour of misogyny. The general anti-sexualization sentiment that came up was in stark contrast to just about every other type of content on r/anime (such as clips or recommendation threads) and the concerns about advertising were not reflected in fanart posts that also were transparently advertising. A large number of bans were handed out in this time over some choice words people were using about the cosplayers.
# Other Points of Note
# Flair Changes
The \[Writing\] and \[Watch This!\] flairs have been replaced with \[Essay\] and \[Review\]. The Watch This! Project had a good run, but after more than a decade there wasn’t much continued participation, and so replacing it with a more general review flair was seen as the most obvious direction, especially since it opens the door to a more varied set of opinions than focused praise. Thus far we do seem to have been seeing more users take advantage of the \[Review\] flair in particular.
# Source Material Corner
We've recently been able to implement some changes to how the Source Material Corner works. It's no longer auto-collapsed on the app anymore, which hopefully makes more aware of it's existence. We were also able to implement an improved and more comprehensive autoflagging method to more completely enforce the Source Material Corner rule. Lastly, we've also added additional clarification that the Source Material Corner is not specifically and singularly about explicit spoilers, and have different removal reasons to make this as clear as possible.
Have you noticed any differences in Episode discussion threads in the last month? And how do you feel about the Source Material Corner rule and source readers talking about the source in general. Does the presence of source readers in the threads affect your desire to use the Episode Discussion threads?
# Changes to Subscriber Counts
I’m sure a lot of people have noticed that Reddit changed from showcasing number of subscribers to number “active members”. Alongside this, they also changed something about either how subscribers occur or what is counted, because while we were monitoring this, the numbers had sudden, very distinct dropoffs at a couple of points in the fall. This hasn't noticeably impacted activity on the sub. We’re going to be re-evaluating exactly how we do events as a result, because X million subscribers is basically dead at the moment.
For everyone that's made it this far, thanks for helping make r/anime a great community. We're hoping to make even more of it in the coming year.
[We hope you're enjoying the holiday season, and that you have a happy new year!](https://preview.redd.it/qc7nwn0zyt9g1.png?width=1692&format=png&auto=webp&s=4553f846e5f000d8b94709abfff18703e875f34f)
# [We've got a quick survey to get a sense of what the community is looking for out of r/anime](https://forms.gle/64irZkVDE6jNBYLr5)
# The Anime Specific Rule
While nothing has changed on this front in quite some time, this year definitely brought the most substantial discussions on the matter in quite a few years. For anyone unaware, r/anime is specifically a subreddit for animation produced by Japanese animation studios. This year did bring a couple discussion points though, so we might as well run through them:
First off was *To Be Hero X* which has Aniplex involved as a producer, but the primary animation studios were all Chinese. There was a not insignificant amount of Japanese involvement in other avenues, and the series debuted with a Japanese dub that Crunchyroll had incorrectly labeled as the original for some time. Second was *Lord of Mysteries* which was a Chinese series through and through, but was again on Crunchyroll and has an established audience that wanted to discuss it here. And third and least notably was *Who Made Me a Princess*, an isekai series based on a Korean webnovel with a Chinese animated adaptation which came with a Japanese dub. Again on Crunchyroll. Not as big a name, so we didn't see as much discussion about it, but still worth bringing up.
Right now, the view of the mod team is that anime is a distinct culture of Japan, though it has prominent influence on animated works produced around the world. We don’t view anime as an aesthetic, an art style, a set of themes/genres, where it's streaming, or anything else. With the sheer volume of anime that has been (and will be) produced, we currently have a truly massive scope, spanning thousands of movies, series, shorts, and music videos. We aren't currently looking to expand that even further. The community is also generally more focused on the 70+ seasonal anime airing at any given time. Any expansion of scope inevitably gives less priority to the seasonal shows that are already niche.
There were a variety of ideas presented about ways we could potentially expand the scope of the subreddit, but the bulk of these tended to feel less like genuine ideas targeted at improving r/anime, and more as ways to justify one or two shows being added to the subreddit because people wanted to talk about those ones specifically.
For now, we’re pretty content with the scope of the subreddit and aren’t looking to make changes. That said, we’re always keeping an eye on the community in case something else makes sense.
# Engagement on r/anime
[Based on comments per month, we can say that activity on r\/anime is down at the present.](https://preview.redd.it/revzk9mfzt9g1.png?width=1130&format=png&auto=webp&s=7020fc23aa50aa009c1bf69b6eafe23ddaaf4c0d)
Part of this is that we’re inevitably tied to the relevance of whatever is airing. With Frieren S2 and Jujutsu Kaisen S3 both airing in January, I suspect we’ll be back up. We’re also at a time when text based engagement is broadly down as people move to more consumable platforms rather than ones they directly engage with. That said, there’s certainly a lot of room to look at what is and isn’t working on the sub and consider what options might be available if we’re looking to make the subreddit more engaging.
This is always a balance. More comments just for the sake of them isn’t something that we want to do. The priority from the mod team’s perspective is that we want to have varied and meaningful discussion on r/anime. We want r/anime to be somewhere that people can go for a sense of community and for things that are interesting and engaging within the context of anime at large. But that's not something we can just do on our own. We can provide the canvas for people to operate on, but without people doing interesting things with it, we won't see improvements in engagement.
# Fanart and Cosplay
A few years back fanart and cosplay were allowed to be posted as images again, and overall the tide has never fully turned back to the absolute glut we were seeing circa Spring 2020 when the frontpage was, on average, 50% fanart at any given time. Overall it’s been mostly a net positive now, as it’s cool to see, but it hasn’t been killing everything else. That said, we definitely had seen some users try to monetize our community in various ways, and were looking at what we might want to do about it.
And then the cosplay wave came in. This was never that much in terms of total numbers, but they tended to shoot straight to the top, and they tended to be NSFW. Most of these were specifically advertising OnlyFans accounts, and that definitely drew some ire from a lot of people. While some of it was well intentioned, a lot of it was not.
In the end, the decision was made to disallow promotional content from fan creators whose accounts we determine to be “primarily centered around advertising goods and services will have their posts removed if they advertise (directly or indirectly)”. This does not apply to say, a YouTube channel or website that also has ads on it. Overall, this change seems to have worked out pretty well. We’re still getting fanart and cosplay, but now without as much of a financial incentive.
That said, I think there was a bit of disappointment on our end how much of the discussion was either “think of the children!” or some flavour of misogyny. The general anti-sexualization sentiment that came up was in stark contrast to just about every other type of content on r/anime (such as clips or recommendation threads) and the concerns about advertising were not reflected in fanart posts that also were transparently advertising. A large number of bans were handed out in this time over some choice words people were using about the cosplayers.
# Other Points of Note
# Flair Changes
The \[Writing\] and \[Watch This!\] flairs have been replaced with \[Essay\] and \[Review\]. The Watch This! Project had a good run, but after more than a decade there wasn’t much continued participation, and so replacing it with a more general review flair was seen as the most obvious direction, especially since it opens the door to a more varied set of opinions than focused praise. Thus far we do seem to have been seeing more users take advantage of the \[Review\] flair in particular.
# Source Material Corner
We've recently been able to implement some changes to how the Source Material Corner works. It's no longer auto-collapsed on the app anymore, which hopefully makes more aware of it's existence. We were also able to implement an improved and more comprehensive autoflagging method to more completely enforce the Source Material Corner rule. Lastly, we've also added additional clarification that the Source Material Corner is not specifically and singularly about explicit spoilers, and have different removal reasons to make this as clear as possible.
Have you noticed any differences in Episode discussion threads in the last month? And how do you feel about the Source Material Corner rule and source readers talking about the source in general. Does the presence of source readers in the threads affect your desire to use the Episode Discussion threads?
# Changes to Subscriber Counts
I’m sure a lot of people have noticed that Reddit changed from showcasing number of subscribers to number “active members”. Alongside this, they also changed something about either how subscribers occur or what is counted, because while we were monitoring this, the numbers had sudden, very distinct dropoffs at a couple of points in the fall. This hasn't noticeably impacted activity on the sub. We’re going to be re-evaluating exactly how we do events as a result, because X million subscribers is basically dead at the moment.
For everyone that's made it this far, thanks for helping make r/anime a great community. We're hoping to make even more of it in the coming year.
[We hope you're enjoying the holiday season, and that you have a happy new year!](https://preview.redd.it/qc7nwn0zyt9g1.png?width=1692&format=png&auto=webp&s=4553f846e5f000d8b94709abfff18703e875f34f)
Commentaires
Keep up the good work mod team 💪. Everything looks like its going well.
[](#modabuse)
I think there can also be an aspect of comprehensive posts not leaving much to discuss in the comments. For an extreme example, take a poor What to Watch? post where the author doesn't include what they've watched or anything they like. They'll inevitably get people asking those things in the comments, and then responding (maybe even multiple times for the same question) which will inflate the comment count. If they instead had all that information in the post in the first place (which I think we'd agree is more desirable), they'd not get nearly as much engagement on their post.
And I do think that engagement (and particularly early engagement) feeds into Reddit's algorithms and what it choses to promote and thus reach a critical mass.
Imo, it's also possible to have such good posts, that there's just nothing much to say but "Good job" or "That was interesting, thanks!".
It's one of the reasons I don't think we should be selling out for any kind of engagement.
> Besides spotlighting such posts
We've done that in the past, and it was not very effective. The spotlight posts rarely were seen by people and I think Reddit in general is too real time focused for something getting a 2nd life to really be that impactful.
Even worse, pinning something takes it out of /new (and maybe others, I don't recall exactly). So sometimes pinning a post actually kills it's performance. Which is completely unintuitive.
More seriously though, yeah I would say it’s that a lot of the one-time ideas have been done (though polls like “Best anime of year X” can still happen every year). Plus, since it’s no longer lockdown, there’s the effort to engagement ratio for taking a risk with novel content, especially when most Reddit posts die down after a couple days.
Yeah, knowing that if your post isn't picked up in the first couple of hours it basically dies forever can be a pain, though it does make it especially satisfying when something does take off.
The structure of Reddit itself encourages churn, probably even more so now than during the lowercase reddit days, as now they want to promote scrolling as engagement.
My dream would be to be able to set custom weights for various flairs or something akin to algorithm hints. Tildes has [supervotes](https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes), which I think would be a great way to help boost high quality content. Though I also think that the community would not use it well (like how downvotes aren't supposed to be a disagree button). But I do think it would be really nice if the mod team was able to like give certain posts a boost to the algorithm or otherwise just directly influence the performance of high quality posts.
But then reddit wouldn't really be reddit anymore, so I don't think they'd ever do that.
In a similar vein, we heavily restrict embedded posts, because simply by virtue of having an image (even a completely irrelevant one), posts do way better than a text only equivalent. One can look at r/animequestions, and one might expect to see a lot of text posts, as questions are heavily biased towards text. But no, 20/23 posts on their front page have an image (which tbh, is high for them).
At one point, I floated letting What This! or Writing posts directly embed a relevant image, but that was shot down, since it was pointed out that then you wouldn't be able to edit the text on the post (because you can't edit text on an image post) and also if it was misflaired, it would have to be removed instead of simply being reflaired (since the correct flair wouldn't be allowed to have images). And that would be too confusing / too much friction for users.
Outside of just wanting to get them to a point that I am happy with releasing them another “anxiety” (for lack of a better word) I have about posting them is the fear that most people will ignore them in favor of whatever episode discussion or other easy to engage with post happens to be up that particular day. It’s kind of eye rolling to put a lot of work into a proper write up just to have it barely break 100 upvotes and five comments while a fanart of a popular character gets upwards of 2000. Honestly, that’s probably on me for caring too much about fake Internet points.
I honestly don't know what the mod team could do that it isn't doing already, but I keep thinking about putting together something relevant to my interests - BL, shoujosei, anime women over 40 might like, bad sci-fi wheelchairs - then remember how people downvote anything queer, and how my one post about BL anime years ago got me lots of reddit cares messages, and I just wonder if it's worth the headache. The other side of the sub growing so large is all the people who don't spend much time here, and think they can talk to people any old way, like they're on Twitter.
I don't know. Maybe I'll get brave in the new year.
[](#mugiwait)
[](#mugiwait)
I always enjoy insightful discussion posts, like the writing club, or short and sweet sundays, or those kind of things, but I also can't help but notice that those kind of posts usually don't get much engagement, especially not compared to the amount of work that goes into them. The good ones are a labor of love, and it's hard to keep up the energy for a labor of love when it gets fifteen upvotes before being buried under a mudslide of "here are my top ten favorite psychopath MCs" and "literally everyone says this show is brilliant but is it worth watching?" and teaser image threads full of misinformation and breathless speculation.
I'm really not savvy enough with reddit under the hood to know how to remedy that, or whether it's even possible to remedy that if it turns out that the flood of low-quality content is what most people actually want.
On the upside, less of the shitpost dreck seems to be making it to the top of the feed. Whatever the algorithm happens to throw into my home feed, at least when I come to the sub, it seems like it's mostly episode discussions, news, and posts that are trying to create conversations.
I dunno, I'm an old weirdo and I recognize that what I want out of a sub may not align with what the majority wants. I actually like writing essays, but it's hard to want to when I can expect maybe ten people to read one and two to comment, on a good day.
I can't really think of anything I'd want to see other than news and discussion threads
It's so hard to win. Hopefully with Awards coming up we'll see a number of writeups with flair that show what we're looking for and how easy it can be to make engaging content. Hopefully I myself can be motivated to do writeups, I can complain all I want about the lack of engagement but at the end of the day I've got writing experience and proceed not to use it.
One thing I like about rewatch threads is the "top comments" section from the previous episode, which often highlights great writing that otherwise would've been overlooked because it came in a few hours after the post. I wonder if there's anything to the idea of spotlighting comments or posts across the sub? Maybe a rotating mod or top user picks out a couple favorites for the daily/weekly discussion? Then again, I really don't know how many people actually engage with the community highlights, or read the discussion posts.
It's a topic with some discussion value in a specific niche, but difficult to research; almost always any production materials are from the American side only.
Yeah, one thing that definitely came up over the spring and summer is that we don't want to have the rule be "r/anime is a subreddit for Japanese anime and also this list of exceptions other shows".
That is the logical stance. Of course in practice we've already got a list of exceptions like the ones mentioned in your other response because "creative control" is an ambiguous and murky concept that clashes with the attempt to have clear cut rules and solid lines. The edge cases aren't numerous enough to be a big deal, but I do find it funny that the mods have to resort to production blood quantum to determine whether or not some projects should be allowed here.
[](#girlslastdab)
Perhaps the prime directive for next year should be to make people care
[](#bigthink)
One of those things where I feel it would be a bit diminishing to the other countries and their work to just call everything anime too. Especially in the long run. These works are more than strong enough to stand on their own and be something to be proud of under their specific term imo.
That's definitely the dream, though the reality has more been that popular Chinese series go to their own separate subreddits and don't really coalesce in the same way that the anime fandom tends to.
> Has there been much thought towards locked cross posts for the popular / hyped things in the meantime?
We talked about it but there wasn't much interest on our end in "picking winners".
Maybe we need a bit more critical mass (both audience and shows of interest) to begin with for these areas to have serviceable communities. Will be fun to see how things evolve, definitely seems China in particular is going to continue stepping up their game.
Yes, [it was rejected here](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1ke6sdt/meta_thread_month_of_may_04_2025/mqgfwz3/)
I understand the purpose of the SMC, and I do think discussion of the source material itself, and direct comparisons to it, belong there. But I've had comments deleted a couple times for saying things like "I enjoyed the manga so I have high hopes for this" or "This show could go several different ways depending on how they interpret the novel," and I don't think it's reasonable for comments that simply *acknowledge* the source material to be considered out of line. I don't think it's out of line to discuss things that are unique to the anime, like music and animation, in the *context* of what they add to a story that obviously didn't have them in another medium.
