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[Flying Dice]

Eeh, that might be stretching. Consider: the primary audience for haremshit shows (at least in my experience) overlaps pretty heavily with the primary audience for shitty fanfictions with overpowered In-Name-Only protagonists who wear two-to-god-knows-how-many woman-shaped scarves.

There are rom-com animes--hell, there are even harem animes, which fill that niche of rom-com aimed at male audiences without being the lazy crap shoveled out by talentless hacks and devoured by tasteless fools. The audience for these things isn't the audience for Mahou Sensei Negima, it's the audience for fanfic retellings of it in which half of the cast cream their panties over a Gary Stu who happens to be a blonde kid named Naruto.

[Putnam]

every time you say stuff like that you remind me of PLH and it makes me sad

[Orange Wizard]

Maybe it's actually just Sturgeon's law in effect (affect? shit. wait, it's effect, i'm sure) and we're overthinking it.

[Flying Dice]

Man, Sturgeon's revelation was a product of a time in which a bad writer still at least had to convince the staff of a SF rag to publish their stories. The internet allowed for a tremendous explosion of all the shit that would ordinarily stay in daydreams and teenaged poetry, magnified by greater access to media.

every time you say stuff like that you remind me of PLH and it makes me sad

Hehe, it's sort of inevitable, considering that he's pretty much the epitome of everything wrong with fanfiction written this temporal side of legolas by laura.

[Furtuka]

I like how the main character of Orguss's reaction to getting attacked by a swarm of vampire bat thingies is literally to individually punch them all in the face until they stop trying to get close to him.

[Twinwolf]

Finally continued watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica. I was on episode 3.

Dear god.

[Frumple]

Man, Sturgeon's revelation was a product of a time in which a bad writer still at least had to convince the staff of a SF rag to publish their stories. The internet allowed for a tremendous explosion of all the shit that would ordinarily stay in daydreams and teenaged poetry, magnified by greater access to media.

And yet sturgeon's still still pretty much entirely accurate. All that shit was still and is still being published -- the only thing editors and whatnot really control for is mechanics (spelling, sentence structure), when it comes to bottom barrel material. Having read entirely too much drek out of sheer boredom, worked in libraries, and spent many an hour trawling through used/discount/thrift stores for books, I can pretty safely say that fanfiction is little to no worse than published media when it comes to headdeskingly bad writing. It just has more spelling errors and marginally worse grammar.

Looking at SF rag stuff would have gotten you a better than average ratio of junk to readable, honestly -- the really amazing drivel is in romance, westerns, crime/mystery novels, and so forth.

[i2amroy]

More generally, it's hard to find equivalents between popular (imported) anime and (domestic) notanime genres. Action/adventure shonen only vaguely resembles action movies or most actionish cartoons; superhero stuff is probably its closest relative.

This is honestly one of the biggest reasons I watch anime right here. The drawn medium means that I can get characters whipping out superpowers and duking it out in awesome, glorious battles fairly regularly throughout a show like Unlimited Budget Works. The quality of the fights might differ a fair bit from show to show depending on the budget, but at the basest level I can still get things like fire flinging that at least look ok. On top of this then I can get a mature story that actually focuses on serious challenges and questions, or on the character beating overwhelming odds.

Here's my alternatives in the US:
1) Live action superhero films (like the Avengers, etc.). I watch these... pretty much all of them. But when you only get about 8 hours of entertainment out of this number every year, it doesn't exactly take up a lot of my time.
2) Live action superhero tv shows. Ever notice how these seem to give everyone awesome powers, and then go quite a bit out of their way to never actually use them? This is because live action special effects cost through the nose. If that character can control fire, then I don't want their total power usage in the series to consist of lighting candles and throwing a fireball once... in the show opener. If you are going to give a character powers that can use a power to solve problems, then you shouldn't be hitting them with the idiot ball every time their powers could solve a problem, which superhero tv shows do pretty often because they don't have the budget to actually do special effects that match the world they need to exist in.
3) Animated superhero tv shows. These tend to boil down to either "never really challenged hero beats up bad guys who have no real hope of winning every week" or "weekly moral because we couldn't have done this without the power of trusting our friends!" There are a few things that tend to avert that somewhat (parts of Teen Titans, Young Justice), but once again it's the same problem as #1, there isn't exactly a whole lot of content being generated.

In contrast with anime I can get something that looks good due to all the clean lines, actually busts out character superpowers for plot solutions and awesome battles on a fairly regular basis, and still approximates more of a story than "So you see Johnny, don't litter, because then superpowered mutants from the sewers will rise up to destroy the city. Recycle instead, and you too can be a hero!". And sure, a fair number of those superpower shows throw in haremshit, etc., but honestly, as long as it's got a cool enough battles and intelligent use of powers, then I could care less if they occasionally delve into things that aren't as good.

Finally continued watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica. I was on episode 3.

Dear god.

Heh. Heheheh. HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE.

[Flying Dice]

Man, Sturgeon's revelation was a product of a time in which a bad writer still at least had to convince the staff of a SF rag to publish their stories. The internet allowed for a tremendous explosion of all the shit that would ordinarily stay in daydreams and teenaged poetry, magnified by greater access to media.

And yet sturgeon's still still pretty much entirely accurate. All that shit was still and is still being published -- the only thing editors and whatnot really control for is mechanics (spelling, sentence structure), when it comes to bottom barrel material. Having read entirely too much drek out of sheer boredom, worked in libraries, and spent many an hour trawling through used/discount/thrift stores for books, I can pretty safely say that fanfiction is little to no worse than published media when it comes to headdeskingly bad writing. It just has more spelling errors and marginally worse grammar.

Looking at SF rag stuff would have gotten you a better than average ratio of junk to readable, honestly -- the really amazing drivel is in romance, westerns, crime/mystery novels, and so forth.

Perhaps I misspoke, though I would argue that there is a jump in quality from self-published junk to published junk, however small. My main thrust was addressed at quantity, however; any given genre can reach the point of saturation in which no publisher will take on additional authors who are not exceptionally promising, whereas there is no cap to how much fanfiction and self-published writing might be released into the wild, save for, theoretically, the total maximum amount of data which can be stored on every functioning computer in the world.

[Reelya]

Some of the worst I ever read was in official D&D Forgotten Realms novels. I was about 14 and already realized how bad the writing was. Lately I discovered that a lot of that was actually written by in-house TSR employees. So it was basically official D&D fanfics. I've heard that official Warhammer 40K novels are no better.

[Orange Wizard]

I'd argue that at least the writer of self-published junk cares about their work, so even if they're horribly, horribly inept, some effort has gone in.
A paid employee, on the other hand, doesn't give a sod as long as he gets paid, ergo, shit.

[Frumple]

My main thrust was addressed at quality, however

You meant quantity, yeah? And... conceptually, I guess? But the saturation point for any particular published genre is not static -- authors float in and out constantly, just like fanfic authors float in and out of active writing. Especially among the worst authors, heh. It's not a terribly low limit on sheer number of drek, and that's something that's exacerbated by the fact that published stuff tends to be longer per work -- a really terrible fanfic author may never produce a novella's worth of text, but that trashy romance novelist produced at least a good 100k words and change.

Though yeah, there's a quality difference. I'd just argue that the quality that they primarily differ in isn't all too terribly core to overall work quality -- it's most strongly seen in mechanics, not plot/characterization/world building. With the latter, I'd fairly strongly argue the difference between published and unpublished work is not particularly notable.

Though @ Ree, the WH40k stuff varies wildly. Some of it's pretty good, just like a fair amount of the Forgotten Realms stuff is solid. It's just some of it... isn't. Think there's some derivative LNs or manga out there that follow similar patterns, heh.

[Twinwolf]

Still watching Madoka Magica. About 6 minutes into episode 8.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I want to strangle Kyubey. Seriously.

Also,

I get the feeling that Hitomi was just telling Sayaka she liked Kyosuke to get Sayaka to confess. I understand the intent... but that was not the way to do it.

[Reelya]

You should probably spoiler that more, because it's meant to be a surprise.

[Twinwolf]

Edited.

EDIT:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And now I'm 13 minutes into episode 8. Holy shit.

EDIT 2:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Finished episode 8. HOLY SHIT WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING OH WAIT THEY EXPLAINED IT HOLY SHIT.

This is the first anime to ever make me actually react like that.