r/u_La_Phyzz

I can't be the only one who feels like a lot of recent anime adaptations, like Skeleton Knight in Another World, In Another World With My Smartphone, Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear, and plenty of others, have become watered-down, dumbed-down or overly sanitised versions of the stories they're adapting.

Now, I'm not talking about things they have changed to avoid depicting inappropriate content. A lot of these authors even write those parts in ways where, if they were faithfully adapted, there still wouldn't really be an issue. I'm talking about cutting out key elements of the stories, things that might not seem important at the time, but can become very important several books later.

And I don't just mean that they cut scenes because they only have 12 episodes to work with. Sometimes they remove or change things that are actually important to the characters, their relationships or the worldbuilding, which then makes later interactions feel strange or incomplete.

One of the biggest examples for me is when the original story has an established polyamorous relationship, but the anime changes it into something monogamous or deliberately vague.

The problem isn't just the relationship itself being changed. The later character interactions were written around the original relationship. The anime then has to awkwardly work around something it deliberately removed, so the characters either continue behaving like they did in the books, which now makes some interactions feel strangely intimate or gives them this weird air, or their behaviour gets rewritten and comes across as forced or out of character.

It sometimes feels like adaptations are afraid of anything that makes the original story slightly complicated, an openly healthy but unconventional relationship, intelligent or thoughtful concepts, morally messy situations, powerful and strong female characters, characters having to genuinely struggle against prejudice, having to work through their traumas, or worldbuilding that actually takes time to explain.

These are often some of the things that made the original stories interesting and popular enough to justify getting an anime adaptation in the first place.

Instead, they change or remove them, seemingly without thinking about what happens later because they are only planning around the first season. Then, if the anime gets a second or third season, they are suddenly left trying to make later parts of the story work when they already removed the foundations those parts were built on.

The same thing happens with other parts of these stories.

A young female adventurer might originally have to prove herself, or even fight people at nearly every guild she visits because nobody takes her seriously, but the anime removes most of those encounters. It might seem like an easy thing to cut at first, but those experiences can be part of how the character develops and why she acts the way she does later.

An example of this is in Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear, where the lack of a fight actually throws the main character off balance and helps highlight that there is something wrong with the town. If you remove all the previous times she had to deal with fights at guilds, that moment loses some of what made it stand out.

Or a character might run through town riding giant bears, again like in Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear, terrifying everyone while desperately trying to rescue a friend, but the adaptation cuts down or completely removes a lot of the buildup and consequences. Then later dialogue or reactions are still there, except now they don't hit nearly as hard because the events that gave those moments weight are missing.

That's one of my problems with Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear. Some lines, actions and emotional moments feel oddly placed in the anime because a lot of the long preparation that made those moments land in the books just isn't there.

It feels like they're simplifying these stories to make them easier or safer for what they think a wider audience wants, but in doing so they're stripping away the things that made people fans of the source material in the first place.

And it can create an even bigger problem later.

Eventually these anime reach a point where something that was cut or changed becomes important to the plot. At that point, what do they do? Retcon it back in? Pretend it happened off-screen? Completely change the story? Or just never do another season?

Now, true, this can be how you end up with a story eventually having to pull a Fullmetal Alchemist and diverge heavily from the source material because the adaptation has written itself into a corner.

And yes, something like that can work, but only if they fully embrace it and actually put the effort into creating a good alternative story. Fullmetal Alchemist still had depth, real moral dilemmas and a story that could stand on its own. It also wasn't really a case of them changing things because they wanted to simplify the source material or dumb it down.

I've almost given up on Skeleton Knight in Another World after Season 2, episode 7 because of their changes to the storyline. The way they changed how the water works, and people who know will understand what I mean, has removed what I think is a really important aspect of Arc's development, as well as some of the character development between Arc and the others.

It might not seem huge if you've only watched the anime, but when you know where the story goes, changes like that become much more noticeable.

It makes me miss adaptations like Fairy Tail and Bleach.

Yes, they had a ridiculous amount of filler arcs and filler episodes, I'm definitely not pretending they were perfect, but the main story was still basically the same. The main changes were usually them trying to make the filler fit into the story once they got back to the non-filler material.

The important relationships, character development and major events from the source were still there. When they added filler, they generally tried to make small changes around it so it could fit, rather than cutting pieces out of the original story and then leaving behind scenes that no longer have the context they were written for.

There are a few anime adaptations coming that I'm excited about but also genuinely dreading.

Reborn as a Space Mercenary is the big one for me because I LOVE the books, and I'm worried about how much they're going to cut, change or ignore, especially the seemingly small things that don't look important at first but have consequences much later.

I understand that an anime can't include absolutely everything from a light novel or manga.

My problem is that a lot of these adaptations aren't taking one book and carefully condensing it into a 12 episode season. They're forcing multiple books into a single season, then cutting huge amounts of character development, worldbuilding and connective story out just to make all of that fit.

It's almost like they don't think viewers have the attention span for a long story anymore.

There's a big difference between condensing a story and removing the foundations of the characters, relationships and world, while continuing to build the rest of the story on top of those foundations.

Sorry for the rant, but this has been bothering me for a while and I've just reached the point where I need to know if this is a "me" issue, or if other people have noticed it too and it just doesn't get talked about much.

So, does anyone else feel this way about anime adaptations over the last few years?

Especially people who read the light novels or manga before watching the anime, do you feel like this has been getting worse and worse?