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2007: My Middle 4 Months in Anime
Four months ago, I got around to writing a post that looked back at the anime I had watched in the first third of the year. Now, I'm doing that again. All in all, I'd say I've been interested in and enjoying what I've seen in the last four months; fears that I might somehow just plain "burn out" seem to have gone into remission since I adjusted what message boards I read to step away from some people who seem unfortunately to have "burned out" somewhat themselves. That should be more or less a good thing, because I've managed to pile up a stockpile of unwatched DVDs through a number of online back-catalog sales. Getting around at last to series I hadn't quite managed to preorder might amount to insurance against the slightly less serious form of "burnout" where someone finds themselves uninterested in the anime being released now, but I remain interested in about as many new releases as I've ever been, so I guess I'm left to chip away at my "backlog" whenever I can.
I did start off the middle third of the year by rewatching a series in a new release, trying in some small way to counter the uneasy feeling that I can only rush from unseen series to unseen series, never looking back. Instead of the subtle chore of working through Zeta Gundam again just to see if I'm finally as impressed with it as everyone had informed me I ought to be, I took in the familiar appeal of Macross, complete with a new English dub. With that finished, this time around I felt a little more ready to try the experiment again with something else.
I did manage to at last complete two lengthy series I had been following for quite some time. Back in my university's anime club, I got to see the beginning of a soap opera of sorts, Hana Yori Dango. It made for an interesting change of pace from the stuff I usually seemed to watch there. When, a few years later, the series was officially licensed under a translation of its Japanese title, Boys Over Flowers, I started buying the DVDs, again intending it to be a change of pace... and then, three discs in, I ran into a single unimpressed review of the series and some comments agreeing with that on one lone site. That somehow seemed to squash my interest in continuing the series. Some time later, though, when I was just starting to take advantage of online back-catalog sales, I decided to try continuing it again. It was easy enough to just pick up where I had left off, and to keep going. Again, it was a good change of pace, although I suppose I did become conscious of how the series had a tendency to introduce new characters and set up and then resolve their personal conflicts to keep the overall story going. I also finished a space opera in the form of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, a very lengthy series I watched in unofficial "fansub" form. It was satisfying to reach its conclusion and reflect on everything that had brought the story there, but also to have a new slot open to watch something else... and then, I filled that space with another lengthy fansub of another older anime. Still, the tenth of Touch that I've watched so far has held my attention. It's another change of pace for me... which may amount to saying it's a "real-world" romance... but it also has baseball in it, although not so much as I had thought there might have been at the very beginning.
One other series I'm continuing to watch in fansub form is Double Zeta Gundam. I had said four months before, just a few episodes in, that I understood just how this particular instalment in the Gundam franchise had gained its darkly peculiar reputation, with just about everything in it played for laughs... but I may have had one crucial thing going for me, and that's that I didn't quite find Zeta Gundam, the series preceding it, as great as everyone else had. As time went by, too, and the particularly clownish antagonists faded into the background as the series began to make at least an effort to present "the horrors of war," I found myself a bit more interested again in seeing how everything would turn out.
I did manage to dip into my backlog to watch two series that I had heard had a faint similarity to each other. The first was Ranma 1/2, which was popular right when I was starting out as an anime watcher... so popular, in fact, that my university's anime club didn't show very much of it at all. I was left to notice how much fanfiction was being written about it (and later read some MSTings of some of that fanfiction), and to wonder what the original was actually like. Much later on, the release of a reduced-price collection of the beginning of the fairly long series finally gave me my chance to see. Along the way to that, though, I had also heard of a series named Fruits Basket, based like many others on a manga (comics) series. I had actually bought the first volume of the manga a while ago, thinking of it as a sort of "poor man's anime," only to not quite get into it... so when I did get the anime series collection on sale, I was left with a sort of mixture of "no sense doing things by half measures" and "does it say something about me, or the whole industry, that I might be more interested in animation that takes more time to get through than comics?" In any case, both series, as I'd been told, dealt with people who were stuck with having to change into different forms at odd prompts (in Ranma 1/2, being splashed with cold water, in Fruits Basket, with being hugged by the opposite sex). Ranma 1/2, though, seemed to make a much bigger deal of this happening when not expected and having to hide it, all played for farce. Fruits Basket was a little less obsessed with the simple transformations, dealing more with character issues... as some had said, Ranma 1/2 seemed aimed at a "shonen" (boys) audience, and Fruits Basket more at a "shojo" (girls) audience. Having heard that Ranma 1/2 goes on for a long time without really resolving anything, I could see how continuing it would be an exercise in diminishing returns, and get a sense of how fanfiction might be popular to provide whatever development anyone wants. The Fruits Basket manga continues on well beyond where the anime ends, but there seemed to have been enough of it to provide a very reasonable conclusion for me. Perhaps, too, it provided some recent reassurance that I really can watch anime that isn't twenty years old or close to it.
