the anime & Japan blog

An anime based on a visual novel with adult con­nota­tions revolves around, guess it, a high­school stu­dent, who needs to run for stu­dent pres­id­ent! How thrill­ingly amaz­ing. But you got me, right? You have seen through my elab­or­ate plan. Today is April’s Fools day, and I am sud­denly blog­ging, about anime. It couldn’t be any less obvi­ous! This anime, picked from Scamp’s Sum­mer 2012 chart because of its most pleas­ant illus­tra­tion image, is just a decoy.

My con­nec­tion to anime has hit the sack, died of star­va­tion and rot­ted to the bones in the last year. My path begun with Hayao Miyazaki, jogged into sea­sonal mara­thon­ing and “keep­ing up” with every pos­sibly anime of the sea­son and con­sid­er­ing every­one who didn’t do that “uncool”, and now this path ends. On my way, I encountered truly good things. Ghost In The Shell being one of them, or the most sweet Kam­is­ama Kazoku. But as the num­ber of anime I’ve seen grew, the pat­terns became more and more obvi­ous. It has become bor­ing and dull, because your aver­age new anime show is just an nth copy of an older anime.

Of course every work of art is based on and inspired by a pre­vi­ous work of art. There is no “true ori­gin­al­ity” per se. But by an odd coin­cid­ence, other medi­ums show a higher effort to shit ratio. That ratio is not high, don’t take me wrong. When I enter a book shop, I fight the urge to leave the book shop, because dozens of Stephanie Mey­ers, were­wolves and dragons stare at me from the book shelves. I prob­ably don’t even have to men­tion mod­ern Hol­ly­wood. But nev­er­the­less, I can think of a very large list of books worth read­ing and films worth watch­ing. The list of anime in this case, is rather small. Yes, I cer­tainly didn’t watch it all. I don’t claim I did. And you could argue that anime is younger, and did not have the time to accu­mu­late the same ratio. I don’t know. I hon­estly don’t. But by my sub­ject­ive per­cep­tion, this medium is no longer part of my daily life.

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God­speed, anime community.

Eugen out.

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Find me elsewhere:

• Zeon Fed­er­ated HQ / B(r|l)og
• The Col­or­less
• Twit­ter