In case you haven’t figured it out, I’ve been an anime fan for a long time, since the mid 1990s. I still watch anime. I’m the adult now and I get to decide what that means and that means I’m going to watch whatever anime I feel like. Sure, it’s great to be caught up on the latest shows as they air each week, but have you ever stumbled across an old and semi-obscure show and really got into it? Similarly, an old show that you’ve been meaning to get around to watching, and you wondered why you waited all this time? I like finding hidden gems like that.

There’s lots of old anime out there. Some of it is more popular. For example, everyone knows about Studio Ghibli for one simple reason: They make good anime. They know what they’re doing. Nausicaa? Totoro? Kiki’s Delivery Service? Castle in the Sky? Good stuff, anyone can watch it. That kind of popularity means that almost every anime fan across the the world has seen something from them, many became fans of Studio Ghibli specifically, and in turn that means some will become bigger fans than others. That comes with a cost in the form of a few who take it too far, the self-proclaimed snobs and gatekeepers. You know, That Guy. We’ve all encountered That Guy in some way or another. The names, faces, times, and locales change, but you know who I’m talking about: That Guy, that self-appointed expert.

I ain’t gonna lie, I used to be the snob, I used to be the gatekeeper. I used to be That Guy. I quit that because it helped nobody, got me nothing, and took me nowhere. I decided that hill was not mine to die on. Nobody will get anywhere if all they do is stand around being the gatekeeper. When I stopped trying to decide for others what anime was good, and came to terms with my own tastes and inclinations, my own enjoyment of anime soared.

What I’m saying is, if some folks would take the five goddamn minutes to calm down and stop offering to toss Hayao Miyazaki’s salad, FIVE FUCKING MINUTES, they would see that there’s a lot of anime out there that doesn’t need the Studio Ghibli name plastered all over it to be good. Sure, there’s a lot of crappy anime out there too, but finding good anime also means watching crap, because for some people (such as myself), a lot of shows that get dismissed by others as crap, is what I like to watch. I’d rather watch dumb crappy anime than stand guard at a gate that nobody gives half a ratfuck about, and I’m certainly not going to heed the orders of a snob with less authority than a fired mall cop. Anime is meant to be enjoyed, not fought over.

Five minutes, for fuck’s sake.

Galaxy Fraulein Yuna
SoulTaker
Nurse Witch Komugi (DVD re-watch)
My Bride is a Mermaid (Seto no Hanayome)
Eiken (BD re-watch)
Ayane’s High Kick
Battle Skipper
Magical Kanan/Canan
Jungle De Ikou!
Photon: Idiot Adventures

I like anime. I like it for all the goofy weirdness it’s capable of that wouldn’t be possible in any other medium. Anime has a lot of freedom as a result. One of those freedoms is that it doesn’t have to make sense all the time. It doesn’t have to be perfect all the time either. Some shows are going to be better than others and I learned it’s better to not worry about that.

Y’see, I look at it this way: My bill-paying job has me working with stuff that could kill me or make me wish it did. The kind of stuff that if a couple ounces splashes on someone’s hands or feet, their only chance of survival involves quick use of a tourniquet and a Sawzall. Or the kind of stuff that if breathed in, it basically deep-fries the lungs almost instantly. Or chemicals that don’t get to me right away but will make sure I don’t make it to retirement. Bad fucking shit with no chill. The only way to work with those kinds of chemicals is to NOT lose one’s shit over it. I handle it by being careful and paying attention to what I’m doing so I don’t suffer a miserable death. That’s worked perfectly so far. If I don’t lose my shit over that, then I’m certainly not going to lose my shit over whether an anime turns out to be good or not. To be sure, when I first got into anime, I had a much different mindset and stronger opinions about anime. But that was a long time ago and back then I was also working at a different job, one that wasn’t actively trying to kill me.

Priorities and perspectives, yo.

BetterMan
Those Who Hunt Elves
Najica Blitz Tactics
Compiler
Idol Defense Force Hummingbird
Shamanic Princess
Idol Project
Arcade Gamer Fubuki
Mouse
Mai-chan’s Daily Life

In the past, my reviews were truly “2-cent reviews”, where I’d watch maybe an episode or two of something and post a short opinion of it. That worked, in a short-attention-span sense, but then that became too much to bother keeping up with. For many of those shows, I never got past the 3-episode milestone to really get an idea of what it’s like.

This time, I’m trying something different. This time, I’m going to watch an ENTIRE series. That’s more fair to the anime. To be honest, I’ve lost count of how many shows I’ve watched where I wasn’t all that impressed by the first couple episodes, kept going anyway, and then found myself really enjoying it.

