• Hey Trainers! Be sure to check out Corsola Beach, our newest section on the forums, in partnership with our friends at Corsola Cove! At the Beach, you can discuss the competitive side of the games, post your favorite Pokemon memes, and connect with other Pokemon creators!
  • Due to the recent changes with Twitter's API, it is no longer possible for Bulbagarden forum users to login via their Twitter account. If you signed up to Bulbagarden via Twitter and do not have another way to login, please contact us here with your Twitter username so that we can get you sorted.

Anime Your Unpopular Anime, Manga and J-Pop Opinions

Got a few hot takes.

1) Never cared for One Piece. I don't like the story, I don't like the characters, I don't like the animation style, and I feel it's terribly overrated. The whole series just feels stupid to me (and that's before factoring in the infamous 4Kids dub).

2) This one's extra spicy: I feel that MHA is overrated and has been in a steady decline for quite some time. The "quirk" gimmick is rather bland, it's a shallow take on more popular superhero series like pre-Disney Marvel, as the series tends to favor powers like smashing and blowing things up over using intelligence and generally less flashy but very practical abilities (like most shonens, unfortunately), completely shafting a huge chunk of the cast in favor of the "power trio". A number of the characters are poorly written (especially certain ones) and the fact the series is in endgame mode yet the cast are still first-year students. That's like having Harry Potter offed Voldamort permanently in the first book, and prevents any of the cast outside of the "power trio" from getting any meaningful development or much-needed screentime. Overall, I feel MHA is a hot mess that is an insult to actual good superhero/superpower series.

3) In contrast, I feel that Welcome to Demon School Iruma-kun is vastly underrated and heavily slept on, as well as being a superior version to MHA in a number of aspects. The story is fun and colorful, with some well-timed humor and seasoned to taste with seriousness. ALL the characters, not just the "power trio" get plenty of screentime, development, and characterization, especially compared to MHA. The Misfit Class is superior to MHA Class 1-A because the writer takes great pains to flesh all of them out, as evident by the Royal One Arc, the Harvest Festival Arc, and the Music Festival Arc, making each member of the Misfit Class feel like an actual characters with actual talents/abilities. The writer did an excellent job at making the entire cast feel fresh and alive, even ones with less-savory traits like Caimu (who is a much better written Minetta with actually useful abilities) feel genuinely likeable and part of the cast as a whole. The teachers are also well-developed and have unique personalities, quirks, and teaching proficiencies, so it's not just one teacher running the show. The school aspect is handled better, too, as at the current point in the story the Misfit Class are now second-year students yet their adventures continue in earnest fashion and they continue to grow and develop. Also, any romances between characters are handled naturally, realistically, and beautifully, such as Iruma and Ameri. Overall, Welcome to Demon School Iruma-kun is a heavily underrated and outstrips MHA in several fields.

That should do for now, especially since I'm quite tired from today's events. Might add more spicy takes another time.
 
To continue along with the trend, I'm not especially a fan of One Piece either. Though part of it is the episode/chapter count in addition to what others have said.

I also don't really like My Hero Academia either, since Izuku falls under a lot of "the main character is even more special than other special characters" and I feel like his story is accidentally ableist due to Quirklessness being seen as a disability but they don't have any Quirkless Heroes and Izuku is given the strongest Quirk of them all. I would love a story of someone trying to be a hero in a world where everyone but them has powers but considering how My Hero has been going, I'm expecting Izuku to gain his own Quirk separate from what One for All gives him. Also, I feel the story glosses over the negative consequences of superpowers in both a setting and for the individual (it astonishes me that the invisible girl was never taught to be able to turn visible again), especially when Heroes are involved.

F*** Oshi no Ko, I would probably be into it if it wasn't a reincarnation story or if the guy wasn't perfect at everything as I've read. I was legitimately more creeped out by the description rather than interested when I first read it due to the reincarnation plot. I also have a strong idea of what the twist is that the series is built around without even watching anything or seeing hints since it seems pretty obvious. The babies with the lights scene though, is hilarious I'll give it that.

I'm becoming really tired of trends in anime and stuff that plays follow the leader after one thing becomes really big.

