What's a TV series that you tried to get into but never could?

There are some gold nuggets within the genre/medium that are worth watching even if you despise typical anime.

If you're like me and loathe a lot of the overused tropes and clichés that define so much of mainstream anime (teenagers, school uniforms, derivative plots, annoying hair, annoying personalities, annoying angst/adolescent bullshit, annoying over-the-top animation/"kawaii" and so on) there are still quite a few decent ones out there that either sidestep these tropes all together or somehow rely on them sparingly/in reasonable amounts. That's because they're, erm, good in their own right.

That said, here's a list of anime for people who don't like anime. This is off the top of my head so I might have left out a few: 

  • Ghost in the Shell (movie)

  • Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 

  • Akira (movie)

  • Plantes

  • Cowboy Bebop 

  • Serial Experiments Lain 

  • The Animatrix

  • Paranoia Agent 

  • Jin Roh (movie) 

  • Great Teacher Onizuka 

  • Neon Genesis Evangelion (starts off slow, you have to stick it out)

  • Battle Angel Alita

  • Memories 

  • Technolyze

 ...And there's probably more, but this is a solid start. 

I find that a lot of people knee deep in anime fandom will recommend stuff like Sword Art Online, .hack//sign, Attack on Titan and Gantz in such a list, but I've tried watching all of these and found them to have too many in common with generic anime to be really enjoyable. I honestly don't know how anyone older than fifteen thinks Gantz is worthwhile as serious storytelling. 

An honourable mention would be Ergo Proxy but I found it to be lacking as well. 

Sword Art Online is incessantly praised on reddit but I think it's shit. It might be alright if you're under 20 and have never read Snow Crash or Neuromancer before, otherwise it's not much more than a run-of-the-mill anime full of typical tropes, a touch of edginess and novelty.

Also some people are probably going to say that a lot of my list is "Japanese animation" and not anime because a lot of it is cliché/trope-free. So be it.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent