To be honest, similar can be said about a lot of children’s cartoons in which the creators tried to be more mature. Indeed, it can be said for a lot of mature cartoons.
Well media as a whole really. I don’t think it’s fair to single out Cartoons or childrens media when “adult” media is mostly just as immature if not moreso.
Edit: I also agree about star wars as a whole. Lets move on.
Sure.
I make a distinction between “adult” and “mature” cartoons, or at least I try to. The current marketing buzzword for mature cartoons is “American anime.” Because they don’t have the content restrictions that children’s cartoons do, they’re typically overindulgent in gratuitous sex and gore.
Invincible is a generic superhero show with a lot of gore tacked on and plot twists that were clichés decades ago. The tone is inconsistent from scene to scene, with slapstick comedy one moment then people being dismembered the next. The gore serves no purpose besides shock value and “adult” credentials. It feels like a teenager’s idea of what maturity is and doesn’t even commit to its own premise.
I could go on about Vox Machina, DOTA, Castlevania, Blood of Zeus, etc. It’s really frustrating. While I’m disappointed Infinity Train didn’t get renewed, I’m glad it wasn’t picked up by an adult network because then it would probably go overboard with gore and sex like all of these shows do. And it was a pretty violent show to begin with, complete with characters being crunched (offscreen) into salsa under train wheels, characters being bisected and surviving for hours afterward, cute cartoon characters being tortured by misbehaving children, characters having their souls eaten by giant cockroaches, etc.
Honestly, I think the content restrictions made the gruesome death and torture in Infinity Train more creative than the generic “and then they exploded into puddles of gore” that the faux anime shows resort to. There’s only so many times you can see disposable characters explode into puddles of gore before it gets repetitive.
Speaking of, the faux anime usually handle death in even worse fashion than Game of Thrones did. Beyond the nameless extras who exist solely to be ground into red paste… named characters either die immediately after being introduced and therefore their deaths have no impact, or they get some mild characterization before being killed for shock value and thus their deaths feel more frustrating than anything else. The protagonists themselves are never actually in danger of dying, so it becomes a tedious exercise in waiting to see which of the deuteragonists get fridged first.
There’s a reason why the only animation I’ve ever watched more than once as an adult is Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. With everything else, I feel like I’m only watching out of a combination of desperation and obligation. It’s frustrating