“How do you watch so much anime?” – Everyone, to me.
I’ve been an anime fan for over twenty years now. When I was just a little chibi fan, all I could do stoke my fandom flame, other than doodle anime characters in the margins of every notebook, was to wake up early before school to catch Sailor Moon on local TV and hope that the local Blockbuster might stock a few random OVA series. It was easy to stay up-to-date on the fandom, even without the benefit of online anime blogs or news outlets; when you could count the number of “big” releases on two hands, there wasn’t a lot of deep discussion to be had. If it wasn’t on TV or sitting precariously on the shelf with the other “cartoons,” it was unlikely that most fans (including my gangly teenage self) would know to even look for it.
Times have obviously changed, with each new season unleashing an onslaught of 40-50 new anime to watch and many of them available to us within a fairly short time period (some with an English dub option!). There was a time, back in the fansub-heavy days of the mid-2000’s that I tried to sample every single anime that was released (at least those that amateur groups deemed worthy to translate). There were fewer series coming out back then, but it was still a huge undertaking. I felt like I was doing anime fandom some sort of service, however minor, since I had few qualms about where and how I was getting my review material.
I eventually reached a point in my life where all that watching, writing, and reviewing became impossible due to the time investment and conflict with my day job. I’ve known people to have gotten away with watching things at work, or doing writing at their desks on a regular basis, but I’m not really in a position to do that – and I like my job, so I’d rather not jeopardize it! There are also substantially more series to get through now than in during the bust years around 2009-2011, and more still are available in easy-to-obtain official forms. About once a year I make an attempt to go comprehensive again and am quickly jerked back to reality, because I’m no longer unique in my coverage methods and I’m an unpaid staff of one. I also have a household and a relationship to nurture, and I think even a very passionate hobby shouldn’t take the place of those things.
This is all a very roundabout way of saying that I don’t feel like I really watch all that much anime – at least not as much as maybe I would like to, if I lived in a world where I had fewer other responsibilities. Yet friends, family members, and people I meet at conventions have all remarked to me in recent years that I watch so much anime and they don’t know how I make the time for it. I started to think about it, and came up with a few insights.
I have a daily commute of about 45-50 minutes each way.
I’m lucky enough to live in a fairly urban area, and I take public transportation to go to work so I don’t have to pay out the nose for parking. That provides me with at least an hour-and-a-half each day where I can just chill, read a book, or watch anime on my phone. I pay a decent amount of money for an unlimited data plan and live in an area with good coverage so I can stream anime every day that I commute by bus. 50 minutes is just about two episodes of anime, so I can get through a 1-cour series in 3-4 days if something unusual doesn’t happen or I don’t choose to drive my car instead. I also subscribe to pretty much every streaming service that does anime simulcasts, so I rarely exhaust my queue.
These are options I’m privileged to have and make it really easy to check out a lot of anime in a short period of time. If I get bored of one series, I can check into another app and watch something else. And watching anime on the bus has the added bonus of keeping other people from trying to harass me during my commute; sit down, headphones in, bye bye outside world!
I don’t consume a lot of other media.
I don’t consider myself a boring person (others may beg to differ) and I have several hobbies that aren’t related to Japanese animation. I like to cook and do the majority of the meal prep at home. I like to edit video. I like reading manga and playing video games. But when it comes to consuming media, anime is far and away the bulk of what crosses my path. There are quite a few Western TV series and movies that sound interesting to me, and I get a chance to see a few of them here and there, but most of the time I set aside for watching things goes towards watching anime, discussing anime, or attending and providing programming at anime conventions.
I’m guessing that most people who comment on the amount of anime I watch probably just prioritize their time in ways that are more suited to the types of things they like to do. They probably see more movies, watch more TV, do things outdoors, or spend their free time doing any number of other things that aren’t watching anime. And that’s great too!
I will acknowledge that watching and reading more things outside of my comfort zone would likely make me into a more well-rounded consumer and probably a better writer. It’s something that I think about fairly frequently. But as a human being I’ve chosen to quit beating myself up over it and to instead just enjoy what I choose to do.
I am not a “plot enthusiast.”
This might seem like a strange thing to say, since anime is mostly serialized entertainment, and that type of entertainment is all about the plot, right? There are a lot of blogs and bloggers that focus on discussing anime series episode-by-episode, detailing what happened, how it happened, who did what, and speculating about what might happen in upcoming installments. I enjoy reading these sometimes, but when I’ve tried to write that way in the past it eventually became a huge chore. I just don’t have that much to say about a show from week-to-week. This might paint me as more of a passive consumer, but really I just prefer to take each series as its own whole. I like to feel out its themes, connect with its characters’ motivations, and allow the creators to take me where they want to go (rather than where I think they ought to be going). I’ve found this to be a more fulfilling way for me to watch anime, and because of it I spend less time worrying about minutiae as I watch.
