[wontaek]

Originally Posted by wontaek

Today's character's visual aspects are usually better, but when it comes to non-visual aspects, 80s characters were just as good. If you limit the scope of discussions to top 25% of the characters in screen time or dialog lines, 80s characters were more complicated in their personality, background, skill sets, and most of other non-visual aspects. The big reason for this is due to the fact that in the 80, most series were designed to last a whole year, that is 40+ episodes. Today, we very few series even reach 30 episode, thus today's characters have less time to present more complicated facets to us.

Originally Posted by Dr. Casey

I don't tend to think of characters as looking younger than their actual age, or men looking too effeminate, either. The Lucky Star characters look like teenagers to me, just with a cute art style (Wheras a lot of people say they look like elementary schoolers), and I've been hearing 'All anime guys look like girls!' claims since Final Fantasy 7 even though the vast majority of characters have always very plainly looked male to me.



I won't agree or disagree with the sentiments (There's certainly truth to what you say, though there still are and probably always will be plenty of good anime characters), though if this is a general trend, I think the fact that the vast majority of anime nowadays is 12-13 episodes as opposed to the 80s' much lengthier series certainly doesn't help.

I already mentioned that part of reason why 80s characters tended to have more character growth and become complex compared to today's character is probably due to that they had the luxury of having more episodes guaranteed for them.