Audience Alienating Era / Anime & Manga

A No Recent Examples rule applies to this trope. Examples shouldn't be added until five years after the era begins. Please also try to avoid Complaining About Shows You Don't Like.

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• Astro Boy might be a classic, but even it is not immune to audience-alienating eras. In the sixties, Tezuka had Astro Boy go through a Face–Heel Turn, and wrote a story where a construction error turned Astro Boy evil. Instead of being a champion of justice who never wanted to hurt a human being, the evil Astro didn't care a bit about human lives anymore. Though Tezuka was fully aware that violent anti-heroes were the latest trend in manga, he didn't feel that it was the way to go for Astro Boy, but his editor insisted that an Astro Boy who killed people and destroyed buildings would be more interesting. Tezuka himself was convinced that the readers preferred Astro to be a good-hearted robot, and was proven right when the readers turned out to have zero interest in reading about an evil Astro Boy. Tezuka changed him back, but it took a lot of time and effort to get the series' popularity back.
• Once Reiko Yoshida left the Tokyo Mew Mew project, Mia Ikumi tried to write a sequel incorporating the retcons made in the TV show and replacing Ichigo with a new character named Berii. Ichigo herself lost her powers except as a living accessory to the new heroine, her origins and family life were completely ignored in favor of sending her to Europe, and she became a washed-up hero. It's no surprise Tokyo Mew Mew a la mode has a high degree of Fanon Discontinuity amongst fans who also really dislike Berii. Berii herself has been Mis-blamed, though; the real blame lies in the publishers, who, among other things, restricted the series to just two volumes when commissioning the sequel.
• Dragon Ball has gone through a few of these:
  • The Buu arc is often criticized for its Mood Whiplash, They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character antics that goes on for an extremely long time. This is partially because Toriyama got a new editor who had less creative needs, in addition to Toriyama being well past the point of creative exhaustion by the time he started the arc.
  • Many, many fans see Dragon Ball GT as this. After the end of Dragon Ball Z, Toei Animation decided to bank off of Z's success by creating an original sequel series. The anime attempted to return the franchise to the comedic roots of the original Dragon Ball, but suddenly went back to Z's action-packed Darker and Edgier tone after that didn't work. Many of GT's detractors state that both the comedy and drama of the show was shoehorned in compared to the more natural flow of the original manga, and the sudden shifts in tone taken by GT certainly didn't help matters.
  • Dragon Ball Super, a similar sequel series from the early 2010s, got off to a rough start due to the first two arcs simply being adaptations of Battle of Gods and Resurrection 'F', as well as notoriously terrible animation on TV airings. Once it started to branch off into original stories, it became far more favorably received as a better follow-up than GT (and appearing to ignore it entirely). That still depends on who exactly you ask, however, as the writing, art style and creative decisions can be contentious (such as the Super Saiyan recolours, to name but one).
• For some portion of the fanbase, Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha FORCE has become this for the main continuity of the franchise. The series became Darker and Edgier, but the method of doing so was introducing an Anti-Magic virus into a magical setting. This led the new villains to become a gang that beat beloved favorites almost insultingly easily while being insufferable, hypocritical jerkasses, the heroes have to combat them with Flawed Prototype weapons that barely even work and the new main character is, unusually, a heterosexual male that has so far not done anything beneficial for the heroes. Even worse, it has undergone a massive Schedule Slip, releasing only 30 chapters in the four years of its publishing. Perhaps due to all of these reasons, it is currently on (a most likely permanent) hiatus.
• While JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is still very popular in Japan and considerably well-loved in the west, each region has their own candidates for the comic's low point. Interestingly enough, each of the below parts that is loathed in one region is highly enjoyed in the other:
  • In Japan, Diamond is Unbreakable is seen as a rather inferior Post-Script Season compared to the first three parts. Reasons for this include the retcons of the bow & arrow and the protagonist Josuke being the illegitimate son of Joseph, the incredibly formulaic Monster of the Week plotline (which had already been established as a formula in Stardust Crusaders), and the lack of a real end goal until Reimi Sugimoto and Yoshikage Kira show up. Overseas, however, ''Diamond is Unbreakable'' is considered a good follow-up season.
  • Overseas fans of the series tend to look down on Golden Wind due to the perception of main protagonist Giorno Giovanna as bland and uninteresting (though translations may be to blame for this), the extremely formulaic Monster of the Week nature that exacerbated the flaws of the previous two parts' plot styles, the ridiculously designed and overly generic villain Diavolo, and the ending, which reeks of Deus ex Machina even by JoJo standards. Detractors take particular ire towards Giorno because he's the illegitimate son of the earlier villain Dio (even reappropriating his battle cry of "MUDA MUDA MUDA"). However, after 2017 saw the release of improved scanlations followed by the 2018 Animated Adaptation and its excellent dub, much of this animosity has disappeared and Golden Wind has become better-regarded.
• Bleach:
  • A sizeable portion of the fanbase felt that the series went into an A.A.E. with the Fullbringer Arc. The arc focused on new characters with totally new powers instead of the established characters and featured a plot that seemed almost completely unrelated to any part of the Myth Arc. To be fair, with Ichigo depowered and Aizen alive but imprisoned, there weren't many plot threads that could be carried over directly from the previous arc and at least nothing involved Aizen.
  • There are also fans who consider the four year long Arrancar Arc an Audience-Alienating Era. In general, the writing became a lot more divisive after the Soul Society arc, and the series' sales and ratings dropped to the point where the anime was cancelled as soon as the Fullbringer Arc wrapped up.
• Lupin III has also suffered through this:
  • The most widely agreed upon audience-alienating era happened with Lupin III: Part III, which consists of the third anime series and the Legend of the Gold of Babylon film. Both the series and the movie had Lupin wearing a pink jacket, most of the adult themes downplayed and the slapstick exaggerated (as well as a bizarre design for Fujiko). Although nowadays it is widely ignored by both the anime producers at TMS Entertainment and most fans in general in favor of Lupin III: Part II and the yearly specials it inspired, it did get a homage episode in Lupin III: Part 5.
  • The franchise hit another slump during The '90s, when it was carried largely by a series of annual TV specials. Said specials are often considered to be of hit-and-miss quality, due in part to the fact that TMS Entertainment did not directly animate the specials in-house, which often resulted in low-budget animation and inconsistent art styles and character designs. The early English dubs of these specials are also marred with the poor-quality voice acting of the era, and come off as off-putting to recent fans who are more familiar with the iconic Geneon dub cast.
• Studio Gainax, a once renowned studio, is widely agreed as having fallen into irreversible decline in the 2010's. While the studio weathered the departure of Hideaki Anno to found Studio Khara in 2006, the mass exodus of staff members, including Hiroyuki Imaishi of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt fame, to found Studio TRIGGER in 2011 dealt a crippling blow to Gainax. Soon after, Gainax would also lose the rights to their Cash-Cow Franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion to Anno and Khara, cutting off lucrative merchandise sales of the series. With much of its talent gone, Gainax decayed from producing acclaimed original series to mediocre adaptations of Shōnen manga such as Medaka Box. As the decade went on, many of Gainax's properties were either sold off or shifted to their sister company Gainax Fukushima, which was later spun-off into a legally separate entity called Gaina. The last nail in the coffin was when a top executive at Gainax was arrested in 2019 for sex crimes, prompting Anno to not only publicly denounce his former studio but also reveal years of financial mismanagement, shady actions, and failure to repay loans from Khara. With Gainax's name tarnished and very few productions in the pipeline, many fans doubt that Gainax will ever emerge from their Audience-Alienating Era.
