From anime ending songs starting in the few final seconds of the episode to the rise and fall of the Yandere archtype, Lucas and Chris take a look at the anime trends of yesteryear.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Lucas
Chris, between our colleagues fawning over all things Trigun last week, being reminded that 4chan largely exists thanks to people spamming Azumanga Daioh memes back in the day, and my subtle retreat into nostalgic media in the face of "The Horrors," I've been thinking a lot about old anime lately! More specifically, I've been thinking about trends in anime that have petered out over time for one reason or another: like ED music kicking off in the closing moments of the main episode in the transition to the ED animation, or yandere girls who actually want to kill you!
Care to take a walk down memory lane with me and remember some bygone anime trends together?
Chris
Who knows, we might even predict what's coming next! Trends tend to be circuitous, after all. That habit you mentioned of EDs starting at the end of the episode before cutting to the credits is originally attributed to City Hunter, but I remember it for popping up a few times in the mid-2000s, specifically in shows like Black Lagoon and Mai-HiME.
It serves as a solid example to start off why these sorts of things show up and catch on—sometimes, simply, they're cool!
Hey, my introduction to that little anime trick came from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and that (on top of being super heckin' queer) is a big part of why I still think that franchise so cool!
I continue to be delighted that they brought that back for one last round(about) at the end of the Stone Ocean anime. It's iconic to the franchise at this point!
God, I know Steel Ball Run has to live up to lofty expectations already, but I NEED that needle drop ED to be IMMACULATE! David Productions has already succeeded in making Gyro the hottest, dirtiest man in all of anime. Now I just need them to stick the landing with the literal episode ending, and it'll get five stars from me every go around!
Even with the gacha horse waifu anthropomorphizing, it's wild that it's taken this long to get a horse racing anime, like Uma Musume! I've known causally for a while now that horse racing is big in Japan, and sports-focused titles have been some of the biggest global hits in anime. Can't believe it took this long for things to click, but I can dig it!
Well, minus the fact that this anime is functionally an ad for loot-box style gambling. That element still sticks in my craw, and I'll never stop calling that out!
To say nothing of also being a promo for old-fashioned sports betting as another kind of gambling! It's remarkable that Uma Musume can come off as uplifting and resonant as it does when you think about how it's assembled from some of the most potent cultural evils. But we have and will have time to talk about that later, I'm sure.
What Uma Musume does bring me to in the context of this topic is that it represents one of the latest successes in a long-standing anime trend: series about characters who are anthropomorphized versions of...well, just about anything, really.
Like sure, cute human versions of guns or swords make sense in a classic kind of cool way, but then you've got whole-ass countries or even soda cans getting turned into marketable husbandos and waifus. It's such a common thing that we weebs don't even blink twice now that they've done it with racehorses.
Oh God, Chris. These images just awakened a part of my brain that's been dormant since, like, 2015! "Girls are actually blank" was a tried and true anime formula for a hot second! While I think it's largely been replaced by the "cute girls doing cute things" subgenre, you're right in that Uma Musume is keeping the trend alive!
Also, and forgive me if asking this question means that I have to turn in my weeb card, but were the girls in "Girls und Panzer" literal tanks, or did they just drive tanks? I was never big into this sub-genre and always confused this title and Kantai Collection (where I think the girls were literally battleships, right???)
Girls und Panzer was indeed more of a Cute Girls Doing Cute Things title, where the cute things in question were piloting tanks in recreational war games. So it was differentiated from Kantai Collection where the girls were the vehicles, but then there was another battleship-themed series called High School Fleet, which was more akin to GuP's setup...only with boats.
And, speaking of overlap and intersection, classifying anime characters into different dere archetypes has been an enduring trend in anime writers' rooms and the anime fandom for a while now! The latest example of this is Mariabelle from the anime Yandere Dark Elf: She Chased Me All the Way From Another World!
Only...she's not actually a yandere! Or, at least the show doesn't follow through on that premise and have her obsession with the MC materialize into murderous shenanigans! This archetype exploded in popularity thanks to the gory and graphic exploits of characters like the previously referenced Yuno from Future Diary, Kotonoha from School Days and Shion from Higurashi: When They Cry.
While on a surface level, this is technically an instance of a trend enduring, it's evolved in a way that softens and compromises the idea, and that's deeply frustrating to me personally.
That's one issue with the trend proliferating more and more into the mainstream. The edges that made them stick out previously get sanded down until all you're left with are some surface signifiers they use to go "See? This is totally our version of that thing that got popular previously!"
Granted, I think another point is that yandere, like tsundere before it, graduated from being a trend to just getting absorbed into broader anime archetypes overall. So now you can find murder-happy schoolgirls Nice Boat-ing dudes in any number of contexts!
It makes Yandere Dark Elf specifically pitching itself as a yandere series stick out, since, as you said, it doesn't really embody what made the trend catch on in the first place, and seems to mainly put the title up-front for marketing purposes.
