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Anyone else here that DOESN'T watch anime anymore?

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.

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  • 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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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