Hype

I have too many thoughts to not put them somewhere so why not bury them on my website that no one ever visits. Its a victimless crime. I get to shout at people and no one has to hear it.

I'm going to talk about hype in this post because I feel it is one of anime's biggest problems. About once every few months an anime comes out that every single person talks about. They get so popular that people who have little to no interest in anime will watch them. A few prime examples of this are Sword Art Online, Attack On Titan, and One Punch Man. I am almost certainly in the minority when i say this, but I did not really like any one of these shows. From my point of view, hype is like one of those traffic jams that just kinda clears up after a bit and there is no apparent cause for it. I'm going to talk about each of these shows and how I feel about the hype that surrounded them.

Sword Art Online: When I first heard about Sword Art Online, I still wasn't very into anime. Sure, I had seen Naruto, but I wasn't a huge fan of anime in general. Sword Art Online was my first real foray into anime as a medium, and at the time, I fucking loved it. I told some of my other 'I've seen Naruto' friends about it and they fucking loved it too. I think this is how most of the Sword Art Online hype was started. People watched it, and without thinking too hard about it, recommended it to others. Looking back on it, Sword Art Online was a massive pile of shit. Saying that, I actually still enjoy Sword Art Online more than a great deal of people as I think about half of it was good (although each time I break down the plot of SAO that number gets lower). Sword Art Onlines hype was what I would call 'Kid Hype' as most of the hype around SAO was kids who didn't really understand what they were watching but thought it was cool because swords recommended it to each other. 

Attack On Titan: When Attack on Titan came out, I was interested in anime enough that I found it on my own without having it recommended to me. I watched the beginning of AoT as it aired and about the last half after it was all done. I watched the show and left thinking "That was ok. it wasnt the best thing, but it certainly wasn't the worst". I figured this would be the overall consensus of AoT in the anime community. Boy oh boy was I wrong. Everyone was jerkin off to this anime that i thought was mediocre at best! Was I wrong about it? I was confused, so I thought back and tried to remember some of the plot points to see if it was actually better than I originally thought. That's when I discovered there were no plot points. The whole show is just small people fighting big people. I found myself staring to not like the show just because everyone else did and I couldn't understand it. The hype had ruined my enjoyment of the show after the fact. Normally hype bad because it ends up being a disappointment, but it was just making me mad because everyone else was absolutely in love with this show that I only kinda liked. 

One Punch Man: I don't have much to say about One Punch Man other than I just don't really like it. I get that its supposed to be a comedy, and I respect that, I just don't find it funny. I don't get whats funny about using the same joke over and over. It got stale for me very fast. This hype was the most confusing for me because at this point I could really tell if something was just hyped, or if people generally thought something was a good anime in the anime community and from what I could tell people loved it. I had not heard a bad thing about One Punch Man. And I just kinda didn't like it. I even went in with low expectation because of the previous two examples where hype had burned me. It just wasn't my cup of tea. It was however, literally everyone else's cup of tea.

Basically, I dont like hype. most anime that are popular in the public eye I end up not liking. Recently though, Re: Zero has shown me that there are exceptions to every rule, but I cant help but feel that someone is going to get way overhyped for Re: Zero and its just going to ruin it for them.

That's the end of my hype rant. I have very strong opinions on SAO and AoT and would love to write up long posts or even make a video about if if people want to hear. I know you probably don't. if you read this whole thing and you enjoyed it even a little, a comment or an upvote on reddit would make my day. let me know if you are interested in hearing me rant more.