someone posted what myanimelist looked like in 2006
https://x.com/nadaqui123/status/2058298326605250604

people in the replies confused why haruhi and elfen lied are rated so high.

must be hard to grasp this now when the most popular anime are AOT, jjk, demonslayer and csm, but gore wasnt really a thing back then, so of course when elfen lied did it and gratuitously it was novel to us.

i rewatched a bit out of curiosity, another thing is that it hits on a ton of tropes that were popular back then but are dead now due to mass commercial appeal and a histrionic normgroid fanbase: SOL, casual nudity, moe, ecchi, and harem.

if you had an anime like elfen lied or chobits about adopting cute girls of the street while banging your cousin nowadays you'd have a thousand voices ignoring the dismemberments to scream at you about diddy bluds

@smugumin Now why is FF VII: Advent Children so high up on that list? It can't be better than that Totoro film.

@berkberkman @smugumin FF7 was kind of a 2000s internet gamer cultural phenomenon. Even if you had never played the game you still had a Cloud wallpaper on your computer somewhere and thought the buster sword was the best weapon in anything ever. Advent Children was an extension of that. It's just fucking cool.