Does anyone else feel like there's been a noticeable reduction in overall media quality over the years, and especially in recent years?
Nah, maybe AAA stuff, but in general nah. Anime has remained consistent particularly in it's balance of scuff-to-polish, even with the AAA stuff.
Things are definitely getting worse, but I'd say American media has seen the worst decline.
>>775560There's still good stuff getting made but the proliferation of a million different streaming platforms etc definitely means there's more garbage being made than ever which drowns out everything else
People always say this but they always base their standards off of childhood consumption
>>775738I didn't "consume" either of the shows in the OP as a kid. The clip on the right obviously looks better.
>comparing tv series to ova
Idiot
>>775740Outlaw Star is not an OVA, it's a 26-episode TV anime. Do young dumb anime fans seriously think anything that looks good and wasn't drawn digitally is an OVA by default? lol
I think there is more obvious technical skill in newer anime but the overall aesthetics of it has been worse since the digipaint era. Could be changing tastes or whatever but a lot of limited animation from the 90s-mid 00s just looks better from an illustration pov even if the actual animation is less impressive. It becomes pretty obvious when comparing reboots of 90s shows, Sailor Moon crystal is a fucking eyesore compared to the 90s show. Cardcaptor while made by the same studio and director never quite reaches the peaks of the 90s show. If they remade Utena it'd probably be dogshit.
>>775728Writing is in the dumpster and has been for a while but tv animation quality hasn't changed too much. Invincible is garbage for instance but Xmen 97 is completely adequate and Castlevania is beautiful.
>>775741Sorry maybe anime does suck now. It's Over
>>775568Nowadays AAA games prefer ugly "realism" over style
Could screen ratio have something to do with it? I believe there is no ergonomic reason for widescreen. Our field of view seems to be widescreen, but when you think about for a moment you realize the stuff on the sides is just really blurry shit and only works only for detecting quick motion. What is in focus is close to the old screen ratio.
The other thing is inconsistent styles. Old animation had already two clashing styles, static background layers with many colors and animation layer with few solid colors. With CGI you have to juggle three styles.
>>775782Good point, I really like watching 1.43:1 imax movies in the theatre and it is often touted as the true way to experience movies
>>775782I basically use my widescreen monitor as two vertical monitors, unless i'm playing a game. My computer monitor has been 4:3 for much of my childhood, so i need to ask:
Do normalfags really browse the web fullscreen, in 16:9?
>>775759I feel like AI has completely shattered the perception that capitalist market economics is democratic in some way. I remember people just assuming that the changes in business and the products being offered were just responses to market demands and that people "voted with their dollars." Seeing this bullshit that no one wants or likes just get forced on everyone like its a new law of nature seems to have made everyone aware that the markets are a very much curated affair run by the interests of powerful investors.
>>775828>not using firefoxget a grip mate
>>775829there's plenty of pro-AI dipshits who think because it's in everything that it must be good and popular.
You are overestimating the modern proletarian capacity for critical thinking
>>775560The quality of animation in high-profile anime has nosedived since the 80s/90s, it's not just a recent thing. I'm not educated enough on the topic to explain the likely material reasons behind that.
>>775560No, that's been a common topic since 2019 or so.
>>775757The "style over realism" stuff that drop isnt much better however.
>>775895japan was experiencing an economic boom when it's animation was at it's best. simple as that
>>775905> economic boom> 90slol, lmao
More anime is being produced recently than at any other point. Studios are stretched thin, on the other hand you are also seeing some of the most technically impressive animation for seasonal anime being released even if I agree that the aesthetics of it has been on a decline.
>>775829normies really liked Expedition 33 and to this day I tell coworkers that the game is ugly slop and they just flouride stare at me. The bar for good aesthetics is just so low at this point that more people will be able to shovel in gen ai slop without people noticing.
This is also an argument to draw yourself and take a serious interest in art, as visual training.
>>775906TBF most animators in 90s Japan learnt most of their skills during the economic boom, you could say a surplus of them had carried over from the previous era.
Anyways the truly groundbreaking stuff is found on manga as it has always been, the commercial viability requirement for anime has always hindered it.
>>775560>extremely bad contemporary example vs. really good classic examplewhy do nostalgiachuds always do this. it's like holding up some rob schneider slop comedy next to citizen kane and asking why the west has fallen.
>>77556099% of times its just you becoming old and boring and having nostalgia.
>>776185This time around, things definitely feel different. "Nostalgia" wasn't nearly as big in past decades as it is now.
