Least favorite cartoon/anime tropes

[Dweller Dark]

I figure at least some people here watch anime or cartoons and have a disliking for certain tropes contained within the series they watch/have watched. Personally, my least favorite is when the MC or the villain say each other's names in full repeatedly, when most viewers are capable of remembering that character's name easily enough. Bleach is guilty of this often enough, a notable example being when Ichigo and Byakuya call each other by their full names repeatedly, even in their most iconic battle. It's less annoying in shows like DBZ where most characters have one name or an alternative name, or in Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood where several characters have nicknames that are used often (ex: Ed, Al, Fullmetal, Hohenheim, Teacher/Izumi, Armstrong, Olivier, etc). FMAB also tends to use a character's full name during impactful moments, such as when a homunculi dies or a character is angry enough to do so. And FMAB also avoids the trope of explaining how all of the powers in the series work, with most of them being alchemy or alkahestry based or homunculi-specific, which are generally touched upon earlier in the series and brought back up briefly for important moments (such as Greed's ultimate shield).

[dasho]

My least favorite would be how video games have managed to do Berserk far more justice than any anime adaptation after the '97 release.

[arialis]

Mine is when characters spout exposition instead of explaining things visually, kills the mood of any scene for me.

[Dweller Dark]

5 minutes ago, arialis said:

Mine is when characters spout exposition instead of explaining things visually, kills the mood of any scene for me.

 

I kinda get why it's done, but I agree that it kills the mood. They want you to know exactly how the power or something works as to not make it confusing or ambiguous, but it's like a lot of dialogue to sit and listen to, rather than focus on the action. And even then, sometimes they over-explain it and it's confusing anyway. And sometimes, a side character who is actually interesting mostly gets the exposition job, rather than doing anything meaningful. Like half the Z Fighters in DBZ, who are mostly there to sit in awe of the MC and occasionally explain how the MC does something (such as Krillin explaining why Goku can't use the Spirit Bomb in Super Saiyan during the ToP arc of the anime).

[Rudolph]

One reason why I ended up giving up on Revolutionary Girl Utena was because the show would not stop reusing the same exact fucking introduction sequence before every duel. Other shows are very much guilty of this as well, but this one strikes me as particularly egregious.

 

The other reason being the deliberately silly episodes that were more cringeworthy than funny.

Edited December 28, 2022 by Rudolph

[Fairen]

The anime trope of female characters who will touch and grab each other in suggestive ways, but will never say a word about attraction towards or explicit romantic feelings for each other.

[Test Tickle]

Something that really irks me, and idk if anyone else thinks this, is when anime exists at all. It's incredibly annoying when you notice it and once you do you never stop noticing it

[Murdoch]

1 hour ago, Fairen said:

The anime trope of female characters who will touch and grab each other in suggestive ways, but will never say a word about attraction towards or explicit romantic feelings for each other.

 

The treatment of females in anime in general often leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. The way some anime shows often very young looking girls in skimpy clothes makes my skin crawl. I see this influence seemingly bleeding over into things like mods for other games. I follow Skyrim mods and there's been a few mods that make many of the female NPCs look like super young anime girls. It's creepy.

[Dweller Dark]

2 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

 

The treatment of females in anime in general often leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. The way some anime shows often very young looking girls in skimpy clothes makes my skin crawl. I see this influence seemingly bleeding over into things like mods for other games. I follow Skyrim mods and there's been a few mods that make many of the female NPCs look like super young anime girls. It's creepy.

 

That's another aspect of anime I don't particularly like because there's usually a weird dynamic between said female characters and male characters, whether it be the weird near-incest love plot in SAO's Alfheim Online arc or the recent thing between Ichigo's mom and dad in Bleach's TYBW arc. I can understand it if said characters are roughly the same age, like Winry and Edward Elric, but not if they're related or one is underage. And anime models in sort-of realistic games is very weird to me too, I avoid mods like that whenever possible.

[Murdoch]

7 minutes ago, Dweller said:

And anime models in sort-of realistic games is very weird to me too, I avoid mods like that whenever possible.

 

I avoid them like the plague. The worst I saw was a couple for Serana, the female vampire added into the Dawnguard DLC. I know there's no sexual/romance component to the character (thank God because I like the character but just find sex and romance in video games... well, it's not for me) but there's an undeniable sensuality to her including the outfit and Laura Bailey's vocal performance. So to hear that voice coming out of a face that looks 12 years old, on the body of a fully grown woman with that outfit is just a holocaust of wrong.

