ITT: ross gets mad about animes

Hopefully now the arguments will happen here, and the Halo: Legends thread won't need to get locked (of course, arguments as to why it will or won't be terrible are fine, arguments about anime in general are the problem).

Before I get into things, I should probably explain a few things.

I've always been a bit obsessive over certain things. I actually have a legit case of Asperger's (diagnosed by a real shrink!), and although it's quite mild, it does show in that I hate talking to strangers off the net and I fixate entirely on things to the point where I can tell you everything about that subject, and nothing about anything else. I only found out recently; considering that finding out has made no impact on my behaviour or my personality, I'm not keen on using it as an excuse or treating it as a handicap like most self-diagnosed poser fuckwits like to. I embrace its advantages (I argue like a crazy motherfucker) and don't really care if I suck socially. It's all cool with me, there's nothing I can do about it and there's nothing I want to do about it.

I've loved warplanes since I was a kid, probably something to do with growing up in the UK. Dad took me to just about every single airshow and every single air museum within a 50-mile radius of where we lived. I can rattle off design specifications, performance data, variants, and what have you of a whole shitload of WWII aircraft from memory. Yeah. I love planes. I'm not sure whether that's the obsession symptom coming out to play or what, but I can draw a Spitfire pretty much rivet-for-rivet and I can list off the maximum level speeds for about half of the production variants to within a couple of miles per hour (fuck metric for aviation).

Now, let's move onto everyday life. In my room at Newcastle (I don't have the space here), I had a single, large framed print of an RAAF Hercules on my wall. It was a gift from a friend of the family. I also had a framed set of Citroen collector cards, another present (my car is a Citroen and I basically helped dad rebuild the engine when it finally broke down hardcore). If you ask me about WWII, I'll blather on for hours without stopping for breath, but I don't often go around looking for an excuse to talk about it and I don't go around starting threads on forums for fellow history nerds to jerk each other off in. I've never been one for trends. I never really got into Pokemon or FF or any of those franchises. The only things I did were usually to give me something to do (my mates all had a Magic: The Gathering phase, so I bought myself a deck so I'd have something to do; they had a Runescape phase, so I joined to give myself something to do - this was before I really got into gaming).

Along comes anime. Suddenly, people who are older than me, people who are supposed to be at least a little bit mature, are obsessing over preteen girls and plastering every available inch of their bedroom with posters and figurines. They're looking at me like I'm some kind of freak for saying "I honestly don't find anime appealing. I don't watch it, and I don't want to." For every one sensible person I meet who can watch anime without basing their entire life around it, it seems another five who can't come along. I finally get told what this 'hentai' stuff is that people are drooling buckets over while discussing, and I think to myself, would they honestly feel the same if it wasn't for anime, or more specifically the way anime seems to be the latest cool thing? Would they still find fictional, cartoony preteen girls more interesting than real women? I think long and hard about this. No. Probably not, once they're past the age of about five or ten. Yet here I am, being blasted for questioning the logic of this and daring to speak out about it.

I don't hate anime. I don't hate anime fans, per se. I just find it exceptionally odd and exceptionally confusing as to why people obsess over it so much, for no readily apparent reason. I've heard things like "I'm just interested in Japanese culture" or "I like the animation style", but it seems that more people are obsessed with individual characters or animes than anything else.

If any of you have any reasons you wouldn't mind sharing, I'm genuinely interested. I hate not understanding things, and how anime has come along in the last twenty years or so and just about taken over has me completely vexed.

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Originally Posted by rossmum

:irrelevant life story:

Along comes anime. Suddenly, 1.people who are older than me, people who are supposed to be at least a little bit mature, are obsessing over preteen girls and plastering every available inch of their bedroom with posters and figurines. They're looking at me like I'm some kind of freak for saying "I honestly don't find anime appealing. I don't watch it, and I don't want to." 2.For every one sensible person I meet who can watch anime without basing their entire life around it, it seems another five who can't come along. 3.I finally get told what this 'hentai' stuff is that people are drooling buckets over while discussing, and I think to myself, would they honestly feel the same if it wasn't for anime, or more specifically the way anime seems to be the latest cool thing? Would they still find fictional, cartoony preteen girls more interesting than real women? I think long and hard about this. No. Probably not, once they're past the age of about five or ten. Yet here I am, being blasted for questioning the logic of this and daring to speak out about it.

I don't hate anime. I don't hate anime fans, per se. 4.I just find it exceptionally odd and exceptionally confusing as to why people obsess over it so much, for no readily apparent reason. I've heard things like "I'm just interested in Japanese culture" or "I like the animation style", but it seems that more people are obsessed with individual characters or animes than anything else.

5.If any of you have any reasons you wouldn't mind sharing, I'm genuinely interested. I hate not understanding things, and how anime has come along in the last twenty years or so and just about taken over has me completely vexed.

