Ani-Mania: Time of Your Life

Someone once remarked that the thing about J.R.R. Tolkien fans is that they don’t want to READ about Middle Earth — they want to GO there. It was a stunningly brilliant observation, and I’m borrowing it for a moment because I think the same observation holds true for anime fans. At least, I know it does for me.

At any given time, I’ll have two or three series I’m watching or reading that I’m really hooked on. For a while it was Inuyasha, Big O, and Cowboy Bebop. Then it was Evangelion. I went through a Love Hina phase, a Negima and then a Haruhi phase. Mahoromatic was in there, too. Most recently it’s been Rozen Maiden and When They Cry. The final arc of Higurashi may not have been all that great in the way of resolving loose plot ends — heck, it left me more confused than I was at the beginning, when I didn’t know anything about what was going on — but seeing Rena admit to Keiichi that she didn’t care if she lost the punishment game and had to take his dare because she actually LIKED the idea of dressing up as a maid for him was priceless!

Maid outfits aside, I’m always on the lookout for the next show I’m going to fall in love with, because sadly, shows end, and when they do, it’s like we in the audience somehow lose our passport to that world they created for us, however briefly it may have lasted.

Some of this might be a factor of the way I watch anime. I’ll marathon watch things now more than I used to — especially now that we live in the age of releases going almost directly to box sets — but in the past, my viewing habits were much more spread out. I have a really good friend who used to come over every Friday night. Friday nights were anime nights. There’s a local club that meets in the evening — a great place, I’ve made a lot of great friends there — but there are just some things you can’t watch in a club setting, either because they’re too mature for a mixed audience, or else the plot is too subtle to follow in a room full of people, where at any given time, at least one person is always talking, and sometimes, they’re all talking at once.

I like people, really I do, but I also like my anime, so on Friday nights, after the regular club met, my friend (I’ll call him Takamizawa) and I would hang out, and have our own anime viewing. We’d spread it out, mostly because I am so imperious that I could make Evangeline with PMS seem perky and agreeable. I imposed a strict two episode per series limit, which was fine, because we’d watch several things, and always had several series we were working through at any given time.

The downside to this was it took a while to finish anything. Sometimes, we’d change to something else part way through, and some poor show would languish for weeks and weeks before it got picked up again. Even watching straight through, at two episodes each week, a 24 episode series would take 12 weeks — something like three months to complete. But that was also the upside. It meant I got to spend longer on a particular title, and had that much more time to spend in that world and with the characters that populated it.

The result for me was that the shows we watched ended up marking the time. In some strange way, they made their own seasons — a fitting concept, since Japanese thought places great emphasis on being aware of the present moment, as well as the changing times of year, and our relationship to them.

As for the characters, they ended up being more like old friends. I still miss Mahoro whenever I see hydrangeas. And I wonder about Lucy — the ending to Elfen Lied was very dark, but some part of me would like to believe that she got away. I have yet to forgive Akamatsu for giving Keitaro to Naru, but then again, he and I both agree that Motoko deserves much better!

Admittedly, it’s a weird, and very personal concept. I don’t know if other fans feel the same way, but I suspect that secretly they do. The shows that we watch, the music we listen to, the places we go, the people we spend time with — even the animated ones — all have this way of getting bound up with the rest of what’s going on in our lives. We may not know it then, but years later, we find that they’ve become touch stones, that let us travel backwards in time, and visit places we may not get to go that often anymore. Or maybe I’m just strange.

If you have any particular shows or characters that have some unusual meaning for you post a reply, and let us know. We’d love to hear about it.

(Author’s Note: The French writer, Honore de Balzac, went into such depth with his characters that when he was on his death bed, he became delirious, and called out their names along with the names of his family and friends. E. Douglas hopes that when he dies — in the distant future — he will be surrounded by catgirls and mikos. But if you see Rena, please tell her she is not allowed to bring her axe.)