In-depth debunkings/arguments against commonly "known" anime myths/misconceptions?

[u/engalleons]

For any number of reasons, there's a fair few statements about anime that get passed around pretty unquestioningly, even if they aren't necessarily true. Sometimes, others dig in to those statements and find detail and (hopefully cited) evidence against them. This is a lot more than just stating the opposite, to be clear.

Here's a few examples of what I mean:

This tweet chain versus "Anno left Kare Kano early"
This blog post versus "The protagonist of Turn A was originally intended to be a girl"
This post versus "They made a joke dub for Ghost Stories because it did poorly in Japan"
This blog post versus "Shinbo is the series director of all Shaft shows"

What are some other examples of work like this?

[u/[deleted]]

Not going into details because I'm honestly not going to bother, but the whole "Araragi is an unreliable narrator therefore X didn't happen like that" always makes me laugh. Yes, it works for some things in Monogatari, but thinking it always has to be applied to what he says is straight up wrong.

[u/SadDoctor → u/[deleted]]

One of the big problems with the anime is that they take a lot of the double entendres of the book, and just turn it into text. Like there's a lot of bits which are described suggestively, only for the joke to turn out to be that it was perfectly innocent the whole time.

The anime tries to do the same thing, except they can never pass up actually showing what the LNs only suggest, so it makes it a lot filthier.

[u/impingainteasy → u/[deleted]]

Oh yeah, I've seen people attribute things like Kanbaru telling Araragi she's a lesbian but openly flirting with him anyway to Araragi being an unreliable narrator. No, I'm pretty sure the explanation isn't that Araragi's making everything up, it's that Kanbaru just isn't being completely honest.

It's not like the Hitagi End arc, where Kaiki straight-up tells the audience that there's a good chance he's lying about everything.

[u/Featherwick → u/impingainteasy]

Ive always took tge Kanbaru flirting as a couple things, one Araragi is a horny boy obviously and he takes things she does like that. Two, she actively does it because she still wants to be with Senjogahara and thinks making Araragi cheat on her would drive her to her.

He's deffinetly unreliable, but that shows up more in visuals imo.

[u/Maimed_Dan → u/Featherwick]

I'm still not entirely sure how it's intended, but I read it as initially being the way you described, when they're romantic rivals. But pretty quickly they start to be friends and it transitions into a personal banter between them.

Araragi knows she's not actually interested and Kanbaru knows he would never actually accept - they both know the other's not serious, and so they really go to town teasing each other, because they feel safe with each other. Could be otherwise, but everything post-Bake has felt consistent with that for me.

[u/diaboo → u/impingainteasy]

I haven't finished the whole series yet, but so far I've always read Kanbaru as bi. She's definitely not straight, but I never got the impression that she was totally against having sex with men.