I've now seen close to two hundred films and series, and probably thirty or forty were various levels of awful - from three through five stars out of ten. One persistently terrible genre, however, has been shoujo - i.e. adaptations from source material marketed towards young, i.e. adolescent females; shounen being the male equivalent.
(Obviously there are other consistently terrible genres - harem and ecchi come to mind immediately. Hentai, like all pornography, I do not consider art at all) So for now, I want to crowdsource and compare shoujo series with the shounen series (usually another awful genre). Let the data mining commence. My results are likely to be skewed, since there are about 1800 shounen anime and only about 600 shoujo anime. No matter. For shounen I've got:
(Obviously there are other consistently terrible genres - harem and ecchi come to mind immediately. Hentai, like all pornography, I do not consider art at all) So for now, I want to crowdsource and compare shoujo series with the shounen series (usually another awful genre). Let the data mining commence. My results are likely to be skewed, since there are about 1800 shounen anime and only about 600 shoujo anime. No matter. For shounen I've got:
- Attack on Titan
- Your Lie in April
- Samurai Champloo
- Silent Voice
- Claymore
- Tsurezure Children
- Shokugeki (guilty pleasure)
Some very fine material here (except for Shokugeki, of which I am kind of ashamed for enjoying. But I like cooking and boy does it make me hungry). Samurai is very good, Silent Voice is top-tier, and Your Lie has moments of pure, elegaic beauty.
Okay, onto shoujo. I combed through the complete database of shoujo anime, and didn't find much there:
- Shirayuki
- Natsume Yujinchou (by reputation only - D recommended it to me, but I haven't seen it yet)
And that's it. Of the shoujo I've seen, only Shirayuki comes to mind - the anime adaptation of Snow White. The first season was quite excellent, but the second was just barely watchable. All the other series seem the female equivalent of harems, except I have the sneaking suspicion that such shoujo series (e.g. Maid-sama, Wolf Girl, etc.) are also wish-fulfillment oriented towards high school boys. If they're not, then the Japanese female fantasy makes the male fantasy seem wholesome by comparison (e.g. the constant, omnipresent threat of and deliverance from rape/sexual assault is beyond twisted). Ore Monogatari, which I've seen half of, is pretty much the genre's last hope, and even that was a rainbow unicorn sugar-fest. I've dropped it for now because it was just a bit too much sweet, and because the female lead was barely a person (a good cook, kind and compassionate, and utterly devoted to the male lead. Somehow light-years away from Belldandy, who has many of those characteristics but has a steel core to her). Shirayuki is easily ten times better as a heroine.
Ecchi is almost exclusively garbage, as is harem (Inou Battle and Nisekoi are really the only exceptions I've found, and they're only rewatchably-entertaining at best; and even then, only Inou Battle has a male lead who's not a self-insert for the audience). Sadly, shoujo seems to be the latest addition to the Anime Toilet Bowl, joining the swirling sewage of ecchi harem.
Ecchi is almost exclusively garbage, as is harem (Inou Battle and Nisekoi are really the only exceptions I've found, and they're only rewatchably-entertaining at best; and even then, only Inou Battle has a male lead who's not a self-insert for the audience). Sadly, shoujo seems to be the latest addition to the Anime Toilet Bowl, joining the swirling sewage of ecchi harem.
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