How deep into the anime fandom would you say you’ve delved? If I really push it, I can trace my fandom back to somewhere in the mid 1990’s, when Sailor Moon and Akira were first popular in the US, and perhaps even earlier to when a friend of mine commented that my character doodles looked like “Japanese cartoons” – it turned out it was mimicking some of the designs from one of several anime that had been wiped of Japanese culture for the consumption of American kids on Nickelodeon. While I know that anime had a minor presence in the West even prior to that, the era of anime alongside Saturday morning cartoons really marked a big jump in its fandom cache. I don’t say all this to imply that I’m somehow “more” of an anime fan than any particular person, I just want to point out that I have the benefit of time and exposure to a lot of series that have since become much less available to newer fans.
Month: March 2020
Well, so I guess the title might be a bit deceiving. For a lot of people, anime is an aspect of their escapism, a way to forget the problems of the real world in favor of plunging headfirst into something funny and entertaining. For me, fiction is a way to help myself navigate very real feelings in a way that’s relatively safe. Still, with what’s going on out in the real world lately, sometimes I’m just in the mood for some goofy bullsh**t or some material that doesn’t mean to chip away at my fragile emotional state, and anime definitely has that covered too. Here are a few of my suggestions for shows that are just entertaining and don’t necessarily require anything additional from the viewer.
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Strange Times Indeed
Hi readers, how have you been holding up? I hope everyone out there is able to stay healthy and that any quarantines, work-from-home measures, or shelter-in-place orders aren’t getting you down too much. In Minnesota, today marks the first day of a couple of weeks of enforced shelter-in-place, with leeway for necessary activities like going to the pharmacy or shopping for groceries. Restaurants with delivery or drive-through options are also operating. People are still allowed to “be in nature,” meaning we can walk outside and in local parks, which my husband and I have taken advantage of a few times already since we’re both now working from home. As much as I like being able to roll out of bed and log in to do my job, though, the social isolation and relative lack of bodily movement required of sitting at my kitchen table and tapping away at my laptop definitely has its downsides. Thank goodness for Nintendo and Animal Crossing, as I still get a chance to interact with my friends that way.
You’d think this would be a great time to catch up on some anime, and for many folks I think that this is the case. The anime club I attend has gone online-only for the time being (thank goodness for streaming apps!), so I’ve gotten a little bit through that venue. I was all ready to put together a schedule and indulge, but as you might have guessed from the lack of updates here, I ran into some (emotional) road blocks that made it difficult to want to do anything, much less consume anime and talk about it.