The Sorrow:

Jagdedge:

The Sorrow:
L's my favorite fictional character of all time, so I had to work something in there.

Anyway, I have to respectfully disagree with naming Kamina the manliest, Jagdedge. Berserk's Guts is the manliest, possibly tied with Hellsing's Alucard.

The thing is, you have to die a manly death in order to even qualify for the manliest being in exsistence. Punching a kid in the face, having the obligatory hot girl waiting for your tender loving, killing upwards of twenty people in giant mechs, and then killing their General, all while sustaining injuries resulting from a giant laser to the chest and a glaive 20 times your size being stabbed into your back are all awesome and manly things, and all things that made up his death sequence. Kamina was the embodiement of everything GAR.

Counterpoint: You know what it took to kill Alucard? They had to bloody erase him from existence in a paradox. He survived mutilation, decapitation, hundreds of bullet wounds, even crashing an SR-71 into an aircraft carrier's deck.

Guts: Where do I begin? The fact that his sword as more than a foot wide and between 6-7 feet long? The fact that he sliced off his own hand to get it free to protect the woman carrying his child? The fact that he's taken out demons twice his size? That got his hand replaced with a fake one that conceals a cannon? HOW MUCH MANLIER CAN YOU GET?!

You die a manly death. That's how.

How is being so unstoppable that they had to erase you from existence not manly? Plus, he stabbed someone with a gun barrel. Now THAT'S manly.

Anyway, somebody should probably warn people about the spoilers contained here.

The Sorrow:
How is being so unstoppable that they had to erase you from existence not manly? Plus, he stabbed someone with a gun barrel. Now THAT'S manly.

Anyway, somebody should probably warn people about the spoilers contained here.

He has a frilly collar. Frilly collar =/= Manly.
Heh, I think this conversation is hilarious. Spoiler warnings may be a good thing.

Anime was some American jackasses' idea to create a clever sounding word to make cartoons tempting. Japaneese cartoons are just like all the other ones dude. Each culture and each country have their own, "televisual norms", America's being poor acting, bad ideas, and reality T.V. Japan's mostly seeming to be on par with the monstrous love child of Billy Idol's "Rock the Cradle of Love" and Cradle of Filth's "Scorched Earth Erotica" .
There's good japanese cartoons, and bad ones. The bad ones just drown the goods ones. That's true for all things. But yes, Anime has practically grown retarded over the past decade or so. Even the Japaneese can be fallible money grubbing hedonistic bastards. Just as Americans, just as Swiss, just as Iraqis, just as Vortigaunts.

TheNecroswanson:
Cradle of Filth's "Scorched Earth Erotica" .

good song

Easykill:
But Death note takes the cake.

Seconded.

And Purple, I don't watch anime for story, or character development. I watch it so there's some action, and, as said by some people before me "kick-ass fights". Oh, and lets not go to hentai. That thing is it's own juggernaut, thanks to the aforementioned 4chan kids.

Geoffrey42:

thebobmaster:
That's what I meant. Still, Trigun should have, and could have, gone for more than half a season.

Half a season? It was a 26-episode arc. As far as I know, that's a full season. To second L.B. Jeffries's comment, that's one of the things I like, and consider (somewhat) a hallmark of a quality anime. Set, pre-defined story arc, that isn't dragged out into the 100's of episodes for the sake of filling time (and selling merch). Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Samurai Champloo: these are my exemplars of how to do it right.

@Piorn: Angst
I don't know that the linked really covers all of the connotations of the word, but it provides the general idea. Often results in unnecessary (and subsequently empty) drama. If you are, or have ever been, a teenager, you have probably experienced it.

You're right. Please call a proctologist.

What's bad is you've obviously based your opinion solely from watching Ikki Tousen. That show is a lame duck.

Anime worth watching:
- Neon Genesis Evangelion
- FLCL
- Ghost in the Shell (both movies, both TV series' and the Solid State Society OVA)
- Cowboy Bebop
- Samurai Champloo (CB's spiritual successor)
- Serial Experiments: Lain
- Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro ("Lupin" meets Ghibli's Miyazaki)
- List goes on..

