I disagree? I think there's plenty separating these two shows, even at the absolute surface level. Just a basic google image search of the two provides some pretty drastically different imagery. I will say that they are both much more anime in their presentation than like, say, Serial Experiments Lain, but that doesn't mean that at the surface level they share much, if anything, in common. Even the framing and presentation of characters is different.
What? Aria and Love Hina are pretty different in their original manga and the anime adaptation with their artstyle and designs. And that without going to the genre of them..
This is exactly what I mean, for the record, and disagreement is an expected response from anyone who's actually seen any amount of anime and manga and has been inducted into the visual tropes of different demographics and subgenres. You speak the language. And yes, I picked an extreme example and if you go so far as even just doing a cursory google search you're going to find enough completely placid promo art and stills from Aria to make it clear that it has drastically different tone and nature than Love Hina, with its emphasis on fanservice poses and outfits. The fact that such an extreme assertion would make you recoil is kind of my point though.
I don't think there's all that much in common between Kozue Amano and Ken Akamatsu's intentions
or design sense as the original manga are concerned. That should be a given.
But if you put the animation design of Naru next to the animation design of Akari, all you have are two teenage-ish looking cartoon girls with eyes roughly the same size, hair roughly the same level of outlandish (if anything Akari's is worse), wearing reasonable clothing. Akari's features are a bit softer than Naru's in the animation designs, sure, and to us the slit on Akari's dress is probably a lot more tasteful looking than Naru's miniskirt with zettai ryouiki--but both of their outfits unreasonably conform to their figure, especially their busts--there's not that much different going on if you don't know what zettai ryouiki tends to be most common in the visual design for.
You can put the crux of this recurring and incredibly apparent dilemma on the neophyte viewer to actually do the right amount of research into what they're watching, but after a couple of misfires because they don't speak the language well enough to tell the difference, you're going to wind up with someone leaving the hobby with a pretty negative perception of what the medium looks like. You see it all the time when people try to do this blind without anyone to help them curate.
I've seen people link AniChart to exhibit the sheer amount of variety in a given season before, and let me tell you right now the people who don't know much about anime are
not seeing the same thing you are when they look at that website. There are a LOT of cartoon girls with saucer eyes and outlandish hair on that page, and how are they to know which ones the camera's going to creep on mercilessly and which ones are going to be treated as completely autonomous, respected individuals?
And that's before you even get into not knowing individual designers or studio house styles to help curate, or the visual tropes specific to the medium (which are often very different from western media and EXTREMELY off-putting to those not inducted).
Try explaining to someone who doesn't know the language why they should be wary that Darling in the Franxx is probably going to cross more lines than Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san by next march based on those thumbnails and synopses.
