Forum - View topicAdvice and/or recommendations for someone possibly outgrowing anime?
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096jjk
Posts: 1 Location: NJ |
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I'll try to be as brief as I can. I'll be paraphrasing an email I wrote to a reviewer I'm a fan of a few days ago.
I, like many people had my beginnings with anime with Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Toonami, Miguzi, Kids WB, etc. For many years I considered myself an otaku, and for many years probably resembled the textbook weaboo stereotypes. I lack the same drive to watch anime, and have since starting high school. Since then I'll maybe watch 3-4 series a year, and watch the first episode of something to see if it goes anywhere every 2-3 weeks. It usually doesn't. While I know it's nothing to beat myself up about realistically, the attachment a younger me had to it makes me feel like I'm letting down a close friend. But maybe it's a more healthy level, too. I think I need to keep my fandom in my own way, and that may mean ruling out attending cons. Since high school the cons I've been to have seemed like a shopping spree for man children, that I've been kind of uncomfortable at. It's usually just me wandering, picking up a few things from dealers, and snapping pics of cosplayers I recognize as things from when I was younger, because I just can't keep up and lack the drive. I even tried to get into My Little Pony, because it seemed like the same people into MLP were the kids that used to be into Naruto. I figured I must be a brony, that my people couldn't be wrong, but shortly discovered I wasn't. I have a few theories: that anything that I was self proclaimed "obsessed" with couldn't last, or that kids get into anime seeing it as endless possibilities but get bored when they realize it's really just another set of cliches. I considered my tastes so in line with Japanese audiences, but realize the only strong link to Japanese culture in my life in the last few years are a few niche bands that sing predominantly in English, and think my tastes have become increasingly Western with aging. The last series I finished was Haibane Renmei and I recently looked up interpretations of the series. I loved that. I loved anything that could spark that. With a few days to sort myself out this is what I've come to. I googled things about growing out of anime, and found people saying things like "you don't say you grow out of books when you read something you don't like" ,and I agree, but it's not a love of anime that prompts me to say that. I don't think I should call myself an anime fan. I'll always have anime in my life to some capacity, but I don't like it because it's anime. I like good stories that happen to be anime, I'd probably like them however they were represented. Younger me did like things for being anime, which is why he looked for things that were particularly, Eastern/Asian/Martial Arts-y in setting, tone or characters. So here I am looking for friendly advice and some recommendations, be it to fit my needs, tastes, or just must sees. My Favorite anime is BECK, followed closely by Trigun. Hopefully that should give some ideas. Thanks. |
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VORTIA
 SubscriberPosts: 947 |
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What sort of anime have you tried and felt let down by?
Anime's a pretty wildly diverse medium. Obviously, Pokemon is something a lot of people outgrow. Similarly, the anime you find you enjoy as an adult might not be as common or as readily available as some other genres. It's quite possible to become bored of what attracted you to anime in the first place, but if you still like what attracted you and you simply feel like what you are seeing now is letting you down, that's somewhat different. Without knowing what you like and what you don't like about anime, I think it's pretty hard to make an assessment of where you stand as a fan. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18574 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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The advice part of this we can do, but not the recommendations, as personal recommendation threads are not allowed per forum rules.
If people want to make a couple of recommendations while giving advice, that's fine. But if the thread goes solely the other direction then I'll have to lock it. |
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Mr Adventure
 Posts: 1598 |
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There's some interesting animation coming out of Europe these days. Try the works of Sylvain Chomet
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yotsubafanfan
 Posts: 653 |
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Try getting into older anime, that's something new you can do, its different from what other people are doing and it can help you appreciate anime classics like Kimagure Orange Road, Great Teacher Onizuka or Urusai Yatsura.
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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This. And just get deeper into anime. Even in the recent years, there's always stuff they just goes by undetected but may be fantastic. Start doing more research into the shows you do like, what else their creators have worked on, what studios you like have also worked on, and more. Pick a random year, and pick a random series from that year and give it a try. If you really are outgrowing anime, then maybe nothing will help you, but you can never be out of new things to watch. |
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Ignatz
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Honestly, people just need to do their own research. If you don't know what to watch, there are plenty of sites which offer recommendations. For example, anime-planet. You said you like Haibane Renmei. Well then, just search for a Haibane Renmei page (this time, I did it for you) and see what other similar anime people recommend. It is that simple.
