I thought about this after a brief conversation with Last Sinner.
I'm probably one of more openly critical people when it comes to any show that Mari Okada works on. I'm sure this won't come as a surprise to many, since I had been pretty vocal about what I seen as a dip in the overall quality of Ms. Okada's scripts over a period of time (and glee at her not being with PA Works for a forth time with Another). What I think might come off as a surprise is that despite all my criticism, I still like Okada as a writer.
Sure, she has her quirks with crossdressing and including somewhat raunchy material in her work (though there appear to be limits ... the limits set by the TV regulations, but I'll take what is given) which often result in ... interesting reactions, to say the least. But I wouldn't say that these quirks had affected her in bad way (well, I think some of them are
bad, but not in the sense that they caused her writing to drop in quality by themselves) and certainly not in the way I've read about from many who seem to dislike her involvement in any anime related works. The problem with Mari Okada isn't that she ''trolls'', emasculate, feeds shippers or even the erotic elements, and even if someone doesn't like any of these things, there can be no denying her strong writing aspects, the aspects that lead to her gaining this much attention.
So before going into what I think is the reason for her decrease in quality, let's first go through the good things. Ms. Okada writes some great dialogue, some of the best I heard in my years as an anime fan. It's incredibly witty and sharp, delivers the point across quickly and clearly without dragging about and establishes the relation between the cast in the best of cases and her exposition is short and informative without being lacking or boring. She has a good understanding of what makes a good drama and how to create the emotions and situations necessary to make the drama work (in most cases) as well as make the viewers sympathies with the suffering of the cast. Her ability to create likable characters and develop them is also important to note, since in her original works she puts in the effort to flesh them out as much as possible. And the one area I think she undoubtedly excels at is her adaption work, primarily on more grounded works similar to Slice-of-Life or Drama since she understand where to emphasis on the key parts of the original work and make them the center piece of the adaption.
I feel like I needed to make this clear since there had been what I can only describe as an anti-Okada surge around these parts whenever her name is mentioned, which I hardly think is fair to her. From my view, Ms. Okada gained the recognition and fame she now enjoys via her own work, and credit needs to be given where it's due.
So, then where's the problem? For me, it all boils down to what I said in the PA Works thread last year. Ms. Okada has gained too much recognition for her work, to the point where she had achieved
Protection from Editors. She has so much free reign on how her stories go, to the point where she can do whatever she wants without any one telling her to stop. I said that the problem with her including these raunchy elements before wasn't due to their nature themselves, but it's due to how they at times over run the show and end up causing the actual message of the anime to be muddled up in all of her ''fun''. It doesn't help that she's using her fame to move away from her comfort zone of adaption work and more grounded shows, which I normally would have no problem with except when she clearly has no business trying to go for genres she has no idea how to tackle. These days, she writes everything from Mystery to the musical to fantasy, with the latter being the thing she seems to like doing the most nowadays.
What is really sad is that most of these shows could have been good had they had a much tighter story to go on from. To take an example, Black Rock Shooter could have been a story about what sort of problems young girls feel growing up in high school, about parental neglect, about the level of power and influence teachers have on their students and how much can they abuse that authority, and most importantly it could have all been presented in a more respectable manner than what we are seeing of crazy lesbian yandere's who are connected via magical voodoo.