Hmm, but Apothecary Diaries doesn't look like Witch Hunter Robin or Ghost in the Shell.
Yeah but my point isn’t that modern shows look like Ghost in the Shell or Witch Hunter Robin. They don’t. My point is that the procedural structure itself never went away, it just evolved. Stuff like Apothecary Diaries, Odd Taxi, Moriarty the Patriot, etc. still use that same case-based storytelling with a larger narrative underneath. The look might of changed, but the core idea is still there.
And also, applying that same logic, Witch Hunter Robin doesn’t look like Ghost in the Shell either. GiTs was a cyberpunk spy thriller, sharing almost nothing in common with the Gothic Noir Urban Fantasy that was Witch Hunter Robin. The only overlap these shows had was there procedural structure.
Fair. Though I believe PicardMan was considering Macross/Gundam to fall in to the "Mecha" genre which he covered with his last article.
Whether you call it "Space Opera" or "Space Western" - do we really get very many of either of these in the last few years?
EDIT: Random thought: Tenchi Muyo's space elements are another one that comes to mind.
Yeah I get the point that we don’t really see much of either nowadays, but I’d still push back a bit on “whether you call it space opera or space western,” because those aren’t really interchangeable categories just because they both take place in space.
That’s kind of what I meant by genre inflation. The space western trio (Bebop, Trigun, Outlaw Star) were absolutely essential to anime’s rise in the West, but “space western” has never been a dominant genre. It had it's lightning-in-a-bottle moment in '98 but there was never a sustained wave of shows. Space opera, on the other hand, was a legitimate industry-defining force back in the 80s. Stuff like Gundam, Macross, Yamato wasn’t niche, it was the foundation of the modern anime industry. But that genre peaked decades ago and has lost its dominance over time. So it’s a little weird to see something like space opera, which actually had a rise and fall, grouped together with space western, which was always more of a niche substyle with a handful of iconic entries. That’s really my bigger point. Some of these categories feel like they’re being treated as equivalent “declining genres,” when they weren’t operating at the same level to begin with.
Well, even if some are "niche trends" more than "genres", they're trends we don't see as often anymore.....but perhaps they evolved.
I think PicardMan has a point in that nowadays we have an overreliance on "Battle shonen" anime, isekai and fantasy titles.
I don’t think PicardMan’s point was that we have an “overreliance on battle shonen/isekai/fantasy,” and if it was, it’s not something that really comes through in the article itself (And honestly, that’s a much stronger argument than the one being made here, because that is something you can actually point to and say "that’s what real dominance looks like").
I don’t disagree that some of these are trends we don’t see as often anymore. But that’s not the same as saying they were dominant genres that declined. Like with space westerns, you’re right, we don’t see many of them. But that’s kind of the point. Space western was always a niche subtype, so its absence is more the trend staying true to its nature versus a genre collapsing. The head trippy anime is actually really interesting but I think that was more of an economic pivot that happened in the 2000's more than a decline in popularity.
If we’re talking about actual genre decline, I think it shows up more clearly in areas where there was real volume and then a noticeable drop-off or transformation. For example:
- High school battle harems : largely displaced by isekai-style power fantasies
- Mecha : already covered, but clearly lost its dominance
- Early 2000s “edgy” seinen : a lot of that tone has been absorbed into modern shonen instead
- Visual novel adaptations : largely replaced by Light novels / webtoon pipelines
- Ecchi-heavy comedies : less central now compared to modern rom-coms and relationship-focused series
I think an honorable mention would be the The Generic School Rom-Com. Before streaming services came into the mix and shifted from quantity to quality, there was a massive flood of very cheap, low-effort school romance shows that flooded the market and that "middle class of shows" have basically been wiped out.
So I guess where I land is:
Yes, we see fewer examples of some of these things. But I think there’s a difference between something being less common and something being a dominant genre that meaningfully declined. And that’s why some of the categories in the article feel a bit overstated.
