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Freezer Surprise
Facing the recurring if ordinary question of what to get for dinner at the grocery store, I thought that since it had cooled down a bit overnight I could have the oven on to cook a frozen pizza. Once I’d picked one of them I continued down the freezer aisle to the merely pizza-like objects, and there I felt some surprise. Packages of “Pizza Pops” sported the Crunchyroll mascot girl and advertised a free trial offer to the streaming service.
Despite my surprise it didn’t take long to imagine being told the peculiar length of time I’ve stayed interested in anime for was working against me once again, that the days when “drawn entertainment from Japan” was in a corner of comic book shops themselves distanced from the mainstream or even on a small portion of a video store shelf are long gone and the stuff is an unsurprising part of our landscape. Even so, I was also thinking a bit of days not quite as far gone, when fans would tell each other “everyone” had at least been exposed to anime and there was no real chance of things getting any bigger than they were, and of times just a few years later when those left in the rubble were lamenting how tastes in Japan had shifted, if not the way things had in comic book shops, then still to something that couldn’t appeal to “sane outsiders” any more. In any case, I reminded myself that those who’d eat “Pizza Pops” could very well overlap with the target demographic for anime. That did, though, get me wondering again about whether not having managed to see the first “anime as anime” video releases when I was in high school, it having been a different time back then, had somehow inoculated me against “no longer being the same age as the typical anime character.”
Despite my surprise it didn’t take long to imagine being told the peculiar length of time I’ve stayed interested in anime for was working against me once again, that the days when “drawn entertainment from Japan” was in a corner of comic book shops themselves distanced from the mainstream or even on a small portion of a video store shelf are long gone and the stuff is an unsurprising part of our landscape. Even so, I was also thinking a bit of days not quite as far gone, when fans would tell each other “everyone” had at least been exposed to anime and there was no real chance of things getting any bigger than they were, and of times just a few years later when those left in the rubble were lamenting how tastes in Japan had shifted, if not the way things had in comic book shops, then still to something that couldn’t appeal to “sane outsiders” any more. In any case, I reminded myself that those who’d eat “Pizza Pops” could very well overlap with the target demographic for anime. That did, though, get me wondering again about whether not having managed to see the first “anime as anime” video releases when I was in high school, it having been a different time back then, had somehow inoculated me against “no longer being the same age as the typical anime character.”