The medium has matured over time and people have higher expectations.FatR wrote:As a side note, the main problem with Aizen is profileration of anime discussions of Internet, that allows whining about truly popular series to accumulate into critical mass. Shonen has a long-standing tradition of making BBEGs that simply are in different category from everyone else, until the hero gets the next upgrade, at least. See: Freeza or Sensui. Asakura Hao or Hanma Yujiro have, so far, far better records of being and remaining totally overpowered for their series. Aizen is just better known.
That's natural, though. Take video games for instance; even accounting for design and programming limitations, we put up with shit back then that there's no way we would now. See the early King's Quests for example.
Same thing for shonen. Dragonball and Fist of the North Star get a pass on a lot of elements just because the genre was immature. A LOT of complaints about modern shonen (marginalization of women, making the hero a standard book-dumb slightly-dimwitted everybody, ridiculous plot twists, constant power and plot-levelling, the shrinking of a large cast) apply even moreso than early ones. Naruto is a genuinely bad manga, but a lot of the things that make it bad nowadays wouldn't have gotten noticed if it was published in an earlier era.
... that's a good thing, mind you. Peoples' standards and tastes are supposed to evolve over time and its the duty of the writer to match them. Bischoff's reign of WCW fell into the same trap. His methods were good enough to get his foot into the door and even overtake WWF, but one of the reasons WCW was doomed to fail (even discounting backstage politics and financial mismanagement) was because they were resorting to the same old shit in 1999-2000 that that they were at the NWO era.
Aizen is the same way. Yes, he continues the long tradition of vanilla super-invincible villains such as himself but the problem is that we've seen this happen so often that people can predict what's going to happen ahead of time and it sucks out the tension. Oda (One Piece), Kishimoto (Naruto), and Arakawa (FMA) use these kinds of villains too but they're savvy enough to add some things on top of it.
In Oda's case, he cycles through villains quickly and makes them WEIRD. Most of his villains have the same spectra of motivations and attitudes, but they don't linger around enough to become a problem. This does have its disadvantages-a LOT of villains caught fire with the audience but were discarded before they could be really used-but also advantages. Arakawa simply doesn't use her Vanilla Invincible Villain; the plot revolves more around Father's much more entertaining subordinates. Kishimoto opts to humanize his Invincible Villains, which has some very mixed successes (though have been erring in the direction of stupid lately). Sometimes he gives us a Gaara and it's great. But most of the time he gives us a Nagato. The only Vanilla Invincible Villain he used was Orochimaru and that character was specifically used as a plot device and a vehicle for the manga's themes rather than a character in its own right.
Sousuke Aizen just sucks. He's a Vanilla Invincible Villain played painfully straight. He doesn't even have an understandable motivation like Sensui.
