It's also a Thursday, which is when I'm supposed to be updating the blog with a new discussion about anime. AND it's the start of a new anime season, so I have a whole host of potential new topics to talk about in the coming weeks. But just a normal post wouldn't feel right on my birthday. This is supposed to be a day meant to celebrate life and reflect on the life I've led so far. Today's post should be personal. I thought about talking about my favorite anime, maybe a top ten list, but it didn't feel right. A top list isn't nearly personal enough for a day like today. Plus, a 2018 anime has made the list of my top 5 favorite anime of all time, so discussing it would spoil my current front-runner for anime of the year, and I wouldn't do that to you guys.
So, today I thought I would do something a little different. I consider myself somewhere between a hardcore and a casual anime fan. I haven't seen a lot of classics that hardcore anime fans I follow on Youtube love to talk about like FLCL or Serial Experiments Lain yet (though I will eventually), so it's hard for me to consider myself a really committed fan sometimes. But at the same time, I look at my profile on MyAnimeList, and it currently says that I have watched 274 DAYS worth of anime and read an additional 34 days worth of manga (How do you measure manga in time?). That doesn't sound like a casual fan to me. So I find myself wondering: how did I get here? How did I become so passionate about anime that I watch over a dozen series as they air in Japan and start writing weekly about the themes and ideas being presented in these series, yet still feel like an outsider that isn't a real fan? Well, today I thought I'd share my story and give a bit of insight as to why I am the way I am.
PART ONE: SATURDAY MORNING CARTOONS
I said about a week ago that the first time I was exposed to anime was at a first grade birthday party. The teacher allowed the birthday boy to bring in a movie to watch while we ate cupcakes, and he chose a Pokemon VHS. The concept of Pokemon is already an easy sell to a six year old - I mean, who wouldn't want to have a pet that can shoot lightning bolts and go on adventures without parental supervision? - but the very nature of how the story was told was brand new to me. I had never seen a show before this that had the story continue from one episode to the next instead of having each episode have a self-contained story that would be forgotten next week. And the art was like nothing I had never seen before. I immediately went out of my way to annoy my classmate (who I normally got into fights with on a regular basis) and find out where I could watch this amazing new cartoon. And the answer he gave me was: Kids WB.
Kids WB was a Saturday morning block on the WB network that was focused on children's television. It ran from 1995-2008 and was on at just the right time to be a major part of my formative years. While it aired a lost of western cartoons like Animaniacs, Scooby-Doo, and the very anime-inspired Jackie Chan Adventures, it also had a handful of anime that became some of their most consistently airing programs. Every week since that fateful birthday party, I eagerly tuned in to watch Pokemon's latest episode. For a few years, Pokemon was my obsession. I bought the trading cards with my allowance and birthday money, I played my copy of Pokemon Yellow religiously, and nothing short of an act of God would have kept me out of the movie theater when the first movie was released here in the US.
Watching Pokemon on Kids WB every week soon exposed me to a handful of other anime like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Cardcaptor Sakura. But I never knew that they were anything different from normal cartoons until a few years later, on a completely different network.
PART TWO: TOONAMI
The very first time I heard a hint that there was something unusual about my beloved Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! was when I overheard someone talking about how they actually came from a different country. Being a stupid kid, I immediately convinced myself that they didn't know any better. "If the show was from Japan, why would it be on American TV?" was the backbone of my counter argument. But then one day, when I was in about fourth grade or so, I remember watching an episode of Batman: the Animated Series on Cartoon Network. After the episode ended, I saw a strange animation of a spaceship and then a weird robot man talking about a new episode from something he described as something along the lines of "one of Japan's best shows." That show was Dragon Ball Z, and that new programming block I had never heard of before was Toonami.
