Boring IS the worst

What is the worst thing an anime can be? Well I guess the worst thing an anime could be is something that brainwashes you, drives you to suicide or hypnotizes you into doing terrible acts of violence. That should be obvious, but assuming the anime doesn’t do that (like 100% of all anime (hopefully and if not I’m sure to make a post about it and all the horrors it caused)) then boring is the worst thing an anime could be, except for maybe headache inducing, and anything else that harms the human body or brain.

The idea is that if you don’t think the anime is boring, then there is something there to enjoy from it.  It’s as simple as that. If a show is not boring then by definition there is something to find enjoyment in.

So now that I’ve got that out of the way I want to talk about what this means.

I don’t believe in rating anime on anything other than enjoyment. I don’t look for any boxes to tick like characters, story, music. animation and visuals because while all these are important you don’t need all or any of them to enjoy the show. And while you may be able to appreciate all of these factors it’s sort of worthless if you aren’t entertained by it.

For me full metal alchemist is that anime that ticks every box for me, except for one. It has great characters, story, music, animation and visuals. But I find that show boring as hell so I don’t care about any of it. I can identify and appreciate things from it however I just can’t be interested in it at all. I tried and 40 or so episodes in I decided to drop it because I just couldn’t make find it interesting no matter how hard I tried.

In the same way you don’t need any boxes ticked at all as long as the enjoyment box is ticked. In fact the reason why you might enjoy the show so much is because none of those boxes are ticked, and you enjoy shitting on the show, thinking about what it should have done instead or whatever! Enjoyment is everything so boring is the worst as it’s the best killer of enjoyment that anime can inflict (since an anime episode can’t exactly stab you).

 

When you are bored watching a show then you don’t care about it at all, you are just forcing yourself to sit through something unpleasant when it offers you no benefit, except maybe being able to review it as you do in these anime watching circles.

 

Here’s the point that I might lose a lot of people though. It’s that the shows that are simply boring, and nothing else are the worst shows. Terrible shows, the ones that you might think have everything wrong with them are in fact better than the shows that are just boring if you find even a minor amount of extra enjoyment from them. This is because there is still enjoyment to have while watching them.

Being able to just watch a complete train-wreck of a series unfold before your eyes could be so entertaining that it becomes a 10/10.  Maybe a show is quite bad, not so bad to be a train-wreck but still bad in general (in your opinion of course). If that show brings you more enjoyment than something you might consider “objectively better” then your bad show is in fact better because you’ve gained more enjoyment from it. It might be enjoyment through thinking how to improve it but that’s enjoyment still the same.

I don’t believe any show is just boring, there is likely going to be at least a little thing that you find interesting, just a general feeling of boredom overall is also pretty bad! But if there was a show that completely boring for every single second of it’s run, I’m convinced that it would be the worst show ever made (excluding everything mentioned at the start).

 

So yeah I think that just about covers it. What do you think? If a show technically has better writing and e.c.t but is boring is it worse than a technically worse show that just provides more enjoyment?

Also is there anything worse for an anime than being boring?