>>100805While SEL is liked by trannies (and other sorts of unsavory people) and above all very liked by normalfaggots, and while it's overrated because those normalfaggots think it's better than it really is (due to their anime experience usually being limited to absolute garbage made in the last two decades so when they see SEL they're totally shocked and amazed), it's flatly wrong to call it slop or consider it as slop.
Slop is something poorly made, hastily made, made with little effort, designed from the ground-up to be compatible with and appeal to the normalfaggiest of normalfaggots, made for an as wide of an audience as possible (although the slop might have a specific age-group as its main target audience in mind), through intentional choices like for example having big-tittied girls with lots of fanservice-moments or lots of cutesy moeblobs etc merely and solely for the sake of how those things look (with very little or no character depth or development; the characters existing only to be visually appealing), with everything presented in a very loud/colorful/flashy way, often with lots of hype-moments in every episode. Essentially like generic pop songs made to be "radio friendly music". That's what slop is.
SEL is the opposite of that, the opposite of slop. It's in stark contrast to slop a very high-quality high-effort production; a lot of thought and care went into it, and it wasn't made to be appealing to the widest audience possible; it's not intended for viewers wanting cheap sexy fanservice or cuteness, and the animation is very good (above average even for its time - when anime was much better animated).
It thus would've been better to write "Before Lain was considered tranime". However to actually consider it as such is also wrong as just because decades later trannies/fags/dykes discover and get into something doesn't magically make the something into media made for them - and they sometimes insert themselves into fandoms of things that NEVER was infested with them in the past, and while they usually attach themselves to things that are highly compatible with them and essentially "made for" them (such as Lucky Star, the fandom of which has been filled with them since it was new), they sometimes attach themselves to things that aren't particularly compatible with them because they're broken clocks that happen to be right twice a day; they occasionally like good things, things that aren't slop or gay, and when they like that thing they try to trannyize/faggotize the thing and "re-interpret" the thing through their tranny/faggot glasses. As they've recently been doing with Azumanga during the last few years.
(relating to the above, the next post is a text that originally was here – it had to be moved to the next post because it made this post too long)
That said however, I do indeed have some problems with SEL and I never was much of fan of it (first saw it in 2001 or 2002 - can't remember exactly - and at the time and in the few years after there were several animes I much preferred over SEL). Nowadays SEL is problematic to recommend as, irrespective of trannies liking it, it's become so well-known amongst normalfaggots (to the point where if one today recommends it people might think one is a normalfaggot and a teenager / tween [as in 20s] simply because one is recommending it), and because as time's gone by it's become even more over-rated than it already was two decades ago. But of course it is, in of itself, a good anime that's well-made and nothing can change that. "Good" as in it should – in an objective and fair review – be rated 6.5/10 at least, but not 8/10. What's always been a bit annoying with SEL is how it causes this perception in a lot of people of being ultra-deep and ultra-sophisticated with a lot of its fans even calling it a "psychological" anime which (despite there being some logic to that) has always sounded ridiculous and it's always been strange how some people obsess over SEL but most of the same people haven't seen Haibane Renmei – another Yosһitoshi Abe anime and SEL's next-door neighbor – which is a lot more "psychological" and deeper and more sophisticated (and better written) than SEL is.