• The retirement of Hayao Miyazaki in 2013 sent Studio Ghibli into an existential crisis. But, even before Miyazaki gave up film-making, the studio is considered by its hardcore fans to have entered an Audience-Alienating Era starting around 2004 when Miyazaki released Howl's Moving Castle, which did well on both sides of the Pacific but got mixed reviews. This was followed by his son Goro's Tales from Earthsea, which was critically-panned (especially by Ursula K. LeGuin) and thrown into No Export for You limbo in North America for several years due to rights issues. After that came Miyazaki's Ponyo, which was a return to the whimsical tone of his late-80s-era movies but still disappointed hardcore fans despite doing quite well at the box office. By 2010, longtime producer Toshio Suzuki openly speculated about closing the studio, although a shutdown was at least delayed by the modest success of Arrietty. In 2017 Miyazaki returned from retirement once again to direct a new film based on How Do You Live? and the studio announced the creation of a theme park based on Ghibli's works. Whether this can truly revive the studio remains to be seen.
• Gundam had an audience-alienating era in the middle of the 2000s that destroyed the international popularity of the franchise and shook the foundations of it over in Japan. After the runaway success that was Wing, nothing really stuck with the American audiences: the original simply had terrible ratings thanks to its outdated animation, G never really became anything more than a Cult Classic, and SEED was such a bust that it got kicked into the small hours graveyard slot about halfway through the series. Speaking of SEED, its sequel managed to kill any traction the original had acquired, even in Japan, and for a while it seemed that the alternate universes were doomed. While 00 did get pretty positive reviews, it was the last truly dedicated effort Sunrise had at making a profitable alternate universe for over a decade. The 2010s only continued the decline in no small thanks to the Build subseries taking up a majority of the TV slots along with the resumed focus on the Universal Century in OVA's and films with only three brand new series following the traditional formula made after the first Build series debuted in 2013.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam AGE is widely accepted as the franchise's lowest point. The art style drew aspersions before it even aired, but deeper problems came. Common complaints are that it rips off everything the previous Gundams had, the deaths are only for shock value, the plot is dumb and inconsistent, and its treatment of women is worse than in shows from decades before. The second arc is generally considered better, but the third arc pushes the series into rock bottom. This explains why the OVA for that series, Memory of Eden, decided to focus more on the second arc, to the point that it demotes Kio to a background character by the time the third arc comes along.
• VS Knight Lamune & 40 Fresh, a sequel to VS Knight Lamune & 40 Fire, breaks the concept of the original series of light hearted and comedic Super Robot fantasy adventure genre into a dark military story with girls showing off their breasts. It didn't go well, considering every previous show before it was made for children.
• Among certain fans, the Pretty Cure franchise has been in one since the end of Heart Catch Pretty Cure (which admittedly was a Darker and Edgier Tough Act to Follow and is almost universally considered the franchise's highpoint).
  • Suite Pretty Cure ♪ is considered one of the weaker seasons. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku didn't help either, as it made what was going to be a dark series aggressively Lighter and Softer. Suite is also disliked for its characterization, as many feel that Hibiki and Kanade come across as flat copies of Nagisa and Honoka with a rather forced Vitriolic Best Buds angle that gets dropped so quickly you wonder why they added it in the first place.
  • Some fans also consider Smile PreCure! this (though it is slightly better regarded) due to its episodic, goofy nature (to the point that it feels more like a spoof of the genre), childish writing (with both the Myth Arc and character growth being non-existent), and what many see as blatant pandering to the Moe crowd. On the other hand it was allegedly very financially successful... though mostly only with otaku. It says something when its first S.H.Figuarts figure is the Ensemble Dark Horse otaku character (Yayoi/Cure Peace) and not the leader.
  • Doki Doki! PreCure is itself better regarded than Smile, but it is also considered this due to its overly-complicated plot and the poor reception to some of its twists. For example, the Sixth Ranger Aguri/Cure Ace was not a previously established character (like the Sixth Rangers of every Pretty Cure season before) but an entirely new one. She also replaced Regina, when the show seemed to be building up to Regina becoming a Cure herself. (In the end Regina vanishes for most of the second half.) Basically, they tried to do the opposite of Smile where every episode tied into the Myth Arc... and despite some initial promise, they couldn't pull it off. It currently has the lowest My Anime List rating in the franchise, and allegedly got some of the worst TV ratings as well.