I'm still not seeing Gurren Lagann on any of these lists of Anime worth watching. Seriously, the show induces eye-gasms. I don't want to have to post some links.

Fullmetal alchemist and Avatar

seriously, i don't know why people think Avatar is just for kids, the animation is well drawn and its got just as many jokes for those of the above 4 1/2 foot persuasion, not to mention it has a dude shooting lightning, how can that not rock?

And fullmetal alchemist was the thing i took to fill up space on my removable hard drive when a friend was leaching me music, anime and... nothing else... and i absolutely love it.

Some anime really is stupid though, i can see from whence you came.

Ah, I forgot how awesome FMA was...

Honestly, I have no problem with hentai, which is unashamedly about sex. It just really irritates me, as it does the OP, when some anime have so much fanservice or sexual tension that they basically become softcore porn but are just unwilling to admit it. I hate when an otherwise-good anime is marred by meaningless fanservice.

That's why I love JoJo's Bizarre adventure. It concentrates completely on the action (except for the first half of the first series, which fools you into thinking it's a standard romance story, complete with wishy-washy protagonist up against a ruthless rival...until said rival becomes a vampire, the hero is shown to possess incredible amounts of badassery and he teams up a dude in a top hat who can split people in half with his bare hands), with no sex at all, aside from the 300-esque subtext (which is there, but it's quite a stretch to take it anywhere at all, hence the complete lack of JJBA slash/hentai fanart or messed up fanfics) and the protagonists (for the most part) have the same abilities and strength throughout the whole series, so they rely heavily on their intelligence to solve battles, rather than just powering up and muscling their way to a victory (DBZ, I'm looking at you)

Plus, JJBA makes ABSOLUTELY NO FREAKING SENSE WHATSOEVER and is awesome in that wacky, random kind of way that is often associated with Japanese things (and with good reason). This is the manga that gave us villains named after rock bands (Wham!, Cars, and AC/DC in the second series), yet another use for steam rollers, and shooting people in the eye with bottlecaps.

Scanlations can be found here, remember to read right to left!
http://jojo.highervoltage.net/

Fanboy? Me? Naaawww ;)

The Sorrow:
I read manga mostly, but I have discovered the two greatest short series(es) of anime ever:
Elfen Lied: Just watch it. If you're squeamish about blood and nudity, sucks to be you, but it's got one of the best stories I've ever seen.

Sounds like Guro

ok, i'm going to say this one more time, evangelion sucks big donkey balls it's main character is the biggest pussy i've ever seen.

Oh and i totally second Guts as the manliest man ever. dying a brutal death is not quite as manly as being unkillable.

but as long as we're listing anime that kicks ass i'll post mine
-Berserk
-ninja scroll:tv show and movie, both good and worth watching
-Fullmetal alchemist
-Devil Man
-Golden boy: funiest short anime i've ever seen funnier even than flcl
-flcl: also great
-mahoromatic: great anime no one has ever heard of
-tenchi muyo
-Baki the grappler: great fighting show
-Shin chan: hylarious
-shadow skill: another older good fighting anime
-samurai champloo
-ghost in the shell
-yu-yu hakusho
-tenjo tenge
-bleach
-Big O
-cowboy bebop
-Trigun
-Hellsing
-Armatige: the 3rd
-lupin the third
-black lagoon
-case closed
-desert punk
-gundam wing
-G gundam
-outlaw star
-read or die
-burst angel
-samurai 7

this is a long list and i'm sorry but it proves a point, there is a ton of GREAT anime out there if you just look for it, your friend's taste may differ from your own quite alot, my best friend loves naruto and i can't stand it.

PurpleRain:
A friend of mine, with an anime fetish of epic proportions

Aaahahahhah... Matt... What a character..

But yeah.. There sure is a lot of crap out there...

^ This is a great list. Especially Tenchi Muyo and Black Lagoon(others that i agree with have been mentioned before). Just I prefer to call it Detective Conan than Case Closed. Horrible, Horrible Dub.