Last edited by Ignatz on Sun Oct 20, 2013 8:03 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Kelly
Posts: 868 Location: New York City |
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My suggestion is doing a search on the words seinen and josei, then seeing if anything piques your interest. That's how I've found some of my favorite anime being an older fan. They might not be as numerous as anime aimed at younger fans, but there are other works - the fantastic Mushishi springs to mind - directed at the crowd who appreciate more mature anime like Haibane Renmei which you have so obviously aged into. It takes a little bit of research, but they're there.
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Chiibi
 Posts: 4829 |
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Anime is but only a medium. You can't "outgrow" anime. That would be like outgrowing books or television.
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 10102 Location: Virginia |
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Try a random approach. Hit the streaming sites and check out new shows and older shows. If they grab you attention watch them, if not drop them. Try anything where the summary doesn't actually turn you off.
Above all don't force it. Pushing yourself to watch anime is just going to make it harder and harder to do so. If necessary take a month or a year off. If you miss it come back if not go develop new interests. Watching anime is something you do for fun, if it is no longer fun, stop. |
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Rhyono
Posts: 1039 |
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As Kelly said: seinen (if you're manly) or josei (if you're not) is probably where you need to go. Seinen is specifically targeted for men while Shounen was for kids (doesn't stop me from watching them if they are good, though).
The other main thing, as yotsubafanfan stated (and we shall all re-iterate), is to try older anime. I generally have trouble doing this because I have a love of things that are visually appealing. I watched Berserk (maybe 4 years ago?) in a horrible 360p or lower resolution with vertical striping. But after the first episode I ignored that because I enjoyed the show so much. If you also suffer the same disdain for all things un-beautiful (I've been watching/enjoying Blassreiter recently and this is my first chance to use that un-word): there's currently a movie series that has begun and a few of us have slight qualms with it being a little more rushed but is otherwise still excellent. So if your inner child wants some good ol' fashioned sword-swinging, but adult-you doesn't mind more adult themes (not hentai) and heads falling off: give it a chance. As for "growing out of anime": that's quite different from no longer enjoying cons. Also, (which you've already stated) growing out of anime is pretty unlikely because it's an entire medium; not just Naruto. Edit: I promise I didn't see Chiibi's post until after (weird we used near identical wording too). I guess we all just agree on that point. 
Trying to get into something (MLP in this case) just because some others that liked a massively well-known, common ground (Naruto) is not a very good way. We have all liked Naruto to some degree at some point and anyone that did not like it was either female or also supposedly never loved Pokemon. This isn't supposed to be a recommendation thread (without offering other advice), which I've somewhat done, so here's a few options and why adult-you might like it:
I have many others that are worth recommending, but I figured these would be some of the easiest to like. |
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zawa113
 Posts: 7360 |
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I'm with yotsubafanfan, go find older anime.
I barely watch any newly produced anime these days. Going on the last 4 years, I've watched maybe only a handful of new anime (Steins;Gate, Madoka Magica, Eden of the East, some of Natsume's Book of Friends, Shiki, and a good assortment of movies I suppose) and of that list, I found precisely one of them to be epically world changing (and some of the movies were damn good), a few to be "meh", and most to be just awful. But if one were to look at my currently watching list, it contains Fist of the North Star TV, Lupin III season 1, Fang of the Sun Dougram, and Rose of Versailles, most of which have the distinction of being 80s series and all of which I'm really enjoying. Actually, most of my plan to watch list contains 80s and 90s series, I just like the storytelling style a lot better than many newer things. Part of this could surely be that Toonami played a lot of 90s anime back in its heyday so I'm used to it. But another part could be that there's a severe lack of good scifi coming out these days while going back to the 80s and 90s yields many more results, it's simply easier for me to find older shows that appeal to me than newer ones. There's this whole back catalog out there that people seem to forget exists because it's not as shiny looking as the newer series, and it's a shame. As someone who doesn't count character design and animation towards making a good show (unless it's severely broken), I see most newer things as disappointment and older things as getting it right. And don't think that I'm that old either, I'm only 24 (and started getting into much older things when I was maybe 21). Some people aren't willing to try and adjust themselves to old animation either and give up before even giving it a real shot, I just ignore them and hone straight in on the story and characters, which pleases me much more than modern anime tends to. The difference here is that some people define older as anything older than 3 years while I think it has to be at least cel animated (so generally late 90s and earlier), so how you define it might affect your choices. If you want newer (I define it as "not cel animated, but older than 4 years), there's lots of hidden gems there too, like Simoun, which I wish more people knew about and can be bought on Amazon for under $20. Either way you define it, things have at that point been around long enough for hidden gems to emerge. Another good idea is to try something you normally wouldn't think to try in a million years because it doesn't sound like your thing. Take Princess Tutu, based on the name, almost no one around here could possibly think it was their thing. But a lot of people around here have watched it, and almost all of them came away saying "Wow, that was simply beautiful". I know it's the whole "don't just a book by it's cover" thing, but it's also "don't judge a genre based on its cover" as Princess Tutu is hardly the poster child for the magical girl series, yet is considered one of the best ones. Actually, Princess Tutu unlocked the whole shojo genre for me. I'd been burned for years by terrible terrible yet popular shojo, and I thought it was safe to assume it was all garbage. I was obviously quite wrong, I was going on the popular poster children who often sucked. And I'm damn glad I learned not all shojo suck because some of my favorite manga are now shojo. And no one could possibly convince me that Basara isn't five times more badass than most shonen manga. I'm also not into sports anime. Or sports. At all. But I ended up trying out Big Windup anyway and actually really liked it, I was absolutely not expecting that. Perhaps you could try manga, there's tons of good manga that never got made into anime, like Basara or Banana Fish. Which is a shame because the story, characters, etc on those is more than worthy of an anime than some of the garbage getting it these days. I personally have a much easier time finding good manga to read than anime to watch. Try looking outside of Japan. It sounds like you have a bit with My Little Pony, but it also seems to me you've overlooked France, who has lately been looking like an animation powerhouse to me. I really enjoyed Wakfu, well the second half mostly when the plot actually kicked in. There's also Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is often considered better than most anime. Adventure Time has a good following, at first I didn't see why, but the more I watched it and saw its slow and deliberate world building, the more I grew to respect it. If there's a show you adored that maybe you only saw in dub and it was ages ago, go back and watch it again. I'd seen Robotech, sure, but when I went back and saw the original Macross in uncut sub, it was like I fell in love with it all over again. Note you only really need to go sub if you're curious or if major edits were made to the original series. But sometimes it's nice to get an old reminder of why you loved anime in the first place to help you as you search for something new (which might in fact be older than you are). Take a break and watch non-animated things. I recently got into Game of Thrones, and it was awesome! I'm also big into Doctor Who and BBCA was playing a new series Orphan Black right after that I quite enjoyed. I clearly go for British TV dramas instead of American ones. There's also Korean dramas, Drama Fever streams tons of them for free (both comedy and drama), though as I'm still trying to get into K-drama, I'm not the best person to ask specifics on (I know there's other round here that are). Try a Visual Novel. They're quite popular anime fodder these days, and some of them are really quite awesome. They have the anime feel to them, but tend to have branching story pathways and such. If you have a DS, you're good to go, because it has the Phoenix Wright series, Ghost Trick, 999, Trace Memory, and the 3DS has Virtue's Last Reward. The genre only really seemed to kick off here with the advent of the DS, probably because the DS is so good at playing them. And it's always possible to find fan translations of other things. Some of the best recent anime I've seen seem to be visual novel based, it's like they tell their stories a bit differently than all the other things coming out. Also, just need to say that I'm a brony, but I was never into Naruto ever. For me though, part of the brony fun is the fanbase itself, who can be somewhat crazy (like picking apart every frame of every ep for every animation error), but are overall awesome people that are tons of fun to talk with. I just try to assume most of them are not cloppers (because most of them aren't) |
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larinon
 Posts: 992 Location: Midland, TX |
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One thing you can try to do is find like-minded users of the site and see what else they've rated as a possible barometer as to whether you would enjoy a given title.