“Hey you should review-”
Hey you should fuck off

I have to set some rules and limits here. No, I am not taking requests. Someone will try anyway but that doesn’t mean I’ll heed them. I will watch what I damn well feel like, and when I feel like. Whether I already have it or not will also play a vital role. Similarly, if it’s something I’ve already seen, then the chances of watching it again go way down (but it can happen). There’s enough anime to choose from that watching all of it is genuinely impossible. Gotta pick and choose.

Someone can still make the suggestion along the lines of “if you liked X anime, then you’ll like Y”. That’s different from diving into a series on account of someone too lazy to watch it themselves. So if someone asks “can you watch this anime and tell me if it’s good” they’ll get ignored. You want to know if something is good or not, then YOU watch it with YOUR eyes.

There are still going to be some shows where I don’t get past 3 episodes. That’s going to happen. I might make a mention of them in a different post, listing the anime I gave a chance but couldn’t keep up with for whatever reason.

No Naruto, no One Piece, no DragonBall, no Bleach, or other animated soap operas

I’m also going to steer clear of the ultra-long shows that started 20 years ago and are still running. Sure, I could eventually tackle a 700-episode behemoth, but with the amount of time required, I could easily cover dozens of other shows. For the most part, I’m probably going to limit this to shows with 26 episodes, give or take a few. I will probably make exceptions to this as appropriate.

You might wonder what I think about physical media. Physical media is not dead. It’s not going anywhere soon. It’s going to stick around for a long time yet. I like physical media because once I buy it, it’s mine. Nobody is able to tell me that I can’t watch something that I have on physical media or deny access to it. DVDs I bought 20 years ago are still just as playable now. When a company makes a bunch of DVDs or BDs, any that make it to consumers are out in the wild forever. The only way they can claw them back is by scouring ebay or Amazon for any second-hand copies, and that’s only if they’re really desperate.

Streaming is too ephemeral. It comes and goes, often without warning. When a company is streaming a show and then the terms of the license ends or they just don’t like having it anymore, they can shut it off, full stop. Downloading anime files is at its most effective when it’s fairly new, but that too can fade away. Torrents can lose seeds.

Does physical media take up physical space? Yes. If you live in a shoebox of an apartment, you may find streaming is more ideal, and physical media is no longer a luxury, or even desirable, becoming more of a liability. I get that. I can grok that. Then there are those of us with plenty of space, and physical media becomes an attainable luxury. We have the room for it and the wall of shelves required for it.

Sidenote: The “Billy” bookcase from Ikea is actually pretty awesome for manga and DVDs/BDs, if you don’t mind assembling furniture like a Lego set. You can get extra shelves, they can be spaced perfectly for manga/DVDs, and the shelves are deep enough that you can double-deep the rows if you want. Doing that, in a bookshelf about 32” wide and 72” tall, it can hold about 650 DVDs; a bit over 700 if you include the top of the bookcase itself.

I’m finding that having a high-resolution 4K TV is a double-edged sword when it comes to watching anime. When files are encoded at 1080p, they look great. (I have yet to find any video natively encoded in 4K, twice the number of lines of 1080p.) When it’s at 720, it’s still okay. When it’s at 480, which is about where DVD tops out, artifacts start to show up because the video player (either computer or BD player) needs to create most of the pixels out of thin air. For much older shows, such as .avi files with only 320 lines or so, I’m really better off watching them on my laptop with its smaller display.

Anyway, reviews will come up in batches, and each month or so. Each article will feature however many shows I felt like watching in the time between. I’m not getting paid for this one way or the other, so I don’t care if any reviews are “on time” or not.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been talking about anime cons much these days, and you might wonder how many I’ve gone to lately. Or in general. Or not. If you don’t finish reading this, that’s okay; I don’t blame you. We’re all busy people these days, we all have a lot of things fighting for our time, and we all have better things to do than read what some weirdo on the internet has to say. (You might even have this bookmarked for the purpose of inducing sleep. That’s cool too.) I’m doing this because I need to, for myself.

This won’t be completely linear; there will be tangents that sprout at odd times and odd angles. And I am going to go on at length about things that could just as easily be summed up in a sentence or two. (Or “rambling”, as the ignorant masses would blandly put it. But hey, this is my venue, and I’m the one paying for this site to exist, so I think it’s fair.) It’s a chaotic pile of thoughts and memories and sentimentality that have been rattling around in my brain for too long, and the best way to get them out is to dump them all on paper or into a big text file or something. At the least, get them on the other side of my eyes. That’s how catharsis works sometimes.

Is 20 years long enough to be nostalgic and sentimental about something? I think so.

This is a story about a bunch of road trips from 2012, primarily the main one in early July. In this short-attention span age where simple texts and tweets can be dismissed as “tl;dr”, this much text is bold and daring. Yet it is a story that must be told (before I forget).

Big wall of text inside, check it out. Includes links to picture galleries (too lazy to post pictures inside this article).