[Dweller Dark]

1 minute ago, Murdoch said:

 

I avoid them like the plague. The worst I saw was a couple for Serana, the female vampire added into the Dawnguard DLC. I know there's no sexual/romance component to the character (thank God because I like the character but just find sex and romance in video games... well, it's not for me) but there's an undeniable sensuality to her including the outfit and Laura Bailey's vocal performance. So to hear that voice coming out of a face that looks 12 years old, on the body of a fully grown woman with that outfit is just a holocaust of wrong.

 

The only time I'd want to hear Laura Bailey's voice coming from a kid is when she's voicing Kid Trunks, it's weird otherwise. Bethesda games in general tend to have some of the most cursed mods too, like that mod for Sunny Smiles for FNV. Not to mention all the sex mods.

[Murdoch]

23 minutes ago, Dweller said:

Not to mention all the sex mods.

 

Yeah there's been some cringe/horror inducing ones show up. One did me make me laugh though. It was an expansion for Serana with a new voice actress which looked good but unfortunately looks like it forces you down a romance path. I was watching some videos to decide if I wanted to download it and it showed one hilariously stupid scene where Serana is like "Oh hey this place is pretty, let's make love" and the screen goes black and a dialogue box comes up saying you did just that... all the while poor Inigo (a great Khajitt follower mod for anyone unfamiliar) is just standing there, presumably screaming internally and wishing he was elsewhere.

Edited December 28, 2022 by Murdoch

[VoanHead]

I hate the power of friendship trope. You're telling me just b/c you had a good handful of flashbacks of time spent w/ good friends means you all of a sudden get super fucking powerful in the middle of a fight/dangerous situation? gtfo here with that

[Azuris]

I have overall the Feeling that Anime are cheap in Story/Character Telling and Development, as they are so hard mass produced nowadays.

 

- The Focus of very very big Boops that appeared in the last Decade.

- Copy and Paste Characters.

- Trying to be meaningful, but it seems more pseudo intellectal.

 

Just as an Example to the later one:

The Episode from Neon Genesis Evangelion in wich Shinji runs away and has this Conversation in his had, about that there are many Trues to ones Character and how he is seen, is very well and intelligent.

 

In the last new Movie they try in Conversations to do something similiar, but it feels like some dumb imposers talking to each other trying to convince the Viewer that they are talking some smart philosophical Stuff.

 

You can see such Stuff in many Anime nowadays.

 

[hybridial]

I feel like I should say something and I don't really know what to say because I threw my hands up and walked away from current day anime years ago. There is a lot to unpack about why it's happened, really. But I guess I'll side step that and just kinda focus on a couple of things.

 

I was into DBZ a little in my early teens. I'll give myself a pass on that because young but I fairly quickly wanted more from storytelling after that. Which is why I avoided the big name shonens like the plague because thematically they are too simplistic and one dimensional. Not to mention the number of episodes; it's a giant mass of bland, colourless food made for constant and pointless consumption. Fullmetal Alchemist is one that I'm not sure if it's considered shonen or not but I say not because it's different, it's actually good and I so wish more anime took notes from it. Have some ambition and structure goddamnit. 

 

It applies just to certain types of anime but I generally don't like how most of them avoid a relatable setting. This applies in a lot of ways, it still applies to fantasy settings, because what I am getting is the world building aspect feeling relatable in a human way. Grittiness is one aspect of this but not the only one. The anime/manga that I've generally liked over the years did better with this than most, and it is my favourite thing about the Devilman Lady anime. It's completely tied to a very realistic late 90s Tokyo that also makes a conscious choice to focus on the mundane urban realities of both how it looks and how people live their lives. It actually makes the insanity of people suddenly turning into monsters work so much better than it would in anything more typical of the medium. But to give an example on the other end, I will name Twelve Kingdoms, which I wish the original novel series got fully translated as I'd love to follow more in it, but it is an Isekai (which is another trend I find annoying but only because it's done far too much now) with a very interesting fantasy world where the Gods make their selected kings and nobility immortal and where the young of all races are literally born from trees. And we get a pretty blunt story about abuse of power, the nature of trust and the pressures of social expectation. It's a very fantastical world with unicorns and mouse people but it tells a very human story. 

 

Nowadays though I just hang around the Devilman fanbase on deviantart, doing the adaptation of the Lady anime because that's where I'm at, that's more interesting to me than following any recent media. I have a collection of the shows I was impressed by, most were released in the 00s, and I'm following the Berserk and Black Lagoon mangas as long as they run but I'm out of the loop on anime now because I don't see anything worth my time. 