The downside is that I occasionally overlook details that others find to be obvious, but to me that sort of bookclub-style analysis is more suited to a second watch. Great series are always worth another viewing down the line, and by that time I’m usually watching with friends and my enjoyment is even greater because of it.
I don’t waste time hate-watching things that will make me angry (most of the time).
When I was an itty-bitty fan, all anime fell under this huge umbrella of “things I want to watch.” Like I said before, there wasn’t that much around to sift through, and my standards as a young fan weren’t very strict. But as with all people, more familiarity with the entertainment, as well as a much wider selection, allowed me to hone in on the things that brought me joy. As I’ve grown I’ve also become more conscious of things like sexism, racism, and other prejudices present within media, and this has greatly affected my tolerance of certain types of entertainment. I’ve gotten very good at identifying things that I know are not going to be worth my time and energy to deal with, so I usually avoid them. I do appreciate analysis of the wrongs being committed by trashy anime, I just rarely have the energy to be the person providing that commentary.
That isn’t to say that I never hate-watch something; generally there’s one thing a year or so that everyone wants me to watch that I know is probably not for me, and at some point I bow to the pressure just to get it out of my system and have the ability to discuss it if it comes up in conversation. But while I spent a lot of my early reviewing career watching things I didn’t like and ranting about them on the internet, In more recent years I decided that I would rather put effort into making time for things from which I expect to get some positive emotional return.
I don’t wait around for other people.
This is probably the point which will come across as the most rude, but believe me when I don’t mean it that way.
I used to belong to more anime viewing groups, including an anime club (which I actually still attend most of the time), as well as a couple of informal groups of friends who would get together to watch anime together and have dinner. Once we chose something to watch, I’d generally avoid watching ahead. This was great for the purposes of enjoying the show with others in real time, but not so great for the purposes of watching anime at a pace to keep up with the seasonal releases. I find that my husband, the person with whom I watch the most anime, also has drastically different viewing habits than I do. This caused some problems for me because I didn’t want to watch things ahead of him, but his tolerance for marathoning several episodes of something in a row is drastically different than my own. Now I’ve chosen to be okay with watching anime on my own and then re-watching it with others, rather than sweating about avoiding spoilers and missing out on internet discussion. It’s so much more difficult getting behind on watching something and then to have to catch up again than it is to keep pace with watching a series in real time (life pro-tip: that goes for responsibilities other than watching anime, too).
I let others do some of the dirty work.
One piece of advice I give to people is to read a lot of reviews and find some reviewers whose opinions you feel you can trust. You don’t always have to agree with them, but you should be able to discern from the things that they write whether or not you’re likely to enjoy something. I read a lot of anime news, opinions, and reviews. I read some other blogs, including those written by individuals whose opinions are different from my own in a lot of ways. I’ve worked to become familiar with some anime directors, staff, and studios, so that I can follow and anticipate their work. I take time to be informed, which lets me narrow down the list of anime I might want to try.
It’s also convenient that most large anime news outlets produce seasonal previews of one form or another. I used to do this for myself in the past, but as just one person it’s difficult to match the speed and comprehensiveness of a website with multiple writers who have time built into their day to preview series as they’re released. If I can go to a few different websites and see opinions from dozens of writers, that helps me to narrow down my planned viewing each season. And with many people doing weekly recap discussions, I can help hone my plan of attack even further.
But still…
Believe it or not, despite watching hours upon hours of anime, I still don’t always get around to watching everything I would like to in a timely manner (or at all). Even with all the aforementioned tools at my disposal, there are still anime series that fly under my radar or end up on the back burner until some vague future time where I have a chance to “catch up” (LOL, sure). A symptom of the current anime boom is that there are simply too many anime series, period, being created for one person to realistically watch, and even the number of very-good-to-excellent series are beyond the average person’s ability to consume in a reasonable manner. It’s not a bad problem to have, to be honest, and definitely not one I would have expected as a teenager in a fandom that nobody cared about at the time. There will always be anime that I never see, films and series that are compelling and brilliant that will never quite cross my path. It’s both wonderful and frustrating, but it’s the world we live in, and I’m actually sort of okay with it.
So there you have it. I’m not special when it comes to watching anime, but I have my system and it works for me. How about you? What do you do to help maximize your anime-watching potential. Let me know in the comments!