Forum - View topicANNCast - Otakon Special with Mike & Daryl
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3 Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
|
|||||||
I wonder if your statement is technically accurate? Are you watching anything this season, are you keeping up with any new(er) shows? I ask because I find that my interest in ANIME remains high, I still love the medium and many of the things produced. My interest in "anime fandom" however I find myself wondering about. Just as example, while I FULLY understand the reasons and motivations behind it, the de-emphasis and decline of actual anime VIEWING at conventions is disappointing. To say nothing of the ever growing amount of content that has little (or nothing) to do with anime at all. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Crisha
Moderator
 Posts: 4290 |
|
|||||||
|
^As for myself, I've been suffering a similar situation. After having the biggest year last year in terms of number of anime completed, this year has been dead in comparison. I've only completed 7 anime this year, and 5 of those were movies/OVAs. There was literally 4 months in a row where I didn't watch a single episode.
There has been very little released this year that has interested me. I started watching the 2nd season of Shirayuki and Erased at the beginning of the year, but haven't really felt compelled to continue just yet (they weren't bad, and in the case of Erased I actually really enjoyed it, but the reviews over time left me uninterested to continue). I've kept up with the previews and there have been other series that have sort of sounded interesting, but nothing I've felt I needed to watch. For one thing, I've grown tired with a large portion of the female characters' designs. For another, everything has just felt same ol', same ol'. And for another, I've grown really, really sick and tired of high school shows. Why now? Why this year? Has there really been a difference? I don't know, likely not. It's probably just me. Stay with a form of entertainment for so long and it eventually starts feeling old hat. So I looked outside my normal entertainment for something that felt fresh. For example, I've never been much for video games or computer games, but I have spent hundreds of hours this year playing games (Civilization 5, Don't Starve, puzzle games). I also got into the Marvel MCU, something that never really interested me before, and have seen a majority of the films released now. Both experiences have been something different than my usual norm, so they were interesting and exciting, unlike what anime has felt like for 2016. Maybe I just needed a sabbatical. Maybe I still need one. Maybe anime is growing away from what I want from it. Maybe I'm just finally growing out of the hobby (I doubt that one, but you never know). I've taken breaks before when I've felt burnt out - this is just the longest one I've had yet. I recently completed Katanagatari, which has renewed an interest in watching other things on my backlog. All from previous years though, nothing from 2016, which is better than nothing. Still, it'd be sad if modern anime continues to feel at odds with what I want from the medium. I know it's me - the medium is still diverse. It just doesn't feel as exciting right now. Especially not after what felt like an amazing and fantastic 2015 (BBB, YuriBear, Maria the Virgin Witch, Death Parade, 2nd half of Yona, 2nd half of Shirobako, Gatchaman Crowds Insight). On the other hand, I'm still really involved in fandom. I doubt I'll ever grow out of that. At least with fanfiction I probably never will. I'll die with megabytes of stories saved on my hard drives (I'm growing ever closer to the 1,000 favorites milestone on ff.net - I've only been at this for 11+ years). |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Surrender Artist
 Posts: 3264 Location: Pennsylvania, USA |
|
|||||||
I think that there is a misunderstanding of what The Worst Anime of All Time is about. There’s no detailed abstract for what the panel was about, but I’ve gathered that it was not about bad in the sense that perhaps the second season of Psycho-Pass is bad (I can’t attest to that; I’ve only watched six episodes and my principal response has been apathy, which is endemic to the franchise for me. Rather, it was about things that are baffling and incompetent. It was more for things like Attack of The The Eye Creatures or Coleman Francis films, if Coleman Francis films weren’t too dead and dull most of the time to evoke a reaction. One of my favorites is a sequence from some seventies (I think) combining robot show that had its team based at an amusement park. The combining sequence shown was a bizarrely long, nonsensical process that was revealed to be completely unnecessary when the characters demonstrated that they could just teleport to where they needed to be. That’s not just bad, it’s damned near inexplicable! A lot of it dealt with animation and production failures. (E.g. this unfinished mecha animation from the train-wreck Gundress) Mr. Toole would frame these with the term sakuga houkai, which translates as ‘drawing collapse’. An infamous error from Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GO!GO! was featured as an example of that. The standard-bearer, of course, for the worst anime of all time is Charge Man Ken, a series so technically and narratively incompetent that it becomes ingenious. I’ll refrain from linking to any videos as Discotek has licensed the series (YESU!), but it’s a marvel. The animation is janky and lazy, but the real prize is that the ‘hero’ is kind of a jerk and episodes are often resolved in ways that somebody would only come up with if his screenwriting technique was, “f**k it, whatever, just finish it.” For example, in one episode, the city is attacked by a vast swarm of carnivorous butterflies (yes, really). Ken defeats them by just shooting each individual butterfly. This is portrayed with a series of crudely animated shots of Ken firing his gun in various directions, the beams passing through the swarm, then the butterflies falling to the ground. It’s pretty fantastic. Besides that, I think that drawing from the forgotten past is part of the appeal of the panel, because the surprise of seeing something that most present fans couldn’t even imagine existing adds a lot to the enjoyment. I would love to see the spirit of the panel revived and even entertained the idea of taking the mantle up myself for about five seconds, but to assemble and present something worth the audience’s time, to say nothing of being equal to its expectations, would require enduring abundant frustration and going to not inconsiderable effort. Hell, if I could imagine myself figuring that out and pulling it off, I might still be willing to try, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll master calculus and linear algebra before I can get to it.