Look, I know it's annoying when some asshole who has obviously read the manga or the novel says, "Oh, I'm just speculating, but I wonder if the bad guy is actually secretly her brother? I bet we'll find out next episode!" or some shit that is *obviously* a fucking spoiler. I hate those people as much as you do. And I also think it's reasonable to keep episode discussions free of arguments about which medium is better. But a lot of episode discussion threads are already pretty threadbare and full of the same vapid one-sentence exclamations, and I don't think it serves anyone to delete otherwise substantive comments just for acknowledging that an adaptation has a source.
For example, discussing how a frame from the manga where no background was used, was changed in the anime to incorporate a specific background and light changes which made the scene much more expressive, to me is talking about the anime. Or the way in which an anime changed the order the appearance of scenes or other changes can show how the anime is being better adapted to the medium.
In a very productive and useful way, that people who have never read the manga would benefit from, you can talk about anime and anime direction while comparing and contrasting to the source material. It shows how anime directors and artists are taking the source material and growing it in the anime in deliberate ways.
I understand why an in depth discussion of the manga art that has nothing to do with the anime has no place in the general anime discussion threads, and I agree with that general philosophy.
But the way the Source Material corner rules are currently defined makes is *very* difficult to discuss such significant directoral choices in the general thread, or virtually impossible, requiring oyu to use the source material corner--which disengages you with a lot of the r/Anime community.
I feel like hte rules should be tailored not to eliminate any comparisons between anime and the manga, but those that predominantly discuss the manga--where the focus remains on the anime and discussing the anime direction, it makes no sense to me to banish such discussion to the source material corner.
In the mean time, moderators go blind when trolls who don't want to promote discussion flood a thread
If you've not read the manga yourself I'm imagine it'd be a very hard thing to judge whether or not something is actually a spoiler.
I agree but don't think that means non Japanese can't make it.
Where anime becomes a Japanese thing is the handling of production. Bigger companies like kadokawa, aniplex and the studios themselves making the shows. As big as Korea's Line Webtoon is, turning popular webtoons into anime doesn't seem to be the end goal.
You know that was a dub right? The original dialogue track is Chinese, and providing sound production amounts to being outsourced really, the primary creative process, production and animation control for To Be Hero X is Chinese, so it's donghua, not anime.
>We’re also at a time when text based engagement is broadly down as people move to more consumable platforms rather than ones they directly engage with
I have noticed this too. I think people are overall just less interested in writing out there thoughts which is kind of a bummer. I would love more meaningful engagement and admit I don't exactly contribute much myself besides bitching in the Daily threads. Good posts just take a lot of time and I'm a busy man, as I'm sure many others are. Then again, it's partially a vicious cycle. Interesting posts don't seem to get a lot of engagement as I don't think a lot of (usually younger) fans are that interested in those more interesting discussions.
I think overall a lot of the issues r/anime has been experiencing this last year are more indicative of the state of the fandom at large, and not anything necessarily being done wrong by the mods (still mad though for getting temp nuked for posting the lightest imaginable spoiler for *Apocalypse Hotel*). I know it's been a few years since the COVID boom, but it still feels like 90% of people who are posting are newbies looking for recs or with too limited experience to result in meaningful and interesting discussion. A lot of discussion that isn't people asking for recs, it's people trying to convince that 90% of people to watch their own niche show and at some point that "recommendation culture" just becomes tiring.
I don't know if there's any real way to fix it though. I find a lot of people spend most of their time on TikTok or somewhere else and only come here to prove an argument or pick a fight. Call me a pessimist, but I don't know if you can exactly change that culture, which is why I've just kept my shower thoughts to the Daily thread.
I would argue otherwise. The fact that the whole community (production committee and consumers) has started shifting, yet this sub's mods decide on outdated notions just means its eventual demise. People just move on when they see every post they try to put up get shot down (including comments and even suggestions). We can track the growth of *To Be Hero X* sub and see how it correlates.
And I kind of agree with the mods stance on the issue. I think at some point you kind of have to put your big boy pants on and put your foot down. There's this increasing notion that "if it feels like anime, then it's anime" which is how you get some people to consider *Castlevania* or *Avatar: The Last Airbender* to be anime. This might seem harmless, but has too major negative effects:
1) It limits anime into being this specific style of show, rounding out a lot of the edges of the medium that give it its diversity. I don't think you can really find a definition of "anime" where both *To Be Hero X* and *Chiikawa* cohesively fit underneath it without making it too broad as to be meaningless.
2) It actually ends up hurting the domestic industries. Why does *To Be Hero X* have to be an anime and not just a donghua? Why can't *Avatar* just be a good cartoon? If we create this idea that "anime" is a style and lump any kind of serious, serialized storytelling into it, then you lose that ability for those domestic industries to create their own novelty and approaches. I don't want "American anime", I want the American industry to just make good, varied shows as much as the Japanese industry is. If anime monopolizes this space, then those industries never get to develop a niche for themselves.
Ultimately, it is on a fandom to establish rules for itself to preserve its own sanctity, and expanding definitions like this ultimately waters down what we're even here for. At that point, just make this a general animation subreddit and accept all forms of animated content from across the globe.
"distinct culture of Japan"
I agree but disagree. It is a culture of Japan but it's not like no one else can make it.
Did you all not have solo leveling on here?
Produced by A-1 Pictures, which fits they currently draw the line at
I know it can't be tricky to define what anime is. But is there a definition you have come up with?
I'm here for it tho. Anne of Green gables is an all time anime from my childhood my grandmother had us watch
Correct. There's some minor nuances for some edge cases, but that's the approach we've taken for quite a while and overall it has generally worked to make for a pretty clear scope for the subreddit with minimal grey area and a pretty good sense of cohesion. It's not perfect in everybody's eye, but right now it works fairly well.
Depends on your definition of "dying". Perpetual growth is never sustainable, despite what Wall Street shareholders expect.
[That's expressly forbidden](https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043066412-Disrupting-Communities), presuming you're talking about having bots upvote content. So we won't be doing that.
If you're talking about other kinds of moderation bots, I think you'll find that there aren't many subreddits with a more comprehensive [automation suite](https://github.com/r-anime).
Also as a note, all non mod bots are forbidden on r/anime, even if they're "good bots". We ban a number of people each week for being bots.
> Also as a note, all non mod bots are forbidden on r/anime, even if they're "good bots". We ban a number of people each week for being bots.
Oh yeah, I always found it annoying how Roboragi doesn't work here. Makes it so much simpler to clarify what series we're talking about.
There is an [extension](https://github.com/r-anime/ranime-Extension) that has a similar function but limited to anilist. You just type the name/some of the name in the "search media" box, press enter, and then click the image and it auto formats the link for your post.
It's pretty much the only reason why most of my mentions of shows are also links to to the show's anilist page. Without it, I’d probably be one of those horrible redditors that just shortens every name/uses its most common abbreviation/etc., regardless of how inaccessible it makes my comments.
[](#azusalaugh)
[example.](https://files.catbox.moe/gloale.png)
[](#utahapraises)
With shreddit stripping out some of what gives it that sense of community like CSS and comment faces, do you have any plans for when old reddit is finally shut down?
[](#curious)
[](#whippersnappers "But maybe I'll get the itch for that next year.")
I'm gone. I have no interest in dealing with shreddit's interface.
[Leave and never come back](#abandonthread)
Shreddit inspires no joy for me, so I can't imagine I will be motivated to battle against tide any further.
I mostly use the subreddit for anime news and to view discussions on episodes I found interesting. I don’t comment super often in the discussions but I definitely enjoy reading them, especially theories for more complex shows!
At some point. I don't exactly recall what caused it to break the FINAL stuff, /u/zaphodbeebblebrox or /u/badspler might know more.
But I'll be doing a rewrite of Holo bot next year probably starting in the Spring, and I'll hopefully be able to make it more modular so that it's easier to work in features like that or other things (like surveys). Holo bot is old as shit and is generally a huge pain in the ass to work with, which is why these things aren't already fixed.
Having FINAL on the episode discussion threads is actually useful to the mods too, because the last episode of a season has slightly different rules with regards to the source material.
As baseball eluded to, the wheels are coming off of old Holo with several issues internal and external piling up without anyone having interest to maintain the existing code base. I also have plenty of thoughts on moving to something new that better allows us to maintain things.
Hopefully by end of next season we should be in a better spot such that this and other issues are no longer problems.
This would also increase the infighting in the sub, since the donghua community is split between 3D and 2D with a lot of animosity between them. There's also the fact that many simply look down on the anime community for various reasons I'd rather not discuss.
> The priority from the mod team’s perspective is that we want to have varied and meaningful discussion on /r/anime
Need to get rid of the downvote button to make that happen. Most threads do not take kindly to any kind of criticism, and discussion tends to be very same-y.
We can't do anything about the basic functionality of reddit.
I recognize the importance of spoilers, but removing comments because people are clicking on spoilers and pretending to be surprised that they contain... well, spoilers, is just excessive.
[asterisks]***>!spoiler!<
[under scores]___>!spoiler!<
[tildas???]~~~>!spoiler!<
[the non breaking space unicode character (but not the markdown shortcut for it)] >!spoiler!<
That is because historically, **that would not hide text** on old reddit. That was fixed a few months ago on old reddit, but the same issue persists on some 3rd party apps which some users still use, and are no longer under development, so they'll never be fixed.
As it turns out, spoilers are not handled the same on various platforms, and vary in their behavior. So our policy is that if any platform will not hide the spoiler, than we will not allow it at all. The other fun one is if you try and nest spoiler tags, which will work as one might expect on sh reddit, but will short circuit and only hide up to the first ending tag on old reddit.
I ultimately decided it wasn't worth the effort to try and campaign for dropping support for 3rd party apps, and decided to leave it as it currently was. If you want to bring it up in the meta thread, we can restart conversations about dropping support for 3rd party apps. Though I think it'll be dependent on this survey showing that there are negligible amounts of users who use 3rd party apps.
Edit: Fuck off Automod, I'm trying to make you not look crazy. And I code blocked the spoiler tags, which I thought was allowed. I guess it's cause the only time I see the spoiler syntax code blocked it's to explain to someone how to use it (which you'd want the right syntax for).
Oof, if only. I don't even want to think about what the regex for that would look like.
[](#dighole)
[](#dighole)
In series-specific communities that a spoiler tag is *probably* going to be for that particular series, but here it could be one of thousands of different anime. For example if there's an "epic anime moments" discussion thread and someone drops a solid paragraph that's just one giant spoiler block as a top level comment with no other context, without actually checking the contents you have no idea if that would be for One Piece, Attack on Titan, K-On, or something you've never seen before.
If you don't care about spoilers then go ahead and click away at anything you come across, but some people care about avoiding them and /r/anime's one of the few places online that lets people discuss things while doing so. As someone that hasn't seen One Piece yet I appreciate having an indication of when a spoiler's for that show so I can skip past that while still reading ones for series I *have* seen and participating that way.
At least up until a couple of years ago there had been no discussion about potentially dropping the context requirement, but I guess it's worth talking about at least. I don't know if it could be added as part of the new post guidance system so people could fix it while still writing a comment rather than needing to repost with the correction though?
/u/Tonberryc to clarify, people still try and do this today. Sometimes it's obvious what is being spoiler tagged, other times, not.
At one point I floated loosening up on certain types of restricted spoilers (notably, correctly tagged spoilers followed directly by a new hidden paragraph without the same context) since it's theoretically possible to identify those, but some mods did not like the idea of loosening up the spoiler rules, so I dropped it since it would have been a lot of work to properly implement.
it does feel there’s a stronger community on the discord, apart from cdf and aqradt. maybe that’s a function of the two platforms. i think the more people who know each other more than just reddit, you will get better content and engagement on the sub. but that’s not necessarily practical.
also, i am in the camp that if you ever get comment faces working on anything other than old reddit, it would help engagement. i know that’s not possible from my understanding - otherwise it would’ve happened by now.
Reddit in general just isn't super good at facilitating more personal connections. CDF and AQRADT are better about that too but they are also more of a janky and not intended usage of reddits systems. Rewatches are probably the closest thing to a more personal experience on reddit while also using reddit more as intended.
> i think the more people who know each other more than just reddit, you will get better content and engagement on the sub. but that’s not necessarily practical.
This is super true. I will often look at a post or comment more closely if I notice the username is someone I know from the discord or is a rewatcher. I think custom user flairs also kind of help with that since if someone has one you can kind of tell that they aren't just another random account so I will often take them more seriously or go out of my way to interact with their posts.
I think the biggest community building things you can really do is have opt in somewhat high barrier events and activities. The barrier makes sure people are actually intending to put themselves out there and be consistent. Things like Rewatches, Modding, Writing Club, and Anime-Swap (A discord secret Santa event that goes every month) do a really good job of giving users a place where they feel like they belong while also being a lot more manageable and personal then reddit as a whole.
I can do it, just not natively. It would have to be opt in via the r-anime extension.
Some time ago I wrote up a proposal to have a town hall to discuss having proper 2nd party extension support for comment faces and the essentially unrestricted nature of that would allow for things like, readding every removed comment face, readding lost animations, readding historical seasonal comment faces. But some of the other mods were highly against making changes to comment faces / expanding the pool of comment faces / incurring any kind of degradation for the native experience, so I dropped it.
Adding support sh reddit support for comment faces to the r-anime extension is on my list of things todo though. It's just likely to be 2027 before I get capacity to get around to it (which would also require me rewriting the extension from scratch, because it's terribly coded compared to modern extensions).
However, if you want to get a full overview of the state of anime as a whole today (e.g. for the upcoming Winter 2026 season), or if you want to post detailed reviews and in-depth technical discussions, I can't think of anywhere better than here (unless it's traditional forums, [which I still use like this](https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com) \- despite their content making is now more YouTube based in addition to articles).
The problem is if the new generation, those born in the 21st Century or even upcoming born in the 2010s, still like to read e.g. my yet-to-be-written recommendation and analysis article (with perhaps thousands of words) on *BanG Dream It's MyGO & Ave Mujica*? And are they even interested in doing them? As someone who's probably close to being called "uncle" (bruh) I really am disconnected from them and I wonder if things have changed.
As a contrasting example - I have been in subs where even those who show the most passing interest in the topic feel welcome and that mistakes and off topic discussions aren't slammed down like they've committed some great insult, but are instead guided in a calm, affable way to why that sub wasn't the appropriate place.
I also find myself massively annoyed with the "animated within Japan" rule as those studios all send their in betweening work to foreign studios where it's cheaper. All the design, layout, and key frames will get done in house, but in betweening is still the majority of the animation frames.
I think a better barometer of what should and shouldn't be here would be what the Japanese public watches. The shows catered to their tastes would be what they would call anime - so it makes sense for us to think of it like that as well.
You don't need to have the sub rules memorized, but not knowing the rules is not a valid defense to breaking them. They exist. They're there for a reason. If you don't like that reason, you can argue about it in the [Meta Thread](https://redd.it/1pg3xx6). If you bring up a good point / argument, we might end up changing it.
> I have been in subs where even those who show the most passing interest in the topic feel welcome and that mistakes and off topic discussions aren't slammed down like they've committed some great insult, but are instead guided in a calm, affable way to why that sub wasn't the appropriate place.
