Honestly, I never really liked anime. I had a stereotypical jocks’ view of the format and the people who indulged in it. This is because I was never really forced to watch one episode of the art form, so I never gave it an honest evaluation. Then during my sophomore year of college I busted my leg playing football, and cracked a few ribs in the process too. It was the kind of break that puts one literally on the couch for a while. I couldn't go out to the clubs or play poker or do....anything including move. That's what I get for going full contact with half the starting football team every week and playing QB when I'm a pitcher on the baseball team; it was bound to happen.
So, with my leg busted to hell and a quarter of my rib cage cracked in half, there was no amount of drugs that would put me to sleep. So, I ended up watching adult swim when I was awake and stuck my girlfriend’s god awful excuse for a couch. I always hated Saturday night adult swim programming because of all the damn anime that was on. But then one Saturday night when the anime block was about to hit I couldn't find the remote and I sure as hell wasn't able to get up to look for it. To make matters worse the T.V was stuck on adult swim and my girlfriend was out so there was nothing I could do to avoid it.
That night I ended up watching Ghost in a Shell, Death Note, and Cowboy Bebop. I even hung in for the replay of Bleach the caught some FMA. After watching the aforementioned shows, I realized that anime had more depth and range to it than Pokémon or the creepy henti shows I stereotypically pictured and avoided like the plague. I had an epiphany; I discovered that anime can be thought-provoking and emotionally engaging while tackling moral and social issues at a level more than worthy of my intellectual engagement. Of course, this didn't happen in a night but as a policy analysis and business major, I really started appreciating most of the shows in the A.S block after a few weekends.
My girlfriend caught me watching the anime block one night, but go figure it turned out that she was a closet anime junkie. She never brought it up because she guessed (correctly at the time) that I’d ridicule her for it and I didn't see DBZ DVD’s littering her apartment, so I had no idea. I figured the few posters sparsely scattered between music posters and volleyball trophies in her room were just art didn’t connect them to “anime”. So, I told her about my little revelation and then out of nowhere she busts out her secret stash of DVDs, one that she quite latterly kept hidden in the closet. I started watching shows that weren’t on T.V at the time like Code Geass and Evangellion (all of em’), which are two of my favorites. I even made it through stuff like Eureka 7 without bitching and even enjoyed it after a few eps.
I'm the last guy that you would expect to watch anime on a regular basis, but after watching Death Note and Ghost in a shell, I became a casual watcher. After Geass and Evagellion, I was started watching the stuff on a regular basis and became a follower of the art form. Honestly, I’m no fan boy (no disrespect meant to those that are), but my horizons were truly broadened during the months I was laid out on that couch and they continue to grow. Now, I'm trying to discover new anime that challenge my moral and world view, as well as my conceptual frames of reality; the kind of anime that truly provokes thought or real emotion through the subjects that the story tackles. Hell, I hate to admit it, but now I even like watching the lighter stuff like bleach on a weekly basis. Now if that story isn't an example of how an experience can change ones conceptualizations of the world we live in, the art that is created in it and the people that truly appreciate it, I don’t know what is.
I know, kind of a weird way to go about writing a profile, but I figured I might as well let you know where I'm commin' from in terms of the site subject and who I am at the same time.
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