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.
Originally Posted by rossmum
At this point, I thought anime was cool, liked it, but it really wasn't that big of a deal.
Bookmarks