Why doesn't anime have ages like comics do?

Yk how comics have the golden age silver age modern age ect. Why doesn't anime have this?

I feel like it'd be way better to put anime into ages instead of trying to decide what newgen and old gen. Just a lil food for thought idk

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Commentaires

No_Cockroach24672026-01-15 03:49

Categories are a fake idea.

BalecIThink2026-01-15 03:53

That and almost no one can agree on when an age starts or ends so the terms have no real meaning.

On the US comic side I've seen arguments dating back to the 70's as to when the 'silver age' ended. We don't need another reason to yell at each other, we're overstocked as it is.

That_Possession32152026-01-15 03:57

What makes an idea real?

Ok-Chest-79322026-01-15 09:14

No ideas are real. All ideas are really theories, and all theories can be wrong, but some theories are better-supported by data than others. Ideas that are real are called facts, but even facts aren't necessarily correct, just so likely to be correct that it's sensible to assume they are.

gymleader-misty2026-01-15 03:49

If you don't say age it is technically legal. Amirite Japan.

That_Possession32152026-01-15 03:57

excuse me

abandoned_idol2026-01-15 04:06

It's a running joke about how many anime (though not necessarily most) sexualize minors. Specifically the flimsy excuses they use ("looks 5, is actually a grandma").

Female minors. Though someone do share if you are aware of one preying on male minors.

There's also the recurring joke about incest, the grooming one, Zoophiles, the list goes on.

Japan = Sex Pest

That_Possession32152026-01-15 04:30

Ik about all that I was just confused about the if you don't say the age cause I noticed it was actually a lot of western media that's anime inspired that either doesn't state character ages and proceeds to sexualize them or insists that every girl in the highschool literature club is 18.

timpkmn892026-01-15 03:51

Because comics have much clearer delineations since you're focused on what's now just two publishers running the same series for decades

RGBkano2026-01-15 03:51

New gen and old gen are fanmade terms to begin with

TanukiiGG2026-01-15 03:53

We go by decades. Say "80's / 90's / 2000's anime" and you kinda know the vibe of it.

abandoned_idol2026-01-15 03:57

Assuming we could label them with said categories, how would this add any substantial value to discussions?

Do you know how incredibly upset some users get when I tell them that I don't want to watch their favorite anime because it aired in the 80s?

It's not dated, it's "classic". Talking about them as if they were as old as Beethoven.

Trivia: Did you know that a small numbers of western anime viewers insist that the entire world knows about "the big 3". I keep forgetting the 3 anime that they mention, and sometimes the 3 are different for some reason.

I forgot to answer the question. Anime is really recent as a medium, it hasn't even been a 100 years since it started. You can just use decades to group them together.

That_Possession32152026-01-15 04:23

Yeah those are all good points.

More trivia: did you know the big 3 are the big 3 because they were consistently the highest rated manga in popularity polls and not because they were they best selling.

abandoned_idol2026-01-15 04:30

I did not know that.

Do you happen to know which polls they ranked highly in? I'm curious to check them out.

That_Possession32152026-01-15 04:33

They're in the back of shonen jump magazines I believe. If I remember correctly every chapter in the magazine has a 1-5 circle and you circle in one of the numbers and then you rip off that piece of paper and do something with it after.

Leiothrix2026-01-15 04:00

Because it is both completely subjective and completely meaningless?

cipheron2026-01-15 04:02

Things like "ages" are only defined as a retrospective.

Also, defining ages means you're glossing over the facts. Comics in America back in the early days were much more diverse than the superhero stuff that came to dominate. Crime, horror, western, war, detective comics etc etc. A lot of that go obliterated by the Comics Code Authority during the McCarthy Era.

The "superhero" stuff survived by being more sanitized than the wider comics that existed before the censorship came in. When they say "golden age" they're taking a glossy image of the past that's largely mythologizing the comics that *survived* and got big, rather than an accurate representation of all the comics that existed. i.e. there's a huge dose of **Survivorship Bias** when defining the "Golden Age of Comics".