God, and maybe that's what I find so aggravating about that title in particular. Yandere Dark Elf turned a previously subversive idea (or at least an idea that was edgy when I was in high school), and softened while overtly cashing in on the work of its better predecessors for a quick buck.
To your broader point, though, you correctly pointed out when we were workshopping this column that the dedicated "moe" aesthetic conventions and artistic direction didn't really go away as a trend in anime, and more got big enough to influence the entire medium. It both doesn't exist anymore and is simultaneously everywhere, which is maybe the ultimate fate of every successful trend in media and storytelling.
Right, there are fewer dedicated "ensemble of girls hanging out to be cooed over" shows because that kind of cute girl just got absorbed into everything else. Look at how many c-tier isekai entries include a cute little sister or something similar, almost out of obligation.
Going back to Uma Musume and projects of its ilk, these kinds of multimedia project series cracked the code of infusing the moe aesthetic into an ensemble for maximum marketability. Love Live! was an example of this from ages ago, tying it into the also-recurrent idol trend.
Hell, when I'm in a discoursing mood, I'll even argue that the only reason Rising of the Shield Hero is popular is because the protagonist is surrounded by no less than four small girls who are obsessed with him at all times! "Moe" was always a bit much for me unless it was used thematically and purposefully, and now it's low-key everywhere in a way that I'm not sure I'm super jazzed about.
But to your point, and echoing an idea that Nick and I explored back in 2024, every female character is kind of a waifu now! Making girls cute in a specific way to resonate with specific members of an audience was too profitable an idea to stay niche for long, so of course, it'd be in any anime even remotely suitable to moe ideas today.
The cute girls even come with their own noticeable opening sequence trend! Though, as a trend, the "Kirara Jump" is pretty evergreen. An ever-present indicator of cute-girl good times.
Like the played-over ending themes we started the column talking about, I find these small signifiers surrounding the show interesting as mini-trends. For instance, it's funny that both Yoroi Shin Den Samurai Troopers and Dark Moon from this season have OPs with their boys attempting lined-up power walks!
I'm going to refer to this particular trend in anime OP's as Reservoir Dogs-ing, and if you're not old enough to get that reference, I don't know why you're reading this column!
I'll be honest, I racked my brain and did a fair bit of research in trying to find some examples of this trend in other, more recent anime, but the best I could come up with was this, much more interesting and better composed shot from the Mashle season 2 OP. Now that I realize that it's iterating on a trend, that makes me feel even more confident in calling it the best OP from 2025!
See, this is what you get with your dismissal of the Chainsaw Man anime, they do a pretty idiosyncratic version of it in that one's OP too!
Given the absolute avalanche of cinematic references in the Chainsaw Man OP, I think it's safe to say this one is very consciously a Reservoir Dogs shout-out too.
While I could get into how the CSM anime's insistence on overproducing just about every element of the manga undermines what made that work quietly and effectively devastating, the inherent weirdness and horniness does give me a great transition into another seemingly bygone anime trend! Remember when incest was WAY more common in anime?
Incest as a "trend" in anime has always been a notable subject—so much so that Sylvia and I did a whole column on it last year, which I will seemingly never escape the subjective vortex of.
The takeaway from there was that incest is always going to have value as a spicy drama component (your co-workers all watched and loved Game of Thrones), but more dedicated takes on the sibling-smooching fantasy have risen and fallen as a trend with the times. We saw this with the anime versions of the works of Tsukasa Fushimi, including Oreimo and Eromanga Sensei, and components of those getting the overall anime absorption treatment of some of these other trends we've talked about (again, peep all the little sisters in isekai).
Sadly, (or maybe this is a positive development depending on how viscerally you react to incest in fiction), I think incest in anime is being used less subversively and in less affecting ways in titles today than in years past. The most recent example of this trend I can find is in Ren Arisugawa Is Actually a Girl, but that anime isn't even good by the standards of smut fiction.
This isn't me trying to do a "things were better back in my day" with incest media, but I don't think I'm wrong for wanting incest to be deployed in a way that's at least interesting in anime if it's going to be so broadly ascribed to an artform that I've turned into my livelihood!
I can agree with that sentiment. If it's going to trundle along as a trend, we ought to at least get an incest anime as profound and affecting as 2007's Candy Boy!
Actually, Candy Boy itself could be relevant here, and for once not just with the incest element! It was a web-exclusive streaming anime years ahead of that becoming a common model with the advent of series on platforms like Netflix. Sometimes when you try to kickstart a trend, you're just a little too ahead of the curve. Or you've got too many blood-related twin sisters smooching, take your pick.
...and that takes care of my obligatory Candy Boy mention in the column for the year.
Oh yeah! There was a brief window where ONA titles were trying to channel the "they won't let us get away with this on TV!" energy of many OVAs. It's a darn shame that Netflix and other streaming giants decided to largely conform to mainstream television broadcast standards, because the distribution revolution could have easily turned into a GREAT way to make more challenging and transgressive media more accessible.
