The answer is… Complicated.
Summary:
- Our memories are unreliable, making you remember only the best parts of old seasons.
- There are more shows being released than there were back then.
- Industry trends change with time.
We all know this feeling — that anime was better some years back. Maybe five, maybe ten, maybe twenty — but there was this golden age when everything in the medium was just better. Are we imagining things, or is anime really worse than it used to be?
The answer is, in fact, threefold.
Memories are unreliable
Our brains like to be efficient with the available space. We tend to forget unimportant things, and even those things of greater value are getting changed and warped with the passage of time. This means not only that you are more likely to remember shows you’ve really liked (or hated) all those years ago than shows you don’t have strong feelings about — you will also mostly remember the highest and lowest points within the “chosen few” shows themselves, making good things seem better than they were, and bad things seem much, much worse.
More shows are being released
Do you know how many brand new shows were released during Fall 1993? Five, and only one of them — Slam Dunk — is still widely remembered to this day. On the other hand, this very Fall of 2023 sees 69 brand new anime shows. Even if we were to claim that same ratio of 20% of memorable to forgettable anime, this would mean that there are 55 “bad” shows released just this season. Meaning, this could also be a matter of a much bigger sample size compared to your favorite anime era.
Trends are changing
There were quite a lot of mecha and fantasy shows released in the 80s and 90s. Then, amidst the 00s, most of the industry switched from traditional to digital animation, while harem anime and slice-of-life shows about cute girls doing cute things got more popular. Then in the 2010s, after the release of Sword Art Online, isekai stories became much more prevalent. This means that depending on when you began watching anime, you could see quite a noticeable shift in the medium trends — and that is to say nothing of the shifts in social conventions. Indeed, humor and storytelling also changed with time, so things that were popular back then could no longer hold water anymore.
So yes, between industry trends, social conventions, more shows being released and unreliability of our own memories — the things have indeed changed. For better or for worse, though, is up to further debate.