Fantastische Hure said:
I guess some of them must be, though it's pretty idiotic when the writing quality of both shows once they started to diverge completely from the source material fell to the level of most modern anime
. Plus, Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Berserk are a better version of Game of Thrones anyway.
Is Anime/Manga past the golden-age? Is the quality declining?
Definitely for both. The Golden Age of anime was easily around the 80s and 90s with the quality of good series not being too far from the quantity produced. Only series I'd consider bad from that era are a few low level episodic, school, harem and gore schlock series, and in nowhere near the amount they're mass produced today. You could perceive the mid 2000s as being close to a Golden Age due to the emergence of many innovative series that improved on older ideas (eg. FMA and Welcome to the NHK), but that was only fleeting. Nowadays, the standard for anime has definitely lowered despite the increased hype people have for them, with most simply riding on a premise and not caring about the execution.
It can also be considered that mangaka and anime directors nowadays have far more focus on gaining inspiration from other manga/anime rather than their own life experiences, making series feel like a carbon copy. I have no problem with being inspired by a series you like. Hell, I've fell prey to this mindset many a time in my creative ideas and do like a few franchises that were mainly inspired by older works such as the Star Wars franchise and Hunter X Hunter. The problem is that modern creators tend to put too many eggs in one basket. For example, Bleach was just a Yu Yu Hakusho ripoff until it became a Saint Seiya ripoff and never had an identity of it's own, One Punch Man rides on a joke that Hokuto no Ken and Dragon Ball did decades before until their creators figured an unbeatable protagonist got stale, Boku no Hero Academia is just a Kinnikuman/Naruto hybrid ripoff that has poor ideas that even Naruto executed far better, etc. Because of this, most of the anime of the 2010s I've been drawn to have simply been adaptations/reboots of older series such as JoJo, Yamato, HxH and UC Gundam, with there being minimal series of worth beyond being decent flicks at best. To summarise, retro series, people can talk about and compare how good they were. Modern series can only be compared as how bad they are compared to past series or each other.
The amount of mass production in terms of merchandise is also a problem. Companies care more about the financial success of a series than it's critical success. Sure, many creators of old were the same, such as Toei, but even they seldom let money dictate their handling of a series as much as in the modern day, as well as perpetuating the problematic psychology of the hikkokomori, NEETs and otaku their products are primarily aimed at. I don't recall the anime industry of the 80s/90s being filled with mass production of body pillows or death threats to creators for something as petty as two characters not becoming a couple.
Basically, the anime/manga industry of today is brought down by a lack of creativity and pandering/exploitation of it's audience. This is the real reason Miyazaki said his iconic quote "Anime was a mistake".
's.