I think that is a lot more viable with smaller subreddits where there isn't a constant barrage of rule breaking posts. For reference, human moderators manually removed 938 posts in November. That's about 30 a day every day. Automod on the other hand removed 6,143 posts in that time period, or about 200 posts a day every day.
If we didn't remove posts that were off topic, r/anime would quickly devolve into an even more general sub than it is right now. Which is not great, considering that reddit's subreddit architecture promotes more narrowly scoped topics.
Stuff that is autoremoved is obviously very limited, as there isn't a real human in the loop. And as for the human removals, I'm sorry to say that sometimes when it's the 500th post removal for something clearly off topic (like asking to find a manga) or is breaking 3 or 4 different rules, or is the person's 5th attempt and they've finally gotten past the automated filters, patience can run thin. That's something we can improve upon, but there's simply a lot of moderation that goes on on r/anime.
> I think a better barometer of what should and shouldn't be here would be what the Japanese public watches.
And how would you identify if a show is or isn't something that the Japanese public watches? There will be users who will endless try and argue for their show to be included, so we'd need hard data to show that it's not within scope.
This is inevitably something with some actual nuance, but the downward trend largely occurred in 2024. This year has been fairly flat, with a downturn in the Fall season, after the shows in question had wrapped up. I don't think there's any particular reason to believe that not allowing discussion of a few shows that have always been outside our scope is having a significant impact on the broad activity of the subreddit. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't see anything in the data that backs that up.
If we say that TBHX would have gotten 1,000 comments for every episode (which seems a bit generous), then that would be 24,000 comments we didn't get, or about 1.1% of comments on r/anime. Which is within the noise level of the natural comment count variance.
That's not no correlation, but that's also just the difference between a normal season and one without a few big hitters airing.
It's also worth noting that the more exclusive you make things, the less people it can attract. The mods need to decide what they care most about - keeping things set in a very particular way, or setting things up so that the sub is inviting and welcoming.
I'm not saying anything goes, but when you act snobby, rude, and aggressive against anything that doesn't fit how you want things to be, you create a space that makes even longstanding users feel less and less welcome.
People notice how things get handled - you guys are way too uptight and forceful.
Linguistically, English already has the word "animation", so it's pretty meaningless if "anime" means the exact same thing as "animation", because then we'd just use "animation" instead. Hence, it doesn't make sense to me that "anime" be used for it's Japanese meaning, since that would make the word redundant.
What exactly that difference is is a matter of debate, though I'll note that most database sites use a geographic definition of "anime". That is, that "anime" is necessarily Japanese and not an art style.
Also just because a word has roots in another language, doesn't mean that their meanings will be the same. Hence why ["mansion" in Japanese means an apartment complex](https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2015/03/15/japanese-confusing-loanwords/).
アニメーション ("animation") is the generic (and widely used) Japanese word for all forms of animation.
アニメ ("anime") can sometimes be used colloquially as a short-form slang of アニメーション, but it can also have a different meaning/connotation. Depends on context.
There's a (in)famous quote from Osamu Tezuka himself saying "It's not animation, it's anime" and if they meant something different to him then we sure as heck ought to believe it.
I'll note that the majority of users on r/anime aren't from Japan either. Look at the geographic insights for [top 3](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1ps12fd/chainsaw_man_assassin_arc_teaser_visual/) official media [posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1pujwsc/i_want_you_to_show_me_your_panties_with_a/) from the [last 30 days](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1prz3cl/dandadan_season_3_teaser_visual_2027/) (because reddit doesn't give us geographic data for the sub as a whole, only for individual posts), our userbase is 45% American, 6% Canadian, the 3rd country isn't that consistent (ranges from UK, Germany and India, looking at a few more posts, but generally below Canada and 5%).
> I’d have liked to discuss the show in the weekly episodes since it was on Crunchyroll and I watched it there along with most of my anime that season
Fun fact, [Crunchyroll also has some live action vlogging media](https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/G6X03JPMY/lisa-tv) and [whatever this ProZD show is](https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/GREX5KEXY/anime-crimes-division), so I don't think we should be taking "it's on Crunchyroll" as our definition of anime, because clearly there is some non anime on the site.
[](#ama)
I agree with another commenter that said no downvote buttons. If you don't like a certain discussion, it's best to just scroll past. Some people also need to realise that if they have nothing good to say they shouldn't say anything.
Live and let live. That's what I prefer.
Btw that is not possible. There is no platform where you can enforce no downvotes, and the only platform you can even attempt to hide it is on old reddit, which is in the vast minority of our users (I think ~5% and by far the smallest platform using r/anime).
That said, there is an overlap with the mentioned titles, with series like *To Be Hero X* showing up on Anime Corner rankings, for example. If you show that a series is getting a positive reception here, then people will want to discuss about it, so not having threads for those shows is just confusing. Might not be ideal for you, but adding series that are at least partially produced in Japan would be the best compromise. After all, you have stuff like *Solo Leveling*, which is a Korean series but produced in Japan, show up here just fine.
**Engagement:** Well, nothing much to do about it. Most people only seem to watch 2 or 3 anime per season, so when there is 70 series being released, it shouldn't be surprising that half of them become ghost towns. Most means of increasing engagement only work temporally too.
**Fanart and Cosplay:** I think the current rules are fine.
Edit: I miss when we could rate episodes!
As of currently [we already consider shows with at least 50% Japanese production / creative control to be anime](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/wiki/rules#wiki_international_co-productions). Unfortunately, TBHX still does not meet that mark, as it is very much predominately produced in China. With all 3 of it's animation studios being based in China and working on traditional donghua shows, it's director being Chinese and working on traditional donghua shows, and all 3 of it's producers being of Chinese origin (including the Aniplex credit, which is from their Shanghai division. The Japanese Aniplex only gets a credit for some sound stuff).
Ultimately, audio stuff just doesn't control much of the creative process like the animation studio or director does.
> After all, you have stuff like Solo Leveling, which is a Korean series but produced in Japan, show up here just fine.
Yes, that's because it's creatively controlled by Japan. Which yes, it's ironic for Solo Leveling.
> Edit: I miss when we could rate episodes!
It'll probably come back at some point next year when I rewrite Holo bot. At least I hope. No official promises.
Over the summer I did have the thought "what would we do if To Be Hero won Crunchyroll's Anime of the Year?" Realistically it wouldn't be the end of the world if we had a thread about it, but it'd be a bit odd. But the follow-up thought was "what's even eligible?" and it turns out that Crunchyroll's definition of anime is pretty much the same as ours (production needs to be primarily in Japan). But of course as a streaming service they're looking to get people to watch, and so if they can stream it they might as well.
But agree on that Cruchyroll is expanding what they offer for streaming and it's simply because money. Just like they now offer dramas/live actions as part of their catalog, that's for sure not anime lol
Crunchyroll is a business with the goal of making money. They do not have a duty to properly categorizing things, and I would not count on a for profit company to make a choice that will likely lose them money (like not using their well known anime branding), and I would expect them to bend something as trivial as a contested definition if one definition will make them more money than the other (which I believe to be the case).
The first is Casual discussion fridays where you can discuss freely.
The second is the source material corner of the anime that is adapting the light novel.
It’s extremely hypocritical to say that anime “not produced in Japan” will be banned from the subreddit, when all anime productions have implemented massive outsourcing in order to make ends meet
Edit: English speaking freelancers have also become important to the anime production as a whole, which means that most episodes have lots of overseas animators included in it. Are you going to ban anime that have americans, british, or europeans working on anime?
It's the Japanese creative control that we mostly care about. And that's mostly easily demonstrated by being headed by Japanese animation studios and Japanese directors.
Do you have numbers for the 2018-2022 period? I think that's a better indicator.
[Freshly baked stats](https://i.imgur.com/eDu2xh9.png)
If you want the whole history [with my shitty graph](https://i.imgur.com/yA1mzZt.png). Disclaimer, as it goes further back in time, the more likely that there is data rot issues. This data collection only started in 2021, and everything before that was backfilled. I think it should be accurate for counting comments, but you never know what kind of warts are in the data, so take it with a grain of salt.
I am in favor of continuing to restrict obvious Only Fans advertising cosplays and overt gooner fanart content. If one goes to series specific subs, it is a very common complaint that when the mods allow gooner content it eventually overwhelms much of the other discussion with racy fanart getting a ton of karma and simple minded comments. I think a case can be made that there are NSFW subs for that content.
What are the things that define this place as a community? What are the things you'd consider representative or emblematic of this subreddit?
Things that come to mind with the mention of r/anime. Things that would make you say: this is from r/anime or this is just like r/anime. Things that would make you identify someone as a person who frequents r/anime.
[](#ama)
It's also a reddit tradition, but in r/anime people are LOCKED IN with the downvotes if they think a show they liked is not liked by someone else. If it's the majority's opinion, you can expect a bunch of your comments to be in the negative real fast, even those not directly dissing the anime in question.
Honestly imo, if you want fanart or cosplay you can go to a cosplay or anime fanart sub as there are specific subs for that. This sub to me is centered around discussion, not "wow this art or cosplay is so good" because that's basically what it boils down to with posts like those.
It's worth noting that this definition would include [what seems to be a Lisa blog](https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/G6X03JPMY/lisa-tv) and [this ProZD show](https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/GREX5KEXY/anime-crimes-division) as being labeled as anime. Not to mention all of Netflix's library.
Which is obviously not compatible with giving an episode discussion thread to every show. Which means that we'd have to open up episode discussion threads to being user run again. Which means that they're vulnerable to being deleted due to random crash outs (where they delete the threads) or users being banned by reddit and then the threads being lost to time.
And if we discount some shows as not anime, than we're essentially back where we started, with needing a way to determine if something is "anime" or not.
I don't disagree that it's the marketed merge that's the cause of this, but I don't think that the higher order affects such a definition would imply would be desirable.
This makes me wonder - are the moderation and rules for the userbase or is the userbase for moderation and rules? The thread was gaining traction rapidly, therefore the userbase wanted it. A subjective judgement was made against the will of the userbase and the thread was deleted. Arguments against the deletion stopped getting answers from the responsible moderator and the thread got locked. I'm not trying to say rules shouldn't matter and all ought to be left to the users, but ruling a contentious topic against the users is bizarre. Or maybe grotesque, given the nature of the news.
It's certainly more meaningful information than Demon Slayer selling umpteen tickets in Burkina Faso, but those were excused with *there aren't actually that many of them.* On the other hand, a single post is too many. Anime is inherently connected to the source material and I feel like policing content regarding both simultaneously sometimes is overdone and ends up being deleterious to the volume and variety of discussion.
In general, posts about real people are uniformly banned on r/anime, because they are not animated. However we allow exceptions if it affects their ability to work in the industry. The relevant rule is below
> [This also limits posts about real people when they revolve around said person's ability to work in the industry. When the impact to their work is big enough, posts about individuals are fine. This includes: death, retirement, extended leave, or other events preventing work for an extended period.](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/wiki/rules#wiki_everything_posted_here_must_be_anime_specific)
The point of this exemptions is to allow discussion of current events as it pertains to their ability to work in the anime industry. And since this particular event happened so many years ago, it's effects had already long since come and gone by the time it was posted. For the same reason, we don't allow posts about VAs getting vocal chord surgery from years ago.
> how it impacted the manga and the anime.
From the translation I saw (which I don't think is good, so feel free to correct me on this), but the anime part of it was a very small segment and was more akin to just something that was going on at the same time, with no details about the actual anime. so the story seemed to be almost entirely the manga and not the anime. **We don't allow news about manga or mangaka**. For the same reason, we don't allow posts about Togashi Restarting x Haitusing Hunter x Hunter. This is an anime subreddit, and the topic of posts here should be about anime only and not things somewhat related to anime.
> The thread was gaining traction rapidly, therefore the userbase wanted it.
The same could be said for the Cosplay situation earlier in the year. Because clearly the userbase wanted it if they kept upvoting it 10,000 times. The point is, that people upvote all sorts of stuff regardless of if it's in the rules or not.
> and the thread got locked
The thread got locked because it was linked in another subreddit and brigadiers were coming and getting permanent bans for brigading (as this is against reddit's global rules). Thus it was locked to prevent more casualties.
> Arguments against the deletion stopped getting answers from the responsible moderator
You can also ask in the [Meta thread](https://redd.it/1pg3xx6) or in [mod mail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=r/anime) if you have questions about specific rulings, as we mods check those places pretty much daily. It's generally a better a place to have extended discussions rather than in removed threads.
> On the other hand, a single post is too many.
This is a single post, yes. But if we allow this, than someone might argue that if we let that be posted, than why can't they post their Togashi health update manga posts, since Hunter x Hunter has an anime too. Or with any other manga that also has an anime. The entire class of posts is not allowed on r/anime, because it's not about the actual anime.
Ultimately it's just a sad story that isn't directly related to anime, for which there are tons of examples of. That's not saying it's not a story that people shouldn't discuss, they should just do that in the proper place, which is not r/anime.
We generally don't like to make exceptions to our rules, as that undermines the rules by creating an inconsistency that gives people the wrong impression of what is allowed or not. People see a post hit the front page, and then that inspires others to post similar content. The very same thing happened with Cosplay posts earlier this year, where it went from basically 0 OF cosplay posts to one every other day in about 2 months or so (and the rule that was changed to allow this to happen happened like a year prior to the first one).
Edit: Not to mention, the title was horrendous and made it seem like the death just happened, which would have never flown even if it was deemed on topic. So that thread would have likely been removed regardless.
Well for one, that post is directly discussing the contents of the anime, and not about the mangaka. Also notice how it doesn't use examples from the manga, and instead sources it's information from the anime. That's how it's different. One is about a mangaka's experience writing their manga, the other is about an anime and it's historical accuracy as depicted in the anime.
>The point of this exemptions is to allow discussion of current events as it pertains to their ability to work in the anime industry. And since this particular event happened so many years ago, it's effects had already long since come and gone by the time it was posted. For the same reason, we don't allow posts about VAs getting vocal chord surgery from years ago.
Also one caveat about this. Sometimes news about some voice actor passing away gets posted, so I decide to check out their roles. It turns out that actor had like 5 roles 30 years ago and were effectively retired from the industry since then. By this logic, shouldn't those posts be deleted as well?
If you want to make a post like that Vinland Saga one talking about Umaru-chan, you can. You could post a write up similar to the Vinland Saga one (though I doubt that'd work as well as I imagine there isn't as much public information on SankakuHead's sister as there is on Thornfinn), your favorite Umaru-chan clip or perhaps a Video Edit of scenes from Umaru-chan that are recontextualized due to SankakuHead's sister (perhaps with a description in the comments). You just need to make it about the anime and not about the mangaka.
> Sometimes news about some voice actor passing away gets posted, so I decide to check out their roles. It turns out that actor had like 5 roles 30 years ago and were effectively retired from the industry since then. By this logic, shouldn't those posts be deleted as well?
No, those posts shouldn't be removed because death is explicitly listed as a reason to post news about someone in the anime industry, as them dying prevents them from ever working in the anime industry again. The reason why SankakuHead's post is different, is that since it's happened so many years ago, the impact where he'd be unable to work in the anime industry has come and gone.
Also ultimately, unless you are extraordinarily unlucky (or lucky in another way to view it), you will experience many more people dying around you than you will die yourself. Because people die when they are killed. Someone close to you dying is not the same as you yourself dying.
After all , many people consume different content who have similar vibes
Japenese people watch Chinese animation and chinese people watch japanese animation
r/Anime is a big community while the Chinese animation industry is still growing
I think it would be a better outcome if those are also taken under the wing of r/anime since there is no bigger community right now that can discuss it.
