Sorry but your post feels like someone saying “nowadays cinema is shit” and then ranting “it’s just Marvel and Pixar movies”.

You don’t even have to look for niche things, just this year we already got Frieren, Dungeon Meshi, A Sign Of Affection, Spice and Wolf 's remake, Kaiju No 8, Oshi No Ko season 2, Metallic Rouge, … All of different genres, kinda mainstream and are nothing like what you said.

And we are only halfway through the year.

Don’t be some bitter old person, every mass media mostly market meh things that are easy to produce and sell, but just like every other media, just a quick search for “best anime 2024” get you most of the names I gave you in the 3 first lists.

I think it’s a mixture of survivorship bias (20 years ago 90% of the crap anime didn’t leave Japan because there was no market for it) and some genuine quality decline. There’s a lot of money to be made in anime, so the safest bet from the corporate perspective is to make the thing that’s been successful a thousand times before. Over time this flattens character design and makes stories progressively blander.

Independent studios can also pump out trash of course, but at least it tends to be weirder, more interesting trash.

There’s a lot of crap out there pandering to the lowest common denominator, that much is true. But this is just Sturgeon’s Law in action. The industry is getting a lot bigger, which means there’s a lot more trash to filter through, but it also means there’s plenty of good stuff being made too.

There’s still good stuff occasionally but the anime industry has produced a lot more trash this past decade. There was an article that explained exactly why but I can’t find it.

Basically, the anime industry is falling apart on itself. Harsh deadlines and low pay means everyone is rushing everything and prioritizing quantity over quality. Even the most popular anime like Jujutsu Kaisen have had controversies on how they abuse their staff.

Also the reason most animes have a similar artstyle is to make it easy to onboard new animators and hire freelancers. If everything had a different style it’d be difficult to train animators to keep it consistent.

its like all other media. its flooded. there is still good stuff being made though. spy x family, frieren, the duke of death and his maid, doctor stone, cells at work, chainsaw man, bungo stray dogs, tokyo revengers, the ancient maguses bride, goblin slayer, miss kobayashis dragon maid, attack on titan just wrapped and my heor academia is apparently still going but I have not seen a recent season. even some in the genre you mention I have found to be decent like overlord and jobless reincarnation. They are so stereotypical of the genre but somehow I find them better. Something about the characters. There is one where a guy is like an accountant helping the kingdom get better but i forget the name but got to get back to it. lesser but interesting to me is classroom of the elite, assination classroom and shy.

Anime has gotten quite popular and with the uptick in new shows you end up with a lot of similar things. I wouldn’t say anime has gotten more cringe because it’s had a lot of cringe as far back as I can remember. Hell, Dragon Ball is pretty pervy and that’s from the 80s. The best shows tend not to have a whole lot. But there’s a lot more series now so all the cringe stuff is just easy to find.

Finding the good shows among the muck isn’t any different with anime than it it with regular TV or movies. There’s tons of reality TV, crime dramas, medical shows, etc. How many of them actually stand out or stand the test of time. Far fewer than what is produced.

No…I think understanding you may not be the target audience for the shows you are seeing is a good place to start, if you wanna watch anime, check out a different genre. I will watch a couple of genres and skip the rest. There were some real nice ones this season as others have said. A sign of affection was very sweet, apothecary diaries had a fun lead and was a nice historical setting. I’m not sure if it was this season but Somali and the forest spirit, the girl from the other side, the fire hunter…etc.

Considering OPs response I don’t expect actual discussion, but as a person that doesn’t like most anime tropes what would people consider a good anime that doesn’t fall into the usual trappings? Even if it’s a popular answer my experience is very limited and would love to find the diamonds in the rough.

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As much as I hate the term “cringe” when not being used in its literal sense, anime has always been cringey, but it’s easier to ignore when you’re younger, and the anime itself is older.

Not all of it is, but the series (as opposed to movies) are really prone to some horribly cringey things.

I think there’s probably the same amount of good anime that there always has been. The industry in general has become more profitable, so now there are more corporations that want to squeeze all the money they can out of it, which means a higher volume of trash as well

Definitely getting old. That’s just how it goes.

being the same “I’m a loser yet I fell inside my toilet and discovered a new world full of breedable elfs” type

Isekai?

Isekai (Japanese: 異世界 transl. ‘different world’, ‘another world’, or ‘other world’) is a subgenre of portal fantasy. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, anime, and video games that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe with or without the possibility of returning to their original world. Isekai is one of the most popular genres of anime, and isekai stories share many common tropes – for example, a powerful protagonist who is able to beat most people in the other world by fighting. This plot device typically allows the audience to learn about the new world at the same pace as the protagonist over the course of their quest or lifetime.[1] If the main characters are transported to a game-like world, the genre can overlap with LitRPG.

The concept of isekai started in Japanese folktales, such as Urashima Tarō. However, the first modern isekai works were Haruka Takachiho’s novel Warrior from Another World and Yoshiyuki Tomino’s television series Aura Battler Dunbine.

I mean, I reckon “breedable” would be an adult sub-genre…

100% used to love anime in the 90s, since then the market has been oversaturated with isekai and tsundere and a billion other tropes that it all got beat like a dead horse.

Any anime with a whiny male protagonist, American, Japanese or otherwise, is pure cringe, though. Can’t even get through a single episode.