Once you dabble with storytelling, dramaturgy and all tropes, you automatically start to dissect any media you consume, notice the patterns and wonder about it. You’ll notice what’s meant to be easy to digest, fast to setup and made to please the masses (like classic Shonen). You’ll notice when good authors try to make something new or take popular formulas to dissect them as a commentary or underline tropes.

Enjoyment is no science though. There’s more to a story than tropes and dramaturgical tools. You may like a certain theme or a system in its world building for example. I personally like well-written and deeply psychological characters with development. Or take one of the many slice of life things, that have nothing much going on, which are something like Zen for your mind. So even if the formula is bland and predictable, there can be other aspects that make one enjoy a story.

Ps: I love Higurashi, too. They established a pattern with deeply dark and psychological arcs, then they broke out of those patterns themselves by undermining their own patterns in ways I couldn’t predict. Also they layered their arcs in such a way that you always learn of a new, deeper aspect of the overarching story they were trying to tell.

I’m no longer thinking “holy shit, what’s going to happen?”

I’m thinking “yeah, okay, here comes the thing they always do.”

I have always assumed that this is a universal experience. Once you have consumed enough media, everything just seem so obvious.

So I would tend to prefer a unique premise over a recycled one.

Sometimes it actually works.

My experience is less of a epiphany like your’s. In my case, the execution / story-telling of some anime is so awesome that the story being cookie-cutter didn’t matter.

That’s why my method for finding anime nowadays isn’t to seek recommendations, but to go down the list of top-rated anime.

OP wrote their post like a recipe website. Explained with an essay and still didn’t write down the recipe at the end. lol

This is how you end up becoming a ‘critic’, in the sense of “this is someone who is media literate enough to speak more about whether a show has broken new ground creatively, rather than just saying whether they have succeeded in being merely entertaining”. A lot of people simply don’t care about the creative merits of a production and just want to be entertained, but enough of us are harder to please that good critics with worthwhile observations are always in demand.

Not anime, but OP would fucking hate House.

But what does any of this have to do with Mathilda from Léon: The Professional?

(Is the app I’m using showing the wrong image? That’s something that’s been known to happen occasionally.)

When I was watching Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure I knew at the beginning of every episode that they were going to get jumped by a new villain of the week, it was going to look like trouble, and then Jo/Bro is going to pull something out of nowhere and beat the ass off the villain. Rinse and repeat next episode.

Somehow, it worked, JJBA is actually one of my favorite animes. It hits the same sort of notes that Dragonball Z does, I think. You know what’s going to happen but the excitement of the show is within the way that they pull it off. “Oh, man, the boys are in trouble. Wonder how they’re going to get out of this one?”

You basically explained why I hate 99% of shonen.

I’m watching Dragonball Z for the Bajillionth time and was thinking about this same thing, but have the opposite take.

You could argue that DBZ has a very predictable mechanic - Goku strong, Goku defeats lots of enemies, Goke gets crushed by some super serious enemy, Goku trains hard, Goku comes back super unbelievably strong and crushes them. Rinse and repeat for a long long time. Maybe switch Goku out for another character sometimes.

However, there’s a lot more to what’s happening than that. The depth of the show isn’t that mechanic - it’s what happens around it. The mechanic and its various flavors are just catalysts for change, and it’s the change which happens around it that makes it interesting.

Seeing the character progression and things that happen along the way is the meat important bit.

This can be a problem for me sometimes, especially with Weekly Shounen Jump manga. Even if the mangaka tries to have an original thought their editor will often push them towards doing the standard WSJ thing if their originality doesn’t immediately translate into tons of readership. I really loved the first season of Demon Slayer. After a while though it was hard to ignore that every dang fight played out the same way over and over. For this reason I rarely pick up shounen series these days; perhaps originality is lower-priority when the target audience is younger and thus hasn’t seen all the stuff it’s cribbing on anyways.

Of course, this isn’t only a problem with anime, or even with bad writing. I used to read a lot of classic sci-fi 15-20 years ago because that’s what I could consistently find in libraries, or in thriftstores for ultra-cheap (think $0.25 per copy). At some point I was about 10-15% into some Isaac Asimov book and realized that I was pretty sure I knew roughly what was going to happen for the entire remainder of the story. TBH I don’t even know if I was correct; I lost interest and returned the book to the library without ever having finished it. I don’t think this happened because Isaac Asimov was a bad writer, but he wrote a lot of books and I had already read a lot of those books.