Toonami was an action oriented programming block that was aimed at older children, usually airing on Saturday nights. And while it originally started with western cartoons like Thundercats and Super Friends, it became so synonymous with anime that when it was relaunched by Adult Swim, almost its entire lineup was current action anime, with the exception of brief revivals of cartoons that had already aired on Toonami like Samurai Jack and Thundercats. Toonami had become a staple of my media diet from when I first discovered it in around 2001 (around the same time I was really getting into Yu-Gi-Oh!) right up until its first cancellation seven years later. I went from elementary school to high school in that time, and I now knew that anime was its own unique animal and that it was inextricably tied into the history and culture of a place on the other side of the world.
I was hungry to learn about this new and strange art form, and Toonami delivered with shows like Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, Zatch Bell, MAR, Prince of Tennis, Duel Masters, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Naruto, and Hikaru no Go, each of which hold a special place in my heart, even if I don't remember them all as fondly as an adult. And Toonami went even further with its frequent airing of movies and specials, usually tying into Dragon Ball or Pokemon, but then culminating in 2006 with its "Month of Miyazaki", where regular programming was suspended in order to celebrate the legendary director Hayao Miyazaki with a new movie airing every week in the month of April. Spirited Away, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and Princess Mononoke were beautiful films with big ideas, and seeing it as a 13-year-old about to graduate middle school made me see anime as something more than just entertainment for children, but a chance to experience true art aimed at adults.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I explored the more mature side of anime, I was first looking to satisfy my ever increasing desire for all things anime in ways other than Kids WB and Toonami. And I found it, not on a TV screen, but in the pages of a book.
PART THREE: SHONEN JUMP
I don't remember exactly when I discovered the existence of manga, but I know it was at least a year after I started really getting into Toonami. While standing in line at the start of the school day, waiting for the morning pledge and prayer (I was in Catholic school) to start before we were led to our classroom, I saw a friend of mine reading a book that had Goku on the cover. I was immediately interested, and begged him to let me borrow it. This was a copy of Shonen Jump magazine.
I briefly talked about Shonen Jump before while discussing the upcoming Jump Force video game, but it's influence on anime really couldn't be understated. This was the home of the original manga that inspired so many of my favorite anime, which ran weekly in Japan and was collected in a series of chapters launched every month in the US. This US anthology launched in 2003, which would put me in the 5th grade at the time, and ran until 2012, which would have been my sophomore year in college, though I had long since stopped reading the anthology magazine in favor of manga scans online at that point.
The very first issue of the magazine I read featured series I was familiar with like Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Yu Yu Hakusho, but also had four series that were entirely new to me: Naruto, One Piece, Shaman King, and Sand Land (there's a series that was lost to time...). As I continued reading over the years, more stories were introduced to me, including Bleach, Hikaru no Go, Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, and Slam Dunk. But Shonen Jump was more than just a vessel for me to catch up on my new favorite manga. It had several articles and columns in between the different chapters that would feature things like interviews with creators, advertisements for other manga from the publisher that wasn't featured in the magazine (like Hunter x Hunter and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure), and discussions of different aspects of Japanese culture and language. While I happily ignored these at first, as I grew up and learned to appreciate anime and manga as art more than just entertainment, I devoured these articles just as fervently as I did the manga itself.
The magazine also led me to check out a new Saturday morning cartoon block: 4Kids TV. Run by Fox, I was first drawn to it when I saw ads for the anime adaptations of One Piece and Shaman King that they were running. 4Kids expanded my anime diet a little, introducing me to Sonic X and Kirby of the Stars, but it never really amounted to more than a footnote in my history as an anime fan, and my favorite thing to come out of it was their revival of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which isn't anything remotely close to anime or even anime-inspired. This is almost entirely due to timing. I was a good way into middle school and about to enter high school when I first was introduced to 4Kids. Watching Naruto, Zatch Bell, and especially the aforementioned month of Miyazaki made going back to the highly censored and aimed at younger audiences of Kirby or the 4Kids edit of One Piece unappealing. I was starting to consider myself too old for anime, and I would have needed something as dramatically new as the day I first saw Pokemon to keep me invested in the medium.