  • HappinessCharge Pretty Cure! looked like it would escape the Audience-Alienating Era... in its first half. The second half was struck by a Romantic Plot Tumor while other plot threads from the first half were either dropped or poorly resolved. It's telling that original series creator Washio Takashi returned to be the series planner for the next season, Go! Princess Pretty Cure. It is also telling that this was the first series to bring in less than 10 billion yen to Bandai since Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star.
• Manga Time Kirara became known as the face of Moe anime and manga throughout the 2000s and 2010s, but towards the late 2010s, things slowly began to decline for them, attributed to the increased fatigue of their brand and less financial return that saw more flops then successes, resulting in less Kirara anime being produced. 2018 saw the anime adaptation of Laid-Back Camp, which became its newest Cash-Cow Franchise, but the other 2018 releases became some of its biggest commercial and critical failures to date, including Anima Yell!, Harukana Receive, Slow Start and Comic Girls. While 2019's The Demon Girl Next Door became a success and got a sequel, things quickly hit the absolute nadir for the company at the start of the new decade in 2020 with the anime of Tamayomi, which became known as Kirara's worst received title, alongside the lukewarm Asteroid in Love and Dropout Idol Fruit Tart, and none fared well financially either. While 2021's solo Kirara installment of the second season of Laid-Back Camp proved to be another success, the commercial failures of both Slow Loop and RPG Real Estate (the latter becoming the worst selling anime in Kirara's entire history) kept a tumultuous era going in 2022, kept afloat by the aforementioned two successes they had at the end of the previous decade. Despite this, Bocchi the Rock!, released the same year, became Kirara's biggest hit since K-On! and was one of the most popular anime of that year, becoming the solo new anime success Kirara had in the early 2020s. Unfortunately, 2023's Kirara entry, Stardust Telepath, while well-received, did not get the same popularity or praise as its predecessor, and was yet another commercial flop, only outperforming the aforementioned RPG Real Estate. Even the immense popularity of Bocchi doesn't help the accusations of Kirara being stuck in an AAE, as the series is a Cringe Comedy with little to do with other Kirara properties' usual M.O.
• The Mecha genre, specifically Humongous Mecha, once a staple of the anime industry with many acclaimed classics, has been in steady decline since the 2010s. Very few new properties of note are being produced, most of them being mediocre Real Robot series, and those seeking to breathe new life into the genre seeing their initial popularity quickly collapse due to Seasonal Rot, and most of the properties that do receive success and acclaim have the advantage of being part of long-established franchises. Many think the genre already reached its peak with the Deconstruction of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Reconstruction of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and most depictions of Mecha nowadays either not the focus of the show (i.e General Franky and Jet Jaguar) and/or only qualify as part of the genre in the technical sense (i.e The piloted Titans from Attack on Titan or the Spider Tanks from 86 EIGHTY-SIX).
• The shoujo magazine Nakayoshi is considered to be going through one, as most of their series in the last 5 or so years are either otaku-bait or a cheap attempt to be Hotter and Sexier.
• Shoujo manga itself is considered to be in an AAE, with drastically-declining readership and anime adaptation numbers as female Otaku turn their attention toward Otome Games, Light Novels, and manga meant for male audiences. In the year 2021, only one shoujo manga received an anime adaptation—Fruits Basket, one of the most famous shoujo of all time^note For comparison, this is like the only shonen anime in a year being a remake of Dragon Ball. Because of declining readership, manga with heavy You Go, Girl! themes that would have been shoo-ins for shoujo magazines in The '90s are now much more likely to be published in shonen or seinen magazines in an attempt to court the large female Periphery Demographic (for examples, see Witch Hat Atelier and Akane-banashi, mangas that otherwise could have been a shoujo being published as a seinen and a shounen respectively). This has also extended even to the demographic's prime breadwinner: romance. The romance genre has been gobbled up by the other demographics of manga, even the ones that are female-centric, and found great success with these (hit romance mangas Kaguya-sama: Love Is War and Horimiya are respectively considered a Seinen and a Shounen manga). What remains in shoujo magazines are a few Long Runners interspersed with Strictly Formula romances. 2023 and 2024 saw more anime adaptations of shoujo manga that weren't legacy series, but with only one or two series a season being made at most, the genre is still nowhere near its nineties prominence.
