YMMV / Cartoon Brew

• Animation Age Ghetto: The site goes out of its way to avert this, but its lampshaded when it pops up. One post, "How Can We Make Adult Animation Truly Adult" notably discussed this trope, even mentioning TV Tropes in passing, albeit dismissing the actual trope page as misguided and narrow in its scope of "adult" animation;
  "The site prides itself on covering as broad a range of fiction as possible, emerging as a sometimes fascinating form of populist, open-access media scholarship. In theory, this would make it the perfect place to cover lost gems of animation, but in practice it has many blind spots. There is little discussion about (Jan) Svankmajer or (Yuri) Norstein, while juvenile mediocrities such as Disney's Gargoyles are treated as masterpieces on a par with the television dramas of Dennis Potter and David Simon. TV Tropes has a page devoted to what it calls the Animation Age Ghetto, which gives a reasonable if scattershot overview of the subject. The page's "examples" section, however, consists in large part of people filibustering about how their favorite superhero cartoons never caught on. The main reason that most of these cartoons never attracted adult audiences, of course, is that they are simply not for adults. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with having guilty pleasures. The humorist Stephen Fry summed things up well: a fan of Doctor Who, he commented that "every now and again we all like a chicken nugget." As he continued, however, "If you are an adult you want something surprising, savory, sharp, unusual, cosmopolitan, alien, challenging, complex, ambiguous, possibly even slightly disturbing and wrong. You want to try those things, because that's what being adult means." The ever-enthusiastic geek demographic certainly does not see animation as being merely for children. But it suffers from an inverted snobbery, with more inventive or experimental animation dismissed as "pretentious" or "arthouse", and from a view of the medium that is built largely on nostalgia for beloved childhood cartoons. Even dedicated animation enthusiasts can overlook much of the best work which is out there: perhaps it is in human nature for audiences to stick to the films which they think they might enjoy rather than try anything new."
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Jerry Beck is generally considered to be the best author for the site. His animation pedigree (both in anime and Western Animation) and the intricate research put into his articles quickly made him a must for any serious animation buff. Needless to say, once Beck made his intents to move to a smaller and more personal site, Cartoon Research, most of his readers followed.
• Growing the Beard: While Amid's reputation remains contested among readers, many of the new writers hired for the site have been met with positive reception, particularly Chris McDonnell's "Artist of the Day" posts.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: When My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was brand new, Amid wrote an article decrying Lauren Faust's involvement as "The End of the Creator-Driven Era in TV Animation". /co/ caught wind of Amid's article and fell in love with said show.
  • His no-less-than-five articles about Glen Keane's resignation from Disney Animation Studios have become annoying, but has driven Keane farther into the spotlight for fans, and they are all clamouring for Keane to produce his own project that will knock Disney out of the park!
  • The layoffs and bankruptcies of animation studios have gotten so common to the point where CB now provides a disclaimer at the end of every one of these kinds of posts, detailing where and how to report these stories to them.
• Vocal Minority: Many of the site's rants against the current state of the animation industry are actually far and in-between.