I have several old anime which I consider to be "classics", which were those things that I adored while growing up. Today, I took a foray into my past to watch a few them.
This was a mistake.
As it turns out, I am no longer a big fan of the "mystical armor" genre. I don't know when or why this came about. It used to be my favorite. Maybe it was because those were the wishes of a ten-year-old girl. I'm a dozen years past that, now. Maybe it's because it was a shallow plot device to begin with, and I've just outgrown it. We're not talking about the deepest of anime, either. We're talking about things like Sailor Moon (an over-glorified love story that somehow got blown way out of proportion) or Ronin Warriors (the most tolerable of them all, but even then...). Maybe I've just gone beyond that now.
It's not that I don't appreciate them. I'll have the memories of those series with me for the rest of my life. I'll always remember how I cried during Ronin Warriors - the first time I had bawled because of an anime. Or the times when I sat in front of my television enraptured by the latest "plot twist" of Sailor Moon. It was those anime that got me into it at all, and I'm grateful. It was they that advanced anime beyond what it was. Without stories like those, we would never have gotten stories Fullmetal Alchemist or Naruto. We would have been forever stuck in kiddie land, with no hope of getting out.
Thankfully, my mind seems satisfied to only let the one genre go. I can still watch and listen to other "old" things (and isn't that depressing?). Just not those.
Farewell, Magic Knight Rayearth, Sailor Moon, and Ronin Warriors. It was fun while it lasted.