• Happened to Yu-Gi-Oh!.
  • Arcs tended to give Kaiba's backstory or company more prominence, and each arc had its own kind of sin for the fans: the Virtual World interrupted Battle City, and was incredibly weird and nonsensical to many people. Waking the Dragons/Doma screwed with the history of the Shadow Games, and the KC Tournament arc was perceived as just a long breather episode that did little even to expand on Kaiba's character, who the Big Bad of that arc was targeting. And that isn't even mentioning the oddness that is Capsule Monsters.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX's first two seasons. The original series ending and the considerably lower quality of GX's dub did it no favors in the popularity department, but even fans of the series acknowledge that the series's lack of focus, slow pace, and excessive goofiness did a lot to ingrain the "spinoffs are always awful" mindset. Thankfully, it Growing the Beard with the Yubel arc, rescued the franchise from its A.A.E. in time for the first season of 5D's.
  • You also won't find many fans of the first two arcs of the second season of 5D's, which is sometimes considered the weakest point of the franchise. Criticisms include either dropping plot threads from the first season or resolving them in anticlimactic ways, demoting prominent characters (especially Carly) to extras, an absurd amount of Product Placement, and a gargantuan block of irrelevant filler episodes at the beginning of the season. Notably, this was the point in the series where the anime writers completely exhausted the initial concepts Takahashi had come up with, and the lack of direction showed.
  • The 5D's A.A.E. extended into its successor series, Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, which took the filler and Recycled Script of the other series and magnified them. Thankfully, it pulled itself together by the introduction of the Arclights and jumped heavily in quality with ZEXAL II, but the back-to-back combo of 5Ds second half and ZEXAL first half was quite the blow to the show's older fanbase.
  • While the first season and a half of Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V was very well received, the rest of the series from the Synchro arc onward fell into this. Instead of addressing many of the problems the previous series suffered from, ARC-V caught itself up in them too, with the rest of the arcs having terrible pacing and a massive amount of wasted potential on account of the series' Troubled Production. And that's not even getting into the returning Legacy Characters, many of whom were said characters In Name Only, and the ending, which managed to sour the whole series for many fans. It got so bad that at one point, the bottom 10 anime episodes of all time on the Japanese rating website Nico Nico Douga were ALL ARC-V episodes until they were overtaken by season 2 of Kemono Friends, and has permanently tarnished the name of director Katsumi Ono (despite much of it not being his fault).
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS continues the trend of divisive series. Following off the heels of the already-disliked ARC-V, VRAINS had a lot to prove from the get-go. Unfortunately, the series was seen as So Okay, It's Average by many fans of the franchise (especially in the west). Most of the problems revolving around both the new "Link Summoning" mechanic, which nerfed other Extra Deck summons both in and out of universe, as well as the protagonist Yusaku Fujiki AKA: Playmaker, who some saw as having all the problems with Yusei Fudo taken to the nth degree with few of the positives, being a boring Invincible Hero with a broken deck who never really develops until the last few episodes of the series. Season 2 did not help matters with characters like Aoi Zaizen or Go Onizuka being given the shaft, the introduction of Takeru Homura AKA: Soulburner and the villain Bohman, a Flat Character as bad as Yusaku who never seemed to be able to settle on a consistent backstory and clearly hadn't been planned ahead of time. While the series rebounded in its third season with a fan-favourite villain and ended up better received than its predecessor, it wasn't enough. After it ended early due to middling ratings, Nihon Ad Systems and Konami took the series away from Studio Gallop and gave it to Bridge for the Soft Reboot that is Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS.
