I had two friends, both very, very neckbeard-y who were militant anime watchers and they thought everyone should be watching them and they were the greatest thing ever. I watched four hours of Cowboy Bebop (which they told me was just like Firefly and they're fucking liars).

I watched Princess Monoke which wasn't terrible but I don't remember much of it.

I've seen a few others here and there. Vampire Hunter D was annoying, the shrill screaming and it was completely nonsensical. There was one that had an interesting premise about an agency hunting witches but the characters were shit. And once again, the non-linear story killed it for me. Oh, I watched Ninja Scroll too, that one was fucking weird. Naruto...fucking naruto. My friends wouldn't shut up about that story. I remember one of them spent half an hour prattling on about riding a giant frog or something? Dragon Ball Z annoyed the piss out of me. Because they ripped off Superman.

Then there was the odd episode of Pokemon I sat through waiting for Batman the Animated Series to come on. No THAT show had some good fucking art.

But pokemon was obviously just a marketing tool to sell shit. And years later when I played the video game the storyline is completely absurd. They kept talking about how the pokemon handlers and their pokemon were friends. Except they stuffed them in magic balls and only brought them out to participate in a blood sport.

Then of course is all the anime video games. Every RPG out of Japan is structured the exact same way. Same characters. Same format. Shit, I just picked up Fire Emblem Awakening and your main character joins the group after they find him napping in a field. Why do these characters always have to wake up?

The thing is that I'm a comic artist. So I've spent a very, very long time learning things like anatomy, how to render expressions or likenesses, character design. Along with that is a focus on story - because when you draw a comic you also have to consider the narrative and the composition on each page so that the progression of the panels is not only intuitive to the reader and progress the story. I also know that anime is designed to be mass produced quickly so their art style reflects that, and that's what bugs me.

Androgyny is because it's easier to animate a few body types and put different outfits on them. You don't need expressions if there's a rain droplet above their head or blood gushing out of their nose. You can take these familiar ideas like, a magical princess girl with a wand with tassles and shit hanging off of it that spends 30 seconds every cartoon waving it around and making cooing noises while a flashing background of colors. That eats up time and they've managed to make it part of the genre.

I'm sure they commission these paintings, chop out parts of them and reuse them for backgrounds in dozens of cartoons. Because they all look basically the same.