As for whether there are stories I can enjoy despite this, certainly there are! Phineas and Ferb is one of my favorite American anime, and it’s about as formulaic as it can get. The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You is also very formulaic, yet it’s zaniness rarely fails to amuse me. You and I Are Polar Opposites is pretty straightforward about what it’s going to be doing, but it’s just the sweetest thing so I enjoy it nonetheless. Heck, most Gundam series follow the same few basic formulae and yet they still are (usually) an enjoyable time. Most of Golden Kamuy is just “let’s see what kind of insane dude we meet in Hokkaido today” and I’m absolutely here for it.

Anything with elves and non-elves. “Oh you’re gonna do the thing where the elf outlives the non-elf and is sad at the non-elf’s mortality.” The Lord of the Rings kind of established this with elves like Elrond outliving non-elves by thousands of years. Elrond was there when Sauron forged the rings. He’s kind of always been there. He knows Aragorn is just a man who will die in what would be a mere sliver of his own life, but he respects the man. So when his daughter wants to marry Aragorn, and give up her immortality (IIRC other elven media hasn’t really done this), it’s a huge loss for him, but he gets it.

The loss part is the very plot of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and they smack you with it in the first episode. Frieren had a crush on this blue-haired boy, Himmel (German for “heaven”, no less), and he just up and died after their adventure, and she never really breaks down in tears, but over the next two seasons, she just begins to mourn this guy. The flood is coming, but it may be centuries away. Peak best girl might start to look 13 or maybe even 14 before she starts to really miss Himmel the Hero.

Then there’s Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms. You know what’s coming at the end. When it does, when she breaks her promise… it still hits like a tonne of bricks.

Oh, and that .hack//SIGN remake… what was it called? Oh yeah, Sword Art Online. Anybody hear of that one? Yeah, figuring out what part of .hack//SIGN they were ripping off was fun. Mostly the first two seasons. And when they paraded out the undefeated duelist, I said “yeah I remember this OVA.” Except it wasn’t three best friends sharing a character and playing in shifts. It was MUCH worse than that. I joke, I kid, but SAO is actually one of my favourite series. I’ve read the books as well as watched the anime, and Mother’s Rosary (book 7, and the part I’m referring to) is by far my favourite part, but it did come from a .hack//SIGN OVA… though, it’s more fair to say both came from MMO tropes. It’s like when Deep Impact and Armageddon were both accused of copying each other, until the producers came out and said they both attended a scientific seminar on what would happen if an asteroid threatened to extinguish all life on Earth. (I wonder if Makoto Shinkai attended as well, considering that’s what his magnum opus is about.)

But no, it doesn’t kill the anime for me if I see what it’s doing.

This is exactly why I’ve abandoned One Piece. It was readily apparent in the manga, the show is the same.

IMO it’s actually fine in series, not just anime, in general. There is a formula for each series that work for them. You watch the series if you like the formula.

On the other hand, I hate this for a lot of Hollywood films. A lot of them share the same formula, it’s not even fun to watch.

I won’t even try to reach One Piece, there is Detective Conan. Every episode is the same for 30 years yet they still make it and people still watch it. Why? Because the formula is good.

Same!

I remember being a teenager and getting tired of Pokemon’s formula, where every episode after a certain point became “new pokemon from the newest games shows up, Team Rocket justify it as rare or special somehow, try to capture it (and Pikachu) and get their arse handed to them, end”. That being said, as I get older and Pokemon becomes more of a nostalgic comfort show to me, I can’t help but soften on it over the years! It’s like the one constant in a world of chaos!

I’m also a big Dragonball fan, and ultimately every saga boils down to “new villain shows up, usually from space, about four or five of the Z fighters have a go at fighting them, they get trounced to build tension, and then Vegeta and Goku give it a go, and eventually Goku wins”.

But I really love it! It’s a formula that so many shows since have tried to replicate, but they never had the diversity of inspirations and the playful nature of Akira Toriyama to give it the same appeal!

Seeing behind the curtain doesn’t bother me. Actually, I almost prefer when it happens because I can usually guess how something will go before I waste more time on it if I won’t like it.