• The second season of the Black Butler anime is seen as this by nearly all of the fandom. The shotacon fanservice was cranked up to intolerably squicky levels, the new characters were poorly written and completely unlikable (and the returning ones were derailed or flanderized), and the plot was a near-complete mess that had nothing to do with the manga and had a Gainax Ending. It took years for another season to be made, and it unsurprisingly ignores everything that happened in this.
• The Unicron Trilogy as a whole is considered an Audience-Alienating Era for Transformers, even among the franchise's notoriously split fanbase.
  • Transformers: Armada was very rushed, with many bouts of Off-Model on par with those seen in Generation 1, an English dub with clunky dialogue, incorrect names and originally silent moments filled with inane chatter and stock phrases, and a slow beginning with many repetitive episodic adventures before the plot really kicks off. But the reason why Armada isn't considered the worst Transformers series ever is because Transformers: Energon took that spot with little competition. All the problems with Armada were amplified, with the plot starting off good, before repeating itself halfway in and the final few episodes being entirely unrelated, character arcs largely being quietly dropped or else ended in a way that doesn't actually resolve them, the setting not giving the cast any real need to transform, and the CG models lacking emotion (to the point where sometimes they're hand-drawn just because it looks more impressive). The dub is even worse - unfinished animation is used, mistranslations are plentiful, and an important episode that develops two characters is dropped and replaced with a non-canon Japanese special. Just read what TFWiki.net has to say about it.
  • Transformers: Cybertron is, however, agreed to be a massive improvement over its predecessors (with the dub and animation being far less shoddy than them), though it still has its flaws (such as an abundance of Stock Footage used to pad episodes, and a drawn-out first half with a comparatively truncated second half).
• Pokémon: The Series: You'll get a lot of answers for what counts as the show's Audience-Alienating Era (and if it has ever left it). Two examples crop up more often than others: Johto and Unova.
  • Johto is a common citation as it contains the start of the fall of Team Rocket, Brock and Misty being reduced to moving background, flanderization of the main cast, and the "Filler Hell" in general. While it started within Season 3 (with the GS Ball becoming an Aborted Arc and such), it is Season 4 where the reputation for Johto comes from: very little of significance takes place (no captures, only several evolutions and three very spaced-out badges), and the filler was less memorable overall - the slower pacing led to much of the old vanguard becoming disillusioned with the show. That said, the succeeding "Master Quest" season is largely considered a return to form: more development of the show's Myth Arc, more Story Arcs to spice up the plot, stronger standalone episodes, and wrapping up the Original Series with a solid Tournament Arc (the Silver Conference being a Tough Act to Follow judging from the overall response to later League arcs) makes people more forgiving of it compared to what Johto previously gave them.
  • Unova is brought up due to how the Reset Button was pressed for Ash, his new traveling companions, the initial story arc with Team Plasma being unceremoniously dropped and later refitted into a short mini-arc, the unsatisfactory ending at the Unova League in which Ash's traditional elimination comes at the hands of an incredibly stupid trainer who only wins because of an extreme stroke of luck, and ending on a lackluster arc comprised mostly of filler.
  • Pokémon: Genesect and the Legend Awakened is agreed to have been the start of an Audience-Alienating Era for the movies (though as with the main series, whether or not it's merely a continuation of one is up for debate). Coming after the positively-received Pokémon: Kyurem vs. The Sword of Justice, Genesect quickly became a divisive movie thanks to a slew of questionable story decisions, most prominently the introduction of a brand new (yet suspiciously similar) Mewtwo over the fan-favorite original from Pokémon: The First Movie. The next three movies, based on the main animé's concurrent XY series, received lukewarm (at best) reception with fans (being regarded as fairly shallow and hollow, especially Hoopa and the Clash of Ages), and even in their native Japan they performed poorly in comparison to the other movies in the series. The poor reception of the XY movies may explain the movies going under a soft reboot starting with 2017's Pokémon: I Choose You! and likely why Sun & Moon didn't get its own tie-in movies.
