I like some anime and I have been exposed to the fandm enough to dislike them, but I don't know what chuunibyou means. Is that like an alternative of "weaboo"? If so I knew a lot of those in Uni.
"Chuunibyou" is a more obscure term that unlike, say, the various "-dere" forms, but similar to "hikikomori", is not necessarily tied directly to anime fandom but Japanese culture itself. Translated literally, "chuunibyou" means "middle school 2nd year syndrome", because it described a type of personality that's "stuck in the 8th grade". It was popularized in the game, anime, and manga variations of the story
Steins;Gate, where the main character was identified as a chuunibyou, and he would just strike dramatic poses for no reason, whip out his cell phone to pretend he's talking to someone important about a conspiracy that doesn't exist, spout nonsensical phrases that don't mean anything because "they're cool", and so on. The closest Western equivalent I can think of is "man boy", where you're perpetually in a mental state of a child who thinks really dumb things are cool. That's more or less what a chuunibyou is, and that's what many (non-Japanese) people actually mean when they call someone an "otaku" in a derogatory fashion, when in fact being otaku just means you really, really, REALLY love some particular subject to the point of obsession. You can be a wrestling otaku, a firearms otaku, a moe otaku, a conspiracies otaku, etc. Anyway, I'd consider myself just as much of an anime fan as my friend, but I'm not an otaku to the degree that he is, and I have a fierce aversion to chuunibyou tendencies, unlike him. Anime fandom in general is split in that fashion, and if you found that you didn't like it, you more than likely found one of those groups that deviate into nonsensical behavior.
The hero triumphing over the villain is cliche, sure; love conquering all is pretty cliche, okay; plot armor in general gets really contrived and cliche, granted. But I'm talking about REAL cliche. Not just "done over and over again." Fucking overdone to the extreme.
I would say this is less the realm of cliche and more like, ready-made-plots. It's like the Monomyth story structure: if done typically, it requires no creativity. You only need to interject characters and locations into where they're needed, like some kind of story where the square peg goes into the square hole and so on. Your friend sees a cliche and that's all he knows so he unknowingly makes stories that are just like every other fucking story ever made.
Eh, close, but not quite. I'd say that your description IS spot on, but he takes it a few steps further. It's not JUST using cookie-cutter story points without much of any creativity, it's also the meat on the bones that suffers from aforementioned chuunibyou behavior.
For example, I was describing a scene to my friend which was essentially a conversation between the villain and the hero, and admittedly that itself is cliche. But the scene would have the payoff that the good guy would assert his defiance agains the bad guy, but not save the day once he did so, but rather simply reaffirm that he's up shit creek without a paddle. He's in the belly of the beast now, and he's fucked. Spitting in the bad guy's face is NOT a good idea, and he's only doing it because he's got a character quirk that makes him oblivious to rather obvious things. The point of the scene was exposition for the reader that would reinforce that the situation is hopeless for the protagonist, even though the quirk would result in a hilarious moment that any reader familiar with the story would react, "Why didn't I see that coming? That's clever!" But no, my friend stops me as I'm about to reach that point in the scene, and finishes my sentence for me, putting words into my character's mouth that sounds straight out of a shitty crime drama, sunglasses lameness cue and all. If I remember right, it was some play-on-words phrase about his friends being weights as he scales a mountain, and that he'd bear the weight and get stronger. Something lame like that. I almost physically facepalmed right in front of him because of how dumbfounded that expression left me. The character wasn't supposed to say a cool one-liner and look good despite the odds, he was supposed to look like an idiot, and be followed up by a reminder that he's still very fucked. But in my friend's mind, this is where the good guy makes a cheeky remark, because it's cool, and it plays on words to make him look witty, and probably gets followed by a deus ex machina "save the day" plot device of some kind. Because, y'know, that's cool.
It's one thing to follow an unoriginal story structure, but it's something else to follow an unoriginal story structure and whip out cliche card after cliche card. ~_~
But really, I'm more alarmed by his spelling and formatting errors, since I was an Art Major for 4 years and he was an English Major for 6. <_<
