I sometimes click in some random clip of current anime someone uploaded on YouTube, like I dunno attack on titan or chainsaw dude, but that’s it. They look cool but despite having the time to watch it I just don’t feel compelled to watch the whole show.
I guess it’s like the Netflix virus, that you keep scrolling and picking what you wanna watch and at the end you don’t watch anything and go back to sleep. Plus, maybe it’s the depression, but I don’t like when things end most of the time. I feel empty, it doesn’t happen with movies but with anime happens, especially when the main character is a dude. The usual end is that he beats the bad guy (or triumphs in life if the show isn’t about punching people) gets the hot anime girl, and ends… I guess since I can’t get any of that irl it hits me hard.
Always been picky about what anime I watch. Haven’t watched any anime in the past few years, though, my life has been hectic the past few years. I guess I don’t like ‘anime-esque’ anime. Ones with an endless parade of episodes and filler, or over-the-top fighting or magic.
Highly recommend Jin-Roh.
Canaan was a somewhat guilty pleasure.
Anything by Miyazaki.
Black Lagoon was hit-or-miss, but when it hit, it was damn good.
Ghost in the Shell - preferring the movie over SAC, but both were good.
Cowboy Bebop naturally, and, on a lighter note, Space Dandy.
Pop Team Epic is hilarious.
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure I like despite its other qualities. It’s an absolute fever dream that makes no apologies for itself, and I respect the hell out of that.
I wonder if there are any that I’ve liked but forgotten? My memory is like a sieve…
Well, most anime has always been trash… like all media. The majority of it is trash, and there’s diamonds in the rough.
Back in the day Cowboy Bebop was a fluke, an exception, not the rule. There’s plenty of easily forgettable anime from the same time period.
I’ve just gotten more picky about my media as I have gotten older, but I also have become more open to watching bad things for the sake of mocking them as I do.
I haven’t watched the Nier Automata anime, but if it’s anything like the game, its a rejection of anime tropes and subverts and overthrows them. The game is very anime-in-style. Most deeply humanist game I’ve ever played and I cried at the true ending.
Funnily enough, never finished cowboy, bored me to death
same here, it isn’t worth the hype it gets
Well an incredible amount is released every season, but just like in the 90s not all is watchable and then only a few titles will appeal to you. Freiren is a new one that I think is up there with the greats but maybe you should try watching some comedy ones instead. Have you seen asobi asobase, uncle from another world or the remastered ranma 1/2 yet?
I sometimes skip shows that I don’t feel I can mentally handle at the time and come back to them later. Part of mental health is adjusting your life to help get your mind back in shape.
Frieren is such a refreshing dip into fantasy as a genre; as is Dungeon Meshi.
I never really watched anime but I can speak for a friend of mine : they stopped watching anime because they got tired of the same tropes over and over again, and especially of the unhealthy/toxic relationships portrayed
Also, fan service
I’m at a place where I still like anime in theory, but I’ve become almost unreasonably picky. I will sit down for the Boy and the Heron, but I have a hard time taking a chance on anything I’m not 100% on.
I have watched a couple in the past but anime tends to over-explain plot points to an extent that really irks me. Something will clearly happen on screen and then follow through with a plain language recap of what happened. Give the audience some credit!
I would like to think that I have outgrown anime. But in reality anime had outgrown me. The type of shows I like have ended in the 2000s. I can’t stand today’s anime themes and styles.
I’ve honestly stopped watching most scripted television. I also feel like, outside of something GitS:SAC, I’m not as interested in most themes in anime.
I used to around 20 years ago. Some, anyway.
But I was always picky about the ones I watched. I had a few friends who liked Naruto and other types I didn’t like. I always found that these two types basically boil down to either:
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Combat centric plot, where each episode revolves around some new antagonist that luckily can be defeated by this new trick the protagonist learned earlier in the episode. Example: Naruto, DBZ.
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Awkward guy spends time with attractive girls. Example: Ichigo 100%, Love Hina.
I really liked Monster, GTO, Elfen Lied, and Chobits. And there was this one drama whose name I cannot remember. I kind of lost interest after having seen those, because it felt like there were too much low quality anime compared to the ones that actually were worthwhile.
EDIT: I remember the other one, Kimi Ga Nozomi Eien. Also, honorable mention: Nana. Great soundtrack by Olivia Lufkin and Anna Tsuchiya
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I haven’t watched it or much by way of movies in general for a while. Moved away from fictional TV series before that.
I’ve been kinda tilting away from fiction for years. I like a number of fictional video games, still enjoy that, but novels or movies or such are kinda…I dunno. Just don’t get much of a kick out of them.