PART FOUR: ADULT SWIM AND THE INTERNET
The year is 2006. Young Patrick was entering high school for the first time, a scary enough proposition for anybody, but especially so for me. For the first time since kindergarten, I was going to a school where I didn't know any of the other students. I was going into public school for the very first time of my life, having spent elementary and middle school at a small, insular Catholic school. I went from a graduating class of about 20 to a freshman class of over 400, and because school districts are weird, my new high school was in a completely different town than my Catholic school. I was a shy and introverted child who had spent several years watching all of his friends move away or transfer to another school and was turned into a social outcast, isolated and bullied for reading manga and still playing Pokemon when everyone else had dropped it. My classmates had been with me since 2nd grade at the absolute latest and were all present when they heard the teacher ask me indignantly if I had taken my medication when I was acting out like a stupid kid who was bored with class, so they had more fuel for teasing, and I ended up staying silent for most of the school day, aside from frequently answering questions during class because at least I was good at something.
On top of all this anxiety of being in a new school and having no sense of how to socialize because of my isolation, my great grandfather had recently passed away and, at the insistence of my family, I was sent on a three day field trip to Philadelphia on the day of his funeral. I was feeling lonely, guilty about not going to the funeral, and nervous about sharing a hotel room with a group of people I had never met. And on that first day of the trip, I was nervously sitting to the side playing my Game Boy as my then roommates were channel surfing on the hotel TV. And that was when they switched on Adult Swim.
I had heard vaguely of Adult Swim before, but it was always just something that I wasn't allowed to watch to me. My parents aren't the close minded prudes that you might imagine them to be after learning that they sent me to Catholic school for nine years. They were only interested in sending me there because it was the only school that accepted me into kindergarten at the time because my birthday is so late in the year. But they still did not allow me to consume media meant for teenagers or adults for most of my time in elementary and middle school, not because they are morally opposed to the content in and of itself, but because they were justifiably concerned with the effect that inherently violent or sexual content would have on a developing young mind. During my later years of middle school, they had slowly begun to allow me to watch more mature content on a case by case basis, including film adaptations based on the works of Alan Moore (which is, in hindsight, not a good parenting decision). So, as you can probably imagine, the very concept of Adult Swim was fascinating to me. The block of shows that referenced profanity, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and sexuality was a brand new experience for me. On top of western shows like Family Guy and Robot Chicken, I was introduced to three new anime that I had never seen before: Bleach, Inuyasha, and Fullmetal Alchemist.
Much like most of the other anime I was introduced to early in my life as an anime fan, I was introduced to these shows midway through their run. Fullmetal Alchemist in particular was near the end of its run when I watched it for the first time. Even worse, watching these particular shows on TV led me to learn that the episodes were frequently being aired out of order, making it incredibly difficult to try to piece together what was going on. On top of this, I was frequently getting impatient while waiting for new episodes of shows like Naruto or frustrated with One Piece's unfortunate departure from American broadcast television. This led me to turn to the internet.
Before high school, my experience with the internet was limited to using it as a research tool for schoolwork and a way to play games on websites for Cartoon Network and the Disney Channel. I was completely unaware that there was more to the internet at the time, and it stayed this way until my father showed me a Naruto AMV on YouTube, a website I didn't even know existed at the time. This blew my mind, and led me to use the internet to learn as much as possible about anime and video games. Not only did this lead me to find fan-subbing websites so that I can keep up with anime ahead of the normal broadcast, through watching AMVs, top ten lists, and abridged parodies on YouTube, I was led to discover whole new shows that I would have never heard of otherwise. Berserk, Lupin III, Gantz, The Vision of Escaflowne, Kampfer, Death Note, Detective Conan, Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Code Geass became a part of my cultural frame of reference almost entirely because I stumbled across them on YouTube.
But then, something interesting happened after high school. I started to get bored with anime. I never truly stopped watching anime, but I tended to stay with shows I had already started, with the occasional new show like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. My reasons for this are simple: college changed my priorities. For the first time, I was balancing classes with a part time job (having only worked during the summer in high school), and I had joined the comic book club and improv team at the time, changing my focus from one interest to another. It wasn't until I had left college and met a new group of anime watching friends as an adult that my interest was rekindled.
