OF COURSE THERE'S A POINT TO THIS!
So it's kind of dawned on me while doing these anime reviews that there's a pattern to how I've been doing things– I've mostly been taking on anime that has become immensely popular and I'm trying to determine the worthiness of this popularity, whether it actually has half the merit its fanbase claims that it does. Two of those, I have found unworthy, one I've found semi-worthy, but only in the loosest sense of the term.
While I do intend to continue looking into them, I should spice things up a bit by looking at other anime that had been popular over the years and determining if it's worth the attention and the praise it receives. Obviously, this won't change the opinions of the fans (and more likely will piss them off), so why should I do this at all?
It's because I treat fiction as an art form. I treat it as a craft, like any other, to be worked on, to be refined, and to strive for perfection, regardless of whether or not it's actually feasible. At the risk of stating the obvious, it's the effort to get there that matters. Anime shall receive the same treatment. It is fiction, it is storytelling– perhaps storytelling with its own tropes and habits, but that does not make it exempt from the bare essentials nor the most important and, dare I say it, sacred principles it entails.
And don't think anime will be the only thing getting this treatment. I do intend on looking at Western animation and virtually anything else eventually. I will gauge it on the same terms, because the fact that people will simply wave their hands and say "It's just a cartoon," or "It's just anime," whether in trying to condemn it wholesale without any real precedent, or trying to defend it from valid criticism, devalues it as a storytelling medium. In the end, whether a story is being told with print, film, animation, CGI, or any other medium does not affect its value as a story. Differences certainly exist in execution and in the limits and capabilities of each of these media, but there are principles that need to be adhered to for every single one of these media to be an effective engine for storytelling.
"It's just an X" needs to stop being both a death sentence for something that may genuinely be well-crafted, and it needs to stop being a shield for incompetence, and I will join the legions of those that came before me to lend a hand to that effect.
With this in mind, here's what I plan on looking at in the future, along with what I plan on continuing:
To Be Continued
New World of Darkness Retrospective
Attack on Titan
Sword Art Online
Fairy Tail
What the Future Holds
Black Lagoon
Deadman Wonderland
Transformers: Prime
Fullmetal Alchemist & FMA: Brotherhood
Golden Sky Stories
Log Horizon
Kill la Kill
Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL
Of course, this is a tentative list, and suggestions for more things to examine are always welcome. Leave some suggestions in the comments, and I always encourage you to start and join in on the conversation. Thanks for reading, and Timere Defectum!
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