While it depends on the show, I really do not like the trend that most romance shows go in anime, especially the popular ones like Love is War or stuff like harem anime. I have been watching a romance show this season (Loving Yamada at Lv999), but that's because I actually really like it compared to how others in the genre have been handling it. I still hate that shows like these get multiple seasons while other romance anime that haven't even shown the full relationship like Kimi ni Todoke barely get anything.
 
- 4Kids did an overall better job with the dub's script writing & adaptation for Pokémon's English dub than TPCi (especially considering they had multiple writers for the Series and TPCi LITERALLY only kept JCC onboard when TAJ took back over in late 2006 who had already been working on the dub's script writing since Season 5 under 4Kids in 2003-- TPCi only used JCC from BF all the way through JN's dub, and this ended up for the most part being the perfect example of what happens when you give one man too much power as opposed to distributing it among various writers).

(It is popular to prefer the 4Kids dub overall over the TPCi dub nowadays for Pokemon, but this is not necessarily a popular opinion listed above depending on which site you are on)

When the change originally happened, as a boy I was one of those who slammed the current dub hard for being inferior in terms of writing when MoMP debuted (e.g. Misty's "Hold the phone," May's "Sometimes I can do the right thing," Ash's "Knock his block off," etc.): though JCC has had his moments (the last dub ep is his best work since...BW there, 12 years ago?), I still stand by this point overall when examining things holistically.

That said, I wish Paul Taylor had been the chief writer they had stuck with as he seemed the most adverse to making script changes and sticking to the original intent, the Movies had the most faithful dub scripts from Movie 3 onward in the original English dub aside from the first 15 Kanto episodes & the late Johto-AG episodes' writing under 4Kids-- and he was a principal player in the former case, with Kathy Pilon the latter.

Ash spoke much more like a normal boy would at his age and was fleshed out in subtle ways that completely avoided the "trying to be hip/cool" stereotypes as well as never saying "I got me," "Stoked," "Totally wiped," etc. etc., Team Rocket generally just spoke without every other line being some kind of wordplay or rhyme (Meowth, in particular, I feel was treated better the most as they would keep his "Nya" verbal tic as "Meowth" early on & never, ever had him say "Dig it/Dig it, jack," "lugs," etc.), etc. May spoke much more like a normal girl her age would, and Max did as well, IIRC.

- Dragonball as a Series went downhill after the Frieza Saga, after hitting its highest point & peaking in that Arc. It has ebbed and flowed since then, with Granolah and Goku Black being the best of the modern Era but still lagging well behind the best of the Series which I felt was King Piccolo through Frieza overall.

- Yu-Gi-Oh went downhill not after the first Series, but after 5D's.

- Detective Conan has gone on for far too long, and should've ended much earlier.

- Boruto is more interesting than Naruto.

- Most of the Series Crunchyroll dubs nowadays are pretty unmemorable and forgettable fanservice shows to me, nothing stands out.
 
Last edited:
I'm a huge shipper, but the canon Naruto ships (NH, SS) suck, as well as the rival ships (SNS, NS, SK).
 
The Pokémon dub is currently one of the worst dubs out there in 2023, but ironically, began as one of the best dubs in 1998 in terms of made for TV Anime for Anime targeted at children (its other competitors were Saban's Digimon, FUNimation's Z/Dragonball, DiC/Cloverway's Sailor Moon, etc. and it ran circles around all of them as well as in 4Kids' case, literally every other Anime they got their hands on was worse than their work on Pokemon really overall- the Uncut releases of YGO & SK never came to fruition overall, otherwise those might have been contenders).

Dragonball GT's Goku is a superior character to Dragonball Super's Goku: despite being regressed to a child, he acts oddly more mature and less stupid in the former Series.

Dragonball GT has a better opening than Dragonball Super, despite Super being the superior Series save Goku overall.

Sumitomo is the worst Japanese BGM composer for the Dragonball Series, by far.

