And here we are for this week’s edition of Worth Reading… Sorry it’s a bit late, forgot we had to take two of the girls to the vet yesterday afternoon, then didn’t feel well when we got home. (Then went to bed early and got up gawdawful early all slept out… and am now finishing this up pre-dawn.)
Hit the jump, and let’s dive in!
Last week, I posted a link from Remy where he pondered things that might cause you quickly drop an anime. This week, Chris at Peach’s Almanac looks at the same question from the opposite angle. In the Art of First Episodes, he talks about the various techniques used in first episodes to hook the viewer.
Speaking of Remy, he’s been on quite the roll the last couple of weeks. This week, he asks a question that never occurred to me: Dessert First or Last? That is, what order to you watch a day’s anime? (Be sure and check out the comments.) Me, it varies… Sometimes light to get ready for heavy, sometimes heavy then light to recover.
I always find it interesting the rabbit holes that fans can dive down… And this week Infinite Zenith jumps down an interesting one: Determining the location of Taki’s apartment in Your Name.
Fandom and obsession oft go hand-in-hand, and that leads Kausus of Otaku Gamer Zone to ask: At what point do we become too invested? It’s all too easy to slide down that slope, and sometimes difficult to find a balance.
And finally sometimes serendipity happens… A few days ago, this video popped up in the “Watch It Again” section of my YouTube homepage:
Which prompted me to post this tweet (kinda sad that nobody agreed with me, but whatever):
Then the very next day, Doteco at Ani-Dotes publishes an interesting piece as part of undertaking the 100 Day Anime Challenge: How ‘Tabi no Tochuu’ Embodies the Soul of Spice and Wolf. As a side note, I keep thinking I might take on one of those challenges, but I need another project like I need another hole in my head.
As a final note, next week is going to ‘interesting‘, but not in a good way. We’d taken Miss Emma to the vet to get a lump checked out (a lump that had doubled in size in the few days between discovering it and getting to our vet)… and it turns out that it’s likely cancerous. She’s a good candidate for surgery, and so she’s going in on Wednesday to have it removed. Of course that’s the day my weekly post is due, but I don’t know how much concentration I’ll have… Please bear with me.
Apprentice Mages Lounge. 
Great collection of posts, as always :)
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Thanks!
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No problem :)
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Best wishes for Emma (she’s the one to the far right, the only standing one, if I read the caption right?).
Remy found an interesting topic, there. Personally, I just open everything in tabs and then click whatever tab strikes my fancy at the time. It’s fun seeing the tabs disappear. Sometimes I forget to open a tab and watch a show a day late. Sometimes I run out of time and the shows carry over to the next day. Sometimes shows get forgotten like that (it’s a pretty good filter, actually, for what to drop; you don’t have to make a conscious decision, shows just disapper).
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Yes, the one on the far right.
The only real constant in my watching is that I generally watch all of whatever is on a given service before going to the next. We watch on our TV via Roku, so we have to load a new app when we switch services. And Crunchy’s app is slo-oo-ow to load even during off-peak times.
Once in an app, we (I, since I usually have the remote) generally just work left-to-right. (My Crunchy queue is arranged in the order they air.) But I do skip stuff I don’t feel like at the moment… And sometimes those end up being drops because I just keep skipping over shows that don’t keep my convinced they’re worth the time.
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All the best to your pet!
Kind of funny that Remy coincidentally put up that post not long after I commented to you on how I wasn’t sure in what order I wanted to watch Yuki Yuna and Girls Last Tour on Fridays. I’ve tried it once each way now (haven’t seen the third episodes yet because I was out last night)…and I’m still not sure. I might just end up going back and forth as the mood takes me – that’s what I’ve always done in the past.
At what point do we become too invested? To me, it’s when a hobby stops being fun and starts becoming a source of stress or an object of compulsion instead. A hobby is supposed to be a stress reliever, to take a break with in-between your daily life. The moment where it starts turning into “work,” or starts to consume more of your time and/or money than is healthy, is the moment where you either need to take a break from it, or turn it into real work and at least get paid for what you’re investing in it.
Finally, in the spirit of your “worth reading” posts, if I may, while I know it’s more of a “worth watching” instead of reading, I’ve been a regular watcher of Arkada on YouTube for years, and he just posted an interesting video today on the topic of whether seasonal streaming is “killing” classic anime. FWIW, I tend to agree with his ultimate conclusion, but it’s an interesting “food for thought” piece nevertheless. Link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfeAtPGwBLI
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We’re crossing our fingers, she’s young and a good candidate, but piggies are fragile…
With all the heavy shows this season, it’s hard to pick an order sometime.
I disagree with some of his thoughts, because there are older shows being discussed (Euph in particular.) Erased doesn’t get as much, but part of that is because the mid-season stumble (from which it never recovered really) and the telegraphed villain took a lot out of it’s punch. Etc… etc… And even when they are being talked about, it takes time for a classic to be realized. In some cases, that can be years. Near instant and enduring classics like Bebop are extraordinarily rare. (It looms larger than it is because of the dearth of material from those years.)
The biggest stumbling blocks (IMO) don’t have anything to do with the focus on the now (which is neither new nor unique to anime). It’s the tremendous glut, both current and back catalog, and the loss/expiration of licenses leading to unavailability. For example, I can’t recommend Yama no Susume any more as S2 is no longer available.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if S2 is back by the time S3 comes out. CR’s S1 license has expired at least twice, and they keep getting it back eventually.
I know where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure if I 100% agree on the availability issue. There are definitely shows where unavailability would effectively kill them, but I’d argue those were the shows that were largely disposable to begin with. Like if Vatican Miracle Examiner disappeared from the streaming sites tomorrow, how many people would really miss it? As a counter-example, Hyouka was totally unavailable in the west until literally just a few months ago, and there were still over 400,000 MAL users who had it on their lists, either watched or planning to watch, making it one of the top 100 most popular shows on the site. If anything, the unavailability of that series only seemed to add to its mystique.
Now I do agree that it usually takes time to bestow the “classic” mantle on a series. Many shows that are popular in the moment just don’t hold up over time, either because the rewatch value isn’t there or they get surpassed by other shows that came afterward or they just age badly. But I agree with his point in that it was easier for a good show to find an audience in the past. A decade ago most new shows were 24-26 episodes and started in the spring and fall, with summer and winter largely being throwaway seasons, and they were only putting out 15-20 new shows in a season instead of 45. A good series is going to have an easier time attracting attention in that environment, when there’s both less competition and it’s on the air longer, versus now when 90% of the stuff coming out only has 3 months and 12 episodes to make an impression against 40+ other competitors, and then it’s right on to another new batch of 40+ shows.
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Thanks for sharing the post. Lots of great posts right here!
My condolences for Emma. I hope it goes well on Wednesday. Keep up updated?
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Thanks! I’ll post updates on Twitter across the day for those interested.
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