The Stealth Collapse of Anime
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When YouTuber Geemo asks, “Do you remember the feeling of watching an anime and knowing you were witnessing a classic?” he’s not just posing a question.
Instead, he’s prodding a wound … one you’re not supposed to acknowledge.
Image: Toei Animation
For many members of generations X and Y, that feeling was real. You’d check out a grainy friend-of-a-friend bootleg of Fist of the North Star. You’d place a mail order through the Right Stuf catalog to see if Neon Genesis Evengelion lived up to the hype. You’d catch a prview of Cowboy Bebop at a convention and have your whole concept of what animation could accomplish turned on its head.
The point is, back in the day, you could stumble upon a new series, sight-unseen, and know by the end of Tape 1 or Disc 1—after the early episode weirdness—that it would send ripples across decades. Those anime didn’t just pass the time; they molded the cultrue.
Today? We have an industry that’s wall-to-wall pastel, shallow, and safe.
What changed?
The short answer: Everything changed after the late 1990s.
I’ve written before about Cultural Ground Zero, that pivot point when the West’s creative machinery flatlined, with Japan’s following shortly thereafter.
For the uninitiated, Cultural Ground Zero is the moment when audiences could no longer reasonably expect each new pop culture product to surpass the last. In the West, it happened in 1997—around the time Marvel Comics declared bankruptcy, Hollywood discovered reboots, and music labels consolidated into a handful of interchangeable conglomerates.
You can chart the damage in music, movies, and yes—anime.
Geemo touches on the symptoms:
The pivot from story to spectacle
The algorithmic curation of viral moments over lasting touchstones
The commodification of every show into a globally palatable franchise.
But these are just the branches. The root is simpler: The industry ran out of cultural capital.
Related: Cultural Ground Zero
If you were into anime in the 80s or 90s, you were invovled in a niche hobby. A lot of people pretend otherwise now, but if you were there, you know that participation in the scene took real effort:
Getting your Escaflowne VHS from an import store, sitting through nth-generation fansubs, and perusing sketchy forums on dial-up just to get that one episode you were missing.
It was a hobby for misfits, driven by passion.
But after Cultural Ground Zero gutted Western media, the big corporations went shopping for ideas to milk. And they found the perfect IP cow in anime, which was …
Cheap to license
Visually differentiated
With a built-in hardcore fanbase.
When Netflix and Crunchyroll moved in, the floodgates opened. Suddenly, anime had to satisfy a global audience conditioned to have shorter attention spans. Driven by the same factors that hollowed out Western entertainment, the new Modern audience craved instant gratification, with zero tolerance for ambiguity or slow-burn plots.
In Geemo’s words, anime went from unapologetically Japanese to sanitized global franchise bait.
Related: Anime Ground Zero
One of the best observations Geemo makes relates to the “TikTok effect.”
Lockdowns glued everyone to screens. Short-form video platforms rewired how they process stories. Audiences learned to expect flashy visuals with the lack of story papered over with big reveals every thirty seconds: the ideal format for emotionally manipulative viral clips.
Welcome to the algorithmic treadmill: content created not to endure but to spike engagement.
A thoughtful character arc over twenty-six episodes?
No clicks.
A fight scene you can synch to a remix track?
Millions of clicks.
Japanese studios are addicted to replicability and predictability, not dumb. They follow the incentives. So as always, the writing becomes an afterthought because spectacle pays better.
In 2004, you could still greenlight a show like Monster because the industry had yet to lose all appreciation for depth. Fans still respected a show that demanded their patience.
Today, even a mid series like Demon Slayer can achieve global dominance. Because moral complexity and emotional depth can’t be quantified into simple metrics on a spreadsheet.
These days, the studios are only interested in engagement rates, watch time per episode, and merchandising viability.
It’s not a coincidence this dynamic mirrors what happened in Hollywood after Cultural Ground Zero. When Marvel was sold off in the 90s and retooled as a cinematic IP factory, the entire superhero genre went from risky storytelling to a conveyor belt of safe, shallow slop.
Image: 20th Century Fox
Anime followed the same track, just with a few year lag.
Geemo nails another critical point: Anime now has to be a cross-media franchise.
Back in the aughtss, you could still get away with telling a self-contained story. Death Note had a definite beginning, middle, and end. Gurren Lagann wasn’t worried about DLC or mobile gacha games.
Now?
If you can’t adapt it into a smartphone game, a live-action film, or a line of Funko Pops, it’s considered a bad investment. It’s the same phenomenon as the Disney live-action remakes: content designed to be frictionless, inoffensive, and instantly monetizable.
The saddest part? A lot of fans have been distracted from the stealth collapse into thinking we’re in a creative golden age by visuals that don’t hold a candle to a typical OAV from 1989.
Scree shots: Bandai
Until the early aughts, limited technology forced animators and writers to focus on character, tension, and plots with satisfying payoffs. If your show couldn’t rely on behavioral psych tricks to distract viewers, the story had to be strong enough to keep them coming back.
Today, technology has created the illusion of progress while storytelling degrades.
Geemo mentions how hard it used to be to even find anime legally. That friction had an upside: It filtered the audience. If you jumped through hoops to get Outlaw Star, you valued it more. You watched with attention. You showed up for a good story, not a dopamine hit.
Now, every episode is just a tap away. New fans have been conditioned to treat anime as second-screening fodder while doomscrolling on their phones.
And when the baseline is instant, unlimited access, nothing feels special.
Cultural Ground Zero isn’t just a date. It’s the long march of entropy. The same decay that hit American comics, movies, and music has infected anime because the business incentives and cultural forces are identical:
Bigger audiences demanding simpler content
Platform algorithms rewarding spectacle over substance
Corporate consolidation killing risk-taking.
Sure, there will always be creators with the ambition to take risks, but those works will be fighting uphill battles in an industry addicted to the short-term sugar rush of viral clips.
Here is the reality no one wants to confront: Anime isn’t getting worse by accident. It’s being optimized into irrelevance. What we are seeing is the stealth collapse of anime.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But as long as the incentive structures remain, the conveyor belt will keep churning out shallow power fantasies wrapped in flashy but shallow animation.
The only way out is to break free from Cultural Ground Zero’s gravitational pull.
Reward creators who take risks.
Support stories that demand patience.
Stop confusing high production value with lasting worth.
Geemo is right. The classics didn’t just happen. They were the result of a cultural moment when creativity mattered more than engagement metrics.
It also helped that any high school A/V club could get film financing from a bubble economy day trader or the yakuza, but that’s neither here nor there.
If we want anime, or any art form, to have meaning—read: be art—again, we’ll have to fight for it.
And that means more than indulging our nostalgia. It means rejecting the algorithm’s cheap tricks and demanding better.
Watch Geemo’s video here:
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Reminder: Just 9 days remain for you to get deluxe signed and numbered editions of Nethereal. And the all-new Kairosis novella, which bridges the Soul and Arkwright cycles to finally reveal Jaren Peregrine’s long-debated fate, is available only through this campaign. Your one shot at these exclusive collector’s items ends when the campaign does. So don’t miss out: Pledge now!