I used to love anime but as the medium matured (denatured more like) I grew weary of it. The stories got stale and the characters got repetitive, following archetypes that no longer make sense or hold any appeal. Add in the reduced budgets and failures of some of the more prominent anime studios and what once set anime apart (the artistry and story-telling) is so cookie cutter these days that I stopped watching.

Japanese animation mirrors Japanese culture in that it has a fairly limited scope and close-minded view of the world, even with the internet and globalization. Look at J-dramas, they have fallen by the wayside to more compelling and interesting shows out of Korea. When they actually handle interesting and socially relevant subjects, they handle it in such a clinical and stale way to make them boring and forgettable.