Yamamoto was always worse than Kikuchi, and one of the few assets I feel the otherwise much disliked Orange Bricks FUNi Redub of Z they did in 2007 in English over Kai (if not the only one) was having Kikuchi's OST over all 291 episodes instead of Yamamoto (once it was found out the latter plagiarized, replaced with Shunsuke's stuff though).

Fairy Tail is a pretty generic show, never got the hype for it.

DP Ash, while more of a character with a personality than XY Ash, was Ash's most overrated incarnation in the classic Era of the Series to me.
 
Last edited:
When I really REALLY like an anime, I actually often don’t want them to get another season, as I like them to feel concluded as they are. I don’t know how much of this is a me thing since I’m super jaded, but I get more apprehensive than excited if I feel an anime has ended on a satisfying note and suddenly there’s more… Always worried there’s a potential it won’t live up to what it was or worse, tarnish it.
 
Seems this one isn't all that unpopular but BNHA isn't even an original concept. Not saying the author was imitating anything, but just in general I could name you at least ten other animes that center around What If School: But SUPERPOWERS!!!!!!
 
They should've not used the female characters in summertime rendering as fanservice, and the fanservice should not have been made to be essential to the plot. Still peeved about it, and it's been months
 
Attack on Titan is not top 5, the highest I could put it is borderline top 10 if I ever consider doing that. It started off good, then I'd say in either season 2 or 3 it started to drag on. Season 4 so far has been alright, for most of the seasons I didn't really care for Eren or a lot of the other characters for that matter.

He'd try to act tough but at the same time was prone to crying which reminded me of Deku from MHA. It's a good thing this all changed by the fourth season where he no longer feels like the main protagonist.
 
I never got the appeal of My Hero Academia, at all, I tried to sit through it once but it just bored me for some reason.

When it comes to the Pokemon English dub, generally it's popular to think the 4Kids dub was the superior version holistically over the TPCi dub for Ash/Satoshi's Series nowadays if people are forced to pick only between the two and not the Japanese Version, but I stand by the claim 4Kids' script writing was a little better-- not just the voice acting, music, or openings/intros.

True, they took a lot of unnecessary liberties regardless and there's still some cringy moments (e.g. "Do the macarena," "Let's Poke-round my laboratory") but overall I felt it was genuinely a little better: I could understand what Team Rocket were saying in the earlier Seasons in English and they didn't feel like adults trying so hard to be hip with children, and there was a genuine sense of good comedic timing with clever jokes and double entendres they slipped past the radar with both the protagonists and villains to me at times. I felt TPCi's dialogue was at best, so dry and so robotic that it felt almost inhuman, and at worst, even worse than 4Kids' worst attempts to be cool with "Raise the roof," "On the blink," "Knock its block off," "Gonna be wiped," "Primo Pokemon" and stuff like "foot on the gas," "down the hatch," etc. always felt awkward to hear coming from children to me.
 
Neon Genesis Evangelion, while a great series, is not nearly as deep as the fandom pretended it was for years. The fundamental message of NGE is just: 'Yeah life sucks and can be difficult, but you gotta open up to other people or else you'll never have a happy and healthy life'.
 
Goku from Dragonball Z was at his peak in the Frieza (Freeza)/Namek Saga: he felt like the culmination of everything that had building from his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood that had begun in the King Piccolo Arc and I think it would've been better had the Series ended after the Frieza/Freeza battle overall.

Pokemon Diamond & Pearl is inferior to Pokemon Advanced Generation in all Languages, especially when it comes to the supporting cast: Takeshi (Brock) and Team Rocket (Roketto Dan) are in particular, far more likable to me in AG than in DP- they may still be a little goofy, but they had far more screentime + I felt generally moments of depth than in the former Series (also DP just used AG as a blueprint for a lot of its attempts to execute things better the second time).

XY is the most overrated Series of Ash's Anime: I will say though, I'm getting along a lot better with fans of the DP Series due to it, and I'm grateful for the XY Series for giving me an appreciation for that Arc I didn't have prior.

I didn't think Sarah Natochenny improved that much as Ash Ketchum, unlike most: while I do think she did get markedly better than when she started (when I felt she was outright abysmal in the role), to be fair, I still felt even at the end in JN she often lapsed into an angry young woman's voice whenever Ash yelled or had to emote, and her laugh still felt forced to me, personally.

