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jennariaNo, I don't mean 'how much anime should you watch in general.' (Answer: as much as you want to, and no more. I'm not the boss of y'all.) I mean 'how much of a series should you have watched before you go recommend it to all and sundry.'
I mean, the ideal answer is 'all of it,' so that you don't run into a BLACK CAT problem. (Which is a good anime! ...until the last half of the last season, where both animation and script go screaming downhill like they're hawks after a fish or something. 'Eh, the real story is over and this is tacked on anyway, who cares.' Show some pride in your work, dammit!) But then you have series that just keep going into eternity (BLEACH, NARUTO, FAIRY TAIL, DETECTIVE CONAN), or series that just started and dammit they're so shiny, and what are you supposed to do? Resist?
...maybe? Look, I have series on my shelves that I bought after watching an AMV, so this is not about pointing fingers. This is a Halloween post a little late. These...are the stories of why you should wait.
"Oh, the first episode was so good!" Yeah, well, if you get my friend Kay going, she will still> rant for half an hour about PUMPKIN SCISSORS, because the first episode was so good, and she bought it! And started watching the rest! And regretted her choice so, so much, because apparently the rest of the series did not nearly live up to the first episode. I had a similar reaction to NOIR. First episode: atmospheric! Girl-slash undertones! I am intrigued! Second and third episodes: ...so are we ever going anywhere with this? At all? Or are we just retreading the same thing over and over again?
"I'm halfway through the first season. What can go wrong?" Sometimes, the Plot waits to show up until episode 7 of a 13-episode anime, and suddenly, tone shift! This happens on the regular with shonen shows, I feel, to the point where it's almost expected - see REBORN!'s Daily Life arc, for example, which goes on for about 20 episodes before the first real antagonist shows up (and then picks right back up again after he's defeated!), or BLEACH's Substitute arc, which also takes about 20 episodes before the Soul Society arc hits and shit starts to get real.
"Look, I gave it the entire first season, and it's going nowhere. Why should I bother?" Remember my friend Kay, from two paragraphs ago? First anime we watched together was what she called the 'Kurama Cut' of YUU YUU HAKUSHO, which was (of course) the Kurama-centric episodes, and only the Kurama-centric episodes. In case you wondered: that's still like half the episodes, but you still skip a lot. The result is that I have a seriously skewed memory of YYH (Kuwabara who?), but I liked it.
The reality is that Fandom isn't ever going to wait until the whole thing is done and only having an opinion then, because even in these days of Entire Seasons getting dropped all at once, there's still always the suspense of What If a second season (a third season, etcetera) and What Will It Contain. Sometimes, you just gotta chase the shiny thing. And if it turns out to be tarnished? Well, that's what fanfic is for.
I mean, the ideal answer is 'all of it,' so that you don't run into a BLACK CAT problem. (Which is a good anime! ...until the last half of the last season, where both animation and script go screaming downhill like they're hawks after a fish or something. 'Eh, the real story is over and this is tacked on anyway, who cares.' Show some pride in your work, dammit!) But then you have series that just keep going into eternity (BLEACH, NARUTO, FAIRY TAIL, DETECTIVE CONAN), or series that just started and dammit they're so shiny, and what are you supposed to do? Resist?
...maybe? Look, I have series on my shelves that I bought after watching an AMV, so this is not about pointing fingers. This is a Halloween post a little late. These...are the stories of why you should wait.
"Oh, the first episode was so good!" Yeah, well, if you get my friend Kay going, she will still> rant for half an hour about PUMPKIN SCISSORS, because the first episode was so good, and she bought it! And started watching the rest! And regretted her choice so, so much, because apparently the rest of the series did not nearly live up to the first episode. I had a similar reaction to NOIR. First episode: atmospheric! Girl-slash undertones! I am intrigued! Second and third episodes: ...so are we ever going anywhere with this? At all? Or are we just retreading the same thing over and over again?
"I'm halfway through the first season. What can go wrong?" Sometimes, the Plot waits to show up until episode 7 of a 13-episode anime, and suddenly, tone shift! This happens on the regular with shonen shows, I feel, to the point where it's almost expected - see REBORN!'s Daily Life arc, for example, which goes on for about 20 episodes before the first real antagonist shows up (and then picks right back up again after he's defeated!), or BLEACH's Substitute arc, which also takes about 20 episodes before the Soul Society arc hits and shit starts to get real.
"Look, I gave it the entire first season, and it's going nowhere. Why should I bother?" Remember my friend Kay, from two paragraphs ago? First anime we watched together was what she called the 'Kurama Cut' of YUU YUU HAKUSHO, which was (of course) the Kurama-centric episodes, and only the Kurama-centric episodes. In case you wondered: that's still like half the episodes, but you still skip a lot. The result is that I have a seriously skewed memory of YYH (Kuwabara who?), but I liked it.
The reality is that Fandom isn't ever going to wait until the whole thing is done and only having an opinion then, because even in these days of Entire Seasons getting dropped all at once, there's still always the suspense of What If a second season (a third season, etcetera) and What Will It Contain. Sometimes, you just gotta chase the shiny thing. And if it turns out to be tarnished? Well, that's what fanfic is for.