And now that I've had an excuse to post one of my favorite screenshots from New Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, remember when English dubs of anime also dubbed the songs instead of just using the original Japanese version of the song!!? We've gone over a lot of bygone trends so far in this column, but I think this is the one that I genuinely miss the most!
It always goes back to fun OP trends. And I know what you mean. They didn't always hit, but they could be a fun inclusion for the vibes. The dubbed version of the classic Dragon Ball OP will always be kind of a guilty pleasure for me.
I feel like this is a trend that fell off twofold, between kids' anime not getting adapted and dubbed for TV as much these days, and the production of dubs themselves losing steam and having less energy put into bonus efforts like these (RIP Funimation). More's the pity, as we probably won't get anything like the Digimon Frontier English OP going ridiculously hard again.
God, EN OP were incredible for anime fans of a certain age, and it's a shame to see them die out. I even have a soft spot for the goofy ones like the Rave Master EN OP by the LEGENDARY ska band REEL BIG FISH!
Okay, but that fascinating time capsule also just reminded me of the choices made for the English OP of Knights of the Zodiac, and maybe some of these are best left in the past.
Did Bowling for Soup ever get cancelled? Is it still cool for me to like them??? Because I keep finding out that they agreed to stupid/cool shit that just makes me like them more and more!
To bring it back, though, I think the trend of in-episode songs and OPs/EDs getting dubbed largely faded away once Sony, a company that's also a giant presence in the music industry, became a de facto monopoly in the English anime world. Music-focused titles like Zombie Land Sagaused to have its English VAs perform in-universe songs, but now they just cut to the original Japanese versions of these works.
On top of this being super distracting to me and the way I consume this kind of media, it bums me out that something as fun and creative as EN VAs creating their own take on a song likely stopped being a thing because a Sony exec thought it'd be more synergistic for there to be only one version of a song they own and can sell rather than two versions.
Never mind that artists creating their own English versions of opening themes is a thing that has been done off and on.
This sub-subject is interesting as an example of a trend dying down not due to a natural arc of popularity, but because of the business components behind it. Along those same lines, you have the budget and churn of modern anime production supplanting the old "trend" of 26-episode anime with the current single-cour model. And man, that old series length is another one I miss sometimes.
Right!? Especially when a new anime is likely to be popular, or if there's enough source material, I'm still of the mindset that anime should default to this length. We still get these longer episode counts occasionally, like with Apothecary Diary and the first season of Frieren, but that's about it as far as recent memory goes.
I'll also say that this trend petering out is particularly annoying to people in our position who review anime. I haven't done weekly streaming reviews for long, but I've already found myself in tough spots on occasion as I'm unsure if an anime is going to be a one or two-cour affair.
You just have to roll with it, especially when a series running for two cours means there's not even a guarantee it'll stay voted in for review in the second half. Still, that 26-episode number used to be so definitive, while single-cour shows seemingly end on episode 12 or 13 at random, and it's not always obvious you're watching the finale!
Though speaking of Frieren and length, that reminded me of that trend we were dealing with a couple of years ago of extra-long premieres. Speaking again as someone who professionally has had to keep up with all the new shows coming out in a season, this is another one I don't necessarily miss.
Oh, you lucked out with what you were keeping track of this season then, because that trend came back with a BANG! Sentenced to Be a Hero got a double long premiere, the JJK season 3 premiere was basically all the new stuff from the Execution movie, and I know there were a few other super-sized premieres from this season that I'm forgetting.
If our columns get to be as cyclical as these trends, I'm sure it won't be too long before we've spun back to this topic! Hopefully, I'll have more titles that fit this mode top-of-mind by then.
Nothing's ever gone for good. Anime that stand out do so, regardless of whether they set or chase trends, because they execute well on their whole package. For instance, plenty of anime had dancing openings and endings in the 2000s, but people fondly remember the one from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya because it was fun and they associate it with the good times they had with the show overall. You compare that to the ending being pretty much the only thing anybody remembers about, say, Girl's High.
I like how these examples of "trends" can be anything from little touches included in OPs and EDs to entire genres that become pervasive. Which also makes me worry that when the isekai trend does finally die, it could come roaring back shortly after. But that's a worry for another time.
And when it does come back, I'm sure we'll be ready to beat the worst of it back down again! Hopefully by then, we'll have plenty of new or re-invented, fun anime trends to chat about as well!
Can't wait to line this one up again with you again in, oh, let's say anywhere between 5 to 10ish years!
Surely we'll be cool enough to power-walk out to do the column by then.
From anime ending songs starting in the few final seconds of the episode to the rise and fall of the Yandere archtype, Lucas and Chris take a look at the anime trends of yesteryear.― From anime ending songs starting in the few final seconds of the episode to the rise and fall of the Yandere archtype, Lucas and Chris take a look at the anime trends of yesteryear. Disclaimer: The views and opinions e...
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