Anime and I have a love-hate relationship, and I mostly agree with Purple. I know it sounds like fuel for a fan-boy holocaust, but the most enjoyment I would get out of a series would be when something makes fun of it (read: Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series).

As with most generalizations, there are quite a few exceptions. I do love Death Note however, as well as FLCL and Bleach , probably because the only anime I've ever seen has been through [Adult Swim] though. I refuse to buy any DVDs, because I want to keep what little dignity I still have, and I loathe cute sidekicks and variations on the words "lolita," "furry," or "fanservice". On a side note, I've always wanted to go to an anime convention in a Hunter S Thompson state of mind, wink wink nudge nudge. Maybe then I could look at a guy with a giant cardboard buster sword, or anyone that's crossplaying without expelling Taco Bell out of my mouth.

Most anime I've ever seen alwyas makes me say in my head:
"what the fuck is going here?" "Why are they flying?" "What the shit is with that cat?" "Who made her a god all of a sudden?" "whoah, you guys can teleport? why aren't you robbing banks then?" "You can glow now? Wait, if you can glow, why are you fighting monsters, let some other masochist do that, you could totally become a pro spelunker, or a carny." "Oh, god, why? That's your sister you fucked up mutant!" "No, just no! Get the fuck out of that giant robot. That is totally unnecessary for the task at hand." "You're how old?!" "Just kill him already! screw the rules, you're rich!" "Ok, Light, I know you're a derranged psychopath, cram school could do that to a human, but there's a hot girl throwing herself at you, and you're not on top of that like a cathedral on catacombs. I don't want to see this actually happen, but seriously, every other guy around you is drooling over this chick and you treat her like she's a pile of ants. God, you deserve the police to lock you up, I don't care if you're a magnificent bastard."
I could go on for pages and pages at a time, but no one wants to hear about my confusion.

The sum of this is that I've come to the conclusion that I'm a closet anime fan, but that I also can't stand 90% of anime out there. Seriously, I hated Neon Genesis Evangelion . I had no idea what the hell was going on half the time. Why were there huge robots that fought aliens? If civilization had advanced to the point that giant robots were a feasible option as a weapon, why the hell didn't they just make an army of tiny ones complete with rail guns, or mini-hadron cannons, or just pick a word from a Quantum physics book and make a gun that shoots that. Seriously, I think they wouldn't lose too much of the audience if they decided to use all of a sudden use a gluon-quark wave cannon. (Although in a practical sense it wouldn't do shit, but it certainly does follow the Rule of Cool, along with the Giant Robots). Since I've succeeded in scaring off any readers at this point, why isn't there an anime that involves superscience, other than the Mecha type series'? It could sort of play out like Death Note where a goody two-shoes, genius-type character, lets call him Dave, develops a new quantum particle in a laboratory's particle accelerator. Through some inner karmatic reversal; such as Dave getting cancer (which isn't that uncommon in his field) or something emo like his girlfriend dying in a car accident; and then Dave decides to mutate the population with his discovery - after he makes a portable version of it though - and bring on the apocalypse, but secretly. Chaos ensues as he one by one starts mutating people - some get powers, some get horrible, horrible cancer, etc - and an antagonist starts to snoop around his lab after doctors find out what is going on. Shit, it's something new and doesn't involve a fucking giant robot or a cute sidekick.

It's all just a matter of personal taste, and no matter what weird genre of anything, there's always someone who'll die to defend it's existence. So long as it doesn't directly affect me, or rob me blind in a dark alley.
/* There should be a general law that states something along those lines, but screw off, I don't want to look it up */

My problem with most Anime

Panty Shot + Explosion + Fight + Panty shot + Obscure philisophy + Panty Shot + Fight = your average anime.

However, there are a couple of exceptions to the equation, and this includes series such as Ghost in the Shell and Death Note.

Anime hasn't gotten worse, it's just that the market for anime outside of Japan has opened the pipeline far enough that now the shit gets through as well as the quality. Anime has always been this bad and always been that good.