So you couldn't apply this to anime because if you try to say there was e.g. a "Golden Shonen Age" which starts with e.g. "Astro Boy" and ends with "Dragon Ball" then you by definition ERASE all the other manga that existed but don't fit into your attempt at a category. For example, are the "Tales from the Crypt" comic series considered "Golden Age" or "Silver Age" and does it even make sense to try and put them into that timeline?

The "Golden Age of Comics" doesn't get around that problem, it just ignores it entirely, so you could NEVER apply such an "age" system in a rigorous way and fit ALL anime and manga into it. No matter what "classification" or category system you try to make you'll always find many things, even **most** things refuse to sit nicely in one category or another.

You might come up with a system that fits many of the "well known" series into it, but you then inevitably have to sweep the thousands of smaller series that don't fit your "system" under the rug and say "well they're not well known enough to think about how they contradict my claim that everything can be categorized this way" ... in exactly the same way many if not most of the old comics don't actually fit into the Golden/Silver categories. What about Richie Rich, Caspar, Ducktales? Are these Golden Age or Silver Age? Nobody asks that question because the system can't actually accommodate most stuff that was made, only the stuff that superhero comic fans care about.

That_Possession32152026-01-15 04:28

I've been an avid comic reader for about 5 years now and I had no idea about this. I simply thought comics were put in ages based on defining runs or events in the comic space.

Thanks for educating me on this piece of history.

cipheron2026-01-16 13:32

Yeah, btw for the pre-code comics, the reason they went away is that western, war, crime and detective stories all use guns, and guns were right out under the new "Code" that the industry created out of fear of government censorship (this was the height of McCarthyism).

Superheroes don't use guns, so those skirted the code as some of the few adventure type comics they could still make.

Ok-Chest-79322026-01-15 09:17

There was no golden age of comics, there was a golden age of *superheroes*. That's a genre, anime is a medium. And the purpose of the terms golden age and silver age etc is that it allows us to shorthand groups of traits that superhero stories can feature - which we associate with time periods only because of when these traits were most common. You can still write a golden age superhero story today if you want.

Salty1452026-01-16 02:36

I mean it's up to the community to establish them and without some centralized authority, good luck getting the anime community to agree on anything.

If I had to offer a suggestion (names subject to change):

1907 - 1963: Anime Pre-History

* This can probably be segmented further, but essential covers the early years of anime. I'm not as well-versed in it as I'd like but for most people is going to be functionally similar. Anime spends much of the 20th century lagging behind the foreign market, existing in the form of short films and a few feature films that are interesting historically, but don't offer much beyond that.

1963 - 1981: Early Age

* Some business types tell Tezuka that he could never make a TV anime financially and logistically viable, so Tezuka makes a TV anime financially and logistically viable. *Astro Boy* lays the groundwork for the industry as we know it, and much of the next two decades is set further laying the groundwork for the genres we know and love. Some creators experiment with more mature storytelling, but most shows are aimed at families or kids. Output is small, but a lot of important names get their start here.

1981 - 1989: Golden Age

* Tomino releases a stinker of a series in 1979 called *Mobile Suit Gundam* that finds new life after airing reruns. Sunrise looks to capitalize and recuts the original series into a theatrical trilogy. A promotional event is set up for the film, resulting in what would later be crowned "The Declaration of a New Anime Century". This pretty much cements the idea of the "otaku" in the public eye, helped as well by the release of *Urusei Yatsura* later that year, whose main girl Lum pretty much becomes the poster girl for this period of Bubble Era anime.

1990 - 1994: Lost Age

* Japanese economic bubble pops and the Lost Decade begins. The film market is shook by a number of high-profile bombs in the late-80s, and the economic collapse puts the OVA market on a timer. Confidence in the future of the anime industry is low to say the least.

1995 - 2006: Silver Age

* *Evangelion* and *Ghost in the Shell* release and anime finds a new home on late-night TV. Short-form original anime start to become a lot more frequent now airing in late-night time slots.

2007 - Present: Modern Age

* Digipaint becomes the standard and most things from here on out still feel very modern because of it. Seasonal anime start to become more popular, foreign investments start to become more common, ONAs become a popular format that (if you squint hard enough) are basically just OVAs but this time on a computer.

I could go into more detail, but honestly this is already a little much for a Reddit comment.