I’m a civil servant, we’re always technically accurate! It’s the best kind of accurate! It’s very much about watching anime. I’ve barely watched anything this year. Per my list, I watched The Irresponsible Captain Tylor series and OVAs in Februrary, Yuuki Yuuna is a Hero in May; I left both indifferent. (I finished Akame ga Kill! in February, but that was a hangover from the year before that I watched on Toonami, making my classic mistake of setting out to enjoy some fun trash, then rediscovering that most of the time, I genuinely don’t enjoy trash.) I watched some things recently in a bid to revivify my interest, but it has not, admittedly gone well. I’ll concede that I’m making dubious choices. I’ve never found Psycho-Pass especially engaging, which the film wasn’t and the second season has thus far kept to trend with the promise of eventually going bad, but not in a fun way. I actually paid for a full FUNImation subscription at the beginning of the year that’s gone almost wholly to waste. (Strange choice given as a I purposefully let my Crunchyroll subscription lapse last year) I seem to have genuinely ‘lost my faith’ as it were. I looked at the things offered this year, but I haven’t found anything that I can imagine myself enjoying. What’s being made and what I might be able to cajole myself into watching seem to have diverged. I don’t like the idea of giving up without trying, but it takes too much effort to even evaluate possibilities. Part of it could be a ‘menu problem’; the volume of options is so great that the effort of deciding among them seems like it might not be equaled by the satisfaction gained from the eventual choice. Sometimes trying to make a 'decision' at all seems meaningless, because it's conceivable that one could come out with the same net satisfaction from picking at random. So maybe *rolls dice* Planetarian… I guess? I know what this sounds like, but I don’t think that it should be entirely attributed to anime. My lack of enthusiasm is general. Very often I mostly look forward to getting things over with, not enjoying the experience of them. There have been a few exceptions, or near exceptions: Bojack Horseman really held my attention, I enjoyed playing Pillars of Eternity and a few films were great to watch (I really liked Brian DePalma’s Blow-Out), but too little feels like more than a means to an ending. I think that I’ve refused to abandon the idea that I like anime largely because it implies an identity, which creates some external significance to cling to. I’ve never been deeply invested in anime fandom, but I don’t want to separate from it; sometimes I even want to contribute to it. I’ve countenanced, planned upon, but then discarded the idea of maintaining a review weblog at least five times since 2011; including two weeks ago. I always, however, appreciate that it would require a level of effort that I could not sustain for long and that I wouldn't be able to write anything that would satisfy my own standards or expectations. Maybe I should just do my overdue ‘every so many years’ watching of Now and Then, Here and There. That might cheer me up. I’ve never minded the dilution of anime conventions. Well, the Homestuck stuff got a little on my nerves, but not as much as it might have, because I barely understood what it was. I just feel too old and too different, which is a bizarre way to feel standing next to people in green body paint and electric-blue wigs, to be entirely comfortable there. Yet I also enjoy seeing that kind of crowd and attending panels. I’m even on the path to reneging on my decision as I’ve secured a room for Otakon 2017. (Of course, at this point I’ve encumbered no actual funds toward attendance) I might not be ready to give up on learning how to enjoy it all, I might just want to see if Masao Maruyama presents In This Corner of the World or I might just not have a better answer as to what to do. Maybe I could make the experience more worthwhile if I held a panel. Who wants a long, dry lecture on Japanese constitutional history? Nobody? Right call, but too damned bad, because it’s the only idea I have. I swear that I’ll show a clip from… I don’t know… Patlabor 2 or something at the end. Politics don’t really turn up much in anime, do they? |
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group