Hi Prattle,

I was reading your mailbag blog regarding Spring 2019’s quality and it got me thinking about how easy it is for a season’s strength to be misperceived. It seems like recent anime seasons without a bunch of immediately accessible, high profile shows, are often written off as underwhelming regardless of what else they have to offer. With that said, I’m curious about your thoughts on why this is such a common outlook. Do people really put that much stock in an anime season’s most popular shows and so little in the rest? – Anonymous

Prattle: For anyone unsure, this is the mailbag being referenced.

Essentially, this outlook tends to be common because there are so few people in the anime community who can honestly contend it, and even less who actually have a reasonable level of influence to make an impact if they did.

To unpack this a little, I want you to think about this for a second:

Out of the 40+ anime that come out on average nowadays from a season, how much of the community do you think are really watching the bulk of that or even half? I’m not talking about people giving a show an episode or two, I mean those who are watching and actively keeping up with it to the finish line during the course of the season.

I’ll give you a good hint…not many.

It’s much easier and often more immediately appealing to primarily consume the handful works that act as “the face” of the season (so “high profile shows”), given that they’re generally more vetted (thus posing less of a risk to waste your time by disappointing),  and vastly more socially rewarding (as they cultivate larger discussions to join in than their less popular peers).

With all that in mind, if a season’s batch of high profile shows lack accessibility – be it that they’re deep sequels, have streaming restrictions, not conventionally easy to digest, etc – then that batch that was only a handful to begin with just got a whole lot slimmer to the common crowd that’s typically not consuming much outside of it. This makes it really easy to confirm the perspective that a season is underwhelming when in reality, it’s often just being underexplored.

Pair that with what was already said just a couple of paragraphs ago: Not many individuals are actually watching large chunks of a given anime season, thus, there are limited voices in a proper position to weigh in with a fuller perspective. It becomes pretty clear that you now have a very effective recipe for the notion of a lackluster season to spread.

As for your second question, I would say that they certainly do for the most part. We’re living in an age where your minute is more and more stretched by the ever-growing waves of media pulling for your attention. The high profile shows of a season are expected to deliver, and viewers definitely want bang for their buck so there’s a lot invested in them from a time/attention sense.

Springboarding off of that, there is sadly a wealth of viewers who only watch the big name titles and don’t really care too much about anything that can be found around the middle or bottom of an anime chart. So if a season is actually “deep” or not makes little difference to them.

 

 

 

Have a question of your own? Feel free to contact us with it! We’ll be picking questions to be shared anonymously (unless the sender requests to be stated) to appear in this segment.