This is a little rant on the trends that I hate the most in modern mangas and light novels:
-Harem and reverse harem: I absolutely hate these genres because the harem are more stereotypes than people most of the time and there isn’t a good exploration of the feelings of the parties involved. And the harem genre for men is very sexist because the male protagonist is almost always extremely bland (alias the kind of person who couldn’t have so many admirers logically speaking), the female characters aren’t fleshed out and every girl and young woman introduced only to have her falling in love with the protagonist, old and middle-aged women aren’t depicted and if they appear are only minor characters who have no weight to the plot and there isn’t the exploration of the fact that most of the time polygyny is used to oppress women and it causes harem infighting. 😡
The reverse harem is boring because the admirers are all stereotypical and the female protagonist is expected to choose between them and it’s almost never proposed a polyamorous relationship between her and the male admirers, there are too many men even when they aren’t love interests and I would be more interested in see well-written female friendships and cool old ladies who mentor younger girls about life and their skills (like magic or painting, etc…) and middle-age between the most important characters in the story than seeing bishounen and the protagonist is almost never an action heroine who doesn’t need to be protected or someone who hasn’t no other ambitions than love and crushes. 🙄😡
Both the harem and the reverse harem have ruined the isekai and fantasy genre because the story wastes more time about the harem than telling interesting things like exploring the political and social system of the region the protagonist finds himself/herself or studying how magic or the magical ecosystems works. 😡

-Vampires modeled after “Twilight”: I have these kind of vampires because they are so boring because they are basically immortal people without analyzing the fact that they need a lot of other people’s blood to survive and that they should be actually corpses and thus incapable to eat, drink and have sexual activities.
The traits associated to modern vampires like having courts and being extremely beautiful and sex gods are actually characteristics of the fair folk (aka fairies, yaoguai, yokai, mermaids etc..).
I prefer the original myths about vampires because they are far more interesting honestly: in all world stories about vampires they have horrible appearance and they are the cause of epidemics and other illness since they are corpses, they kill people without regret because they were often bad people in life or they are souls so full of hatred and grudges that they want revenge at all cost not caring how much damage and how many deaths they cause and if their anger is even rational or not and all kinds of vampires are selfish and cruel.
They are perfect villains and symbols of how choosing to be cruel and self-centered and/or vengeful turns people in monsters.

What are the things you hate in modern Asian media?

for me I am sick and tired of isekais. Like, we get it, a truck kill u, you get reincarnated to a victorian era with lords and barons and kings and magic and whatever. If it's shounen it's pretty much always reverse harem and like you said it's just so bland and there's little to no characterization. If it's shoujo, which is the ones I've read the most, ITS ALWAYS THE SAME FREAKING STORY (with a few exceptions of course)
oh wow I died now I am a baroness who's a bastard child with a shitty family and i will avoid death by not falling in love with the man who killed me before. oh look at this the man who killed me is not so bad after all maybe ill fall in love with him. time to socialize and get involved in the same bland pseudo-political conversations with other noble ladies with a lot of time to spare and somehow become popular and loved
oh also the OG FL hates me and I shouldnt trail away from the plot cuz that will minimize the drama and misunderstandings, which won't keep the readers interested so there's that

GOD. MOVE ON. EXPLORE OTHER TROPES. THANK YOU.

Boys in love are the prettiest thing in the world

I totally agree with you 💯
It’s the reason why I read non-isekai fantasy stories by East Asian authors.

Sexy vampires isn’t really sourced in Twilight, it goes back to at least Dracula with the Weird Sisters. But I looked up history of Japanese vampires and it was really interesting!

I dislike the enduring sexism in the shoujo/josei genres, even in mangas that seem more progressive. E.g. the comment ‘you can’t get a scar because you’re a girl’ is framed as an example of good/attractive male behaviour when that actually sucks, since it’s saying that more of the worth of a woman lies in her looks. Or these notions that the ML ‘can’t control himself’ around the FL, that she’s at fault for ‘inviting the attention’ of other men by having a male friend, etc. It’s not sexy. STOP.

I used “modeled after Twilight” because it’s the most recent example but you’re right that sexy vampires started in 19th gothic literature because they were used as subtle sexual metaphor as it wasn’t considered proper to openly speak about sexuality in Victorian Britain so authors had to invent different ways to convey their messages about it, and it included remodeling characters from folklore without considering that their meaning in the original stories was very different.

I hate the fact that there’s still so much sexism in shoujo/josei works: do the authors suffer from internalized misogyny?!?!?
Women should be represented with scars like male characters, especially if they are warriors, policewomen, firefighters, mercenaries, pirates and huntresses because getting scars is part of these jobs or they survived a fire or a big predator attack or other traumatic accidents or they were/are abused physically, and the scars intended to be horrific should be represented as such because I noted the trend to show the female character who should be ugly because some awful scars being drawn as a normal woman who simply has a little cut on the face. 🙄😡
Women of action should be represented as muscular because it’s necessary for them to develop strong muscles and I would represent them as flat chest or with a medium size breasts because big breasts are useless and an impediment for action-oriented jobs; so if an author depicts a muscular big chested amazon I would like to see her wearing bandages to flatten her breasts do they don’t become a problem and exploring all the problems caused by big breasts in daily life and how they are bad when women start aging.
I would like to see more stories in which it’s strong female friendships and love between sisters and/or mother and daughter and female master-female disciples relationships that save the day, because it’s important to point out that love isn’t only romantic but it has different forms that are all important and I would like to see more women who help other women than the misogynistic representation of women being always rivals for men affection 🙄
I would like to see more female protagonists and characters who are better in terms of smartness, skills, abilities and cunning than male ones (I abandoned “Koi dano ai dano” because it turned out that the male lead than the female one in school works despite the fact that the narration and the prequel showed how the female lead is smarter, more cunning and observant and better at school than him repeatedly, and I found it very wrong because women are equal to men in everything and I have real life experience about it: both in elementary, in middle school and in college none of my male classmates succeeded in understanding the lessons and studying well and many of them tried to go to university but they abandoned it because their grades weren’t high enough while I was always the best in my class and the whole year along with other female classmates and I and my female friends went to university, got high grades there and we got good jobs) and women in power who can’t be replaced by a male newbies because they are the best in their job and they have experience (an example from my real life experience: a female relative of mine that it’s old enough to retire is continuing to work because no one else is good at organizing an archive of official documents written in Latin and belonging to different time periods like her because no one else manages to read little characters written by hand and a scripture full of abbreviations and to understand Latin).
I would like to see more stories that lampshades toxic behaviors in romantic relationships and that punishes severely the abusers and that points out the fact that only because a man has a tragic past or other kinds of Freudian excuses it doesn’t justify toxic behaviors and so it’s right to abandon and punish him.

+1 on isekai LOL. I don't know how or why it started, but suddenly one day, a ton of isekai stuff showed up.

To be fair, there are some really good ones out there. But a majority of them are the sameeeeee. There's also a growing bunch of them that are of the martial arts genre too. I think people just like the concept of having all this knowledge and being able to go back in time to change things. 🤣

Nobody mentioned it yet, but I also have a thing against the "video game" trope, which is sort of an extension of the isekai genre. Suddenly MC gets sucked into a video game, or somehow reality becomes like a video game, or something like that. I swear, everyone just spun off from Tower of God and Hardcore Leveling Warrior. Aside from Omniscient Reader, I can't think of any other recent title that does this genre well.

Edit: thanks OP for starting this thread. It's refreshing to get to rant like r/offmychest 🤭

I agree with you totally about isekai 💯 and it’s the reason why I tend to avoid most fantasy isekai in general.
I think that “time rewind” genre is popular because it appeals people’s desire to correct their past mistakes. I found some titles belonging to this genre that are interesting but they’re very few and one thing I find very annoying it’s the fact that it’s never revealed how it was possible to return to the past (indeed, I love that “The husky and his white cat shizun” by Meatbun actually explains it and makes it a very important plot point and that in “Lord Seventh” by Priest it’s shown in the very beginning of the novel that the time rewind was possible because an underworld deity sacrificed his centuries of cultivation in order to permit the protagonist to return to his first life as said underworld deity felt guilt for having causing the protagonist five lifetimes of pain and grief by mere accident).
Part of the reasons why I tend to dislike isekai stories it’s the “videogame” trope and the fact that it’s never explained why it exists (in fact, I love that “I’m a spider, so what?” actually explains it as it’s an important plot point about the past of the fantasy world in which the story is set).
I’m happy that you like this thread 🙂
I started it because I wanted to rant about the things I dislike in modern East Asian media and I thought that other lovers of mangas, manhwas, manhuas and light novels would have liked to do the same.

I enjoyed El-Hazard a long time ago; because it was issekai-lite
being transported to a mythical world where you are the chosen one doesn't quite play out the usual way when your high school rival is transported along with you, and they're not a love interest; it's the guy you hate more than anything
I swear it's a Moby Dick cautionary tale about 'sort of paying attention' to the lives(and problems) of people around you, but mostly having a hard-on for someone 'you'll never see again' in a year or two when you graduate.

young people drama I guess; it's tiresome

easy for me to say now; but even back then, it lost it's flavor quick

I looked at the plot and I have to say that the ideas on what this series is based are more original than most modern isekai, but I agree with you that it must be one of those series that is targeted to teenagers and so it talks about themes that are close to heart at that age, thus they could be uninteresting for adults.

As all of you said harems are terrible. After reading lots or shounen I've become a inmune to it.

Aside from that and the fact that many modern series that are clearly not planed out / mass produced, the trend Japanese use I hate the most is copying and pasting whole scenarios and dynamics. I mean, ok you give a certain character a similar background as another from another series and you'd think that they'd immediately drift apart after being introduced since the overall setting is different ... well no they won't. I feel as if it were the next step to collective characters, it feels as is there were only few colective entities interacting and one of them includes the background itself.

It's especially annoying if they skip the whole scene setting or don't ever delve into it because well you know it's clearly set is in "XxX era" or a "modern" setting and procede to add the most generic and stereotypical behaviours (usually with a tint of imaginary politics or boxed reasoning). I mean I've always been a fan of in media res starts but they're usually terribly executed with lots of late over-explanations and leaving key details out until the second half (added that they try to confuse us so we can't figure what it's all about).

Indeed, all harem and reverse harem are boring and annoying because they’re all identical 🙄
I guess that these genres exist only for wish fulfillment instead of actual exploration of these situations 🙄
I think one of the problems for most series is that all of them try to use the same formula of a famous work without bothering to see all the complexities that made the formula actually interesting because it’s how the ideas are developed in the story that makes it a worthy reading.
Another problems is how the authors don’t make a planned worldbuilding and storylines, despite the fact that it’s important especially for stories that start in media res, and the fact that they forget that the setting is very important for the characters’ actions and motivations, as societal structures and societal interactions are an essential part of how people grow and why they have determined habits and ideologies and the different natural environments play a massive role on the development of societies and cultures and interactions between different countries, and how it’s important to explain how the setting works if the story is fantasy or science fiction because it’s naturally set in a world that can be very different from ours.