Checkout Surprise
Apr. 6th, 2022 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerGoing to the grocery store remains my oft-only outing of the week beyond travelling to work. An occasional variation on that is to go to an older grocery store where there isn’t as much room in the aisles (although it was left standing after the small shopping mall at the nearest major intersection to me was torn down, with much of the land opened by that now filled by a multi-floor self-storage facility). One day I was preparing to check out from those unusual surroundings when, in a passing glance at the magazine racks at the checkout aisle, all of a sudden I was looking at a cover with a number of anime characters on it, explained as a guide to manga (in big letters) and anime (in small letters).
I’ll admit my reactions were jumbled. Having lived through the “anime and manga bust of the end of the 2000s,” I can come up with trying-to-joke “well, this proves it’s unsustainably popular again” thoughts every so often. If “surely everyone would love this thing too!” might be over-optimistic, there’s some real danger in “those who don’t like this enough, or not the way I do, shouldn’t get involved.” The first sense of the characters on the cover coming from titles that have been around for years did give a sense of “there’s a lot more to take in about this ever-churning industry than this magazine might manage,” but I do have to admit I couldn’t quite recognize one of the characters. In the end I left the grocery store without grabbing a copy, but it did keep sticking in my mind.
I was just starting to wonder about going back to the same store the next week when I realised I’d missed ordering one particular volume of manga from the notable area comics store I often patronize online these days. Taking a chance on going to the city book store given I now have a stock of N95 dust respirators came to mind, and when I was there I thought to walk by the magazine racks. The guide I’d seen at the grocery store happened to be there. Had I seen it there first I might have just shrugged it off, but now the thought of seeing what was in it was inescapable even if there did seem the certain risk of being out for “a cheap hit of misplaced superiority.” I bought the magazine as well, then left it sitting around for a while before handling it again (and in that time got to thinking I ought to cut my outings back down again as far as they’ll go for the foreseeable future).
A part of me seems to have wound up too forgiving to enumerate “moments where the perpectives seemed limited,” although I did raise an eyebrow at a comment early on that sports anime “made its debut in 1983.” I haven’t seen Captain Tsubasa to know just what it did, but I haven’t seen 1968’s Star of the Giants either for all that I can enthuse about (late) 1969’s Attack No. 1 because someone went to the lengths of “fansubbing” it. Later on, noticing Hachiman Hikigaya from My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong, as I Expected in a sample list of characters seemed about the most “obscure moment” I happened to know about myself, even if the characters being ordered from A to Z left me thinking “and just how would their names be ordered in Japanese itself?” Supposing I know more than this guide doesn’t mean I know everything, but I did also keep contemplating the high school years when a certain number of people really get into anime and how for me, “back then,” I only went from “still remembering Robotech” to “barely aware animation from Japan was being brought over here, if still unaware of where to find it myself.” Somebody somewhere might yet happen to learn something from even unlikely resources.
I’ll admit my reactions were jumbled. Having lived through the “anime and manga bust of the end of the 2000s,” I can come up with trying-to-joke “well, this proves it’s unsustainably popular again” thoughts every so often. If “surely everyone would love this thing too!” might be over-optimistic, there’s some real danger in “those who don’t like this enough, or not the way I do, shouldn’t get involved.” The first sense of the characters on the cover coming from titles that have been around for years did give a sense of “there’s a lot more to take in about this ever-churning industry than this magazine might manage,” but I do have to admit I couldn’t quite recognize one of the characters. In the end I left the grocery store without grabbing a copy, but it did keep sticking in my mind.
I was just starting to wonder about going back to the same store the next week when I realised I’d missed ordering one particular volume of manga from the notable area comics store I often patronize online these days. Taking a chance on going to the city book store given I now have a stock of N95 dust respirators came to mind, and when I was there I thought to walk by the magazine racks. The guide I’d seen at the grocery store happened to be there. Had I seen it there first I might have just shrugged it off, but now the thought of seeing what was in it was inescapable even if there did seem the certain risk of being out for “a cheap hit of misplaced superiority.” I bought the magazine as well, then left it sitting around for a while before handling it again (and in that time got to thinking I ought to cut my outings back down again as far as they’ll go for the foreseeable future).
A part of me seems to have wound up too forgiving to enumerate “moments where the perpectives seemed limited,” although I did raise an eyebrow at a comment early on that sports anime “made its debut in 1983.” I haven’t seen Captain Tsubasa to know just what it did, but I haven’t seen 1968’s Star of the Giants either for all that I can enthuse about (late) 1969’s Attack No. 1 because someone went to the lengths of “fansubbing” it. Later on, noticing Hachiman Hikigaya from My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong, as I Expected in a sample list of characters seemed about the most “obscure moment” I happened to know about myself, even if the characters being ordered from A to Z left me thinking “and just how would their names be ordered in Japanese itself?” Supposing I know more than this guide doesn’t mean I know everything, but I did also keep contemplating the high school years when a certain number of people really get into anime and how for me, “back then,” I only went from “still remembering Robotech” to “barely aware animation from Japan was being brought over here, if still unaware of where to find it myself.” Somebody somewhere might yet happen to learn something from even unlikely resources.