Ofc not everything is anime but mods and people aren't dumb enough to distinguish what can be considered
This way it shows more of the anime community, and kind of sticks to the broadness of this sub.
Things are not always clear cut; Hitori no Shita was a chinese production but released as an anime (in japanese) and it had proper season episode threads here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/4s0arl/spoilers_hitori_no_shita_the_outcast_episode_1/
After two seasons, the Japanese run ended but the Chinese run continued on from season 3 (Yi Ren Zhi Xia, now at season 6); imagine telling the fans of season one and two you can't discuss season three onwards here because it changed religions and is now a heathen...
You gotta have some realisation of the difference, and adjust accordingly. One post per week to sum up ALL the anime-adjacent content is not a bridge too far.
Great news, this basically already exists as the [Casual Discussion Friday](https://redd.it/1pvqcti) weekly thread. It doesn't have mod run top level comments to discuss other shows, but nothing is stopping you from setting that up yourself.
> Things are not always clear cut; Hitori no Shita was a chinese production but released as an anime (in japanese) and it had proper season episode threads here:
That was 9 years ago under a different definition of anime (one that was actually written stricter than our current one). The subreddit today and the subreddit from back then are vastly different.
On that note: it frankly still rubs me the wrong way that I cannot even say - for example - that I’ve enjoyed Who Made Me a Princess in AQRAD (daily thread) without my comment getting removed.
I don't disagree, but it also isn't me that you need to convince to fix this issue.
> it frankly still rubs me the wrong way that I cannot even say - for example - that I’ve enjoyed Who Made Me a Princess in AQRAD (daily thread) without my comment getting removed.
Well the first A in AQRAD stands for anime, which Who Made Me a Princess is not considered to be, so that makes sense to me.
And there’s a grey line too. Because if I mention the series as part of a recommendation or example in a discussion, then it probably won’t be removed - right?
Not really imo. Top level comments in the daily thread are supposed to follow the same anime specific rules as regular posts, as they're supposed to be like mini posts. If you were to use Who Made Me a Princess in a way that would generally be allowed in a post, it would also be allowed in the daily thread. AKA, not actually discussing Who Made Me a Princess.
True, but I want the mods to recognise the situation at hand and engage with the comment base here; "Casual Friday" is genuinely casual, discussing LotM or Link Click next to a post about, I dunno, some one's ingrown toenails or whatever is a mess and helps no one.
A proper niche, with a mild restriction of topic (anime adjacent only), will help foster discussion and maintain hype, as well as allow discovery of new series. it will allow discovery and appreciation of art directors and other talent, that participate in anime too (for example, Chengxi Huang, who was the famous art director for both the Boruto fight and the Hitori no Shita Season 3 fight).
> That was 9 years ago under a different definition of anime
IMHO a more inclusive era, with a better diversity of topics, which helped properly this subreddit to the juggernaut it is today. Not saying you need to clutter the subreddit with non-anime series thread, but you gotta at least admit, becoming a hermit kingdom and closing all borders is not useful.
Anime is becoming mainstream, and cross-country collaborations are just going to keep rising. Soon you will start having MANY series which won't fit the exact definition, simply because Japanese studios will no longer be able to afford 100% local production; anime purity tests will soon not be useful.
I'm not asking much, just a single weekly post, as a token gesture of conciliation towards other anime fans. You should do it not because you HAVE to, but because you WANT to increase the size of your tent, while still maintaining boundaries.
One weekly post, and it will introduce some good anime adjacent series, and if people like to discuss in depth, they can go to their respective subreddit, but if not, the series can coast of the general hype of the anime subreddit post and stay above water.
You don't need to convince *me* of this.
I do wonder if it wouldn’t be better to direct all the what-to-watch posts to a specific mega-thread designed for this. Then again, that is sort of the purpose of the daily thread I believe.
I heard they get random notifications and even view count notifications on their comments! madness!
But I don't want reddit as a freemium game. People are actually actively chasing the "streak" notifications like it's Duolingo or something... I'm not interested and it just annoys me that the notification bar is almost always red with something on new reddit.
[like this!](#anko)
This does go back to possibly limiting these types of posts to a single weekly thread or redirecting them to an entirely different sub like r/AnimeSuggest for posting. It's just alot of repetition and not true engagement imo.
We're reluctant to do so mostly because we believe that most of the people who we redirect to the daily thread wouldn't repost in the daily thread. This is particularly true because a lot of WtW posts are made by people who are new to reddit.
This is most likely an unpopular opinion, but personally I see this as a win-win. My main issue with the current (though it's been that way for years I believe) state of the sub is that at almost any given moment when sorting by new (which is my default), like idk 80% of the shown 25 posts are either flaired "help" or "what to watch", the 2 most un-interesting types of posts there are on this sub. I'm mainly on this sub for the seasonal episode disc threads, discussion of new announcements and just discussion threads in general, not to babysit users who are too lazy to just browse MAL for 5 minutes to find a show to watch next themselves. Now the obvious solution to this swarm of help/wtw posts would be the suggested megathread specifically for those types of question, but yes, technically that would fall under a part of the already existing daily thread. Since I am a daily visitor and contributor of the daily thread I personally wouldn't be happy with that solution either since I wouldn't like having the daily thread get flooded and diluted with even more help/wtw type comments since as I said I find engaging with those to be just plain boring.
What I personally would do if it was up to me (but probably wouldn't be possible in practice due to whatever reasons) is:
* set up a new megathread specifically and only for help/wtw type posts.
* auto-remove all help/wtw posts with a redirect info to this new megathread. If this alone really causes those people to not repost (I mean it really is just copy pasting the thing in a different thread, what's the big hurdle?) in that new megathread, then honestly so be it. This might sound harsh, but if their engagement gets hampered this easily I personally don't really consider it a loss for the community.
* Make the current daily thread to be only about actual *discussion* (to differentiate with the new megathread) of anime (and in the future maybe even anime-adjacent topics, one can dream), be it about recent news, opinions about anime you watched and so on, and not about recommendations or educational questions. To me aqradt became its own sort of bubble within r/anime with its share of regulars who you know better than most random people you come across in all the other threads. Whereas CDF is similar, it is basically a place where any random comments fly (meaning 9 out of 10 comments are random boring shit, no offense), what I appreciate about aqradt is that it's always still about anime at its core. I know this is very subjective but personally it would lose a lot of its appeal when the number of "guys tell me what to watch next" posts within aqradt would rise even more if help/wtw posts would all get pumped into aqradt instead.
These threads have really low karma counts (0-50 range most of the time) so they don't actually push any news from the front page. Just disable reddit's idiotic "Best" sorting and return to the original "Hot" sorting which gives you the most upvoted recent content first.
The top voted answers are usually the same, but there's some divergence in preferences down the list.
If this subforum was "trash", I would not cite the above reason in the top 10 reasons list.
...it really isn't?
should all of these posts just be comments in the daily thread? probably. but people are gonna people
Can you elaborate on what this means for me? I haven't seen Oshi no Ko, so I haven't been looking into their OM posts.
But the rest of it seemed properly tagged for an OM post. Obviously this would not fly in an episode discussion post. Though it seems like that's quite the disappointment that they'd need to go in the SMC even for the non spoiler tags bits for some people in this thread.
Everywhere, for anything. Bring up Oshi no Ko, and people will start reminding us anime onlys yet again that the ending apparently sucks.
And once people start off with the general complaints it devolves into more specific plot related spoilers. It's like opening the floodgates.
Basically, according to mods, opinions about the manga and how it did is fine as long as they don't spoil anything. It makes sense, but I still don't agree on it.
It's quite annoying and I hope the mods decide to remove them next time.
And how do you feel about the arguments [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1pxbws9/state_of_the_subreddit_looking_at_ranime_heading/nwa8jv8/)? Cause I just spent a large chunk of my day listening to people tell me that source material restrictions are draconian and should be loosened up.
On the other hand anything at all regarding the FUTURE should be dealt with the most aggressive approach, because you guys can't realistically put a scale on it and say "this yes, this no" - there's just so much nuance.
Honestly, the anime onlies are not morons - and even when an individual comment, on its own, is not a spoiler, when they are bombarded with "non spoilers" they will eventually make the connection without being told explicitly. So I actually support harsh moderation of any future event or opinion of how the series gonna turn out. Even "getting excited" for a certain character can spoil it - like being excited about that random ass nurse in Game of Thrones Rob Stark passes by one fine day - it gives you a hint she'll be back, and quite likely as a romantic interest, and that starts giving you other plot related spoilers.
The arguments you saw were mostly for the latter - the future - so I support being strict with them. But I do think there should be a distinction to things that are behind us.
It's not like r/anime is dying - participation is still vibrant, and on the big shows you have hundreds to thousands of comments on each thread.
So with that in mind, I don't think some mild (or even not mild) reduction in comment count is that hurtful. In a sense, when it's not too saturated, the comment quality actually rises per comment, since people feel more heard than swallowed in megathreads.
These are the questions for everyone to consider about this situation. I, for one, welcome lower amount of public comments if that means quality will prevail over quantity, and people will quietly contemplate the few good, elaborate comments they see here, rather than maniacally post of the sake of posting, as the administration messages refers to, as well.
Bonus: You feel like one of the cool kids.
Tbf one downside could be limited discussion. Imagine a banger episode just dropped and all comments are just Martin Scorsese going " Absoulute cinema".
Well, are they wrong tho :D
Jokes aside, its probably one of these things that tends to happen and cant be really "controlled" tbh
But that's not what I come to r/anime for.
[](#yuishrug)
new reddit is unreadable because of image spam
[#Cinema](#cinema)
The vast majority here is not for discussion or engagement, they are here to feel heard and seen for what they seem to love - watching Japanese art - and validate themselves through extremely quick, limited interactions that leave no aftertaste. Expecting any more without an affirmative action towards (positive) change is simply unrealistic.
I'd rather have more discussion threads for less popular ( or more popular in this case ) shows than these low effort "what do i read" or "it it only me that does X" where X is a very common opinion on a show. The sub is being demonic as is regarding restrictions on what you can post.
e: honestly can't believe so much fuss is being throw about with all these stupid what ifs when we have like sub 5 shows for the whole year that are very popular and would bring about more activity in the sub. like jesus christ whitelist those 5 and call it a day if there's enough demand. pretending that people want 5 billion donghuas here and not just the 2-3 shows they saw on CR and discussed in adjacent subs or discs is clownish
[Holo bot](https://github.com/r-anime/holo) is open source, and many other subreddit's don't restrict normal users ability to post episode discussion posts like r/anime does. If someone wants to set it up for their favorite shows, there is literally nothing we can do to stop that.
Just the fact that enough people asked and were confused why neither lotm nor to be hero x was present should've been an indicator that the mod team should perhaps ask the community instead of deciding that their playground is for woooah nippon supa good animaishn exclusively
Who's "the community"? Because we've had extensive discussion on this topic in the meta thread. If people have missed the months of thousand comment long threads, are they in the community?
And your frontpage can't be that place because...? Or create a custom feed which includes a whole bunch of smaller subs.
Popularity has never been a metric we use for discussion threads. If it's anime, we have a discussion thread for it.
> If lotm or to be hero x is popular enough, there's no reason to refuse making discussion threads for them.
Would you put any restrictions on what gets discussion threads beyond popularity? I would assume "animation" as a bare minimum, but other than that?
I can't say anything other than "use reason". Lotm was very popular, it has consistently good animation on par with japanese directed. If your definition of anime is that it must have a japanese director and nothing else (seeing how any amount of outsourcing and any, even if miniscule, amount of direction when translating from manga/manhwa is fine) , then i can only laugh at that definition
Like come on man, just whitelist bot for those 2 shows and have literally no negative impact. Why do i have to read about sponge bob and every donghua being accepted if we allow lotm/to be hero x for 1 singular season.
Whatever, the community is already aware that the mods will simply never change their position. I'd rather discuss this matter with other members of the subreddit
The main takeaway then is "when a new non-Japanese animated work comes out, send the fandom to r/anime to get it approved there". The long term impact is an endless litigation of what should and shouldn't be allowed as exceptions. I'm not interested in wasting my time on that.
Because that is the obvious and natural follow-up to your suggestion, to which you need to have an answer to be taken seriously. If To Be Hero X is accepted, *literally why not* every other donghua? What makes that show different from all the rest?
If you don't have any kind of an answer to that question, that really kind of kills your entire argument.
> this sub is being demonic
Yeah, you're so oppressed and not over-reacting at all.
The reality is anyone trying to figire our some specific set of rules to decide what we're allowed to call anime and what not is doing something futile. It's like desperately holding on to definition that jrpg is an rpg ftom japan and not just a genre that has enough set characteristics that people recognize.
I'll do you one better for that first question: can you find anyone asking in confusion, where the discussion threads for SpongeBob is ? Because i can do the same for lotm or to be hero x.
It's really not that complicated. If the majority of creative control is from Japan, ie Japanese animation studios/production companies, then it is anime. If not, it is not anime. There are things like co-productions that make the line fuzzy, for sure, but we try our best to determine, with the information available to us, where the majority of creative control is. To Be Hero X was not one of the fuzzy lines. Chinese animation studios, a Chinese director, and of the three production companies involved, two were Chinese with the third being the Shanghai branch of Aniplex. The largest Japanese creative control was the OST being done by Sawano, but if the composer was all it took to determine whether or not something was anime, then Frieren would not be anime.
>can you find anyone asking in confusion, where the discussion threads for SpongeBob is ? Because i can do the same for lotm or to be hero x.
If you look at the first page of Wikipedia for To Be Hero X, you will find the first article starts with "To Be Hero X is a Chinese Donghua..." The Wikipedia page for Lord of Mysteries similarly starts with "Lord of Mysteries is a Chinese web novel..." Looking later in the article, you will find that the animated series is said to be "a donghua adaptation."
To be perfectly frank, if people are unwilling to do the most basic research on a show such reading the first sentence of the Wikipedia article (or even just googling it and reading the Wikipedia excerpt that pops up), then it really is not our fault if they are confused. Nor should we have to cater to them just because they can't do a simple google search.
But then again, this question was not directed to you, nor am i interested in discussing this matter with part of a mod team that have already made a decision they'll refuse to go back on until we get another shelter situation.
Anime series have adapted non-Japanese properties for decades. It doesn't matter what the origin of the source material is, what matters is who created the actual anime.
>Wouldn't that also make spongebob an anime if we changed the director then ?
If Spongebob was created by a Japanese director, production company, and animation studio, then it would likely be considered an anime. If everything about its production was the same except for the director, it probably would not be considered an anime.
That's basically what the Youtuber Gigguk did to create [Bâan](https://www.livechart.me/anime/13225), so yes. [Here's the discussion thread for it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1nm3h16/b%C3%A2an_otona_no_kyoukai_b%C3%A2an_the_boundary_of/)
> Wouldn't that also make spongebob an anime if we changed the director then ?
[There's a Rick and Morty anime made in Japan](https://www.livechart.me/anime/11224) and [yes it was also allowed here](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1etgqku/rick_and_morty_the_anime_episode_1_discussion/), though that's separate from the original show.
And just like those shows before, there will be new shows tomorrow that people will ask where the discussion threads about it are.
But you have to realize having "anime + 2 donghua that I like" is not exactly a good rule for the subreddit.
It's consistent and leaves no room for drama. If you're mad something isn't allowed on here, the team did not specifically make that decision.
I'm not saying that using MAL as a baseline would be the worst idea, but just throwing our hands up and saying that what's allowed on our subreddit is out of our control would be such a cop-out. We've allowed works from Japanese studios that MAL doesn't, and I'm not interested in treating "well that's what MAL did" as a defense of anything we do here.
