While I’m not sure I understand the premise, the only thing I’ve ever had a ♠ romance with has been Attack on Titan. I hated that first season with a fiery passion even on my first watch, despite being absolutely captivated by the first episode. Like, I will give it props for having such a marvelous set-up that you immediately want to know where it all goes, but I was constantly enraged by almost every plot beat. It kills off characters you don’t know or care about and yells at you to feel something. The MC maybe goes through some struggles before it was revealed that no, he’s a genius and people were just bullying him. Then it has the gall to make him God’s specialist little boy. The only character I even liked was General Pixis, tho Armin has his moments.

I’ll refrain from talking about spoilers in subsequent seasons, but those also pissed me off. The main reason I haven’t actually finished hate-watching the entire show is because it took so damn long to come out, and quite frankly I needed my spoons and straws to survive the politics and plague of the last ten years. Funnily enough, all my friends save one are of the same mind that AoT sucks, but AFAIK it’s popular among the greater anime community.

intense all the way through

I think I’ll just quote Shinji on this one “You ran out of ink, too, didn’t you, you bastards?”

I’m just a rando online but I would say give Abridged a shot. It’s clear that they understood the show and while they do poke fun, it’s not just constantly shitting on it like I’ve seen from some abridged series. That said, Abridged Kirito is portrayed kinda like Donald Duck in that he’s deliberately insufferable so that you laugh when he gets his comeuppance (which is frequent), so if you think that would be too much to power thru, just give it a pass then.

I’m not a certified SAO hater but I did sour on it by myself after the Alfheim arc started so I loved what Abridged did to “fix” some of my issues with it, and it has a hella memorable ending to the Aincrad arc that actually uses the OP (This Is War by Thirty Seconds to Mars) for the climax.

I get where you’re coming from but bruh I have piss-poor hearing (probably genetic, too). I’ve always watched anime with subtitles even in English because I WILL miss things otherwise. Hell, half the reason I tend towards subs isn’t for the dumb notions of purity of translation but because 90% of the time the English audio balancing sucks so bad that I literally can’t hear things even will the volume turned ALL the way up. I swear those Blu-rays I got have English audio tracks at half the volume of the Japanese.

I’ve never made the switch over to Blu-ray (and every Blu-ray I have been gifted has been a terrible experience for me – WHY AM I NOT ALLOWED TO PUT SUBTITLES ON WITH THE ENGLISH AUDIO‽‽‽ IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO PROVIDE CAPTIONS I NEED SOMETHING) so I was involuntarily placed into case 4 some years ago because anime seems to have stopped releasing on DVD at all.

I also used to love buying from RightStuf, as well, but I’m not wanted apparently.

I’m OOTL, what happened to them?