What a lot of people condemn as generic tends to only be similar to other anime in very superficial ways, and what a lot of people praise as great tends to just have the type of accessibility that makes them unafraid to tell their non-anime watching friends about it.
Why do I watch and like Harem&Ecchi series like To LOVE-Ru or KissXSis when I could be watching fan favorites like JOJO’S BIZARRE ADVENTURE??? Or critically acclaimed masterpieces like HUNTER X HUNTER??? After all, what I like is always about a bunch of girls liking one dude. Virtually in-fucking-distinct from one another if you want to pretend nuance is dead. And the characters? Dere archetypes. These may be umbrella terms that say fuck all about the character other than how they express infatuation and can therefore possess incredible range in what characters can actually fall under that umbrella, but remember - nuance is dead. Every dere is a copy/paste of one another, full stop.
Really, don’t pay people who say shit like that any mind. Just try to figure out what made you like it and how to put that into words, rather than abdicate it as being “another generic Isekai.” There was something that made you look forward to it every week, and that something/combination of somethings clearly seems to have outweighed the negatives you felt it had. What were those somethings? What made it work?
On the other hand, if you want to enter arrested development, this is the right path. Fuck introspection and understanding in how you interact with media. ‘Tis just another generic Isekai. I really had fun watching it, but I’ll just nod my head at these clearly Ebert-tier reddit critics since its all generic still, amirite? Instead of figuring out why I like it and exploring what made it work for me, lemme just say it sucks but I like it anyway! Woooooo! Kowtow to the intersubjective consensus convinced it’s something much more than an intersubjective consensus!
This thread has historically been a cancer tumor about peer pressure to conform like this, so I guess reading takes like that isn’t surprising, but encouraging divergence from as much would be pretty dope. I think the best thing to ever happen to me as an anime fan was to go out to MAL and figure shit out on my own in an environment dedicated to this shit, instead of just letting these people rag on me for being different and liking the “bad” stuff all the time. Leaving the confines of a small backwater like this and all of that. It’s why it brings me great joy to be such a tumor on your conversations in turn, now that I’m all bigger and stronger than the rest of you :’)