Whatever happens on r/anime should be done because it makes sense for r/anime.
enjoy!
I also think the cosplay situation was handled poorly earlier in the year. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it caused a downturn in activity, but speaking personally, I mainly visit for new production announcements and PVs, seasonal surveys, and episode discussions. During that earlier period, there was a stretch where it felt more like I was visiting r/cosplay than r/anime, so I ended up getting my news elsewhere and I wouldn't be suprised if others did the same.
I'd be curious to see what the actual numbers were and what the maximum number of cosplay posts on the front page at once was, because as someone that's here daily it only ever felt like a small bump that was easily ignored.
That said I think shreddit and presumably the app has a different algorithm for front page content compared to old reddit which I still use, so it might have pushed more cosplay posts because they want to have more easily consumable content that got a lot of upvotes compared to link posts for videos/announcements.
[](#taigasigh)
[](#lolifightsback)
[](#modsalute)
[](#mugiwait)
As for something I'd like to see change: Is there a way to preemptively add in streaming links for upcoming seasonals so the bot has them ready to go? Whenever a new season starts, the bot lists "no streams" for every anime and the comments are always full of confused people, especially if it's not a Crunchyroll anime. Livechart is a centralized place to get streaming information for seasonals.
We have some in at the start of the season. However, the links often don't exist until shortly before the show airs. For instance, [_Sentenced to Be a Hero_](https://www.livechart.me/anime/12268), which airs five days from now on Crunchyroll, does not have a page on CR and likely won't for several more days. This makes it difficult for us to always get links in before the bot has to post the thread. We'll likely be somewhat better this season than prior seasons, but we will not be perfect.
"They all look alike" is *not* an argument with very good optics. Among the people who would take issue with that are Chinese and Japanese people.
[This comment chain from a previous Meta Thread discusses the matter at some length.](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1lsnro9/meta_thread_month_of_july_06_2025/n3qsfxk/)
There is even a show that are each very similar. Chinese is Immortal King and japanese is Disastrous Life of Saiki.
The chinese cartoon industry came about because the success of anime. Also there is chinese companies involed in many series. from out sourced work, to studios, to things like Bilibili you see at the start of some shows no adays. Does that disqualify them from being anime?
The comments I linked above went to some length to discuss why certain series aren't "anime" by *at least* the description the subreddit uses and why lumping donghua into anime is also not appropriate.
To [quote](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1lsnro9/meta_thread_month_of_july_06_2025/n400r0a/) here:
> They do talk about the Office? People do talk about Squid Game in the same discussions as in anime? Maybe not in your circles, but there are multiple circles globally. It is just not your circle, but there are multiple other circles.
>What my question means? A lot of people insisting that r/anime include Chinese animation still group Chinese animation into Japanese animation and calling all of it anime. Which is what I am calling out, Chinese animation is donghua and the Chinese animators will want to be recognised that the product they made is a Chinese product. Not a copy of a Japanese one. And I am very sure the developers will want their effort to be recognised as *not Japanese*, but as artwork done by them as Chinese.
>In that case, the answer is clear. This subreddit is dedicated to the efforts and art of the Japanese. We celebrate and enjoy the creativity and hard work of the Japanese animators and creators here. There is no reason why people will want to have Chinese animation here, unless they intend to not differentiate between both. If I may put it bluntly across, it is disrespectful to the Chinese and the Japanese if r/anime includes donghua, because it only means the Chinese can only make animation similar to anime and not their own product. It also means that all these while, the Japanese have not made a product that can be differentiated from the Chinese. Which translates it to being an insult, to both the Chinese and the Japanese, and an insult to the hard work and creativity both sides have demonstrated.
>I hope you understand what you are trying to go for here when you insist on Chinese donghua being included on r/anime.
I personally prefer the way the JRPG subreddit is ran where they accept anything in the JRPG style thus you see things like Expedition 33 there.
In the end this is coming down to the difference between calling it champagne or sparkling wine. Though in this case be like Germany and not France saying you can only call it champagne if it comes from the champagne region.
And what the JRPG sub does is it's own business and has no bearing on what this sub does, they're free to manage their community as they see fit, like all subs.
You seriously overestimate how popular a position this is mate. This stance is *far* from the "Voice of the Community". Pretty much no one that's actually a regular on this sub wants to open that can of worms.
If it's the voice of any community, it's the "Big Hero X" community, not r/anime.
Most people I see complaining about excluding donghua are upset that their one favorite show isn't allowed here as an exception and don't care about anything beyond that, while the mod team needs to take into consideration everything that it would entail.
/r/donghua exists so why not use that subreddit as well? /r/anime's community and infrastructure didn't come out of nowhere, it was built up over time with guidance from the mod team making decisions along the way as they continue to do so now. If enough people felt strongly enough about it they could make their own subreddit that includes whatever series they wanted and enjoy that expanded community, but I haven't seen anyone put in the work for it. They shouldn't try to hijack this subreddit to cater to their whims, they should ask the mods of other subreddits to step up to be as good as this one.
r/anime should NOT be the place to overwhelmingly discuss manga.
Yet in news, OM etc.. threads it's often the case.
Open any Oshi No Ko thread, 90% of the comments are either
1. People talking about the manga ending
2. People spoiling a specific plot point (that everyone knows already)
3. People complaining about people who do #1 and #2
Almost no one is even talking about the anime.
What's the point even having OM threads and the like in r/anime with this current stance?
In other situations - including in this very thread - users have been told things like "This is not that you can't discuss that, it's that r/anime is not the place to do it"
Well... You know... Perhaps...
It applies here?
Perhaps people could go on Oshi No Ko to talk about the manga? Or I don't know, maybe they could create a new sub to talk about manga, they could call it r/manga ... Oh damn, wait, it already exists!
[](#awe)
And I've said it before, yes I do believe there's some discussion that does belong here even if the manga is brought up in some form, BUT there is a difference between
"bla bla bla anime bla bla bla anime bla bla bla anime bla bla bla anime bla bla bla manga bla bla bla anime"
and
"bla bla bla manga bla bla bla manga bla bla bla manga bla bla bla manga bla bla bla manga bla bla bla manga bla bla bla manga bla bla bla manga"
The former is discussing anime and has a small tangeant about the manga.
The latter is discussing the manga.
"Here's what I think about the manga series and its ending" is NOT a comment about an anime;
It's a comment about a manga. And therefore does not belong in r/anime. (Other than CDF).
On top of being annoying as fuck and killing all anime-only discussions because anime-onlies avoid these threads like the plague, well it often end up spoiling the whole thing, **even when people are not actually giving away spoilers**;
What I mean by that is (and that's another thing I talked about before), say the Takopi threads;
I brought that one up too, and I said that the comments in all Takopi threads were giving away the whole thing... I was anime only, yet I already knew that [Takopi big spoiler]>!kids would be bullied/sad/have atrocious lives, and they would die too!<
No one **directly** said that, but the """vague""" comments they posted about the source, pretty much gave it all away. It's not exactly hard to connect the dots, even when people aren't directly giving spoilers. Especially when they get close to (to use ProZD's example) [Takopi]>!"Hurr hurr well don't get too attached to him hurr hurr" ... Okay, so he dies!<
And this leads to a situation in which everyone's discussing the manga and giving vague spoilers and then people giving real spoilers because they don't know the difference, or they think their "obvious vague spoilers" aren't giving it away, and even if they're banned it doesn't really change anything, everyone saw it already.
So anime onlies quit reading these threads, and the threads turn EVEN MORE into "manga readers discussing the manga", and so on.
When I brought it up, I was told something like "These threads can be used to get a general feel of how the story will go" or something like that...
Well, at some point we should just lock these threads and put up a link to buy the manga, so people can read it for themselves and get a feel for how the anime will go.
Why read the anime thread to have 1000 manga readers tell you everything about the manga, when you could just read the manga yourself?
[/rant](#seasonalpout)
> [In terms of spoilers, "Official Media" flaired season and episode trailers, promotional videos (PV), key visuals (KV), teaser visuals, and next episode preview threads are now treated as episode thread discussions without a source corner.](https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1ejhqmz/meta_thread_month_of_august_04_2024/)
>> However, all source knowledge and discussion would still need to go under spoiler tags.
>> In addition, any spoilers regarding future plot points or events that occur later in the narrative, including information from source material or prequels, must still be appropriately spoiler tagged.
Enforce that. Someone mentions or alludes to a future manga/LN event outside a spoiler tag (e.g. "Ending sucks" without a spoiler tag)? Ban them. Rationale for changing it was effectively "lack of discussion points for promotional material" and, in my experience, has fallen into two categories:
* First season: If users liked it and themes that'll be present (e.g. trigger warnings for sexual assault)
* Sequels: Readers can't shut the fuck up about what occurs dozens of episodes/chapters beyond what the season covers
(Likely won't respond for at least ~18 hours if you want to think about it before replying)
It will still need championing. Just like how Cosplay posts did even though we already had the bit about not selling things in the rules. Major interpretation changes require a vote. And this would be a major interpretation change imo.
---
And you know what I think is the stupidest part of that rule (of which I was involved in the passing of, so this is purely a personal opinion), it doesn't apply to news posts. Which means currently if they just announce a season 2, you still need to spoiler tag season 1 spoilers. But if they include a KV with the news that it's getting a season 2, then you don't. That's dumb imo.
One day I'll finally have time to go back and argue the thing that brought this up (which was not really this point, but about flairs), but that day is not today.
Also if you put it in the meta thread, it give me something I can point to as something people want, which makes any case stronger.
Then I step into these sequel announcement threads and it's "Really? These comments are allowed?" At least make an attempt to discuss the anime up to now.
[Thank you](#seasonalpls)
> ^(just for it to transition into the next month.)
If you want, I can repost it in the new meta thread once it goes up for you.
Like, every single comment that talks about or requires manga knowledge (other than basic premise stuff like 'it's a cute romcom') being behind spoiler tags or in the source material corner? (if the thread doesn't have one, then spoiler tags)?
I'm honestly not seeing what is the downside to that... (well, other than 'more work' I suppose, but I do believe manga readers would be quick to learn, I mean people already use spoiler tags in a variety of threads, the only difference is that now their usage would be more consistent, and not "I can say this here but I can't say it here")
SMC reporting happens through AnimeMod 2.0, so it is not constrained by Automod's limited capabilities. It is only constrained by the limits of the reddit API, which for this, is basically that reports are constrained to 100 characters.
I've discussed hooking it up to an LLM to get an more advanced check than a keyword / regex check, but that would be completely new to me and has a number of technical hurdles to overcome.
> Obviously this would mean many more posts for mods to review
I believe that adding SMC checking to all posts or OM posts would be a significant amount of additional workload for the mods. Though I'm not sure how much of a deal breaker it would be, since there are less OM posts than episode discussion posts.
> but at least being able to report and temp ban ppl would maybe get ppl to change their behaviour
The vast majority of of the items in mod queue come from autoflagged things, and not reports from humans. I think it's probably > 95% autoflagged (though we do autoflag a lot of low action things).
is there any interest in reducing the # of OM posts per series per day? it does feel like it can get too spammy on announcement days, personally.
any idea how much of the bannable/action-worthy items are autoflagged vs human? just trying to get a gauge for what level of egregiousness it takes for humans to report it. i think i do a decent job reporting when i come across stuff, might be a bit more overzealous than ideal tbh.
is there some system to auto remove posts that receive X # of reports, or that receive both a report and an autoflag? obv there could be a slippery slope for abuse, but since one of the main constraints is mod manpower and knowledge of each series, "outsourcing" more of the work to the general community would help. iirc in past years for big series like AoT there were temp mods or one-series mods that were recruited just to aid with certain shows, and i wonder if that would be possible to do on a more regular basis
I'm already paying $30 a month for server hardware. And we don't pay by the CPU cycle. Our CPU usage is pretty low for the most part, mostly hovering around 12% - 13% (except when running out DB backups, which spikes to 100% for a few hours). So we generally have some CPU cycles to spare.
We'd also have some kind of regular check we'd do (like our current keyword / regex checking) which would cut down on the actually LLM calls to just the one's we're already flagging (which is a lot more reasonable and probably like a few hundred per day tops).
> not to mention the various ethical
Yeah, if we did it, it would be a virtually airgapped local LLM model (though idk about memory constraints, since it turns out getting close to the box's limit can cause really bad thrashing and effectively take the whole box down). But if not, devvit has some guidance on approved LLM stuff in the cloud.
> accuracy concerns of relying on that for moderation
Yeah, I'd do some back testing to see how well it does beforehand to ensure that it reaches a baseline accuracy. Though it would it just be an autoreport means that it needs not to be perfectly accurate, just needs to mostly clear the cruft out. I'm hopeful that a relatively simple prompt like "is this talking about the source material?" would not require knowledge of the show's themselves (which would have data issues since they would involve current day information), and also would be generic enough to not require something too specific of a model.
There's a lot of question marks in that kind of a plan though. But ultimately, there should be a path through that allows for better flagging (this is kind of LLM's actual strong suit, converting free input into various buckets).
> but being able to do a regex check sounds a decent bit better than just plain keywords
Currently the keyword checking is implemented using regex. Automod supports regex checking and regex is just more powerful than the keyword searching (so no need to implement keyword searching proper, since it can be done via regex). I think it should also be more performant given many different keywords, but Idk, I didn't benchmark it too much (and reddit comments / the number of keywords are small enough that any differences are pretty negligible).
> is there any interest in reducing the # of OM posts per series per day? it does feel like it can get too spammy on announcement days, personally.
I want to propose a new Production Update flair (which someone modmailed us as a suggestion), which would essentially consist of all major updates to an anime. Which is currently split between News and Official Media, depending on if they also give a goodie with the update (which I think they very very often do). Basically any new season announcements, release dates, major promotional material (Key visuals / trailers). Basically anything that if you wanted see what was the latest information for an anime, you could search for the show and the flair Production Update and get all the currently known information.
As part of that, I'd also love to merge all announcements into 1 post, because I think it's kinda stupid to have an anime drop a new season announcement, a key visual and a trailer at the same time. Which currently results in a News flaired season announcement, a embedded Official Media key visual, and a linked Official Media trailer. Of which, the embedded Official Media key visual will cannibalize the others. And even more confusingly, users don't need to spoiler tag prior animated events in an Official Media flaired post, but they do for a News post.
Anyway, that has been met with quite a bit of resistance internal (in all facets). So if you have thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them, and potentially be able to point to your comment as showing there is a desire for such a thing.
> any idea how much of the bannable/action-worthy items are autoflagged vs human?
I haven't run the exact numbers, but I think it's probably 90% bot flagging, and maybe 10% human flagging. And of that 10% human flagging, maybe half of it is reporting the ecchi clip on the front page for child pornography. The other large chunk of it are spoiler reports, which we don't have any significant autoflagging for (because spoilers are not very keyword friendly). Then there's also human reports that double up on autoflagged reports, which is still nice, because it makes them stand out more. When I see something with 2 reports in the mod queue, I make it a priority to look at it.
> just trying to get a gauge for what level of egregiousness it takes for humans to report it.
I operate under the assumption that nobody will report anything useful but spoilers. People just flat out do not report things. Even things where they'll complain about it in a reply about being rule breaking, they still won't report it. Any useful human reports are a bonus for me.
That was one of the bigger shocks when I joined the mod team, because I reported a lot of posts and stuff when I saw them. And then I became a mod, and I could probably count the useful human reports on my fingers for the day.
I've had people straight up tell me they won't report things because they don't want to snitch on other redditors. People seem to have a really crazy level of tolerance and or outright opposition to the concept of moderation. And that's kinda sad imo. Almost nobody cares to make the place better for everyone. They'd rather complain about their specific post being removed than have a meaningful conversation about if the rule is useful or effective in the meta thread (it is unbelievable to me, how few people actually repost in the meta thread when they are redirected there, it's like single digits).
Tbh, that's just kinda I feel the internet is these days. Apathetic users and a big disconnect between those in power and those not.
> i think i do a decent job reporting when i come across stuff, might be a bit more overzealous than ideal tbh.
If you don't report every ecchi clip for child pornography, then you are in rare company, and for that, I thank you. Please keep it up. Our tools aren't perfect, and we miss things or even misjudge things. Human reports are something I use to identify if there is a gap in our automation, and to hopefully think of ideas on how it can be automated to make it more consistently enforced.
> is there some system to auto remove posts that receive X # of reports
Yes, it usually doesn't get abused though, because it'll usually very obvious when it's time to hit the ignore reports button (\*cough cough\* ecchi clips or Cosplay posts).
> but since one of the main constraints is mod manpower and knowledge of each series
I would say availability over manpower, but that's a bit pedantic.
> "outsourcing" more of the work to the general community would help.
See [the end of this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1pxbws9/state_of_the_subreddit_looking_at_ranime_heading/nwkydbf/)
> LLM moderation
good to know you've clearly put a lot of thought into the LLM idea, though it's a little too bad it's not possible to rely on it for catching "actual spoiler" content, but yeah that'll be impossible since there's no way for it to be aware of the content of a just-aired anime episode, even if you could update it's knowledge base daily (which doesn't sound feasible in the first place).
> News/OM spam
the merging of News/OM makes sense to me, I didn't even realize there was a difference tbh. And yes, thanks for articulating it way better that having an announcement, KV, and Trailer post all at the same time is way too much, I'm surprised there's so much internal resistance against merging that. What's the argument for getting more spam on the front page of r/anime?
During the whole TBHX debacle, there seemed to be a ton of anti-corpo sentiment in terms of allowing marketing arms of anime related companies to affect r/anime's policies/content, so I don't see why we need to revere japanese corporations so highly and allow their marketing shotgun of posts each announcement. IMO the combined post should take the stricter spoiler ruling like the current News flair, so that people interested in a show don't get spoiled on earlier seasons just because a big announcement hit the top of the sub.
> Reporting
Ooof, i didn't realize so many ppl were crusading against anime for "child porn" still. not a fan of loli content myself, but it's wild so many ppl can't recognize the difference between animation and real people still.
Tbh spoiler reporting is prob the part i care most about too, the other rules (except maybe the advertising ones unless super low quality) tend to be of lesser direct concern for users. there's the rare occasion i come across someone being toxic enough to the level of reporting them, and if it's probably not something that's perma-worthy, it doesn't feel like there's a point to reporting someone.
It's an unfortunate fact that getting a discussion forcibly moved tends to kill it, people just want to be met where they're at, whether that's because of pure laziness or being able to get more eyes on it from supportive folks. It does feel like wandering into the meta thread is an invitation to get dogpiled by those more sympathetic to the mods, which is frustrating and discouraging when you disagree with the rules.
> At one point I floated a system that would allow for community members to be chosen as experts in particular shows, and to jury rig the report system to have special reports immediately remove the content, which then could be adjudicated by mods after removal (and overturning or removing privileges if they are too frequently wrong). That was met with a strong argument of something like "no non mod should ever be able to unilaterally remove a users comment. They should become a mod instead."
Wouldn't it be way easier to moderate this small pool of individuals to see how well they're moderating rather than directly handling spoiler comments for every discussion? I think there's a decent population of ppl with interest enough in one series to be a mod for it, without wanting to take on the whole other whackload of mod duties being a "full" mod would entail. NGL, the argument feels a little gatekeepy/elitist
To be blunt, I think it would make my life more difficult. I can trust my fellow mods to make moderation decisions that are sane and consistent with both our policies and our precedent because they regularly make moderation decisions, we discuss with each other what our moderation policy is and should be, and we discuss specific moderation actions to come to a team consensus whenever mods are uncertain what the correct call is.
Meanwhile, a user who "moderates" one show a season does not have any of this. They're going to try their best based on their own personal view of what a spoiler/&c. is, but that will likely be at least somewhat misaligned with our view as a mod team. I believe consistency is important, and as such believe I (or another mod) would need to review each decision these pseudo-mods made. This would be rather difficult without actually knowing their reasoning; in many cases, it would be more difficult than researching and coming to a conclusion on my own.
As such, the only way I would even begin to consider it is if each pseudo-mod was required to write out their reasoning in full (think minimum 1-2 paragraphs) for every decision they made. Even then, I'd be reluctant, as I believe that someone who infrequently moderates is worse at moderation than someone who does it frequently (same as basically any task). Additionally, topics where one is strongly emotionally involved are those that are hardest to moderate, so someone signing up to mod a show because they love it is, in a sense, the worst possible scenario.
that's a ridiculously high bar for basic spoiler removal, and ensures you'll always be playing catchup when writing a spoiler is so much easier than getting one removed.
i believe having a worse moderator is better than having a severely delayed or non-present moderator, because you aren't and can't be everywhere, and you don't have the series knowledge to know spoilers on sight
You’re only fooling yourself if you think SMC doesn’t drop the overall number of people discussing the source. I don’t think “oh well” is a good enough answer in these cases.
But the status quo is already tanking the engagement of anime fans (i.e. the ones who matter most in r/anime) because they avoid these threads.
The Oshi No Ko threads would be full of anime discussions if it wasn't for the manga readers, but now it's nothing but manga stuff.
They're killing all the anime discussions, by 1) making anime-onlies not wanting to be in the thread in the first place, and 2) [what they're saying in the thread]>!by trashing the series/the ending, which makes people lose they hype they had!<
It might not seem like it adds up to a lot, but if you consider the sheer number if anime produced each season there’s a lot more of these types of announcement threads than there are ones with high levels of interest/anticipation.
I do think that updating the SMC rules would be a positive step, but I also think it’s something that should be considered more seriously than surface level, and perhaps rolled out in steps rather than all at once.
I also enjoy rewatch threads more than regular episode discussions because of the source readers' participation. As long as they don't spoil future events, anything they tell me about the source only enhances the experience for me.
It's like saying all those posts about dance in the Wandance thread should be banned because they're not about the anime. They added so much to that show for me and many others to get a sense for what the story was talking about. Same goes for source mentions as I see it. As long as they're discussing the source in relation to the anime and following the spoiler rules, I don't see a problem.
I've said it before and will say it again, not being so hard and fast about source mentions in episode threads will increase engagement. Otherwise it's just people broadcasting their opinions and not discussing. Or worse, source readers pretending they're not and cleverly "guessing" plot points (TAD threads were full of these if memory serves - I wasn't signed up to reddit then just a lurker, before you ask why I didn't call it out).
I don't think it has in a substantial manner since I joined as a mod. At least not in this framing. We've confirmed a few times that the SMC only applies to episode discussion threads. Hell until last month, it wasn't even in our rules page (only sh reddit rules and the pinned comment).
If you want this, please champion this in the meta threads. [I'm very over capacity atm](#seasonalpls)
> well, other than 'more work' I suppose, but I do believe manga readers would be quick to learn, I mean people already use spoiler tags in a variety of threads, the only difference is that now their usage would be more consistent, and not "I can say this here but I can't say it here"
I don't think that would be the case. We get a few people in mod mail each week for karma gatting questions (usually they have no idea why their image post was removed). And also for spoilers, the majority of users don't repost their corrected spoilers, and I still see a ton of spoilers without context tags just browsing the subreddit. it's not uncommon for a popular WtW or Discussion post that his the front page to have like 5+ spoiler bonked comments in it.
I completely agree with you, but I do want to point out that r/manga is completely useless for any type of discussion other than under posts about new manga chapters. It's a shame, because it should be the perfect place for these Oshi no Ko discussions. It's all either manga discussion threads or people posting hentai images and asking for the source. The manga release threads are the best part of the sub, however they hamper its improvement since they clog up the /new feed, so you don't have a community of veteran fans to participate in discussions once they are posted (like we have here on r/anime).
Also, it has one guy moderating it, so any post that tries to start up a discussion is full of untagged spoilers.
I know this is r/anime, but I just felt like going on a little rant of my own about the state of another subreddit.
There are a few sub-communities in CDF, the daily thread and rewatches. People can get to know each other in those places and that gives comments a small extra oomph. Reading a comment praising an Isekai anime from someone who I know mainly watches Mecha tells me a lot about that anime, for example.
I still think there are a few things that can be improved:
* CDF and the daily thread *can* be unwelcoming, and I'm probably a part of it. But that's almost a consequence of the pre-established community they foster. Very hard problem to solve, and I have no proposals on that front.
* The episode threads still incentivize early posting. I only post comments in small seasonal threads because those are the only places were I still feel like there's decent participation past the first few hours. How do we feel about sorting threads by new by default? I'm almost sure that this already got piloted, but I don't remember the results
[](#teehee)
On the other hand, I think a few things that the mod team has been doing right.
* The mod team has clearly stated that they want to foster community, and I think the policy making and their enforcement has been consistent with that. The fanart situation, the constant changes to Essay/What to watch/Recommendation posts, and the establishment of the Daily Thread have overall been steps in the right direction.
* The subreddit-wide events are great. The start/end of season polls, the milestone contests, and the r/anime awards are very high quality content. I'm always excited to participate, read, or watch them.
* Communication has been great. I know lots of people in this thread are unhappy, but I'm a power user, and let me tell you that the Donghua situation has already been discussed to hell and back. Some people might disagree with the resolution, but it's been a very transparent process.
* While still suffering from internet culture changes, the subreddit still has a lot of place for proper thought and discussion. I know I dissed episode threads, but somewhere in the middle of the thread you can usually find a relatively long and insightful comment about the anime; even more so in rewatches. And I think it's all due to the constant and consistent policy work I mentioned in the other point.
Thank you for reading and for participating in r/anime! Have a happy new year!
[](#konhug)
I usually still post if it's less than 24 hours. There won't be a lot of replies, but I've definitely gotten some commentary within the next day or two afterwards. So it's not like it's dead right away.
As for the strictness of the definition of what is allowed here, as someone who is unhappy with it, I do agree with you. It has been transparent and I can't fault the mod team as a whole there. There's gonna be pissed off people whatever the ruling is.
My suggestion is to replyguy, if you just reply to top level comments rather than make one of your own you are much more likely to get a response at least from OP if nothing else. If you're late to a thread yeah it's tough to talk if you want to make a TLC, but you can make a reply and talk to TLCs about *their* tlc
I agree
> The episode threads still incentivize early posting. I only post comments in small seasonal threads because those are the only places were I still feel like there's decent participation past the first few hours. How do we feel about sorting threads by new by default? I'm almost sure that this already got piloted, but I don't remember the results
I discussed this internally when I first joined. At the time, it seemed that others were happy with the current dynamic of episode discussion threads (and as someone who doesn't watch shows seasonally, I didn't want to butt in too strong).
I agree there is a large snowballing effect inherent to using the best sort by default.
FWIW, my money is on the random sort for a several hours, before switching to best sort. Early comments are still advantaged since they get put in the random lottery more often, and otherwise makes the early game playing field a lot more even.
I was gonna make a super comprehensive simulation to prove my point, but turns out that generic simulation is pretty complex (cause I also wanted to be able to tweak via configuration the distributions and run multiple trials etc, as well as not being a literal time based simulation (which would be slow / inaccurate)). But that never happened, and it won't happen for a long time.
But I do think that it's especially ridiculous that episode discussion threads go up once they are available, and not after they're they've been available for their runtime (people should be allowed to watch the anime at 1x speed in full and not be disadvantaged imo).
[But that's a fight for another year for me](#tiredaoi)
> Thank you for reading and for participating in r/anime! Have a happy new year!
> [](#konhug)
[You too!](#k-on-hug)
That sounds like a good compromise. And probably better than just sorting by new
> But I do think that it's especially ridiculous that episode discussion threads go up once they are available, and not after they're they've been available for their runtime (people should be allowed to watch the anime at 1x speed in full and not be disadvantaged imo).
Yeah, and that's how we end up recycling most manga memes. The manga readers already have their reactions ready, post them on the first minute and that makes them rise to the top.
So yeah, a 30 minute delay + random/new sorting for the first few hours could be an option to pilot next year. I'll leave it in your hands
[](#salute)
[Please don't](#overwhelmed)
I have too much on my plate as is. Please champion (or at least kickstart) this yourself in the meta thread.
[](#seasonalpls)
[](#konhug)[](#mugiwait)
> we all need a break at least for the holidays
Not me, I already took my break, and I'm way overbooked now.
[](#longday)
Hang in there!!!
[](#faito)
[I'm really not](#everythingisfine)
Though the consequences of my actions won't catch up to me until the new year.
[](#pout)
Granted, that must have been before you joined as a mod
Just keep bringing it up. There's a lot of stuff that goes on day to day behind the scenes, and it's really easy for things to fall between the cracks if people aren't bumping it up for attention.
[](#faito)
>
> I agree
How did you make your debut?
[](#ama)
I was well aware of the CDF before then, I just didn't want to come into an existing community outside of the few times I actually wanted to discuss something on reddit, and the CDF was the only valid place to do it. I think that only happened like 2 or 3 times though.
[](#slapbet)
Say something simple and dishonest.
It's good to know that it's not completly off the table, I would also favour random, switching to top after a set ammount seems like a good middleground
I would not describe it like that personally.
[](#shhbabe)
That's 1 sub-community in 3 places.
[](#yuishrug)
Overall I would say I'm fairly happy with the state and direction of the sub this year. I was able to engage with a couple of rewatches, one of which as a host, and it was great fun getting to engage with a small temporary subcommunity to experience something together. I really feel like rewatches are where this sub really shines, and I learn a ton from my fellow commenters every time I participate in them. I've been slowly trying to educate myself on the nuances of screen writing and visual storytelling techniques that can be explored more freely in anime, and these discussions have been invaluable to me.
I'll also shout out all of folks who are helping to run and participate in the r/anime awards which are still ongoing. I unfortunately had to drop out of this years iteration because I got busier irl with a new job but in the couple weeks I was able to participate in it there were many veterans with a deep well of knowledge to draw from and the discussions were fun to participate in.
I guess synthesizing these two ideas, the greatest strength of this subreddit to me is that it's able to connect me through various pathways to people who are the exact same kind of nerdy that I am. Not just an anime nerd like people I know irl, but people who want to take deep dives with me and broaden our understanding of how these wonderful creators tell their story. It's a pretty small niche admittedly, but I'm grateful to have those outlets for my curiosity.
Do I wish there was more high effort posting going on in the subreddit? Certainly, but I'm hardly one to throw stones when I am also not posting that often and thus am part of the problem.
[](#tiredaoi)
I do wonder how much of my current circumstances are mirrored in the rest of this subreddits' more active users though. We've seen through sub censuses that the sub is gradually aging on average. Maybe there's less effort posts (or posts in general) because we're all getting older and now have responsibilities beyond writing posts about who is best girl.
[](#whippersnappers)
All in all, I think it's been a fun year, and I look forward to watching and reading discussions on some new favorites right alongside you all into 2026!
Definitely a factor for me as well. I had planned to host more rewatches this year but only got around to two of them (Yona of the Dawn in Jan/Feb, and Oshi no Ko ongoing now) because of too many other projects taking up my time.
[](#tiredaoi)
It had an interesting premise and characters, and really flashy animation... But it's not anime. It's actually painfully obvious - even when you watch with a JAP dub (which I did) - the pacing, the dynamics, resolution of issues and most of all - the animation itself - is not anime.
For the most part, for me, this was basically a Sims machinima - the 3d models looked like they're out of a video game. Then there were a lot of visual effects or sudden changes in animation style, but all in all doesn't really have the consistency of "normal" anime.
It's very clearly NOT anime. It's a cartoon, but there are plenty of cartoons out there - South Park, Simpsons, Family Guy - and they have their own merits, but they're not anime (even if they have anime episodes that were co-produced in Japan). It doesn't even feel like it's "anime inspired" like Avatar: The Last Airbender, for example. It's just not anime, and that's it.
I really don't see why it should be on r/anime. It's off-topic. And there are a lot of anime as it is, so further saturating the sub feels redundant.
Like, somehow I can buy the "realism" of MHA or The Boys when they present heroes but not the fake TV show where a guy is attacking the #1 stars. And I can have suspension of disbelief in Nisekoi when the bratty Chitoge is forced to be the fake gf of the MC (they did this in The Boys too actually...), but they stay cool for a very long time. Here they are kidnapped?? And after a month this dude who has zero game convinces the unimaginable popular beauty to marry him because "if only you'll give the nice guy a chance, you'll see how good he is".
Again, anime doesn't handle these situations in this way, things are resolved in a different way. It just feels like every idea was pitched and then immediately made into production, without questioning "will this break immersion? Is this too much?"; anime is a very established medium so they had decades to evolve and grow over this stuff. Same with western shows like The Boys. TBAX isn't there yet.
So for me, in combination with the Sims 3: Livin' Large animation, that was a dealbreaker and I dropped the show.
I can still see how a lot of people would like it. The premise is great, and the pacing is very rapid, the animation is flashy etc. But it isn't anime.
>the pacing, the dynamics, resolution of issues and most of all - the animation itself - is not anime.
Wouldn't the same argument apply to Solo Leveling or any non-Japanese story adapted by a Japanese studio? (Besides the animation point of course). We have those in the subreddit.
I feel like if you look broadly enough you'll find plenty of anime that could pass as a foreign animation because it doesn't quite have that "anime" feeling. The medium is more diverse than you give credit for. On the top of my mind Beasters and Odd Taxi. (Odd Taxi being only linked through Japanese speech pattern, and Beasters from shounen conflict). But stylistically and structurally they do not resemble "anime" per se.
I am not against not including Tbhx simply because it's not Japanese made, it's a consistent reason, so it's fine. But to create any other argument is redundant as you would easily find counter examples from the sea of anime out there.
You pointed at specific points where anime diverged from the norm to experiment. But TBHX is different is many ways, and like I said, the animation is the primary one. For something that isn't anime and doesn't even look like or directed like anime, I really don't see the reason to put it in r/anime.
As I pointed earlier, South Park had a full fledged anime episode. Hell, it was much more anime than TBHX looked to me. But you wouldn't suggest putting it here, because it doesn't belong.
Eastern animation is not all alike, just like you wouldn't put French animation and Hollywood animation as identical "Because they were made by people in the west". It's up to a French animation to show that it's anime if it wants to be considered anime, and the same goes for Chinese animation. It's that simple. That's why Studio Orange can have a 3d anime but it doesn't have to prove anything - it was already anime the second it left the animators hands.
>It's up to the non-anime animations to show that they match the genre.
The genre of which Odd taxi didn't match? you see what I'm saying? we have Japanese animation not meeting your standard of the genre of anime despite being one. This genre thing seems very subjective.
Imo the only reason Tbhx should be included is because it's quite popular with anime fans and have a Japanese animation style (to an extent, as it have both 2d and 3d style). And more importantly, it would help the subreddit gain more attraction. The subreddit is nowhere near as popular as it was couple years ago.
I understand that allowing such an outlier will create issues later on, as in "What will we not allow now?" and eventually the subreddit which is specifically for anime will have discussions for Invincible and non-anime shows.
My suggestion is simple. very simple. simply add a tag called "foreign animation" this tag include everything: discussions, news, arts, cosplays.No, they will not be included in any "top 10" nor in the subreddit usual activities. And should be discouraged to mentioned them in regular anime recommendations and discussions. This create a bridge to interact with other media that has similar mindlike fans and bringing them here while keeping the japanese animation the main focus.
As long at it's not hell to moderates I see no issue.
So I don't see the point, since the "it will grow the sub" argument is not convincing at all for me. Especially if the growth is from non-anime fans. See my original comment and the discussion there for the full rationale.
I also noticed you kinda ignored my reply to you. Odd Taxi has NOTHING to prove to anyone. It's anime BY DEFINITION, end of story. It's up to the non-anime to try to fit in, not the other way around. Even if aspects of TBHX are similar to some aspects of some rare anime in only some very specific ways (and even then, not really the same) - that doesn't really make it anime.
Avatar is much much more anime-like than this show, and I think a show has to be somewhere around that level to really start being considered animesque.
Regarding your suggestion, I think maybe a weekly single post for ALL foreign animation is a nice idea. And you can have a comment for each non-anime in that where people can discuss things. Why not? Sounds nice. I think you should suggest it in the meta thread.
Avatar to this day people still argue about. not everyone think on your wavelength and believe it's more "anime" than that one or it's less because of this and that.
Regarding your growing subreddit point: You actually opened my eyes. I was comparing the Karma between before and now. but the truth is the sub is already doing good and active. Even r/manga has lost the plot with how many posts of twitter manga that consest of 1 page that flooded the subreddit and the mods refuse to do anything about it. Actual chapters of manga that are published on magazines you barely find any interaction with.
Your suggestion to my suggestion is very decent too. I still find no harm in adding a tag. But maybe just for trailers and news of foreign animation, while keeping all the discussions for episodes and such on a single thread.
But... it's r/anime... not r/animation. Of course something that isn't anime has to jump through hoops to get in here. That only makes sense, no?
It's like having a Lord of the Rings forum and then have people argue that you should have a weekly discussion about Game of Thrones since there's so much crossover, it's the biggest show in the world and so many people on the forum watch it, etc.; But it's not LotR, so it's gotta have a special justification for the specific forum that is named after LotR.
> Regarding your growing subreddit point: You actually opened my eyes. I was comparing the Karma between before and now. but the truth is the sub is already doing good and active. Even r/manga has lost the plot with how many posts of twitter manga that consest of 1 page that flooded the subreddit and the mods refuse to do anything about it. Actual chapters of manga that are published on magazines you barely find any interaction with.
I think our natural inclination is that bigger is better. I felt the same about enterprises in my own life, like social groups in real life that I founded and cultivated. But it turns out who and when matters a lot too. And when it's not a commercial enterprise, it's really unclear that growth for growth sake is actually beneficial. You don't want to die out, for sure, but you can have a really nice thing going if you have a minimum amount of base participants. And like I explained there, reddit in particular has a weird tendency for self destruction after a certain size, so you actually have to be careful not to overgrow.
> Your suggestion to my suggestion is very decent too. I still find no harm in adding a tag. But maybe just for trailers and news of foreign animation, while keeping all the discussions for episodes and such on a single thread.
I'm also trying to think what would be logical for mods to accept and for people in the community to accept. This is low maintainance, so it's good as a test and you can keep/withdraw it with a low cost. Bigger changes are harder to implement and retract.
The cosplay situation was the lowpoint of the sub in quite a while imo. It’s not my type of content, though the random fanservice compilations/clips also don’t do much for me anymore, so I don’t miss certain posts. I also did feel something needed to be done and it’s understandable that people weren’t really happy about OF advertisements on the top of the sub (that the sub itself votes to the top though). But some of the discourse was absolutely vile. You can show disagreement while staying a little bit polite.
At the end of the year I’m again still surprised about the push for Chinese stuff on the sub. Not the fact that people are searching for a place to discuss those works, but that there still isn’t a (satisfying) dedicated one. Because in the end I think this whole discussion is mostly the understandable want of a place to be able to talk about them with other fans. Like I also wouldn’t mind a place to focuses more on French animation since some recent output looks stunning. But I keep expecting that someone will make a dedicated place for those Chinese works while it just doesn’t happen. I’ve no idea why though, or why something like /donghua isn’t satisfactory, with how big certain Chinese productions are getting.
Whatever the reason might be I do think it’s a deadended discussion. We’ve always had multiple approaches to ‘anime’ (or at least since the Avatar days). Japanese animation or a certain ‘vibe’ and aesthetic. They aren't compatible with each other. My Melody & Kurumi is just as anime as JJK or Demon Slayer to me, but the discussion is almost always about shows similar to the later ones. Which circles back to the cliched idea that anime is spikey haired boys yelling at each other while shooting power beams or something. Which I reject. Anime doesn’t say anything about the quality, style, genre or whether I’ll like it or not. In a way thus a pretty useless term. But useful enough for when I want to keep up with the Japanese animation industry and that’s why I’m here. And maybe it’s old man yells at cloud and a losing battle with services like Netflix treating anime as a genre, but that doesn’t mean I suddenly want to follow that idea when it has never been that for me.
To end it with my main gripes at the moment (well it has been for a while now): the clickbait nature of anime reporting. We don’t see CBR or animehunch all that often (thankfully) but we’ve articles with selective quoting from various people just to create a narrative, headlines that don’t fit with the body of text while everyone knows that internet users often only read headlines, copypasting posts from people who actually did some research/work. We also saw it with the Annno ‘viewers will have to adapt posts’ where people go full on the ‘Yeah based Anno, Western entertainment/influence bad!’ while the man wasn’t even talking about that. To me it wasn’t much more than the basic ‘write what you know’. Which is a pretty mild and boring statement? I don't know what mods can do about it though, since it’s the state of anime ‘reporting’ and users only reading headlines. Besides with the language barrier it has always been playing the telephone game with anime information, but well just venting I guess.
The other gripe being what to watch posts without context/information. I get that we want to be ‘welcoming’ and that a group of new watchers will feel lost with all the anime out there. But that isn’t an excuse for poor posts. A bit of quality standard is not too much to ask imo. Someone is still welcome when I ask them to take off their shoes. But with these posts you’re also only going to get people listing their favorite or the classic popular shows. They’re almost all the same and I could do without them. Especially when there is a sub dedicated to anime recs.
Because, just as an example, people from r/LordOfTheMysteries aren't going to migrate over to r/Donghua, a smaller community, to talk about the series. But they might move or show up here, where more eyes would be on it, to make a few posts and interact with the r/anime community. In theory.
I also disagree with the idea but that's the main reason for this push. Getting their series here means potentially growing its audience and maybe their own community by association. Getting it on /r/Donghua does nothing for them.
- Most Underrated Anime poll
- Most Overrated Anime poll
- Worst Girl Contest
Nothing could possibly go wrong!
We had that one time, it was fun, would not be opposed to having another.
Most underrated: AoT
Most under appreciated: AoT
["This is an American joke."](https://youtu.be/bXK25VEKbgc?si=YKs_S4_CSztGJ1E-&t=30)
Thanks
I see the resemblance but for some reason I remember that goofy style of drawing from somewhere else. Was it Crayon Shin (haven't read this in a long time) or something else? Help!
Do you know what's the style of drawing called? I really like how weird it is.
That aside, regarding the anime-specific rule:
I won't disagree that shows like *To Be Hero X* should not be on r/anime, because it would certainly open up a floodgate of dilemmas. It is a necessary evil for now.
However, I do feel like we should re-consider where the line should be drawn going forward if the subreddit aims to be a community for people who enjoy anime, as opposed to a place to departmentalize the discussion of certain works. After all, people fundamentally enjoy anime not because it is Japanese but because it has certain attributes, with the integration of Japanese culture being only one such attribute.
In my experience, the "cartoon / anime" dichotomy is largely an American-only occurrence. In Chinese-speaking animation circles, for example, the barriers between fans of 2D Japanese and Chinese animation are basically non-existent, because the two are treated as essentially equivalent. Something similar happens in French-speaking animation circles. Animation has always been a global phenomenon from the perspective of both creators and audiences: Osamu Tezuka was influenced by works such as *Bambi* and *Princess Iron Fan*; Japanese animation has in turn influenced the rest of the world.
To me, it simply isn't ideal to make it harder to interact with like-minded people for the sake of an arbitrary label. Going into the future, I think it will become increasingly difficult to meaningfully be an anime fan without this interaction. Of course, I understand that we don't live in an ideal world, nor do I currently have any particularly feasible solutions...
Still; it is for this reason that *even if* r/Donghua can one day become its own thriving community, I would still wish for the line to be re-drawn. As the largest animation-related subreddit on Reddit, I feel it is our responsibility to be a space for works of animation that are enjoyed by the largest animation-related community on Reddit.
The note about how "In Chinese-speaking animation circles, for example, the barriers between fans of 2D Japanese and Chinese animation are basically non-existent" is definitely an interesting one and something I've observed as well at times. But I think that saying we're a subreddit for 2D animation would be a huge non-starter for a lot of people. Things like *Houseki no Kuni*, or *Girls Band Cry* are pretty broadly treated as just a different style of anime, not a separate thing entirely.
Ultimately, I wish that it was easy to basically have something where we could have r/anime be broken into several pieces, and when you join the sub you could subscribe to them separately, but that's not really how Reddit tends to work (even though multi-Reddits technically exist, nobody uses them and there isn't really an easy approach to make it workable on our end).
> As the largest animation-related subreddit on Reddit, I feel it is our responsibility to be a space for works of animation that are enjoyed by the largest animation-related community on Reddit.
Honestly, I don't really feel that we have this responsibility, especially because this is a justification for r/anime to be a general animation subreddit, rather than covering a specific niche (regardless of what that niche might be). The subreddit's been build up for nearly two decades with *a lot* of work going into things like the episode bot, comment faces, and community events. I don't think we just owe every other subsection of animation access to that platform. Maybe there's contexts in which it makes sense to change the lines, but it's not a matter of responsibility.
I personally think crossposting / linking could be a valid solution if implemented extremely precisely, but emphasis needs to be placed on the "extremely" part. So, I do not think this is an attainable solution at all...
>Honestly, I don't really feel that we have this responsibility, especially because this is a justification for [r/anime](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/) to be a general animation subreddit, rather than covering a specific niche (regardless of what that niche might be).
I didn't intend for my original comment to come across as conveying this argument; I meant to equate "the largest animation-related community on Reddit" as "people who enjoy anime and would enjoy stuff like *To Be Hero X*:" still a niche. I can see why this wording was a bit unclear, though: I was puzzled by this line for a moment, now that I look at it again under half an hour later. My bad.
China regularly bans "subversive" anime which could mean things like protesting your government, anything LGBT related, questioning authority and more. And in some cases they censor those things or sex/violence out of anime. They're not friends to this industry - in fact, if they get too much sway, you'll see diluted and meek anime, just like some Hollywood movies removed things that can hurt Big Brother from their films (they even had a thought police commissar on set in some cases to help them along!)
There's nothing equivalent about the two. One is under extreme authoritarian grip, the other is a full expression of artistic art. Bunching them together like that line doesn't exist is ignoring reality itself.
It's also ironic, since Chinese audiences only see Big Brother Approved ^TM and censored anime which would match their own productions in the values department. They don't experience anime, they experience same shadow of it that they are allowed to see.
I'm Chinese, and while the government definitely controls animation, creative people are going to be creative no matter what. Not to mention, you overstated this control: this isn't some 1984-esque dystopia we're talking about. Criticisms of corruption, LGBT-related content, and "subversive" things are always not banned, either because they're simply not actually banned or because of how useless and inconsistent the censorship bureau is.
I get that these views are ones you actually hold, and I don't think you're "brainwashed" or anything. But, please just consider: why is just seeing the word "Chinese" enough to compel you to write this entire thing about the evils of China, under a completely unrelated comment about anime? Please, learn more about China and how Chinese people exist on a day-to-day basis. That's all I'm asking for. No offense intended, genuinely.
Your comment was rather civil, so I will say this gently - Yes, yes it is AND THEN SOME. Your human rights as a people are a joke. Chinese people are like medival peasants compared to people in the West or Japan. The difference is so huge there is no comparison.
I really wish the proud people of China will remove the chains they're leashed with. But I cannot take seriously the words of a miserable vassal slave that can be whiffed at slightest whim of his overlord. I can only seriously engage with free people. I am sorry for you and your people for this miserable chapter in your history, and wish you would be liberated and stand among other man as free people who have rights like human beings.
This conversation started as a discussion of the relationship between international animation and anime, but as soon as I mention China, it became about the government. I'm tired of having to say this: I'm not trying to argue, just to set facts straight.
If that's you, though, there is the spoiler corner where you can discuss the work with others like you who have read it before.
It should be noted, the Source Material Corner is not the Spoiler Corner. **All spoilers must still be tagged in the Source Material Corner**.
I assure you they do, it's just the current rules force them to effectively hide the fact they've consumed the source or banish themselves to the source corner that virtually no one reads besides other source readers.
It's similar to how it's near-impossible to consistently define "indie" or "RPG".
You know, I was agreeing at first, but after thinking about it a bit more, I actually disagree that 'anime' is basically undefinable. I think the issue is that we keep trying to treat it like a binary switch is it Anime? Yes/No, when it actually works more like a radial spectrum, or a flavor wheel of expectations.
Most of us can agree on the anchors. You’d place *DBZ* near the core of 'Orthodox Anime' and *Steven Universe* near the core of 'Orthodox Cartoon.' This isn't because of a single rule like 'Made in Japan,' but because we subconsciously weight a bundle of cues: visual language, pacing, performance style, humor, and the storytelling conventions the show assumes you already understand. If I order from the 'Anime' side of the menu, I’m usually expecting serialization, specific visual tropes, and high stakes. If I order 'Cartoon,' I’m usually expecting something more episodic, distinct Western aesthetics, or comedy-focused.
But this spectrum isn't static; time is a huge factor. What defined 'anime' in the 90s is different from today because the medium has evolved. The lines have blurred as creators globally grew up watching each other's work.
This is why we have so many edge cases that don't fit the old definitions but still need labels:
* Western Anime: Shows like *Avatar* or *Castlevania* fall into a hybrid category. They borrow the anime aesthetic and narrative stakes, but the dialogue rhythm remains distinctly Western.
* Global/Donghua: Series that look anime-adjacent visually but have a completely different cultural cadence and pacing.
* The 'Arcane' Paradox: This is the perfect example. Visually, it’s nothing like traditional anime, but Netflix categorizes it as such because it shares the same 'flavor profile' of serialized drama and stylized action that fans crave.
So, I no longer treat these labels like hard boxes or passport checks. I treat them as relational signposts. They exist to answer the real question: *'If I liked X, what else is likely to feel similar?'* Whether it's technically Anime or just Animation doesn't matter as much as whether the label accurately signals the taste and experience I’m about to get
Most people who like modern anime will like Arcane, but does that mean this sub should allow posts about Arcane? I would say no, if only because the majority of the users wouldn't understand the nuance of the decision and just assume that all "western anime" is allowed, then get annoyed when their posts are removed.
I'm also still kind of wary on including things like visuals or narrative into the definition because it comes with the risk of excluding outliers. Like IMO Sazae-san is definitely anime but it doesn't have a continuing narrative and has almost zero stakes. I tend to lean towards country of origin being the most important distinction simply because it's the best way to not leave out the "weird" shows, but of course then you get into endless arguments over international productions and whatnot.
Basically I agree that it's something like the spectrum you proposed. But I don't think that kind of definition can be clearly defined with consistent enough boundaries that you can moderate based on it.
I think the only way through this and to resolve the exact friction you're describing is to acknowledge that "anime" currently operates on three different axes simultaneously. People keep arguing because they are using different axes without saying so.
Here is the framework (I call it the V3.0 Model) that explains why Sazae-san is allowed, and Arcane isn't:
Axis X Industry Lineage (The Source)
This is the Moderator-Friendly Axis. It asks: Who commissioned it? Where does the primary creative control sit? Which industry pipeline produced it?
Result: By this axis, Sazae-san is uncontroversially within scope because it is part of the Japanese Industry Lineage. This gives mods an objective, scalable boundary ("Designation of Origin") rather than a subjective one.
Axis Y Media Grammar (The Voice)
This is the Viewer Expectation Axis. It asks: How does the show behave? It measures a bundle of cues: serialization level, emotional register (sincerity versus melodrama), staging conventions, dialogue rhythm, and assumed genre literacy. Visuals support this, but aren't the whole definition.
Result: By this axis, Arcane reads as "Anime" to an English speaker because it hits high marks on serialization and styling, even though it fails Axis X.
Axis Z Community Identity (The Discourse)
This is the Social Axis. Some works get "discourse citizenship" because they are constantly referenced or treated as shared language. This axis explains why edge cases like RWBY or King of the Hill trigger repeated scope disputes; the community is split on whether to "claim" them
The useful framing for r/anime is that the Subreddit Name aligns with Axis Y (Global Usage/Grammar), while the Rules are enforced strictly on Axis X (Lineage). That mismatch is why
If the subreddit wants to reduce this friction without losing focus, there are really only two coherent paths:
Option 1: Dual Citizenship (With Guardrails) Keep Axis X as the primary rule, but allow a limited Axis Y exception for clearly anime-adjacent works with strict containment
Guardrails: Mandatory flairs for non-Japanese works (\[Western Anime\], \[Donghua\]), weekend-only threads, or high-effort post requirements
This acknowledges modern viewing expectations while maintaining the feed's niche focus.
Option 2: Truth in Advertising. If the goal is to remain strictly industry-focused, the clearest solution is to explicitly state this in the subreddit description
While the word 'anime' has expanded globally, this community is strictly for the Japanese Animation Industry
This prevents newcomers from being surprised that Arcane is out of scope. It’s not a value judgment, it’s just aligning the label with the enforcement axis
I don't know if it continues to update anymore but you can still see the subscriber count either through the [RES hover](https://i.imgur.com/F5iwFAL.png) on /r/anime
Or on the [google search page](https://imgur.com/lWsJUk0)
---
Edit: 14 hours later, considering [the number displayed by RES](https://imgur.com/WOrHI0x) is now higher I'd say they are updating
>We've recently been able to implement some changes to how the Source Material Corner works. It's no longer auto-collapsed on the app anymore, which hopefully makes more aware of it's existence. We were also able to implement an improved and more comprehensive autoflagging method to more completely enforce the Source Material Corner rule. Lastly, we've also added additional clarification that the Source Material Corner is not specifically and singularly about explicit spoilers, and have different removal reasons to make this as clear as possible.
>Have you noticed any differences in Episode discussion threads in the last month? And how do you feel about the Source Material Corner rule and source readers talking about the source in general. Does the presence of source readers in the threads affect your desire to use the Episode Discussion threads?
I personally find the way the source material rule has been historically enforced to be terrible and capricious in many instances. I have seen numerous times where a post is deleted simply because someone mentioned that source material exists, with mods taking any questioning and pushback on this personally and becoming vindictive and petty in response. It also seems like the mods themselves aren't on the same page regarding what counts or when to enforce it. Sometimes there will be threads where the whole topic is something like 'who is the best final couple in a love-triangle romance' or 'what was the worst ending in anime'. Sometimes, only sometimes, a mod will go through and remove damn near every comment because they're spoilers or reference source material, despite the whole topic of the thread being something that is a spoiler by its very nature. Other times they go completely under the radar and nothing gets removed and the thread is left to be the discussion it was intended to be. It's all very unevenly applied, seeming to depend more on which mods happen to be online at the time and what sort of mood they're personally in more than any clear understanding of the rules as stated in the sidebar.
Those sounds like regular threads, which the source material rule doesn't apply to (they're only on Episode Discussion threads posted by u/AutoLovepon).
> Sometimes, only sometimes, a mod will go through and remove damn near every comment because they're spoilers or reference source material, despite the whole topic of the thread being something that is a spoiler by its very nature.
It is the posters responsibility to ensure they don't spoil people because a reader must be given a choice to spoil themselves or not. The easiest way to do this is to simply tag the spoilers.
In order for a thread to be spoiler tagged, the shows it spoils must be in the title (which can't be edited) so that people know what will be spoiled if they click into the thread. Obviously for open ended questions like you mentioned this isn't viable, and so any spoilers by commenters must be tagged.
The reason we have such strict spoiler rules is that nobody likes being spoiled, and there's always new people going through r/anime who haven't watched a particular show (even if it's old or omega popular) who don't deserve to be spoiled.
I should also note, that spoilers are the one thing that we depend on the community to report, as it's not feasible to autoreport spoilers. Reporting a comment for spoilers is the quickest and most efficient way to have a comment reviewed for spoilers. So sometimes, it's just that nobody reported the spoilers, and so it was never looked at.
> It's all very unevenly applied, seeming to depend more on which mods happen to be online at the time and what sort of mood they're personally in more than any clear understanding of the rules as stated in the sidebar.
Have you noticed it being more consistent lately (in the Episode Discussion threads)? Prior to the changes made in November, a large chunk of SMC removals were dependent on individual mods going through threads by hand for the shows they watched.
To be frank, I don't think your feedback is valuable if you cannot distinguish what flair (and thus set of rules) a post has.
But that's exactly how it should be. It sounds like youre trying to create a definition or consistent rule to be applied by a robot. But really, all it needs is to be selective and case by case basis. Guarantee that there would be a lot more interest to discuss To Be Hero X on this sub than 90% of any of the 70 seasonal shows. If this is what community wants then you should just find a way to justify it, even if its only because of Sawano Hiroyuki or Aniplex involvement. There doesnt need to be any kind of slippery slope if you just do it case by case basis.
If your prioritizing the community, then i think that is something it would appreciate. Fact is, shows like that are relevant to an average anime watcher, relevant to western anime community. So does it actually serve r/anime to be so rigid and conservative in this question?
There's two main things with this. First off, this is also true of a ton of things that aren't really what we think r/anime should be about. We could have had threads for say, the Kaguya-sama manga, and those would have been bigger than 90% of seasonals. We can just hunt for stuff that would be popular with our community and become r/otakuinterests, but being a specialized sub with a specific purpose works fine for us.
But second is that being bigger than those 90% just means that those series all get pushed down the list. For a lot of shows, r/anime is one of the biggest places that they can get a foot in the door and find an audience, and if we start trying to expand our scope, then those shows have less exposure and wind up with even smaller audiences. I don't think that we need to grab the biggest non-Japanese animated works and fold them into our scope just because they might give us some active threads.
> There doesnt need to be any kind of slippery slope if you just do it case by case basis.
I would say that regardless of whether or not there are substantial changes, case-by-case inherently leads to people advocating for a slippery slope. If we start to say "r/anime is for Japanese animation and also these other things" we will inevitably get "but what about these other other things". We can still have some kind of a line, but if we had a specific line of where we might make exceptions and some of the bigger non-Japanese series still didn't get in, we'd just be dealing with *more* complaints about "well why not Y?"
its a terrible analogy. Its a different medium, different format, no music, no openings, no voice actors.
> that those series all get pushed down the list.
This is not a meaningful concern. If something like that meaningfully hurt any series here than maybe cosplay and fanart should be banned altogether since those are objectively less important. People know how to use reddit to find what they are looking for. I look for discussions that happened weeks or months ago quite often.
It doesnt seem like people are requesting to reduce amount of variety of content on the subreddit for the sake of boosting viewership of less popular shows.
I'm also highly skeptical that it would work that way anyway.
>"but what about these other other things"
This is not an unanswerable question. The other things arent as popular and dont have sufficient interest, that's all.
If Aniplex is able to judge that "this show will appeal to both western and Japanese anime fans" and therefore invest into advertising, dubbing and streaming it on relevant platforms, then you should also be able to recognize what about that show can be relevant for the community.
Your premise was just that it would be popular, so I was following that to its endpoint. So I guess I should just ask: what specifically would you be looking for in a scope change?
> This is not a meaningful concern.
I would disagree.
> If something like that meaningfully hurt any series here than maybe cosplay and fanart should be banned altogether since those are objectively less important.
I think that having some variety in format of content is nice, but also having that variety doesn't change opportunities for exposure. Fans of series can make fanart for it even if the show isn't popular. The most popular way for fans to promote a show on r/anime is to post a clip from it. Different formats of content provide avenues for all fandoms.
> The other things arent as popular and dont have sufficient interest
Everyone will have their own definition of "sufficient" interest. We could metric it one way or another, but whatever the solution would be is almost certainly clunkier than what we have now. If we had said "oh yeah Arcane has enough interest, but TBHX doesn't" then that's just going to rile people up. If TBHX is the line, then it's Lord of the Mysteries fans that get upset with us. An arbitrary line just means we have to endlessly litigate it. Right now we have a clear scope that we're happy with and causes minimal issues.
TBHX and Lord of Mysteries both stream on CR and get dubs, this alone already puts it in crosshairs of an average anime fan. Whatever the other shows might be, most people dont even have awareness of them to care if they are here or not, they are not easily accessible from official channels.
Im not necessarily saying that everything on CR should get a discussion here, but these are just additional criteria that most of the other shows wouldnt meet.
I think that an interesting aspect of the discussion is that the most significant details vary quite a bit person-to-person. Like the dubbing route is one possible option (though then there's the American stuff that's natively English which would be a separate can of worms) but the third Chinese series that was discussed this year (The Fated Magical Princess) was one that didn't have an English dub, but a Japanese dub. For a large percentage of our active userbase, the Japanese dub is what people will be watching, and so in many cases the presence of that will be what people will see as making it "anime". One of the quirks of Crunchyroll actually is that every dub language is listed in its actual language (Français, not French, for example), except for Japanese, which is listed as "Japanese". I'd say that the Japanese dub of TBHX being the default (at least initially, maybe not now) was one of the biggest drivers of people on this subreddit feeling that it should be here.
Crunchyroll as a metric is definitely something that's been mentioned more than a few times, whether as just a "everything on Crunchyroll" or as just one flag as you're suggesting, but I don't think we'd really want to go that route specifically. A lot of people are going to be watching most of their anime on Crunchyroll, but also more anime gets watched on Netflix than on CR. Things like Castlevania have been advertised as anime in the past, and digging through modmail I'm also finding that we had a number of people confused about why Arcane wasn't allowed.
Realistically, wherever we move the line, not everyone's going to be happy. I'm putting together a list of hypotheticals to see how the team would broadly feel about some different scenarios that might in the future drive changes to what the scope of the subreddit is.
Japanese dub as a criteria could work. I recently [found a trailer for a Solo leveling derivative webtoon adaptation](https://x.com/TombRaider_King/status/2012087568389816662), and its with a Japanese dub already and Japanese marketing. So really, for most people it's not gonna seem meaningfully different from Solo Leveling, but because of the current rules we can't even make fun of it for being so derivative here.
It's not like people watched Solo leveling because of A-1 pictures. And because of the nature of animation productions nowadays, animators could be from all over the place as they are in Japanese productions as well quite often.