There was one recent anime, the short OVA series Gunbuster 2, that I never quite got around to buying in the past four months, tied into the latest scandal (or at least one of the latest) where anime fans beat up on the anime companies who can't seem to do anything right with their releases. In this case, though, the company is an actual branch of a Japanese company, just starting out also releasing things in North America... that, all of a sudden, has decided to raise the prices of their DVDs to $40, $50, or $80 MSRP, openly declaring that this is "to discourage reverse importation" back from North America to Japan, where all DVDs apparently cost that much, and has stopped including English dubs. I can live without a dub, but I'm not interested in paying a premium for that, and while those who still get those releases say that the audio and visual quality is very high, I'm afraid that's not quite worth it for me. Still, I've got enough anime to watch right now anyway.
I did have the chance to experience one particular series that I had only sort of seen over a decade ago. Just when I was joining my university's anime club, a handful of series made it back to broadcast TV here, one of which was named "Teknoman." It was interesting enough in the "powered armour mecha" vein that I kept watching it, but apparently the ratings weren't good enough for it to reach its conclusion. Then, years later, the original Japanese version Tekkaman Blade was licensed, and I got back into the series, getting a sense of just what would have been cut out of it to get it on North American TV back then. It now looked interestingly quaint in an early 1990s sort of way, different enough from a 1980s way, although there was the further fillip that the series had been an updating of a concept from the 1970s. I got to see enough of that earlier version through one of the bonus features on the DVDs to think it the very definition of cheese.
One other series I had seen on broadcast TV, but more recently, is Fullmetal Alchemist. I was interested enough in it to buy the DVDs, and now I'm watching through the Japanese-language version of the show. There are no grand surprises of what had to be cut out in this case, which provokes a few thoughts on where things have been and where they've got to. As well, instead of having to lament on how I know all the plot twists now, I find myself interested in the prefiguring of them. With more of the series still to go, I'm doing all right entering the last third of the year.
I did start off the middle third of the year by rewatching a series in a new release, trying in some small way to counter the uneasy feeling that I can only rush from unseen series to unseen series, never looking back. Instead of the subtle chore of working through Zeta Gundam again just to see if I'm finally as impressed with it as everyone had informed me I ought to be, I took in the familiar appeal of Macross, complete with a new English dub. With that finished, this time around I felt a little more ready to try the experiment again with something else.
I did manage to at last complete two lengthy series I had been following for quite some time. Back in my university's anime club, I got to see the beginning of a soap opera of sorts, Hana Yori Dango. It made for an interesting change of pace from the stuff I usually seemed to watch there. When, a few years later, the series was officially licensed under a translation of its Japanese title, Boys Over Flowers, I started buying the DVDs, again intending it to be a change of pace... and then, three discs in, I ran into a single unimpressed review of the series and some comments agreeing with that on one lone site. That somehow seemed to squash my interest in continuing the series. Some time later, though, when I was just starting to take advantage of online back-catalog sales, I decided to try continuing it again. It was easy enough to just pick up where I had left off, and to keep going. Again, it was a good change of pace, although I suppose I did become conscious of how the series had a tendency to introduce new characters and set up and then resolve their personal conflicts to keep the overall story going. I also finished a space opera in the form of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, a very lengthy series I watched in unofficial "fansub" form. It was satisfying to reach its conclusion and reflect on everything that had brought the story there, but also to have a new slot open to watch something else... and then, I filled that space with another lengthy fansub of another older anime. Still, the tenth of Touch that I've watched so far has held my attention. It's another change of pace for me... which may amount to saying it's a "real-world" romance... but it also has baseball in it, although not so much as I had thought there might have been at the very beginning.
