I would argue that the popularity of SAO is more due to the fact it is a self-insert story set in a world that hasn't exactly been mined very heavily. Self-insert stories always do well, but rarely does that popularity stick around. Twilight for example pretty much vanished after the books ended, where something like Harry Potter, which does have it's problems but is still a fairly well put together story, managed to keep it's popularity.
Series like HxH and One Piece dwarf the rest of the Japanese market, both sell absolutely insane numbers compared to literally everything else. Nothing even comes close to One Piece numbers over there. So I'm not sure if your assessment is accurate.
But SAO is getting a season 2! It'll be interesting to see what kind of legs it ends up having, but yeah, I agree it's probably more of a "one hit wonder" rather than a long-lasting classic, certainly.
HxH is weird for my example, as I'm talking more about new shows made by newer talent, that weren't popular in our previous awesome show Eras. Those people with the lessons from new and old works do a much better job at producing shows that have that crossover appeal and quality.
The more I see of OP, the more I actually dislike it's moment to moment story telling, but enjoy it's overall scope. I really think the show shines best in games and merchandising due to this, because the focused, cleaned up stuff does so much more right for me.
As far as the American market goes, things like Breaking Bad and True Detective would disprove your thesis as well. They were both well thought out and well-written stories that earned every cliche they used. Especially True Detective, anyone who has seen the final episode knows the scene I am talking about.
I know little about either, but yeah, I'm mostly talking about youth who grew up in this time, and the industry pros who are closer in age to their young target audiences.
When we get to the expectations of youth we have a problem. One the one hand we have Avatar, which was extremely popular and well put together, while on the other we have stuff like what CN has been doing for the last few years. That's a hard group to read in large part due to how the shows marketed to that group have been managed, a good example would be something like Sym-bionic Titan which had like three different time slots over the course of it's run and numerous breaks. So while we know that creative and well put together shows can have massive success, we don't have many examples due to how these shows are managed.
I just get the feeling that the youth generally doesn't hold as much contempt for things that many of us just hate. For a variety of factors, such as:
- Young parents that like similar things to their children, thus avoiding the old "2 far-separated generations" trend of old
- A wider range of stories to choose from
- Wider acceptance and access to works of different nations and people
- Crap attention spans, spoilers galore for "free"
- The fact a LOT of this stuff can be viewed for free, without placing money towards it itself.
There's just less reason to be a real demand on works, given such factors.
Haha, I think I myself was harder on BGC 2040 when I bought it on DVD years ago, while watching it just recently on Netflix, I didn't feel nearly as bad about it. Though it still is the lesser work compared to the original!
