I follow a website called the Umai Yomu Anime Blog via ATOM feed. Most of Yomu’s recent posts have been anime writing prompts. I save many of the prompts for ideas since I watch anime, write on the internet, and sometimes write about anime on the internet. I am posting most of my responses on our companion short-form writing site, The Emu Café Social, but occasionally we get a prompt which prompts a longer response. One such prompt was published on Yomu on April 3, 2024: Writing Prompt: What’s a well-liked anime that you didn’t really like?.
First, let us tackle Yomu’s answer:
This one didn’t take long for me to think of. I may have even used this anime in a past post, it’s a pretty simple topic so I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve already touched upon it. Anyways, my anime of choice here is Kaguya-sama: Love is War.
Those of you who read my 2022 review of the year that was in anime will know that I respectfully and subjectively disagree with this take based on Yomu’s query (see my discussion of Kaguya’s third season). I think that it is a terrific series and one of the best anime comedies in recent years. The show mainly centers on skits involving two highly intelligent members of a student council who are in love with each other but both consider confessing their feelings to be the same thing as losing. While the fun first season and much of the second hews to twists on the same formula, the show showed unexpected (from my perspective as an anime-only viewer) character development in season two and definite plot development in season three. While Kaguya has yet to win one of my coveted (surely coveted) anime of the year awards, its second and third seasons were my runners up in 2020 and 2022 respectively – with its third season especially having been strong enough to win in some other years (e.g., season three of Kaguya would have been my 2023 anime of the year had it aired one year later).
Yomu’s question, as I understand it, has two prongs. The first prong is that the show must be well-liked, which I interpret as being broadly popular or otherwise critically acclaimed. The second prong is an anime that you, the person answering the question, did not really like. Thus, while the popularity prong looks outward, limiting possible answers to Yomu’s prompt to those anime that meet some popularity or critical acclaim threshold, the second prong looks inward, asking the person considering the query to choose one anime from the pool that he or she did not personally enjoy. The second prong keeps this from simply being a question aboutbeing an overrated (in the eyes of the respondent) anime. An anime that the person answering likes but likes less than the masses (by whatever metric we are using) would be a poor answer.
Having established what my answer is not, I must figure out what my answer is for this article to have a reason for existing. This is difficult because I am not too up to date on what is popular. I choose which shows to watch based on what looks interesting to me. I am sometimes aware that something is popular. For example, it would have been hard to miss last year that the first season of Oshi no Ko was a force of nature in the anime popularity department. I could very easily answer this question if I did not like Oshi no Ko, but its first season was my 2023 runner-up for series of the year (and may have been my choice for anime of the year had it not punted its last episode), so that too cannot be my answer even though I am confident I am not on the high-end of Oshi no Ko enjoyment (2023 was a bit lacking at the top of my ranking).
Having little idea of what is popular, I turned to My Anime List (“MAL”) for the anime rankings. I understand many people use this site to track and rate anime (I think I tried it for about 5 minutes to see if it was a good forum to share some of my articles). I present an archive of the list as it existed on September 2, 2024 since the rankings are subject to change.
(Note: I am not discussing any individual show in much detail in this article. Each show will have a link to its MAL page so you can use that to find a short summary and idea of what it is about beyond my breezy commentary.)
According to the MAL people, the best TV anime of all time is the recently completed Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End – a high fantasy show about a near-immortal elven mage learning how to appreciate the finite things in front of her. This finished airing in the winter season of 2024 (its first season – there will certainly be more). I am loath to fully tip my hand on Frieren since I will be reviewing anime in 2024 in a couple of months. But I did already tip my hand that I do not think it is the best series of 2024 – which you can infer from the fact that I described the second season of The Dangers in My Heart, which also concluded in winter 2024, as the first genuine anime of the year contender, and I just noted that I had also watched Frieren as a simulcast. It should suffice to say that I think Frieren being the top-ranked anime series of all time is the result of the typical over-exuberance associated with shiny new object bias. But with that being said, I think Frieren was good (at least until the “mage examination” arc) and had a couple of episode of the year caliber episodes to go along with some all time production values and aesthetics. Because we have already established that I need to find an anime that I did not really like rather than an anime that is overrated by the crowds, my search continues.
I will have to skip second place because that is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (keep this between you and me: I never got too far into Fullmetal Alchemist). Third place is Steins;Gate – a parallel universe science fiction adventure. Steins;Gate is certainly not the third best anime series of all time. For my money, it was not even the third best series of 2011. I have referenced or discussed in some detail at least three 2011 series I would rate over Steins;Gate in New Leaf Journal articles. I may write an article someday about how much it bothered me that the characters never changed their clothes (even before the looping). But I liked and enjoyed Steins;Gate. It has some good drama and emotional impact in its latter, more dramatic half and was good enough to have landed in my year-end top-three in some weaker years. Now I would recommend the readily available visual novel on which the anime is based over the anime, but that is beyond the scope of the question. My search continues.