>>776212That’s due to society measuring time in a more exaggerated way nowadays
>>776212Because of nostalgia marketing being capitalized on thanks to boomers and millennials getting too much cultural attention
>>776213What does that mean?
>>776215There have always been nostalgic older generations. Nostalgia did not dominate popular culture until now. The coolest decade was always the decade you were currently living in and the past decades always felt kind of outdated and hokey. It is only very recently that I have seen media that seems to portray past decades as the coolest and very little championing the current one.
An example would be Back to the Future. It's clearly operating partially on 1950s nostalgia, but its also operating on the feeling that the 1950s are outdated and hokey in comparison to the new, cool 1980s. This is not the spirit in which nostalgic products today are made.
>>775895I think there was a boom in anime investment at the time.
Bro this is a communist chan you should know its just enshittification ergo just one more thing capitalism is at fault for
As companies need to make more money they play it safer and thats how you get sequel and remake spam. As regular people get poorer they have to take less artistic risks and instead focus on creating lucrative art like drawing porn instead of anything groundbreaking.
art does suck nowadays and "muh nostalgia" is just a rhetoric that helps big money get away with making everything ass and poo
>>776310I don't know about that it's a very breadtube-era analysis of cultural decline. China don't exactly produce better culture right now, actually it's even more slopfied than what we have and a far cry from Hong Kong cinema's glory days.
>>775759this shit looks like ai honestly, and ive heard it looks like shit because of unreal 5
>>775892And there are plenty who don't. I don't personally know anyone irl who doesn't hate this silly shit.
You are underestimating the modern proletarian capacity for critical thinking.
When a new medium is founded the lowest fruit is plucked first. That's why the best music and paintings were made centuries ago. Good stuff may appear much later, but it takes much more effort, and will be heavily derivative. The same is true of technological innovation. You can think of it as an evolutionary search space. There's many ways to be dead, but only a few to be alive, and even fewer that works well.
>>776186>comparing the worst of the present with the best of the past isn't putting your thumb on the scale, it's "having eyes"ok buddy
>>777135csm (and jjk) is quite literally the best of the present tho. And Sakura isn't really the best of the past either, if I wanted to be a real dick I would have used Maccross Plus or something. Tourist.
>>775560I think it's because workers are being replaced by brainrotted since birth zoomers
>>775560For books, the mainstream is completly shitty fantasy YA crap, Brandon Sanderson is dogshit and he's not even the worst, not even going to talk about the porn books.
For Movies, it's slightly better these last few years comapred to when Marvel was strong, but it ain't great either; We aren't ready for the onslaught of ai generated movies tho.
TV shows, still as fine as always, good things come out, bad things come out, TV has never been the greatest.
The plastic arts are still as shitty as 30 years ago.
But yes, in general I agree. Altho the internet has allowed to access more niche stuff.
>>784054Millennials are the disney adult generation, you can't say shit to gen Z.
>>784056Idk how anyone could enjoy Brandon Sanderson slop. It's just so boring wtf.
>>784064worst of all is that he's the top of the iceberg for fantasy slop, there is shit like "Litrpg" that are pretty much books written like video games with video games mechanics, it's so unbelievable dogshit but it sells very well. It's depressing, when you consider that something like the Count of Monte-Cristo was considered to be low popular art in the 1800s.
>>784074There will never be a book with any form of value written like a RPG video game, it's simply derivative slop. Fantasy peaked with Tolkien, because Tolkien didn't intend to create a genre, but simply to create a mythology for the anglo-saxons, most of the next fantasy writers haven't even read Beowulf, the Odyssey or the Illiad, without any reading, no great story can be written.
Litterature peaked in the XIXth century, the Count of Monte-Cristo was considered to be low grade back in the day, and it's still better then 99% of the books written in the late XXth and XXIth centuries. If I had to wager, the decline started when talent artists went into cinema, now now that cinema is also mostly slop, where do the talented artists go ? No where, Capitalism has killed the humanities, and in doing so, has killed our humanity.
>>784083It's because Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings with the desire to create an anglo-saxon mythology, he was a well read academic, and has an actual vision behind his writing.
Most fantasy authors have never read anything beyond fantasy, and you'd be lucky to fall on one that has read any classical book, even something like the Illiad or the Odyssey. But since it's easly digestible slop, thats what publication compagnies are going to sell to the public. Imagine if all food was made by McDonalds.
>>784075>Fantasy peaked with Tolkien, because Tolkien didn't intend to create a genre, but simply to create a mythology for the anglo-saxonsYou're acting like there aren't legions of well-off writers, that publish their own sprawling worldbuilding materials.
