How many favorite anime have you gone through?

Anyone who’s been an anime fan for a number of years has probably experienced at least a few titles that really stood out to them in their personal fandom. Many anime have come and gone, some that I’ve especially loved, but there’s only a select few that were able to claim a place as my favorite for any amount of time…

This isn’t a favorites list; rather, it’s a look back at the seven anime out of the two-hundred+ that I’ve seen which I would have called my favorite during the time I was into them. These are series that I didn’t just love – I became obsessed with them.

The below list of my seven anime obsessions is mostly in chronological order (some of them overlap). Most of these were touched on in My Anime Autobiography.

Pokemon is what got me interested in anime, and for roughly three years, I was completely obsessed. I played all the games, watched and recorded all the TV episodes, saw all the movies in the theater, collected the trading cards and many other merchandise, drew pictures of pokemon all the time, and went to local Pokemon Leagues at various shopping centers. The franchise was literally everything to me back then.

Nowadays, I’m still very much a Pokemon fan, but my obsession isn’t what it used to be. I stopped collecting the cards a number of years ago, and the amount of Pokemon stuff I buy has been limited to make room for other anime merchandise. I stopped watching the dub of the anime a few years ago, but I continue to watch the episodes and movies in Japanese online. The main part of the franchise I’m still a hardcore fan of is the games.

Mon Colle Knights is probably the least intense of my anime obsessions. The reason I have it on the list is because I did truly get into it at one point. I didn’t just watch and enjoy the (terribly rewritten) dub – I actively searched all around for Mon Colle Knights web sites (which were very few) and I even bought this device for my old iMac so I could take screencaps and videos for the Mon Colle Knights episodes I taped on VHS. And because VHS/DVDs of the series were never released in English, I recorded my own tapes of the dubbed episodes and I even bought one of the Japanese VHS volumes and R2 DVDs of the ending episodes and 30-minute movie. I never bought raw Japanese episodes for any series besides one VHS for Pokemon, so I guess I really wanted to see more Mon Colle Knights!

To most people, Mon Colle Knights was just another dispensable monster-collecting kid show meant to emulate Pokemon. But for some reason, I really liked it. It had cool and cute monsters, pretty character designs, an adorable romance going on between the two main characters, genuinely funny humor, and the most hilarious villains. It had great opening songs too, which are still among my favorite j-pop tunes.

Back in the day when Tenchi was a popular series on Toonami/Adult Swim, I absolutely adored it. It was one of the first really character-driven anime I’d seen and I just loved the characters so much. I didn’t have cable back then so I got my first look at Tenchi through tapes from a friend. I got so hooked that I bought all the DVDs – the original OVAs, Tenchi Universe, Tenchi in Tokyo, the movies, and the Pretty Sammy spin-off series. I watched them many times dubbed and subbed. Since I don’t enjoy reading manga as much as watching anime, you can tell I really like a series if I’m diligent with reading the manga. During my years of Tenchi obsession, I not only read but diligently bought the manga volumes as they were released by Viz. Despite not being very computer savvy back in the day, I put together a pretty big collection of Tenchi images on my computer and wrote a 30+ page long Tenchi fanfic.

As my Tenchi obsession started to wane, I ended up selling my DVDs of the TV series and movies because my main love for the franchise was in the OVAs and manga. But since the OVA remained incomplete for many years, I eventually lost interest in that as well (stopped collecting the manga, too). By the time I found out about the long awaited sequel to the OVA in 2005, I didn’t have any motivation to check it out. I still like Tenchi though and maybe one of these days I should try to get back into it.

My Evangelion obsession occurred simultaneously with my Tenchi and Inuyasha obsession, however it ended up being the shortest of the three. Like many new fans who watch Evangelion for the first time, I was completely blown away. I watched my DVDs of the series a bunch of times, dubbed and subbed, and eventually bought the movies and director’s-cut DVDs, too. I just couldn’t get over the brilliance and ingenuity of the series. I spent many hours looking online and absorbing information about the story and characters, especially interpretations of the ending. The same summer I wrote my Tenchi fanfic, I wrote a long Evangelion fanfic too, which I’m still pretty proud of.

At one point I couldn’t choose between Evangelion, Inuyasha, or Tenchi as my favorite anime, but my Eva obsession cooled off before the other two. I guess since the series wasn’t ongoing, I eventually got over my initial amazement. I still consider it amongst my favorites and I’m still keeping up with it through the new movies.

So far, Inuyasha has been the longest lasting of my anime obsessions, spanning five of my ten years as an anime fan. I just love the characters, and the seemingly never-ending story always kept me begging for more. I accidentally bought bootleg DVDs before starting to buy the official ones (never finished my collection though). I watched all the dubbed episodes on Adult Swim as well as fansubs, bought a lot of Inuyasha merchandise over the years, and did more work on the Inuyasha section of my site than any other. Inuyasha is also the only long-running series where I’ve read all 558 chapters of the manga and seen all 4 movies and 193 anime episodes (167 for the first series and 26 for the last). A day didn’t go by in those five years where Inuyasha wasn’t on my mind.

I was so into Inuyasha that I never thought I would lose interest in it. But it finally started to happen when the quality of the manga began to decline in the later chapters. Even though I’m not obsessed with it anymore, I still like it very much and it will always be special to me.

Kannagi was the shortest of my anime obsessions, lasting only a few months in the end of ’08 and the beginning of ’09. I didn’t start watching it until the second to last episode aired. I loved it so much that I plowed through the 12 episodes in just a couple of days. On the day episode 13 was to come out, I was so impatient for the fansub that I kept refreshing Tokyo Toshokan literally every few minutes. When the anime finished, I jumped right to scanlations of the manga. At that time, only volumes 1 through 3 had been translated. But I just couldn’t wait and ended up reading volumes 4 though 6 raw. As I stated before, I’m pretty lazy when it comes to reading manga, so the fact that I not only quickly read through the Kannagi manga, but read it raw, means I really loved it! I eventually read the scanlations of volumes 4 through 6 when they came out.

My obsession with it cooled down before too long, but if the manga ever resumes (it’s been on hiatus for a couple of years now) or a new anime is made, I’ll get back into it!

Haruhi is currently my favorite, and along with Pokemon and Inuyasha, has been one of my biggest obsessions. I actually didn’t like it that much when I first watched the series in late ’06. However, the Haruhi promotion going on at AX 2007 is what changed my mind about it and made me decide to watch it again. I ended up loving it the second time around. Since then, I’ve watched all 28 episodes a few times, read all the novels at least twice, have been buying the English releases of the DVDs and novels, and have over 1GB worth of Haruhi pictures on my computer. I’m slowly building a collection of Haruhi merchandise, but I have a ways to go.

It’s hard to say when/if another anime will rise up and replace Haruhi as my favorite. Not knowing when I’ll discover a new favorite anime is part of the fun of the fandom!

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It’s weird that only seven out of the two-hundred+ anime I’ve seen have been able to steal my heart. Besides these seven, a few others such as Cardcaptor Sakura, Slayers, and Lucky Star came close, but I didn’t get quite into them enough to put them on the list. I’ve gone through many of the anime that other fans were obsessed with at one time, such as Naruto, Death Note, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Code Geass. But though I loved these, I never got that into them.

If you’ve also gone through any number of favorite anime over the years, I’d love to hear about them. More or less than the amount I have? Same amount of obsession?