For a long time I meticulously maintained a MAL page where I’d keep track of the obnoxious number of anime series I was watching at a time. Every season I’d watch anime I liked, anime I didn’t like (I was big on watching things ironically at the time; I’m sure I was completely insufferable), and older anime I’d heard about that I thought might fill in some of the many gaps in my viewing history. The nice thing about using the tracker was that it helped me stay on top of what I’d seen and what episodes I still needed to download and watch. And I have to say, doing things this way exposed me to a lot of anime series that I enjoyed and barely anyone else remembers, which is both very cool yet somewhat lonely at the same time.
When legal anime streaming started to overtake my consumption of downloaded media, I slowly gave up on maintaining the tracker. Why waste all that time logging and scoring series when the various websites (Crunchyroll, then others) could keep track of the episodes I’d seen on my behalf? Sure, the internet points were nice, but aging seemed to take away a lot of the motivation I had to compare my anime fandom status to others’. At some point I forgot about MAL all together and moved on to another prettier platform (Kitsu) that never seemed to take off and which I barely updated except in random fits and starts when I remembered it existed. I never used it to keep track of my viewing list contemporaneously, though.
Around 2014-15 I was going through a lot of personal stuff, and anime was a hobby of mine that was barely hanging on by a thread, priority-wise. I faked my way through a few anime conventions around that time, trying to sound educated about a bunch of anime series that my mind and soul weren’t particularly focused on (I still worry about people seeing me during that time and losing respect for me as the current-anime “expert” I had been attempting to be within the local geek fandom). I did stumble through, somehow; I started writing again once I figured out how WordPress worked (although to be honest the WordPress text editor keeps getting more and more ridiculous, so I get the opportunity to re-learn it every time there’s a major update) and I recaptured my interest in currently-airing anime that I’d let fall to the wayside.
Over the years I’ve realized that my motivation for writing and watching anime is deeply influenced by my emotional state. Things like depression and trauma affect us all in different ways, but for me these things are like dementors that siphon away any desire I might have to do anything resembling a hobby. This year has been a big one for emotional ups and downs – I experienced a pregnancy loss, then my clinic shut down soon afterward due to the pandemic, so I was left to stew in my own emotions for several weeks. Then, my husband and I decided to buy a house(!) in this environment (our lease was going to be up soon anyway, and we’d planned for this for a year at least, but the timing ended up being much more stressful than we could have anticipated). Both he and I are secure in our jobs, and I can do a lot of work from home, so I’m lucky not to have to deal with the added stresses of interacting with random people in large groups, but with things as they are, many of the large events we’d been planning for were canceled or postponed. I’ve literally spent multiple days just not leaving our apartment at all. It would be the perfect time for watching anime… except that I just haven’t felt like it.
The anime club I belong to moved its meetings online, and there’s a place in the club Discord server where people post their anime lists and ask for recommendations from others. And, as is usually the case, it was ultimately my FOMO that got me to update my MAL list to be roughly current (so that I felt better about participating). And it was seeing what I considered a pitiful number of completed anime series on my list that got me to sit down and watch some anime again. I guess that need to earn internet points never really goes away, does it?
The way that COVID-19 has struck down or postponed so many productions this season has actually made me too upset to start any of them. No, seriously, for the past several weeks I’ve been attempting to watch and write about first episodes, and with each attempt I start to get extremely anxious. I’m reminded of a time several years ago where a friend asked me to take an online food science class with them, and some of the pre-work involved a refresher on certain math and chemistry concepts – trying to complete the exercises gave me panic attacks. I’m sure I must have hurt that person’s feelings once I dropped out of the class, but hey; they also were never very keen on trying to understand my mental illness, so I suppose we’re even now. In any case, it’s the same tightness in my chest and impulse to cry that overwhelms me whenever I’m having an anxiety episode, so despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever (does it ever?) I’m leaving the Spring anime season be for now.
Instead, I’ve been trying to whittle down all the incomplete series on my MAL profile (as well as trying not to feel too bad about dropping series that I probably will never finish). As much as I thought that keeping track of my anime viewing habits episode-by-episode was tedious and unnecessary, I’m finding that doing so helps keep me accountable and provides me with a sense of accomplishment. I’m hoping that looking back will give me some material to write about until I’m able to look forward again.