  • In general, when the anime goes through an A.A.E., it gets a lot of fan backlash (which sometimes extends to Ash and Pikachu themselves) due to its ubiquity and effect on other parts of the franchise. It also should be noted that said fans are the Periphery Demographic, since the target audience appear to have had much fewer problems with Johto and Unova.^note particularly the latter, which was most stable in the ratings throughout its run, whereas there was a noteworthy drop-off in Johto due to the Pokemon fad in general dying down in popularity.
• Many fans believed that CLAMP entered the Audience-Alienating Era when their first original anime, Blood-C, took off which earned a mixed reaction from viewers and poor BD sales for having a Failure Heroine, which invokes a lot of Genre Blindness, a ridiculous plot and the needless gore and violence. Though many argued that the audience-alienating era started when the last chapters of Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- enter into Mind Screw territory and the No Ending of ×××HOLiC. CLAMP is now trying to Win Back the Crowd by continuing Tsubasa and ×××HOLiC in order to fix the problem, the sales went down on its second week which indicates that CLAMP really needs to step up from their game to pass the audience-alienating era. In 2016, they finally did when they released the sequel of Cardcaptor Sakura, Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card whose anime adaptation aired in 2018.
• Wave, Listen to Me! had the School of Wave Wisdom arc, an arc-long Bizarro Episode that completely threw any semblance of realism out the window as the protagonists end up getting caught in the midst of a cult that plans to use radio as a sonic weapon. It ditched the topic of radio broadcasting to feature such ridiculousness as a breeding program, a Large Ham cult leader, and revealing the cult to worship a character who had previously only been mentioned as an aside. It certainly didn't help that it was longer than any other arc in the manga at that point—and the finale included Attempted Rape and Koumoto, Nakahara, and Shinji mowing down scores of Mooks with previously-unseen fighting powers. After this arc, the manga pretended like it never happened.
• Tenchi in Tokyo is this to the Tenchi Muyo! franchise as a whole. It's seen as having an interesting concept where Tenchi leaves the girls behind to live his own life seemingly without an Unwanted Harem but the execution itself led to a very cold reception, particularly with the lower quality animation, a really divisive new love interest in Sakuya, Denser and Wackier humor that may not appeal to everyone and feels borderline childish most of the time, and the perception that the writers really failed to distinguish Tenchi from his usual Harem Anime hero mold and give the character a more refreshing, unique spin towards the end of the show.
• Sailor Moon:
  • The fourth season of the Sailor Moon 90s anime run, SuperS is considered this to the fandom. Coming off of the Darker and Edgier S season (which was considered a little too dark to some parents), Toei decided to not follow the manga's Dream counterpart in favor of its own storyline using the characters from the storyline. This effectively turned the entire season into a Filler Arc as the Dead Moon Circus' desire to find Pegasus really meant nothing as the audience already knew Pegasus was with Chibi-Usa, thus it wasn't a matter of if they found him but when... and that doesn't happen until the final seven episodes. As well, because of Chibi-Usa's greater importance to the story, she effectively became a Spotlight-Stealing Squad that was made worse because Chibi-Usa's character development that happened in the manga never really happened in the anime. This season killed off Sailor Moon in the west due to lower tolerance of Chibi-Usa to begin with because of her poor dub voice, resulting in the final season Stars not being dubbed until decades later.
  • The Dream arc itself in the manga didn't fare much better due to its overuse of Chibi-Usa and focus on Sailor Moon, Tuxedo Mask, and Chibi-Usa to the detriment of the other Senshi, as well as its Lighter and Softer tone compared to the Infinity and Stars arcs. Most fans consider it the weakest arc of the manga overall.