Well, long time no see. Call it laziness, forgetfulness, or just straight up the fact I was way more busy than I thought I was when I first started this blog, fact of the matter is I haven’t touched this site since January. So if you are one of those who might have seen the link in my twitter bio and clicked it to be met by a very empty page, sorry? I’ll hopefully be a bit more active in the coming months, but I hate to make promises I don’t end up keeping so, I guess we’ll see with time.
Anyways, now for the main purpose for this blog, talking about whatever media I’m currently into. If you’ve talked to me at all or even just followed my twitter and passively gotten a stream of my bs on your feed, you’ll know I’ve spent a little over a year at this point a obsessed with Japanese animation, or as everyone ever refers to it, anime.
I’ve had friends call me a “weeb” for about 7 years at this point, and to be completely honest I have been for at least half of that. I’ve been playing games by Japanese developers for pretty much my whole life, watched Japanese players play Splatoon, jealous at how much better the state of their competitive scene is over there, and also had a very steady stream of widely diverse Japanese music playing through my headphones. It’s safe to say that Japan has had a very large influence on the things I enjoy throughout my day. But despite this, the one thing that always surprised people with similar interest to me is the fact that until around a year ago, anime wasn’t really something I watched ever. It was definitely on my radar though. I had a lot of friends who liked anime. I definitely knew a lot of the “memes” surrounding the bigger shows out there. And I also would’ve been able to name a few of my favorites I’d watch on tv back during my time in elementary school. However, it was around 5th grade where I just sorta stopped watching it altogether. You could say a large part of this was just the stigma surrounding it, which even with how much I don’t mind people’s opinions of my self-expression, I just couldn’t shake how “weird” I thought anime was. Now fast forward about 8 years, I have a MyAnimeList account that looks like this.
For someone with as hard of a time committing to things as me, I consider these stats a bit impressive, but also I have a brain and realize telling people, “yeah, I’ve watched 70 different animes within the past year” will get me a lot of weird looks so I try not to brag about it. Point is, I watched a lot. Crazy what hyperfixations can do to a guy.
Anyways, this past year in school also happened to be the most busy I’ve ever been with both studying and my social life. I did watch a lot, but even with that a decent number of these have come from just these past couple months which have been my summer break. Before the spring semester ended, I sat down and made a short document with a list of many shows I planned on watching. Among these were a bunch of highly-praised classics I’ll write about in the parts following this post in the near future, shows such as Clannad, Angel Beats, and Code Geass. And to add to these, I even added a few here and there that may have fallen a bit more into the social background since they came out, such as Eureka Seven and Air.
My finals for the spring semester ended around early May, and I was free for the rest of the summer. Upon going home, I tried applying for jobs in many places and even managed to get a couple interviews that went really well. But despite this, nowhere seemed willing to take me even for seasonal part-time work. I was basically stuck at home for the majority of my summer, and while in the past I’d usually fill the time with mindlessly playing video games, as you could probably guess I spent most of this endless free time watching anime. Sometimes it was with friends, most of the time on my own.
Overall though, this summer I watched a total of roughly 20 different anime. Some of them I completely loved, a few so much that I could easily say they will be held as some of my all time favorites in the future. However a couple I ended up not enjoying as much as I hoped I would.
If you read the title, it should be apparent this post is only one of at least a couple more I plan on writing within the next week to serve as a sort of closing event for my very lazy summer break. My sort of plan is to list out shows I’ve watched and give at least a little bit of my personal thoughts and overall experience watching the show. If I have time before I move back to college within a week, you might even get a bonus part about my experience reading manga and light novels this summer.
If you managed to get this far in reading this, thank you! Look forward to the next parts this week, and give the blog a follow down below if you’d like. I don’t remember if I left a comment section somewhere on this site but do feel free to also give me honest criticism that could help me improve my writing or even just the site in general. Looking forward to using this blog again.
Dastyy's Obsession Archive 