there are a lot of 'gateway' animes, which are what you're discribing

fullmetal alchemist, one punch man, my hero acadamia. things that americans can watch without being into japanese shit

things with good english dubs

there are a few more but i cant think of them off the top of my head

Having said that I'm not gonna pretend like I wasn't watching the Pokemon marathon for a few weeks.

god i havent seen that show in years

It's a show that's really gone on far longer than it should have.

Ash stopped having any interesting development after the Johto League.

lol

see, i havent seen it in so long i dont have any idea what johto is

last thing i saw was the mewtwo movie

i saw that in theaters as a kid

tl;dr, Ash finally actually beats Gary, and has completely failed at any real growth beyond that point.

i didnt see it in theaters, but i had the vhs, which came with a mewtwo card

theater did too

The movie came with some sort of card. I don't know if it was a Mewtwo card though.

I know the second one came with a special Mew one.

i still have a bunch of pokemon stuff somewhere

I'm not a weeb but at this point I prefer anime to western animation by a mile

I gave all my card that I had to my kid brother.

i dont watch any animated shows at the moment

I really don't either. I don't watch TV, and I don't have any current subscriptions to any streaming services.

It depends for me. I'm really picky in general

The only sort of "kids" thing that I follow any more is the Sonic comics. Those are pretty good.

typically, to get made into an anime, you need to be very successful in manga or light novels. it is very meritocratic, so most animes are very good. trash still gets through, but all that matter in the industry is success. SJW stuff, which never sells, would not make it in the japanese market. at all.

Oh yeah, for sure

and that industry is competitive as fuuuuuck

I think you see a lot more creativity because most anime is based on manga, and mangas usually have a single writer

I don't now man, I've seen plenty of anime that's tantamounted to "a bunch of school age kids go on a wacky adventure to breakup their mundane school lives"

Nothing is made by committee

You're inevitably going to have shit with that kind of volume

'successful' does not automatically mean 'good'. it has to make money, and those kinds of stories are popular over there

I used to know this one weeb that literally wouldn't shut up to me about Sailor Moon.

and some of them can be very good

Gave me the usual lines of "You have to watch a good sub, the dub ruins it". I did try a sub, and I still found it annoying.

sailor moon is a shoujo, which is designed for girls age 8-16. it is popular as fuck for that demographic

He was like a 30 year old dude.

Older than I am.

Okay that's kind of weird

you would want a seinen, which is designed for males age 18+

my favorite anime is the older movies from the 80s and 90s, there are some decent shows too
but i think 98% of anime is shit, i cant stand the schoolgirl stuff, it really tainted the whole genre for me