Edited December 28, 2022 by hybridial

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

"Okay, so this character has very big tits. See how they jiggle every time she takes a step? We'll zoom in just in case you didn't notice. Wow, look at them jiggle. Okay, now we're going to show her tragic backstory where her brother gets killed, please take her very seriously and sympathize with her. Now she's going to take a shower and cry. Look how big her tits are!"

Edited December 28, 2022 by TheMagicMushroomMan

[HavoX]

It is said that in anime, bandages heal anything and everything.

 

NO. This is not a trope. This is a superficial gimmick, and a very unfunny one at that.

[vyruss]

Surprised nobody's brought up the bumbling idiot protagonist that somehow gets super powers when situations get dire in a story that is supposed to be serious.  That one always irked me, but a lot of the others here also really make me despise most anime.  Don't forget the dumbass sweat drop, or the group fallover shit.  Dumb, irritating, nobody needs to constantly mimic it yet here we are.  Hell, another one that was hot garbage that should be derided is a certain whole franchise based on turning certain countries during a certain period of the 1900's into a bunch of pretty boys.  The fact that people ate that shit up was equally as dumbfoundingly bad as the concept itself.

[esselfortium]

Overworked animators needing to constantly juggle freelance contracts between multiple pitifully-underfunded studios to barely support themselves while deep-pocketed investors like Kadokawa and Netflix push those same struggling studios to produce more and more content every year without doing anything to improve the financial situation that keeps them dependent on the investors and subject to their whims, resulting in more and more slapdash productions as single episodes' staff credits balloon more and more and production assistants increasingly rely on last-minute recruiting of inexperienced foreign animators via Twitter just to get shows out the door at all.

 

Also, slavery isekai adaptations.

[7Mahonin]

Episodes that are basically low effort end of season type ones where they essentially do a montage, compilation, flashback sequence, of past episode moments. It feels incredibly lazy. If it is showing new scenes never seen before that would be one thing but just seeing old clips to fill in their time slot between the 4 minutes of new footage is just lazy no matter how you twist it. They’re almost always written the same way. The characters are together talking over the past and each say something that leads to a flashback clip. I guess if you hadn’t seen the past episodes it would work better but if you’ve already seen them then you’re not really getting anything out of episodes like these. 

Edited December 28, 2022 by 7Mahonin

[esselfortium]

8 minutes ago, 7Mahonin said:

Episodes that are basically low effort end of season type ones where they essentially do a montage, compilation, flashback sequence, of past episode moments. It feels incredibly lazy. If it is showing new scenes never seen before that would be one thing but just seeing old clips to fill in their time slot is just lazy no matter how you twist it. 

It's because the production schedule forced onto the studio is hellish. Studios resort to recap episodes when it has become completely impossible to get the next episode finished on time. Calling it "laziness" is funny in a painful kind of way, considering that avoiding that outcome can often involve staff forgoing sleep for days or needing hospitalization. (A few years back, the Flip Flappers finale would not have aired if not for the show's director pushing himself hard enough to animate much of it by himself in the days before broadcast.) The state of the industry is extremely dire and getting worse due to the increasingly unreasonable demands of investors like Kadokawa, which don't account for the fact that there are literally not enough people in the industry to staff all of these productions. The people doing the work are just doing what they can to get by and put out something they can hopefully be proud of despite the desperate conditions they're working under.

 

Sakugablog is a great resource for reading about what really goes on behind-the-scenes in anime production, both the good and the bad.

[Misty]

Perverted old man and master trope reading softcore magazines and lusting after young girls, borderline harassing them for their looks and features they can't change. Is it supposed to be funny? It makes me shudder to think about it, especially when Dragon Ball franchise is full of it. 

[Nikku4211]

I really hate anime that make sexual jokes involving minors. It's just not funny.

[Rudolph]

As much as I love the Saint Seiya anime and its soundtrack, I hate how almost every single story involves the same damsel in distress. The latter is already pervasive enough as it is in fiction, but Saint Seiya takes it to the next level - or shall I say, The Next Dimension. :P

 

Suffice to say, I was honestly shocked that the Soul of Gold spin-off did not revolve around saving Athena for the millionth fucking time. That, and it is a direct sequel to the (actually decent) Asgard filler saga from the original anime, which is equally surprising.

Edited December 28, 2022 by Rudolph

[Labryx]

21 hours ago, arialis said:

Mine is when characters spout exposition instead of explaining things visually, kills the mood of any scene for me.

This is why personally, I feel Stone Ocean is a fucking chore to get through. When the main characters have to explain the power and intention of every little tactic used in a fight for 20 minutes straight I just groan and wonder, when is the goddamn fight just gonna end already and for the story to move forward.

Edited December 28, 2022 by Labryx