(I'm in the popular camp that she's middling though, with Taylor/McInerney in front + the best of the three and Rogers the worst of them in the role-- but I genuinely don't feel she was still quite good enough to replace Veronica Taylor/Kathleen McInerney's iconic portrayal in English full time, given the excellent performance that preceded her IMO)
 
Robotech was a good dub for the time it was made and aired in the mid-1980s. While there are certainly many flaws with the series (namely how it was three separate anime in Japan - Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada - that were edited together into one show because they needed at least 65 episodes for syndication) and it's certainly incredibly dated by today's standards, this was the first anime to get released in the US where they didn't just consider it cheap children's fodder to air in syndication or get released on the growing home video market of the 1980s (cause licensing and dubbing some random Japanese cartoon was certainly cheaper for a lot of companies than producing an entire original cartoon).

In a time period where anime would be heavily edited to make it appropriate for the child audience in the US by changing or removing content considered inappropriate such as violence or character deaths (and also often changing the order of episodes compared to the original Japanese version or skipping some episodes entirely because of inappropriate content that can't reasonably be edited out and/or 'Well we already have enough episodes for syndication'), here was a series that didn't try to edit out character deaths from the original version, was a relatively faithful translation (for the Macross part of the show, the latter two shows that were included were altered a decent bit more and have quite a few plot holes because of the whole 'they were separate shows in Japan but now we're pretending they're all one show' thing), and demonstrated to audiences that cartoons can be more than just 'for children', helping pave the way for the modern anime industry in the West where 'faithful dubs and translations' is the norm and has been the norm for decades at this point. (The fact that IIRC the target audience for Robotech was actually teenage and young adult science fiction fans and not strictly children helped too)

All that being said, hating Harmony Gold (the company behind Robotech) for their years of legal maneuvers to maintain their license to the Macross franchise, which resulted in nearly nothing Macross-related being released outside Japan for years* and them, in the past, sending cease and desists to online retailers stocking Japanese Macross merchandise because 'it's unlicensed by Harmony Gold, who have the international rights to the Macross franchise outside Japan' and trying to make them stock HG-licensed merchandise instead (although they only did this during the early 2000s I believe, when there was a serious ongoing dispute over licensing and merchandise rights outside Japan) is still totally valid and, as a Macross fan myself, I totally agree with that.

＊Seriously out of all the Macross stuff there is, the only things to get officially released in English at all are the Macross II OVA, which isn't even canon, the Macross Plus OVA and movie, and the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross.** It's different now because Harmony Gold and Big West and Studio Nue reached an agreement where they acknowledge HG's license to the original TV series and the character and mecha designs within and Big West can license and distribute pretty much everything that was released AFTER the series (sans the Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love movie, which is caught up in a whole bunch of legal complications even without Harmony Gold) in 2021 and a whole bunch of Macross stuff has since been announced for release in the US.

**We do NOT talk about hilariously bad English dub of Do You Remember Love that was made in the 80s and was completely unconnected to Robotech and was given an edited release on VHS called Clash of the Bionoids, unless we're talking about hilariously bad 80s anime dubs from Hong Kong lol
 

Similar threads

AgedVeteranofShow
Review What are your popular opinions/noncontroversial opinions about the Ash-related Pokemon Anime and Movies etc?
2
Replies
27
Views
2K
DigitalGen6
DigitalGen6
ZinnLav
  • Sticky
Share Your Anime & Manga Lists
Replies
17
Views
9K
Princess Viola
Princess Viola
MimeyTheKeeper
PWC Story Blueprint - Proposing A Way To Finish It All Sensibly and Satisfyingly(Hopefully)
Replies
6
Views
2K
cricketlaxwolvesbandy
cricketlaxwolvesbandy
Juliko
Julia's Reviews on Various Media
25 26 27
Replies
534
Views
162K
Juliko
Juliko
lovandra
Anime Hero Academia (Manga and Anime) Discussion Board
Replies
3
Views
630
----
?
Back
Top Bottom