[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by Midonin

What makes one form of goodness any more "legitimate" than another?

I don't think it's about legitimacy so much as it's about rarity.

Anime-style comedy is rather common in anime, as one would expect. If that's what a viewer goes for, there's no shortage of it, really. When people accuse something of being "a dime a dozen", they're not necessarily saying that it's bad, period. They're saying that it's so common-place that the worth of each individual instance of it is reduced significantly. Honestly, that's how I feel about anime-style comedy.

But serious drama, especially one involving complex plots, can be hard to find in anime. The fact that True Tears is still considered by some of us as the pinnacle of anime romance drama says a lot, in my opinion. It means that no anime romance drama since then has appealed to us as much as True Tears has, or we'd reference the more recent work instead when we point to what we consider good anime romance drama. True Tears isn't all that recent any more.

So it should come as no surprise that some of us, like Demi Soda and myself, would like to see Okada do more works like True Tears. They're harder to find, in my experience, than the more Comedic-based properties that Okada has recently worked on.

If I'm coming off as somewhat biased towards comedy... yes. Comedy is harder to pull off than drama, I'd argue, and has just as good, if not better, results when it's pulled off.

I think it's harder to insert a little bit of comedy into a mostly serious show than it is to insert a little bit of drama into a mostly comedic show. Here is one area where comedy is harder than drama: In getting it to fit well in a place where it wasn't really there before.

But I think that a comedy show (as in a show with "Comedy" as its primary genre, a show all about the comedy) is easier to write than a Drama show (as in a show with "Drama" as its primary genre, a show all about the drama). A big part of the reason why I write that is I find with comedy shows, as long as half the gags/jokes work, the audience is satisfied. I include myself in this - If an anime Comedy show gets to me to laugh at a half, or even sometimes just a quarter, of its gags/jokes, then I tend to be satisfied. Put another way, half or more of the gags/jokes can fall flat, and the Comedy show can still get away with it as long as the rest is funny.

But if half or more of the drama doesn't come off well in a Drama show that can ruin the show completely. Viewers tend to be pickier with Drama, in my experience. I mean, I've seen Code Geass and various Gundam shows picked apart in ways I've never seen a Nichijou or a Ben-To picked apart.