(no subject)

Aunt Allison came to stay over at our house yesterday. From what she told me, Cousin Steven is somewhere in California, and I'm guessing that Blas has stuff to take care of back in Pennsylvania.

She, Mom, Dad, and Brian all went out sailing yesterday afternoon. I stayed home, but didn't bother playing Angry Birds. I'm just really into Rockman & Forte at this point, and I also started reading this fanfic called Mega Man X: Ghosts of the Machine.

(no subject)

(This entry was previously privatized when I wrote it yesterday afternoon. Half of it is just rehashing stuff that Jake and Chelle already know anyway, but I do kinda like it myself, and might just make an addendum to it this morning.)

Jake has for not the first time told me that I need to try out manlier anime than Lucky Star, A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Previously, he has also urged me to try out Xenoblade Chronicles despite its art style being lifelike, and had once inferred that I would hate Leonardo DaVinci for not drawing anything animesque and the Mona Lisa for not having breasts.

Let me just state right now, once and for all, that the right kinds of character designs are exactly the reason why I even appreciate any anime in the first place: Because it's more attractive than real people. To begin with, I have very little interest in anything that isn't a video game (fanfiction notwithstanding, but all of that's recursive anyway). As of right now, I'm not particularly interested in watching anything at all.

Now, to be fair, none of this is anything I actively avoid; I just don't have an active interest in it, save for Avatar: The Last Airbender (for unrelated reasons).

So anyway, how did I come to like anime to begin with? It should be no secret that it all started with the first season each of Pokemon and Digimon. With the former, right when the great Pokemon craze began to die out among kids my age (8th grade at the time), I happened to become curious about the whole thing, especially since I had graduated from Middle School, started Junior High, and was able to watch the actual show in the morning before the bus would come. Digimon became actively relevant three months later, to correspond to Pokemon like yin and yang. I never did start watching other anime airing at the time though, such as Monster Rancher or Cardcaptors, until I decided two years and some months later to ditch Pokemon and check out Mon Colle Knights (mainly due to cuter character designs.)

Two things to keep in mind: One, that this was during the years when I was even watching anything on TV regularly. And two, while I had heard of the word "anime" at the time, it wasn't until two years later until "manga" became part of my vocabulary (after finding out what the whole category was of those kinds of art styles in general), and another year until I started to know the difference between "manga" and "anime" (referring to anime and even anime-style video games as "manga", and pronouncing it like the English word "mango" to boot).

Back on topic, time went on, I continued watching Digimon and MCK until the Tamers season and MCK itself both ended, and then stopped watching anime for a while. For a while, I did appreciate anime for a while, and claimed to be an anime fan. However, I was still in my, let's say, Early Experience Weirdness, and hadn't even watched that many anime for years to come. Mom once rented Spirited Away for me to watch with Matthew during 2003, something which I wouldn't bother with nowadays unless I had any real reason to. Meanwhile, that was also when I was starting to realize how little I actually enjoyed TV and movies in general. I just didn't enjoy sitting through it and watching what goes on; I would rather be actively playing or reading something. It was in the summer of 2008, thanks to Netflix and YouTube, when I watched Haruhi's first season, Ultimate Girls, and A Little Snow Fairy Sugar all the way through, and one year later was when I watched all kinds of other different anime.

So what's my point here? It's that the reason I don't watch stuff like Toriko or JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, is because most non-video-game media in general don't interest me enough in and of itself to begin with. The reason I like anime in the first place, it because it's more interesting to look at than real people or anything lifelike.

As for video games, given how many more anime-style games we have nowadays than back in the 90's, if I wanted to buy or play anything overly involved, for the most part, I'd go with something along the lines of Grandia III. Admittedly, the Earthbound trilogy gets a Grandfather Clause, and I actually am interested in playing Paper Mario on the Wii Virtual Console at some point, but I really don't care about all these life-like games. (Contra IV was once a favorite of mine, but there's nothing too involved about that one.) On top of that, I've mostly put video games behind me already in favor of working on fanfiction, especially since novelizations and fanfiction in general are usually better than the games they're based on (not being so restricted in the action and all). Most of what's still relevant now is Getter Love!!, Kiratto Kaiketsu, Makeruna! Makendou, Chip-chan Kick, Angry Birds, the Earthbound trilogy, and Mega Man. (Notice that one of those is not Pokemon, for reasons I've already covered before.)