User blog comment:Hidden Scorpius XI/Kneejerk reaction to "Raven Branwen"/@comment-10380701-20150825003158/@comment-4010415-20150827012909

Basically, when it comes to popular anime, I look into it first and see if it piques my interest. If it's something I would've been curious about and interested in checking out in the first place, then I'll check it out. If not, I'm not gonna check it out just because it's popular, unless it came out years ago and is still popular, like Cowboy Bebop.

Basically, if it has aged and is still popular, like Cowboy Bebop, then it's most likely popular for good reasons and is actually a good anime.

If it's some brand new anime that just started coming out and everyone's all over it, it's hard to tell if that popularity is because it's actually good or if it's just a fad. SAO was a fad. I may be a bit biased in my decision, considering I originally was going to put off watching SAO, since I already had other anime in mind that I wanted to watch. A friend of mine suggested watching SAO, a Youtuber I watched suggested it to his fans, and I kept seeing SAO screenshots, gifs, and fanart everywhere. So, I gave in, and I was like "It's popular, and it's constantly in my face, so I might as well check it out."

The beginning was really cool and interesting and had promise, but then it suddenly switched to being about Kirito journeying through the game's world, meeting people, having girls fall for him, and the show kept timeskipping like crazy. It would've been so much better if they had stuck to the whole "We're trapped in this video game world, and we need to escape" and had him and other characters actively working toward escaping more than just once every 10 episodes or whatever. Oh, and if he wasn't OP as fuck. Like, I get it, he's a Beta tester and thus knows more about the game and is already a higher level, so people don't trust him. Did he really have to get to the point where he regenerates HP faster than people can reduce it? At that point, just turn evil, prevent people from leaving, and become their god.