This is the token “I’m not dead” post, I guess – I mean, I’ve gone almost two weeks here without an update. I’ve been captured by the Dread Spectre of Video Games, I’m afraid. I’m making something of a concerted effort to plow through a good chunk of my backlog, and, frankly, it’s a little hard to find time to watch anime, let alone write about it, when you waste a good twenty-six hours of your weekend playing Ar Tonelico II (whilst listening to old instalments of AWO, admittly).
And, good lord, the English versioning on that game is even worse than I’d imagined. I’d heard about the whole Raki crash-bug thing (indeed, that’s where I left the game last night – I’ve not been pro-active enough in my IPD collection thus far to waste her quickly enough to proceed), but the text is truly horrific. I mean, there’s a frequently recurring line of dialogue that’s been left completely untranslated. I have no idea how anyone could possibly have missed that, but even then, an unreasonably large amount of the dialogue that made it into the game is in broken English anyway.
But that’s kind of old news, I guess. The Os fuelled brouhaha about fandom burnout, “moving on” and the like seems like old news as well, really. Not so much that it all occurred last week, rather that it’s one of those topics that crops up cyclically. I’m sure it’s brethren “This season sucks!” will come along in short order as well, though I think we may well skip “Anime-blog Saturation” this year.
I suppose the posts about the attitude of those who’ve stopped following the stuff is somewhat new, even if it mostly ends up going to the same place. Nothing against Hung here, mind – I remember Hung. Nice guy. I appeared on some podcast thing he used to do a couple of times and probably said some embarrassing things which weren’t entirely true. I seem to remember he wanted someone on with a British accent and got freaked out by my Northern drawl. Fun times.
I think the larger point here is that, I admit, I do tend to get weirded out by statements like the one that Hung made. I think it’s less the fact that he’s stopped watching the stuff (though, after sixteen years in fandom, I find that a curious concept), more the implication of watching anime being such a binary concept – the fact that so many people consider it less a pastime than a hobby, I suppose. It makes me wonder if altogether too many people take this stuff entirely the wrong way, entirely too seriously. The Japanese may want to foster the impression that anime is something you need to get entirely obsessed as a way to promote merchandise sales (something that I’m far from immune to myself), but ultimately, it’s really just another form of entertainment.
Yet a lot of people seem entirely unable to take it that way, and, really, a few years of thinking about nothing but anime the way many of these people do is going to wear on the average person. On my part, whilst I don’t tend to buy much in the way of DVD content which isn’t anime, I do watch an awful lot of US and UK TV. I read a lot of books (and not just light novel translations). I’ve already mentioned that I play a crap-ton of videogames. I have a healthy, balanced entertainment diet, which may well explain my lack of burn-out.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I’ve not got any conclusions or points, and I’m really just writing this post for the sake of posting something, with little thought put into it before hand. I suppose that, without going through the process of losing interest and ceasing to follow anime, it’s not really something I can make any genuine statements about – my interest may ebb and flow, but ultimately I have no experience from which to draw conclusions. Again, it’s really just the fact that casual anime viewers seem to exist in such a minority these days – people either seem to watch far too much of the stuff, or none at all. Although that’s probably a false, internet-born perspective on the matter.
It seems kind of odd for me to be posting something on this subject when I’ve not posted anything here for a fortnight, though. I kind of hate to fall back on something I mentioned with derision earlier in this very post, but honestly, it’s kind of hard to get excited about anime when there’s nothing airing that gets me excited beyond Durarara!, nor is there anything especially worthwhile hitting DVD at the moment. Right now, the thing I’ve actually getting most excited about is remembering that the Patlabor movies exist (thanks AWO!). I ordered the hell out of those, and I’m really freaking excited to watch the first movie again for the first time in about ten years.
I have to admit, though, I fully intend to buy less anime this year. I’ve been acquiring above my rate of consumption for some time now – I’ve still got Geneon releases lying around in shrink-wrap – and I’m in desperate need to rebalancing.