Mainichi Anime Yume
In past posts I’ve talked about the subtitle quality in anime we watch, as well as anime dubs, but I never specifically wrote about watching anime in its “pure” form – raw in Japanese without any subtitles. However a recent post by froggykun got me thinking about the what, why, and when of my viewing of raw anime…
Since I got into anime in the early 2000s when the Internet culture was just taking off, I can’t comment on how fans stayed up-to-date with anime and connected with each other in the years before then. But it’s very obvious that the medium and its fandom would not be as universally accessible as it is today without the Internet. Thanks to the World Wide Web we can now converse with and share things with fellow fans from all over the world, any time, anywhere, as well as stay up to date on all the latest happenings of the anime world. So for today’s topic, I want to discuss my personal routine for staying connected with the anime community and see how other people’s routines differ…
As I discussed in a post from a few years back, the majority of characters in the anime we watch, especially main characters, tend to be teenagers around the age of 14-18. There are many anime that feature a cast of older (or younger) characters too, but teenagers seem to dominate if you look at the anime released in any given year or season. In the previous post I talked about why I think school-aged characters are so prominent, so today I wanted to look at the other side of it; anime that feature adult characters rather than teenagers and if the age difference has any significant impact on the kinds of stories an anime can tell…
Most anime fans I know, myself included, enjoy all kinds of anime with a wide range of stories and themes. But there are also plenty of fans who prefer anime on one end of the spectrum or the other; either they prefer “light” anime that never get too sad or disturbing, or they prefer “dark” anime that are raw and gruesome rather than idealistically pleasant. Everyone has their reasons for why they prefer light anime over dark anime or vice versa, and today I want to think about what those reasons could be…
If you consider yourself an anime fan, chances are you also partake in related hobbies like reading manga or playing video games. Even though I do like the other two, anime is the hobby I spend the majority of my time, money, and energy on, but I’m always impressed by people who manage to more or less equally balance themselves between all three of these big hobbies…
For roughly the past decade we’ve been able to watch the same anime at about the same time as fans in Japan, at first only illegally through fansubs, but in recent years, many legal options became available such as official simulcast streaming sites. Now, through legal and illegal means, we have easy access to pretty much every anime ever made, new and old. Despite this, the majority of fans I know, myself included, prefer to watch only new anime – anime that’s currently airing right now in Japan – and might pick up an old series only once in a while. But by “old” series they usually mean a series that aired within the past few years or even months, not something that aired decades ago or even just 10-15 years ago. So when does an anime become “too old” for us?…
Having Japanese literature as one of my major fields of study in college, there’s a trope I discovered during my studies that’s always fascinated me. Actually, reading a lot of Japanese literature made me aware of it, but anime and manga is where I see tons of examples of it. It’s when an anime has a character that is some kind of immortal being, whether a god, a devil, an angel, etc., but they’re presented as more or less…human.
As I strive to be an open-minded anime fan, I’m reminded time and time again that many things simply boil down to personal taste; that no matter how much I think a certain anime is great or another one is terrible, there will always be fans who feel completely different from me and have their own valid reasons for it. Inspired by posts from a couple of other bloggers, I felt like examining the concept of criticism within anime fandom specifically…
In past posts I’ve talked about forms of anime “burnout,” from personal anecdotes about people I’ve known who lost interest in anime over time, to discussing exactly how/why someone would burnout on anime. But today’s topic isn’t so much about losing interest in anime as it is simply taking a break from it, which can be a form of preventing loss of interest in the first place…
Three years ago I wrote a post discussing how, over the years as I’ve watched more and more anime at a given time than I used to in my early years as a fan, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to remember every single one. Recently czai over on the Blacksheep Project wrote a post dealing with a similar topic about how she remembers some of the 200 anime she’s watched more than others and why that is. So today I was inspired to revisit this topic of how well we’re able to remember all the anime we’ve ever watched…