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1. Obsessive nerds crop up with every medium from Videogames to Celebrities to Comedians to Airplanes. :downs:
2. Perhaps (and I've raised/seen this point rased so many times at you and never see a decent counter) a lot of the people you don't know like anime... like anime! Obviously you're going to know the obsessive nerd loooooves his aimies, but the quiet afficionado will likely be just that; quiet about it. Not ramming it down your throat. invisible to you.
3. Some wouldn't, some would. Again, it's the art style which does it for some people where as others just want something more interesting to fap over than "OH FUCK YES *TEETHBREATHE*, CUM ALL OVER MY BIG TITTIES FUCK ME YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAAH!!" or humans with visual imperfections. It doesn't have to be logical man, it's a fetish. People get off to feet ffs (something I don't understand but hey, to each his own and just keep it to yourself).
4. Again, you get that happening with all sorts of media. People really get into shit (usually reading too much into it) and look for heaps of depth when it really isn't there (the shit they make you write in highschool english over stuff like Shakespear is a good example)
5. Wapanese culture, circlejerking-elitest nerds, kids who want to seem cool/counterculture, people hearing about some "cool new show" and checking it out, the usual way shit gets popular.

some anime's okay. when it comes to excessive use of oversized sweat drops and big eyes and typical #-shaped popping veins, it gets a bit annoying.

Looks like somebody's mad about animes :realsmug:

Alright, this is how and why I'm an anime fan.

Yearssss ago, when I was a little kid, I was introduced to anime. I started out (like most other people here) watching Toonami. On Toonami they had all sorts of anime; most introduced new concepts and such that were quite different from what you'd see in western cartoons. This intrigued me. At this point, I really wasn't able to tell "good" movies/shows from "bad" ones, so I just ended up watching whatever was on TV. If an anime was on TV, I'd most likely switch to it. Although, at this time, I really didn't find anime to be amazing or anything, I found it entertaining. While I was still at this age, I also watched this really good anime with my brother called "Cowboy Bebop". Really liked it at the time, and still do. ;)

So, skip forward a few years to the 3rd grade. Right now, I have a friend named Ethan. We're both pretty interested in anime and talk about it every now and then, but anime was probably still secondary on my list of interests to video games. I was still casually watching anime on TV every now and then, still no real interest. One day Ethan invited me over to his house, telling me he had this new "Naruto" anime. (Keep in mind this was years before the word Naruto was commonly known in America)

It was completely in Japanese, had subtitles, and was very interesting to me. It was completely uncut, they said words like "damn" and "shit". It was surprisingly gorey as well. The whole time I was thinking, "Wow, they can't do this on TV, this is actiony!" or probably some other shit like that. I was also able to notice that the voice acting was at least more believable. He also introduced this thing called manga to me, which was like comics, but anime style! (z0r) This was probably something that lead me in the direction of being a fan.

I then bought the first season of Naruto at a store called "Toy Mandala" which sold overpriced Japanese imports. This is a bit of a side note, but although these DVDs were from Japan they had rather primitive, poor, English subtitles. Regardless of the subtitles, I was happy and watched the first season with my brother. We both wowed and decided to buy more. Another side note, we ended up buying like 6 seasons of illegally sold fansubs off ebay in DVD form lol. When we received them, we of course, became even more addicted and were impressed that the DVDs were so cheap! (Heh) I soon discovered what fansubs, in their proper form were. I started torrenting every week. We later discovered Bleach, watched the hell out of that as well. Now here's the actually relevant part of this section. :neckbeard:At this point, I thought anime was cool, liked it, but it really wasn't that big of a deal.

I eventually introduced anime in this form to my friends. At first, they really didn't care that much, but they later ended up getting into Naruto. They were addicted as my brother and I and started following it as actively as myself. Trevor, or SexyTime, as many of you know him, decided to deviate from us a bit. Rather than just watching Naruto/Bleach/Inuyasha, whatever horrible shit we watched back then, he decided to branch out and watch all sorts of anime. Although I had watched some anime at this point other from the shonen shit (all that bullcrap I mentioned earlier) I still wasn't at a point that I liked it a lot.

This, however, was about to change.

One day, when Trevor was doing a routine search on www.animenewsnetwork.com to find what anime to watch next, he found an anime with rather high ratings. That anime was called "When they Cry - Higurashi". He decided to get the series and on a whim, I did as well. When I got it, I decided to watch an episode to see how it was.

This was when my entire idea of anime changed.

This anime was far different from the others I had seen before. This anime was a compelling tale of people, their own faults, and their mistakes. The character's emotions of love and care were clouded by the characters themselves. Through madness their own original intentions of friendship were gone and were replaced by... hate, envy, disgust, terrible emotions. The result... a schism. Murder and distrust... all because they had forgotten the true intentions of their own ambitions.

This anime had left me speechless. Its message and emotional power had been enough to move a mountain. It was this anime that led me to realize what true anime was, what its real purpose was. Real anime, has meaning.

Stuff like Naruto and Bleach is fun as long as you don't take it seriously, but you really don't gain anything out of it. The one thing if I had to say anything I learned about anime, was that anime had the abillity to be incredibly expressive of emotion.

... And that concludes my school paper.
Owait. :downs:

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Originally Posted by ultama121

:frogwords:

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lol you watch anime what are you 12

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Originally Posted by Kyon

lol you watch anime what are you 12

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http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c2...s/kyonava2.png

I, too, am 12... I did it right didn't I? :saddowns:

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Originally Posted by ultama121

I, too, am 12... I did it right didn't I? :saddowns:

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You waiting for the a.f.k. subs for Haruhi s2e9 too brah? :neckbeard:

I hear Endless 8 just ended. :ohboy: