What causes backlash against Anime that’s objectively successful?
Some shows, movies, or franchises reach massive levels of popularity, with high viewership numbers, strong production quality, and constant online discussion, yet they also receive nonstop criticism and negativity. Even people who claim to dislike them often keep up with new releases. What do you think drives this kind of backlash toward media that is clearly successful?
Commentaires
Taste is subjective like Raven said too. Not everyone will like everything. Dragonball and all of the spin offs are objectively successful and I don’t care for them one bit. Same can be said of Haikyuu - could not caress for any of it. But I love One Piece, and all it’s award and accolades speak for themselves- yet there are still people who feel the same way about One Piece that I do about Haikyuu \*shrugs\*.
You realize that you like what you like, and that’s all that matters.
More popularity=more people giving their opinions on it. If you find an unpopular show mid, you might just think "figures", but when you find a popular show mid, you're surprised and might want to talk about it or see if other people agree.
Whether you like the show or not doesn't have a quantity attached to it. Success does.
But I can't discern if that's nearly exclusively from foreign/international viewers (specifically English-speaking Westerners as I am also an English-speaking Westerner and it's within these corners of the internet) or there is similarly any native Japanese backlash, at least within the online/social media sphere.
1) You find the fanbase obnoxious and the show itself becomes guilty by association.
2) You didn't really like the show that much, and hearing about it non-stop makes upi forced to think about it more, further reinforcing your dislike/indifference to it due to the disparity between your opinion of the show's quality and the common perception's. This can go both ways by the way, if you're a fan of a commonly shit talked show.
3) You might not actively dislike the show but you find the show's success or the way people put it on a pedestal to be completely undeserved, especially if it's in a genre that is otherwise unpopular (\*cough\* 86).
There are plenty of IP's out there that are trash that make way too much money.
There are IP's out there that are trash that make no money.
Winning awards is not objective success.
The issue is that you would place any one show on such a pedestal that it's not above criticism. Nothing is perfect, a lot of people liking something doesn't make all of them correct.
Quality however is a subjective thing.
Again, just because people demand something doesn't make it successful.
You saying something isn't successful just because such and such is equally a subjective opinion. IMO the only objective way to measure success in this situation is to measure intent with results.
Look, philosophically I would agree with you that profits don't equal quality. I definitely don't think that just because something makes money, it is a GOOD product. I do not equate success here with being a GOOD product, which I feel is the reason why you're reluctant to equate profits with success because it seems you feel that is what it should mean. However, I don't. I feel when something is created, it is meant to do something. In the case of commercial art, it is to make money, first and foremost. Ergo by making a lot of money, it achieved its goal, so therefore it can be defined as a success, regardless of whether it is well made or not.
If profit alone defines success, then a product that destroys its own future demand is "objectively successful" right up until it collapses, at which point your definition explains nothing. That's not an objective standard it's a post-hoc justification.
Look at say Game of Thrones. Made hand over fist, but everyone hates season 5+. There's no neat percentage score to assign here either. Was Game of Thrones a success because everyone liked the majority of episodes or was it a failure because the back half is so *despised.*
How I Met Your Mother's last episode is so sour in people's mouths people say it ruins the entire series.
With Video Games people hate any of the Telltale games because they promised a payoff people waited for, and then failed to deliver on the promise at the end, which post-hoc people see as making the beginning and middle pointless.
Profit cannot be the measurement of success. There are so many variables besides profit that it's too narrow a definition. You can make profit on the individual unit of something, and simultaneously fuck it up so bad you could of made MORE profit if you had made an earlier piece of media of a higher quality. In the case of anime, Profit starts with the general public's interpretation of the studio when a given project is announced. "Trigger saves anime" is probably a meme that has made trigger hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars as a stamp of quality and it has nothing to do with any given project other than being the studio of said project.
People talk about them a lot, therefore you get more responses, and just more interaction. I can rant about how much I don't like Gundam Stardust Memory however, way less people are going to care about that, compared to me talking about how much I don't like the Attack on Titan ending.
Plus you have to consider, that the people making said critical or hate posts, are also just casual fans of said popular anime. They don't have the extensive library to talk about other stuff. Most of the really toxic x battle shonen sucks posts, usually come from people that are fans of other popular battle shonen, and watch very little else in my experience.
> Even people who claim to dislike them often keep up with new releases.
I mean I don't get it, but still some people like to riff on bad media as a hobby.
>Some shows, movies, or franchises reach massive levels of popularity, with high viewership numbers, strong production quality, and constant online discussion
That doesn't inherently mean the media is good though. Your personal enjoyment is all that matters. How does the fact it sells well impact my enjoyment? It only matters if you care about a sequel, otherwise it means nothing. Animation isn't everything either, and also subjective (there are people who don't like the obsession with speedy action sequences that seem popular right now).