Poking around on some of the anime blogs that I view from time to time, I see that we’re heading into a new season of shows soon. It occurred to me that I hadn’t picked up any of the Fall 2007 series. Why was that? In the interest of concision: they sucked.
Maybe they didn’t suck, but they certainly weren’t right for me. Over the past couple of years, the slice-of-life school comedy and endless-string-of-misunderstandings-romance clichés have really worn thin for me. It really doesn’t matter to me if they’ve got some tsundere, yandere, deredere, moeblob, whatever in the show. It’s about as appealing to me as all those prime-time broadcast sitcoms that I never watch either. This meant that shows like Bamboo Blade, Sketchbook, Myself; Yourself, Goshuushou-sama, Clannad, Kimikiss, and whever the heck else people were watching for the past couple of months never had a shot. Didn’t even merit a single viewing and nothing anybody posted in their blogs tempted me to think otherwise.
I gave Ghost Hound a fighting chance, by which I mean I labored through the first couple episodes. There were no characters that appealed to me, nothing about the premise that intrigued me. Having recently seen Ghost Hunt and Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, I’ve got high standards for spooky/creepy content these days. Sorry.
I probably would have watched the second season of Genshiken if it weren’t for the pyschic damage that a couple of episodes of Lucky Star inflicted on me a few months back. Anime geeks making shows about anime geeks brings disturbingly-pathetic images to mind. It was like the main character from NHK Ni Youkoso had made a cartoon while drinking himself to a stupor, crying himself to sleep, and masturbating. It’s a genre niche I’ll have to stay away from for a while.
Gundam 00 I skipped because it’s Gundam. Bandai, you’ve tricked me into watching your crap years ago, but never again! I’ve learned my lesson.
Shakugan no Shana is one of those shows that I watched at first, but just couldn’t get behind. The premise was interesting, but the execution put me off about six episodes into the first season. Watching the second season just wouldn’t have made any sense.
I may go back and check out Rental Magica at some point, and Dragonaut didn’t put me off as much as I figured it would have; I just never made the time for it. The Winter 2008 season isn’t looking too hot at this point, either, but at least there should be some more Sayounara Zetsubou Sensei coming in.
Anime is so hard to get into at times because there is not an easy way to get it. Hunting down for a whole series on DVD to have it suck is not cool, watching it online or subbed ticks hardcore otaku off… I sometimes feel like it is my doomed hobbie.
I ease the pain a bit by not looking for an entire series at a time, but the first episode or two instead. If a show can hook me in during the first couple episodes, I’ll go to the effort of getting a few more, and so forth. It helps to have friends and coworkers with slightly different taste, also, as they can pick up titles that you might not have been interested in at first glance. Alas, that didn’t pan out for me this season.