Anime is trash and so am I.

Some of the best shows are straight trash. Such as Domestic Girlfriend

I mean most any media is trash. Why is anime any different than, let's say, TV shows? The medium doesn't make it better or worse, it's the actual quality of the particular series that's important.

Ninety percent of everything is crap

Nah, Cowboy Bebop is awesome, as is NG:E, Trigun, Hellsing, and Darling in the Franxx. But yeah, there's so much that it's basically just a lot, and it's certainly reductive to just call it "trash."

There is a logical dilemma here, in that Cowboy Bebop is an anime. Avatar we got away with because it's Western, but Bebop is anime.

That makes sense tho. They would recommend stuff that's more accessible, whereas anime fans might forget which ones have 2000 year old dragon children in them and that really needs a disclaimer or something

You know, power of friendship is boring when it's done stupidly and it becomes the only answer to every problem...

but to me the worst kind of shounen degeneracy is when they stop caring about the human aspects at all. And instead they just do endless power level fights where heroes keep winning by ass-pulling new strength from nowhere.

I've abandoned several series that I thought started well over that.

Miyazaki was right when he complained that the only people getting in to the anime industry were people who only consumed anime/manga. The tropes got out of control.

A lot of all entertainment media is garbage. Maybe anime has a lower barrier to entry, so the signal to noise ratio is worse, but then again, the big movie studios are so risk averse that they mostly pump out boring, focus-group-tested sequels and reboots. Wait maybe there's a barrier-to-entry vs financial-risk sweet spot that produces the greatest share of good stuff? Hmmm...

The vast majority of anime is aimed at minors, not a huge surprise that you aren't as interested anymore at 43. It also seems pretty repetitive nowadays, though IDK whether that was already an issue 30 years ago.

Sturgeon's Law is always in effect.

I feel like the industry as a whole refuses to innovate and modernize and is just stuck in a rut of appealing to 15 year olds with slide deck level animated content and dated and frankly in 2026 offending characteristics, forgetting all of us 30+ people with disposable income who want stories with depth and animation with quality. One thing I always liked about Ghibli is that even if the protagonist of a movie is a young kid it, they never made the movie itself childish or pandering to a younger audience, if anything they were willing to take the risk of gently exposing adult and even difficult topics in such movies like Totoro for example, that one scene of the big sister coming across her little sisters shoe by the pond is seared in my memory.

I'm close to 40 and I have some modern, mature, suggestions if you're open to it.

They're also heavily value engineered and animators are extremely overworked... even artsy anime shows don't have the movement or detail of ye olde hand drawn shows.

I love Japanese animation, there's some very good stuff, however, the absolute majority of "anime", and the anime/otaku culture per se, ouch, I cringe hard at it