The trick is, however, that you need to create a list of anime that you've seen and rate them. To populate the my anime list, you'll have to go through the encyclopedia to the individual pages and select "seen all" or "seen some" and then you'll be able to rate it from there. What you've seen and how they're rated affect the generation of the like-minded list. It's comparing your list against other users existing lists. For example, Calathan is listed as being most like-minded to myself, with 47.5% similarity over 229 mutually seen titles. But then maybe you go to someone's list and you see they have Slayers Next and Slayers Try rated as Masterpieces and then decide that maybe the next user might have some different ideas worth considering. Nonetheless, it's an interesting tool that probably doesn't see enough usage. You won't be able to generate quite as many results as subscribers do, but you'll still be able to see a decent number to get some ideas from. |
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Dessa
 Posts: 4438 |
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I got into anime when I was about your age, and, a year or so, was shocked to find myself pretty much not watching any anime, after watching massive amounts the years previous. Part of this was waning interest (I had been in the "must try the first episode of everything" mindset), and part was a desire to stop with anime fansubs (I have a few exceptions, for things that I know will never get licensed here, or that I'm protesting the ridiculous US price of *coughaniplexcough*).
At the same time, however, I'd also branched off anime into a related medium, Tokusatsu. Now, granted, if you feel you're "outgrowing" anime, titles like the Kamen Rider and Super Sentai franchises probably wouldn't be your thing (like Power Rangers that adapts SS, they're meant for younger audiences), but, especially if you watched Power Rangers when you were younger, you could try out Akibaranger? I haven't watched it myself (not really my thing), but it's a parody of the Super Sentai franchise, and, apparently, an episode in season 2 (13 episode seasons) establishes that in Akiba's universe, Super Sentai is actually an adaptation of Power Rangers, not the other way around. Another toku title I'd recommend, if you like horror at all, is GARO. There's 3 seasons (season 3 is still airing), and a few movies and OAV, and it's a good blend between tokusatsu and Japanese horror. I'm not really into horror, but I'm enjoying it for the tokusatsu side. My roommate's not really into tokusatsu (although I can get her to put up with some of the KR series), but she's enjoying it for the horror and Japanese mythology sides. Finally, back to anime, I know that quite a few people have said to look at older titles. I'll counter that, and say that you should look at the current season, most specifically, the simulcasts. But this doesn't just mean watching whatever's coming out. There are a number of resources for you to start with. ANN has it's guides to new shows coming out, and the reviewers review the first few episodes. There's also places like AniChart.net (link is to the current season's chart), which will give the list and descriptions of everything coming out. Use these resources to make a list of everything that sounds like it might be interesting to you. Once you have this list, find out what's simulcasting. If you're lucky, sites like Crunchyroll might even have a trailer for it for you to check out. Watch the trailer, or the first episode, and determine if it's in one of 3 categories: 1) Definitely want to watch 2) On the fence 3) Definitely don't want to watch If it's in the last category, then you just drop the title. If it's in the first, then you've found something new to watch. If it's in the middle, then try out a few more episodes before deciding on if it's 1 or 3. The reason I'm suggesting this, rather than older shows, is because sometimes disinterest in something can come from oversaturation. With an older series, you (likely) have access to the entire thing, and the temptation is to marathon it, and take it in all at once. While this might be good on the short-term, you can get burnt out. As well, it's a time commitment that you might not want to give. With a simulcast (or any other current-running series, see above about my lack of anime fansub watching), you're limited to only one episode a week. For a 26-episode series, there's a big difference in about a half hour a week commitment, vs. a 12ish-hour "whenever-you-have-time" commitment, even if it comes out to the same amount of time in the long run. One thing I had to come to terms with, personally, is that being an anime fan doesn't mean you have to like all anime. It's also not a genre, which means that there's no reason liking [title x] should necessarily mean you're a fan of [title y], when they're nothing alike. Knowing a friend is a fantasy fan, I may recommend "oh, you like Dresden Files? You should try the Lightbringer Series." But those are both books in the same genre (and also both involve magic and smart-asses). That's nothing like saying "Oh, you like Pokemon? You should try Zegapain." The two series are nothing alike, despite both being anime (and both based on video games). Just take your time, be picky about what you watch, don't try to rush watching something all at once, and try branching out into other Japanese mediums, like Tokusatsu. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1809 Location: South America |
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Indeed. There is a gazillion different kinds of stuff made in the medium. Variety is actually greater than in US television. I began watching anime regularly at the age of 23, after finishing my undergraduate and master's degree. I found the best anime series to be significantly smarter and more interesting than other TV series available. Haibane Renmei, for example, is more sophisticated and has more realistic characterization than anything I ever watched in English speaking TV. Japanese cinema (live action and anime) appears to be generally able to create more realistic characters than Western cinema. |
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