EDIT: I think that maybe, part of how much you enjoy something links into how much other stuff you can mentally connect it to. So, like, maybe if you’re super-big into the Star Wars universe, say, or some big franchise like that, then new material connects to lots of things that you know about there.
But fictional stuff tends to only tie to other stuff in that fictional universe, so in each work of fiction in a separate universe, you kinda “start over” from scratch.
Where with real-world stuff, you can mentally connect to other things that you know about in the real world, and your body of knowledge there grows over time, so there’s more to connect to. I do definitely think that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve shifted towards non-fiction. And while I don’t have anything to quantify it, I kinda get the impression that the same may be true of a lot of older folks out there.
Now, okay, anime is just a medium. Anime doesn’t entail being fictional. You could, theoretically, make an anime documentary on something…but it’s not usually used for that purpose.
All the anime I’ve watched for years now are reruns of anime from before I was born. Anime as of late has been so sucked into its own style that it’s starting to feel like that, in order to appreciate anime, you have to separate tropes between “everyone else’s style” and “anime style” or “humor you’d expect from everyone else” and “humor you’d expect from anime”. I think this is what one calls a subculture. However, to put it one way, if it’s an acquired taste, it has unacquired me in being one.
The only exception to this is Pokémon Horizons (someone who knows my artist side may notice this series has been an enormously recurring part of my art), and a part of me thinks they’re actually trying to pull the anime equivalent of Pokémon Red/Green saving Nintendo (there was a time when Nintendo thought of just going back to selling cards again like they did in the 1800’s because games pre-Pokémon were failing in sales) and save anime with it.
I, of course, am not unaware of other modern anime, and you may find art of them from me, but my main source for these is second-handedness in some form. These anime are not always bad in my mind, but they’re all “just there”. Which as an artist of such anime I’m aware rubs many the wrong way, that I may do things pertaining to a fictional world but at the same time not talk about it with the same enthusiasm (the art equivalent of inventing baseball and not liking to play it, the horror). It’s just too distinct with so large a subvariety it’s difficult to fully appreciate it.
Nope. I watch stuff whenever I can and I don’t even care that much what it is. Watch series over movies though with both normal shows and anime.
I watched so much when I was younger but I pretty much stopped 6 or 7 years ago. I’ll watch a Miyazaki movie if my spouse grabs it, but I won’t seek them out.
There was just too much fan service, filler, and melodrama. Not enough substance to make it worth it. My last attempt was My Hero Academia. It was all the tropes I was tired of and I couldn’t get into it. My friend who was watching it with me said it was satirizing those tropes, but I had given up.
I’m sure there are some incredible shows I’m missing out on, and I definitely don’t judge those who still enjoy it. I just don’t line up with the grooves anymores.
If it ain’t LittleKuriboh or PurpleEyes, I’ve probably lost interest.
I never really got into it. I did enjoy cowboy bebop and have seen a couple ghibli films, but never went out of my way to watch anything else. I suppose it’s funny since I now live in Japan.
Also, you should work on yourself including therapy, probably, as someone who had issues with depression for years
howd you get around to moving to japan? hoping to move internationally, not necessarily japan, but always wondering how jobs/visas/etc worked for people.
Studied the language a bit (just as a hobby and to meet people in a new city). Went on vacation. Liked it. Got laid off of job and decided to take an extended vacation there. Still liked it. Saved money, finished university (I hadn’t bothered by that point, but it made the visa process much easier), and came over on a student visa. Studied at Japanese language school, found a job, and then it’s just life as usual.
Definitely visit (preferably for a longer time on a fixed budget) anywhere you plan to move. Expect to possibly take a pay cut (some jobs just don’t pay as much in Japan) and expect take-home pay to be less due to taxes (though things like medical and dental care are much cheaper than the US, though that’s not a high bar). Think about how long you plan to be in the place. Does it make sense economically with the cost of moving? Can you retire there?
If you’re a US citizen, you get the added bonus of needing to figure out a whole bunch around yearly taxes, whether you need to pay state and/or local taxes to be able to vote in your area (which probably means double-taxation after some point), investments (being a US citizen sucks for trying to do banking stuff in any country with which the US has an agreement), existing investments (many retirement vehicles can’t be contributed to in some cases which can happen for those overseas), keeping a phone number for US bank 2-factor auth, and a whole host of other ugliness.
incredible overview thank you. can i ask what field you’re in? techs getting grim so im not sure if i should double down or just give up and get an mba
Software engineer. I had about a decade of IT experience when I came over (I started in tech support and went from there). I used to be full-stacl, but I’m just backend these days. If you want to move to another country, you might see if an MBA or language courses make more sense.