>most of the next fantasy writers haven't even read Beowulf, the Odyssey or the Illiad, without any reading, no great story can be written.If these works were what specifically lead to the creation of Tolkien's books and others, that are revered by their respective genres, the things that were compelling about their ancient predecessors should still be found within them. There is nothing to suggest understanding the works of Tolkien couldn't lead to someone writing fiction of equal quality, except some misguided notion of historical or societal purity.
>muh talentLike any creative work, a book is often not well received particularly for the authors writing skills or sometimes even in spite of them, for example it is widely agreed that Isaac Asimov's prose is relatively lackluster. The variation in craft also makes it hard to pinpoint what "good writing" exactly means, except by superficial metrics like vocabulary or on an argumentative case-by-case basis.
I think your view of the past is biased through curation, not only the fact only the most highly regarded of past works are preserved, also the incessant splintering of literature into micro-genres ( compare "magical realism" > sth-"punk" > "mechsploitation"; ao3 trends are now genres). It is genuinely hard to find the worthwhile stuff, not only because genre authors are incentivized to optimize for output. Yet in almost every genre, there is something compelling, which makes people think, and for each piece of low-quality dreg, there is a better book it draws from and may be a better book inspired by it in the future.
>>784085>You're acting like there aren't legions of well-off writers, that publish their own sprawling worldbuilding materials.Tolkien didn't write "worldbuilding materials" he wrote a mythology, it's a very different, there is no spiritual or religious meaning in worldbuilding, unlike in what Tolkien wrote.
>If these works were what specifically lead to the creation of Tolkien's books and others, that are revered by their respective genres, the things that were compelling about their ancient predecessors should still be found within them.Tolkien took some things from traditional texts and gave up others, you can't recreate the ancient texts from Tolkien's Fantasy as a genre is a attempt to recreate myths for the modern day, how can one do this if they haven't read the ancient ones ? At the Very least the Homeric ones.
>Like any creative work, a book is often not well received particularly for the authors writing skills or sometimes even in spite of them, for example it is widely agreed that Isaac Asimov's prose is relatively lackluster. Asimov, had some litteraraty value despite his prose. I don't think we can say the same for most writers nowadays.
>The variation in craft also makes it hard to pinpoint what "good writing" exactly means, except by superficial metrics like vocabulary or on an argumentative case-by-case basis.Sure, but you can have a general sense of it, to take the lowest of the dredge, I don't think ai writing is any good for exemple. Formulaic sloppy writing like the ones most popular nowadays is similar.
>I think your view of the past is biased through curation, not only the fact only the most highly regarded of past works are preserved, also the incessant splintering of literature into micro-genres ( compare "magical realism" > sth-"punk" > "mechsploitation"; ao3 trends are now genres). It is genuinely hard to find the worthwhile stuff, not only because genre authors are incentivized to optimize for output. Yet in almost every genre, there is something compelling, which makes people think, and for each piece of low-quality dreg, there is a better book it draws from and may be a better book inspired by it in the future.My point might have been unclear, it's not that I think every book writen in the XIXth century was good and every Book written today is bad, it's simply that as a general art, Litterature has gotten worse.
Nowadays the best selling books are YA slop with no real litterararu value
Wheras in the XIXth century, the most popular pieces of litterature were still fairly good, the Count of Monte Cristo is once again a great exemple, it was read by fairly poor people and it's a genuinly great work of art that is incredibly better then anything published nowadays.
>>784090>Wheras in the XIXth century, the most popular pieces of litterature were still fairly good, the Count of Monte Cristo is once again a great exemple, it was read by fairly poor people and it's a genuinly great work of art that is incredibly better then anything published nowadays.If poor people did read as much as you're suggesting, i agree somewhat. However i do still think you're overestimating the quality of 19th century literature. For one, what might be challenging to a reader of the modern age might have seemed far more leisurely to contemporaries, who had direct access to most of the linguistic and cultural context. Consider also the literature of the romantic movement, which was highly philosophical and artfully written, yet vapid and substanceless so much so, that Hegel hated it with a passion (and i do as well). I recognize the value that older works have in impact alone, yet i maintain most of our attention should be directed towards contemporary authors, since their curation remains a pending task.
>>784065>>784074>LitRPGThis one really gets to me.
Firstly, I feel like fantasy lives or dies on the authenticity of its world and you're deliberately going for fucking video game bullshit.
Secondly, there actually have been novel series based around a group of friends sitting down and playing an RPG together. It's just that they tried to take their RPG experience and translate it into something that feels like an authentic fantasy world.
>>784217Well the second level of fantasy worldbuilding is the "cram everything I remotely like in"
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