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the wierd shit is direct to video. If you were to lump direct to video movies in with regular theatrical release movies without making any distinction, you'd have a totally different picture of the movie industry. Same with anime.

Sure, there are shitty broadcast anime in Japan, just like there are shitty regular broadcast TV shows everywhere else.

Oh, and thank whoever for reminding me about Gankutsuou, which is blindingly gorgeous and awesome, and on sale right now at Rightstuf! Yay, score!

Easykill:

Death note takes the cake.

I watched the 2 Ep of that so dam cool. Wait a moment, it's on tonight!

How do you feel about Fullmetal? Personally I consider it the benchmark along with Ghost in the Shell. Anime movie's I hold up to a different standard as time is something needed to give anime that, *thing*. Akira did not need time to get that *thing*.

The only Anime I've seen and hated is Neon Genesis. The story goes nowhere, and no a circle does not count as going anywhere if the circle has no meaning

i didn't like death note.

thats right, i couldn't get into it, and there's nothing you can do to stop me.

that said, don't get down on anime, our TV has some genuine shit on it as well.

As has been said before, there're good anime and bad anime. Same with everything. OP just needs to find a good one. It also depends what you like, because "anime" is a very broad term. There's action anime, comedy anime, character drama anime, the list goes on. For every genre you have in the West, you have an Anime equivalent, basically.

Action: Check out Gundam 00 for minimal plot with maximum robots. No main characters who cry or have their clothes ripped off here. Samurai Champloo had some extremely nice action sequences, as well.
Comedy: Not exactly my thing, but I thought Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann was pretty hilarious in a lot of places, and Baccano (see below) had some really funny moments. So did Samurai Champloo.
Drama: My favourite (so far) has been Planetes. It's set in 2075 (or so), and revolves around these guys who live on a massive corporate space station, as they pick up space debris. It's a really nice character study.
Snatch: If you've seen the movie Snatch (or Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, etc, etc), and want to see how it holds up as an anime, go find Baccano. It's almost too awesome for words. It's set across 1930-1932, and examines heaps of different characters as they interact across three distinct storylines. It's complex, but every single thing, no matter how bizzare, is fully explained by the end of the 13th (and last) episode.
Sci-Fi: Ghost in the Shell. Amazing realisation of a world where everyone's brains are connected to the internet, and possible crimes that result from people and computers being almost the same thing. Philosophy + Action = WIN.

Those are my recommendations to the OP, anyway. Depending on what he likes.

Edit:

Ultrajoe:
Thats right, I couldn't get into [Death Note], and there's nothing you can do to stop me.

That's fine, man. It's all about finding what you like. All I can do is recommend what I like, which I've done.

I have a really old sub of Berserk and it's spelt Gatz not Guts but that's just nit picking he's still the double hardest bastard ever to grace book or screen, ***massive spoiler*** even hell couldn't stop him and he takes a demon into himself just to get his revenge on Griffiths (the Anime's actually somewhat less vicious than the manga which does degenerate to babies on spikes level at some points)

All in all Anime's a bit hit and miss though, some of it's great and some of it's terrible, personally if it's got school kids in it at all then I avoid it like the plague (apart from Full Metal Panic which was funny as hell)

I have fallen in love with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, because nothing beats an awesome "Gattai!" scene... except for a constant supply of MORE "Gattai!" scenes, each larger, more hot-blooded and crazier than the last. Where else are you going to find mechs so large they use galaxies as weapons?

Anime is usually crap for the same reason (to a much lesser degree) that a lot of first person shooters are crap, there is to many of them because they're to easy to make. Because pretty much any "Japanese-Average-Joe" with a crappy anime idea can make there show, there are SO many anime programs out there that there's a 95% chance you'll land on a crap one.
For every Spirited Away (which was excellent) there are twenty other anime movies that suck more then season 12 of South Park.