We have to skip over a few popular shows I have not watched – most of which because I recoil from the hard-core shounen action shows (I tend to opt out when I see a “training arc”). I dropped Attack on Titan, which has its third season in the otop-ten, long before its third season. We have Bleach at 9. I watched some early seasons of Bleach, but this is the 2022 season. I checked out long before that. In 10 we have the third season of Kaguya-sama. I explained at the top why Kaguya-sama cannot be my answer. It is nowhere near my all time top 10 – I doubt the third season will be in my 2021-2030 top 10 when the decade is all said and done (it is in there for now, however).
I was surprised to see the third season of Fruits Basket in position 11 – not because Fruits Basket’s third season, which was my first runner-up for the 2021 anime of the year prize, is not good, but because it is a very feminine show, surrounded on this ranking by action-type shows that are aimed at boys or shows that are at a minimum, not clearly aimed at girls and women in the way Fruits Basket is. I actually liked Kaguya’s third season more than Fruits Basket’s, but since I liked both, we will not be answering this question with the third season of the second Fruits Basket adaptation (I have also written a little bit about the original 2001 Fruits Basket anime).
In 13th we have Clannad: After Story, which was one of the best anime series of 2009. To make a long-story short, the first season of Clannad centers on the budding romance between Tomoya, a somewhat mercurial high school senior with an alcoholic loafer of a father, and Nagisa Furukawa, his meek, sickly classmate. In the second season, they get married and aspire to start a family together. After Story is one of the trickier good shows to evaluate. I found the first 9 or so episodes, which covered several arcs from the end of the main cast’s final year of high school, to be among the weakest of the 48 Clannad episodes (between seasons 1 and 2). The rest of the show, which dealt with post-graduation matters including Tomoya’s and Nagisa’s marriage, are the best the show has to offer. Episode 18 in particular is almost certainly on my list of 10 best TV anime episodes of all time (I would have to sit down and make such a list, however), and I was partial to Clannad’s ending (it was not universally popular). After Story had too many issues to be anywhere near the top 15 TV anime pieces of all time, but I like it, so we must keep searching.
In 15th we have the second season of March Comes in like a Lion. In an article wherein I recommended anime from the 2011-2020 decade for general audiences, I not only recommended both seasons of March but noted that the second season was the best TV anime season of the entire decade. Here, I will addend that by noting that March’s second season was the best anime of the 2011-2020 decade by enough of a margin that I did not have to spend much time questioning my conclusion, so let us continue.
(Go watch both seasons – Even the MAL people recommend it.)
We are getting warmer in 16th place with the second season of Code Geass, which aired in 2008. Code Geass is kind of an action soap opera with giant robots and an anti-hero revolutionary protagonist with mind control powers (that is my best shot at a one-sentence summary). 2008 is one of the very few years that had an anime better than the second season of March. In fact 2008 had an anime series better than all the other anime series I have watched – Aria the Origination (98th on the current MAL ranking). Here I am supposed to be sharing an anime that I do not like – and instead I just re-noted my favorite anime from 2011-2020 and noted for the first time my favorite TV anime series of all time. Maybe I am losing the plot. Speaking of losing the plot, let us get back to Code Geass, which I only wrote about in our newsletter. I very much disliked the pointless, boring, “China arc” in season two. Geass is a mess. Season 2 is a much bigger mess than season 1. But I appreciate the mess. If you can turn off your brain just a bit, it is a fun, wild ride. I would feel bad about choosing it as my answer. We are going to move on.
Next, we have 17th place – The Apothecary Diaries. This aired at the same time as Frieren – beginning in fall 2023 and concluding in winter 2024. Here, we follow the very smart daughter of an apothecary (for those who watched, I watched too, I know) who is roped into service in an imperial court (it is set in a fictional world inspired by Ming Dynasty China) where she ends up solving many mysteries. I wrote very positively about Apothecary Diaries early in the season in question when I covered hair color in its world. Its fourth episode was strikingly excellent. But it had some irritating tendencies which started to grate on me as the show entered it second third (season one was 24 episodes), and I started to find it boring in the second half. There was too much of the protagonist – charming as she is – solving mysteries through internal monologues while being surrounded by apparently low-IQ fictional Chinese court people. It picked up too many simultaneous threads and had trouble focusing. I will watch the upcoming second season in the hopes that it will cover some more interesting material (or at least focus on more interesting material), but the first season left me with a sour taste in my mouth. It was not bad, but it was irritating enough that I think I can finally answer Yomu’s prompt and, in so doing, keep this article from growing too long.
Thus, my answer: The Apothecary Diaries season one.