PART FIVE: PRESENT DAY
My renewed interest in anime came just from talking about anime with new fans, but I didn't get a lot of new shows to watch out of it. Mostly, it was just us gushing about how great the old shows we loved were as we were forming our new friendship. I tended to recommend shows for them to watch more often than I got shows recommended to me, and when they did recommend shows to me, like Fairy Tail, they usually didn't click with me for one reason or another.
But what never did end was my interest in One Piece. No matter what had happened, I was still tuning in every week to watch new episodes or read new chapters in the manga. And my never waning enthusiasm for One Piece in particular led me to find YouTube personalities who would share their theories, review new chapters, and analyze the themes behind the story. Eventually as I consumed these videos, I became fans of the personalities themselves and watched videos they made that weren't about One Piece. This led me to learn about new modern anime like One Punch Man, Recovery of an MMO Junkie, and My Hero Academia.
At around the same time, I had gotten access to a Netflix account for the first time, and along with watching a bunch of movies and tv shows for the first time, I was also exposed to new anime I had never heard of before this. Not only was I getting to see new shounen action comfort food like Attack on Titan and Seven Deadly Sins, but I took advantage of this as an adult to broaden my horizons by checking out new (to me) kinds of anime like Gargantia on the Verduous Planet, Ouran High School Host Club, Sword Art Online, Kill la Kill, Angel Beats, Psycho-Pass, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Darker than Black, Samurai Champloo, and Durarara.
And this leads us to today. A lapsed anime fan whose experience with the medium was almost entirely limited to a single type of story (shounen action, specifically) experiences a huge renewal of interest in the medium with the rise of analysis and recommendation videos on YouTube. Combined with a desire to experience a variety of stories and genres outside out what I was used to as a child watching anime for about 17 years up to that point, an extreme diversity of content that is more easily accessible than ever with several different streaming platforms, the nature of the internet allowing the ability to watch at my own pace, and the rise of seasonal anime that run for less than 30 episodes making new shows more easily digestible, this particular experience leaves me feeling so inexperienced and out of my depth when talking about anime, even though I've been watching anime for 20 years now. I look at the seasonal chart of currently airing anime over on MAL, and I find myself overwhelmed by just how many different series are debuting in just the month of October. With such a wide variety of new shows airing, plus the sheer amount of shows that have already aired in the past that either never made it to American television or slipped under my radar because it wasn't interesting to me when it was new, how can I ever become informed enough to talk about anime in any meaningful way?
Don't take this the wrong way. I'm in no way trying to suggest that I'm giving up on anime analysis, nor am I trying to suggest that I am incompetent at this. I've read over the blog posts I've written in the past few months, and I'm happy with my work overall. There is definitely room for improvement, but I'm satisfied with my explanations for why I liked or disliked a particular show, and I'm especially happy with my hypothetical pitches to fix bad anime. I just think that it is worthwhile to address the doubts that I occasionally experience as I work on this blog and how I got here, and a nostalgic look back on my development as an anime fan is a fun way to celebrate my birthday.
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| And a birthday is a good excuse to drink! |
Before I leave you, I'd like to take a minute of your time for an announcement. In addition to my normal weekly content, I'm going to be having weekly episode recaps and reviews of what I'm watching starting sometime in the next few weeks. I'm using this time to try to decide what shows to cover as a whole bunch of new shows are debuting for the Fall 2018 season right now. I will NOT be covering shows that have debuted prior to the Fall season that are still currently airing, like One Piece and Captain Tsubasa, simply because I feel that it would be unfair and inefficient to try to talk about a story that is already very much in progress. I haven't yet decided when to post these "Weekly Roundups" as I'm currently calling them, but I'm currently leaning toward posting them on Sundays. So, look forward to that, along with my regular weekly content!
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