I never really thought too much about Anime. The books give me a terrible headache(just can't get the reading back to front thing). But I recently came into the custody of Appleseed Ex Machina and several Gungrave DVDs and I thought they were "pretty sweet". So now I want to explore the Anime horizons. But I'm not much for the "killer-tentacle-penis-stuff". Guns or chicks with guns are cool. Even robot chicks with guns would be great. Hell if anyone knows of an series that has chicks, guns, robots AND the undead now THAT would be spec-friggin-tacular. If anyone knows of anything that fits the bill please send me a title or two in message so as not to bore the obvious learned Anime contributors with directing my Anime-noob ass down the road of Japanese Animatory Enlightenment. Thanks to any and all.

BTW, most disservice you could do to most animes is watch the English version, which is usually badly dubbed and censored.

That said, since everyone else is, I'll post my list of favorite anime shows and movies:

Trigun (English dub is very high quality)

Full Metal Alchemist (only watched it in Japanese)

Outlaw Star (English dub is also very good)

Naruto (dear God, avoid the English version at all costs!)

The Getbackers if you can get past the Engrish

Mononoke-hime or Princess Mononoke (English dub is very good)

Steamboy (see PM)

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (it has Mark Hamill and Patrick Stewart. Nuff said)

You guys seem to be overexagerating the bad aspects of anime. Its ironic though since what I like about anime is how the characters overexagerate expressions. To me it makes the characters seem more believable, most of the time anyways. The truth is that there is bound to be something of your tastes no matter what you like. What is my tastes? Well I have plenty, but one of my favorites would be thrillers. Case and point look up an anime called When They Cry. It starts out as a generic harem comedy, but quickly goes straight to hell. Watch the first 4 episodes and see what I mean. And I try not to use the term Anime since it separates it from the rest of the worlds animation.

I find that the most popular and most known animes are the ones that sold enough in Japan to be valid for sale in the West, American companies pick this up mostly I think, but don't quote me on that.

So of course we probably miss out on some underground gem that is less known, for example, I didnt see anyone list Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu which is probably the funniest piece of anime to date or that brilliant masterpiece Paprika. These are two animes the later a movie mind you, that I find are almost never quoted as the great ones of our time, it's always Comboy Bepop, Trigun, Evangelion and on and on it goes, Gundam even. Trigun was really quite a fine piece altough as always I found it better represented in the original manga by Yatsuhiro Nightow, the Hellsing anime was shit, Hellsing Ultimate on the other hand was a brilliant animation much up to the standard of Kohta Hirano's childishly badass style.

Anyway, went off on some strange tangent there, my point is that what we get is what's worth distributing over here, what's worth the money to subtitle and gods forbid dubb (altough I will agree that sometimes it works), so we probably miss out on a few sweet gems only thoose freakishly obsessed Otakus know about. What I can say the Japanese do way better than us in the west is animated TV shows, because in all Western TV shows, animated or not, nothing really happens, even in shit like Lost and Heroes nothing really happens, just an epic plot-twist circle-jerk, and anime always goes somewhere which is probably why I watch next to no (especially american) tv shows.

Yeah, Hellsing Ultimate is amazing. So is the manga.

The Franco:
It could sort of play out like Death Note where a goody two-shoes, genius-type character, lets call him Dave, develops a new quantum particle in a laboratory's particle accelerator. Through some inner karmatic reversal; such as Dave getting cancer (which isn't that uncommon in his field) or something emo like his girlfriend dying in a car accident; and then Dave decides to mutate the population with his discovery - after he makes a portable version of it though - and bring on the apocalypse, but secretly. Chaos ensues as he one by one starts mutating people - some get powers, some get horrible, horrible cancer, etc - and an antagonist starts to snoop around his lab after doctors find out what is going on. Shit, it's something new and doesn't involve a fucking giant robot or a cute sidekick.

That sounds exactly like an American comic book.

@thebobmaster: FMA actually has a really good English dub, too.

Now on to the reason I'm posting on this thread: FMA manga! If you liked the anime, read the manga, it's quite a bit better, and this is coming from someone who loved the anime.

Another anime worth recommending is The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. If you don't like anime because you can't understand what's going on, stay as far from this series as you possibly can. Otherwise, it's fantastic.