The anime industry has been in the decline for a long time, or at least that's what I've been told, I haven't seen signs of productions or developments slowing down in the last few decades, the same number of shows are produced ever year with little variation. The reason, though, isn't visual appeal, anime has that by the gallon, it's not a drop in quality of animation or even a drop in the quality of the narrative, stories are just as good now as before. I've always associated the decline of the anime industry to the characters.
The industry has latched to a set or character archetypes (It's archetypes, not tropes) that they keep recycling over and over. Even with a few variations, for the most part the shows and films of the last several years are all different stories and settings with pretty much the same list of characters they just happen to have different names (Hell, there are a bunch of them that even look like).
The biggest issue that I have, and I can't be the only one, with modern anime are the protagonists (MC's). It has been years since I've seen a likable lead character in an anime. They are all the same shy or aloof, oblivious towards women's feelings, modest and proper boys. Where have the confident boys gone? Where are the self assured protagonists? I just finished Unlimited Blade Works and as straight forward and brave as Shiro was he was still this polite and sometimes downright doormat-y adolescent who, like all the others, is so restricted that he practically lacks character. He is a good fighter, he's polite young man, a good cock and for the most part also good everything else he sets out for, and popular with women, but what else does he have? He isn't flawed on a day to day basis, he doesn't tell jokes (though he is the butt of a lot of them, specially coming from women), he doesn't laugh or have quirks. He, and they, are just wooden boards.
There are just so many of these wankers all over mainstream anime they've flooded the market and to top it off they aren't likable. They aren't unlikable either but that right there is the problem. A few weeks ago the girls who host the IGN anime potcast were discussing anime protagonists who have a whole lot of women aiming after them and one of the girls mention that she didn't like it when they had these bland characters who everyone wanted to kidnap and have their way with because there is nothing about that that justifies all these women having lady boners for them. And why, oh, why, does Japan think it's such a bad thing that men might like boobs, asses, and any other parts belonging to a woman. They treat male sexuality with such... Well, I'd like to call it something else but the way they make it seem I want to say disgust. Get over it, you bitches, it's called biology.
On the other hand I saw one anime where the protagonist was the exact opposite and it was deleteriously moronic, an overly stupid excuse for a male power fantasy with an imbecilic, muscle bound, sci-fi motorcycle riding, 'I know all the sexy pressure points and I never loose a fight,' BS set up that made me want to punch the screen. It was a puerile and laughable excuse for a male power fantasy that comes off like it was written for and by a 12 year olds. If you care it was called Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero and by god was it garbage.
I once saw a documentary about modern genders and there was this guy used to cosplay as Haruhi Suzumiya and he talked about what that was like for him. One day his girlfriend found some of his cosplay stuff, the panties and bra, I think, and assumed they belonged to another girl. Well, he was too embarrassed to admit they were his so they broke up. That was the point of the documentary, that there is no acceptance for men like him in modern Japan, that there are few places that he feels he is safe to take on his indulgences. More to my point, however, when they asked him why he dressed as a female character he said that there were no male characters who were appealing to him, none that were as fascinating or spoke to him as an individual. That pretty much sums it up, the lead male characters, or just men in general, are not interesting. The women are interesting but the men who are as interesting, or even interesting at all, on anime are rare and can provably be counted in one hand. For one reason or another they just don't care to make the men as lively, interesting, or appealing as the women.
I don't know. Are Japanese boys really that un-fascinating? Or is it just the ones that watch anime? Am I wrong to assume that they make these shows with a target audience that so ridiculously average that they lack any real traits but still want them to think that all the ladies want them? I could make a mile log list of these bland wankers that pass off as 'lead characters' and that's the problem. Why aren't there more characters that don't follow this mold?
And so, that leads me to a hypothesis that directly related to Hideaki Anno. I think a lot of these overused archetypes were born from the popularity of Evangelion. The painfully bland protagonists are a response to Shinji Ikari, the stoic girl to Rei Ayanami, and they tsundare (God all mighty, I hate using those stupid anime phrases) to Asuka Langley. After Evangelion there were plenty of imitators with large variations as to the degrees of success. Ultimately, though, none ever managed to parallel the popularity of the show. Sufficient to say it's become a world phenomena and a cultural one in Japan and interestingly enough, though, even though the direct imitators never quite matched the original's impact what did seemed to survive was the main characters' attributes which resonate to this day with modern creations. I don't think that they were the first of their kind but those archetypes certainly bloom and reproduced with vigor after Eva; Even the a--hole father architype seems to have found a resurgence after G. Ikari was around. Yes, a--hole fathers have been around for a long time but fathers who are a--holes to their teenage sons are far more common now.
At the same time I feel that simply copying the more shallow attributes of the characters was an injustice to them. While characters who are like Shinji are like Shinji because they are or maybe shy, a tad oblivious, reluctant at almost all intersections, somewhat scared of women, but exceptional at what they do, they lack the depth that he does that is as far as the similarities go. Same think with Asuka and Rei. Yeah, she yells a lot even though she likes the boy and the other is almost devoid of emotion at most every situation that is not with out reason. Shinji is quiet and shy because he is genuinely, clinically, depressed and the walking embodiment of what psychology calls 'conditional love' while Asuka was always trying to prove her worth against the boy who keeps besting her, even if she likes him, and Rei was not all human so her physiology and psychology were somewhat different, so her responses to stimuli were never going to be all normal. Few of the characters that came after them, that are meant to be their embodiments, have had the benefit of reasons for been as such. Yeah, the archetypes themselves have taken a role of their own and have formed and even managed to accommodate large degrees of variations of those character types but I still believe their popularization originated in Evangelion (I could also go on about Misato, Gendo, Kanji, Ritsuko and the rest but I think this is plenty enough to make a point).
To summarize, I believe the decline in the anime industry isn't do to it's quality, simply the lack of diversity in it's characters and the lack of interesting or even just appealing male as opposed to their female counterparts which outnumber by the hundreds, and I think many of the overused archetypes that plague the industry originated, or at least became so popular because of or in response to Evangelion.
I can honestly say I never thought that I'd be writing an essay on anime. Life has so many twists and turns, don't it? Still, I don't think Anime is going to vanish, ever. That fear has been discuses so many times in the last 20 years I don't pay attention anymore. Rather than sink they will shift to what works. We usually root out the bad so I don't believe Japan will ever stop producing animation and from what has a lasting appeal we will see the future creators mimic that.
