It is Perfectly Normal to Drop an Anime if You Don't Like It

Summary:

• Fans often continue to watch anime they don’t like for superficial reasons, when it is entirely reasonable to drop it.
• Source fans are partly to blame for the mentality, setting unrealistic expectations for anime watchers.
• However, not dropping anime is also fine if you feel like you have a good reason not to.

Many fans struggle to continue watching anime that they clearly don’t like — yet they do so anyways. This, in turn, makes them dislike it even more, and they often end up irrationally complaining about it. A situation like this could easily be avoided if these people were more picky with what they watch — or if they dropped anime they clearly didn’t like.

Many superficial reasons not to drop an anime

Often otaku fall into the trap of continuing a series they dislike. A lot of the time, this is dictated by peer pressure: the thought that if everyone else is watching it, you should be watching it as well. It can also be explained by the hope that it gets better — even if it’s very obvious to the person watching the anime that it is not for them.

Also anime fans often fall victim to sunk cost fallacy: continuing to watch a series just because they are already a significant amount of episodes in, even starting new seasons when they clearly don’t like it. Some watch anime they are not in the mood for (when they can always come back to it later), and some follow anime weekly when it’s better to binge it — and in all of these cases, dropping the series (even temporarily) might be a better decision from the perspective of time management.

Source fans are partly to blame

A lot of the time the source readers set up unrealistic expectations for the anime-only viewers. Praising the work as if it is the unquestionably the best thing ever, they often respond to people criticizing the adaptation with “it gets better later”, and, if the source is long enough, with something along the lines of “season 2 is where it will be the best thing ever.” For example, Chainsaw Man fans often behave like this.

While there might be some truth to these claims for particular series, in reality, most of the time only the most dedicated fans would follow the series for a long time and consistently praise it — and if someone is clearly not interested from the beginning, they probably won’t be interested later, either. Yet somehow, the never-ending praise from source material fans makes many otaku continue anime they don’t like.

Not dropping is also fine

Ironically, it’s also fine if you want to continue a series you don’t like. Perhaps you like a certain aspect of the anime enough to follow it all the way (or a certain character, like Yuno in Mirai Nikki). Perhaps you just want to see how it ends, or perhaps you just want to have an opinion on the entire thing — it doesn’t matter. As you shouldn’t let peer pressure dictate what to watch, you should also not let others dictate how you spend your time — the decision whether to drop or not is yours alone.