One other series I'm continuing to watch in fansub form is Double Zeta Gundam. I had said four months before, just a few episodes in, that I understood just how this particular instalment in the Gundam franchise had gained its darkly peculiar reputation, with just about everything in it played for laughs... but I may have had one crucial thing going for me, and that's that I didn't quite find Zeta Gundam, the series preceding it, as great as everyone else had. As time went by, too, and the particularly clownish antagonists faded into the background as the series began to make at least an effort to present "the horrors of war," I found myself a bit more interested again in seeing how everything would turn out.
I did manage to dip into my backlog to watch two series that I had heard had a faint similarity to each other. The first was Ranma 1/2, which was popular right when I was starting out as an anime watcher... so popular, in fact, that my university's anime club didn't show very much of it at all. I was left to notice how much fanfiction was being written about it (and later read some MSTings of some of that fanfiction), and to wonder what the original was actually like. Much later on, the release of a reduced-price collection of the beginning of the fairly long series finally gave me my chance to see. Along the way to that, though, I had also heard of a series named Fruits Basket, based like many others on a manga (comics) series. I had actually bought the first volume of the manga a while ago, thinking of it as a sort of "poor man's anime," only to not quite get into it... so when I did get the anime series collection on sale, I was left with a sort of mixture of "no sense doing things by half measures" and "does it say something about me, or the whole industry, that I might be more interested in animation that takes more time to get through than comics?" In any case, both series, as I'd been told, dealt with people who were stuck with having to change into different forms at odd prompts (in Ranma 1/2, being splashed with cold water, in Fruits Basket, with being hugged by the opposite sex). Ranma 1/2, though, seemed to make a much bigger deal of this happening when not expected and having to hide it, all played for farce. Fruits Basket was a little less obsessed with the simple transformations, dealing more with character issues... as some had said, Ranma 1/2 seemed aimed at a "shonen" (boys) audience, and Fruits Basket more at a "shojo" (girls) audience. Having heard that Ranma 1/2 goes on for a long time without really resolving anything, I could see how continuing it would be an exercise in diminishing returns, and get a sense of how fanfiction might be popular to provide whatever development anyone wants. The Fruits Basket manga continues on well beyond where the anime ends, but there seemed to have been enough of it to provide a very reasonable conclusion for me. Perhaps, too, it provided some recent reassurance that I really can watch anime that isn't twenty years old or close to it.
There was one recent anime, the short OVA series Gunbuster 2, that I never quite got around to buying in the past four months, tied into the latest scandal (or at least one of the latest) where anime fans beat up on the anime companies who can't seem to do anything right with their releases. In this case, though, the company is an actual branch of a Japanese company, just starting out also releasing things in North America... that, all of a sudden, has decided to raise the prices of their DVDs to $40, $50, or $80 MSRP, openly declaring that this is "to discourage reverse importation" back from North America to Japan, where all DVDs apparently cost that much, and has stopped including English dubs. I can live without a dub, but I'm not interested in paying a premium for that, and while those who still get those releases say that the audio and visual quality is very high, I'm afraid that's not quite worth it for me. Still, I've got enough anime to watch right now anyway.
I did have the chance to experience one particular series that I had only sort of seen over a decade ago. Just when I was joining my university's anime club, a handful of series made it back to broadcast TV here, one of which was named "Teknoman." It was interesting enough in the "powered armour mecha" vein that I kept watching it, but apparently the ratings weren't good enough for it to reach its conclusion. Then, years later, the original Japanese version Tekkaman Blade was licensed, and I got back into the series, getting a sense of just what would have been cut out of it to get it on North American TV back then. It now looked interestingly quaint in an early 1990s sort of way, different enough from a 1980s way, although there was the further fillip that the series had been an updating of a concept from the 1970s. I got to see enough of that earlier version through one of the bonus features on the DVDs to think it the very definition of cheese.
One other series I had seen on broadcast TV, but more recently, is Fullmetal Alchemist. I was interested enough in it to buy the DVDs, and now I'm watching through the Japanese-language version of the show. There are no grand surprises of what had to be cut out in this case, which provokes a few thoughts on where things have been and where they've got to. As well, instead of having to lament on how I know all the plot twists now, I find myself interested in the prefiguring of them. With more of the series still to go, I'm doing all right entering the last third of the year.