| Recently I decided to get more into older, more artsy, "avant garde", "cult", "elitist" anime. The story behind it is that my political-ideological positions changed over the years, and together with them the way I view things, including media. At first I would find weird how some progressive essayists way of analyzing media was using it to talk about everything else tangentially related, because the ideology I previously subscribed had a "everything is an isolated box" way of viewing things, until I finally noticed it actually makes more sense to analyze media that way: Nothing is made in a vacuum, you know? So, because of those essayists, I decided to "expand my tastes", but to this day I still don't know if I'm ready or not.
How can I ever be sure that I'm ready for "harder" anime? And if I'm not ready, how can I become ready? |
| when i find it interesting and motivated enough to watch then im ready any time |
| Fu#k that movie I hate it so much Angel's Egg I watch few moths ago and I hated that message so much. |
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Reply to Kirika_Madeleine
Fu#k that movie I hate it so much Angel's Egg I watch few moths ago and I hated that message so much.
| @Kirika_Madeleine Hey, at least you manage to get some message from it, I wasn't so lucky. |
| I have the reverse question,how do people get into/enjoy "happy" anime ? To me it's pointless,aka the position you are trying to reach I've always been there. |
| Can I Still Go To Heaven If I Kill Myself? |
thewiru said: How can I ever be sure that I'm ready for "harder" anime? And if I'm not ready, how can I become ready? I don't know when you will be ready to analyze anime, because I don't care. I can enjoy anime without forming the same interpretations as those "essayists." And that is how I consider Belladonna of Sadness to be the worst of the 3 Animerama movies. |
| その目だれの目？ |
| I don't know if a show can universally be called "difficult" or not. As with all art, anime is made in the personal and societal contexts that surround it. You can have personal interpretations of works, divorced from the circumstances that created them, and then you can have analysis of the "text", taking into account various factors of the author and the world to try to understand what is meant by the authors. These two things can vary wildly, and that's what makes art worth talking about. |
| "Dreams are worth fighting for" Backloggery | YouTube | Heatmap |
| My rule of thumb is; if it looks like something I'd enjoy, I watch it. It's not really something you need to try and force. |
| depends on your mood. read the synopsis, genre tags, go through discussions and reviews and determine if you are in thr mindset to enjoy smething like this and then go ahead. it is importanr to know what youre getting into ohterwise it can be disappointing and not fair for the wwork either |
 The end of an era. Thank you Wit, Mappa and Isayama. Feeling half happy, half sad. Kawaii waifus and precious best girls <3333 |
| Basically I'll never be ready for "difficult anime". I recently watched sonny boy, and it's not that i don't understand it, but i just don't fuck with it. If i wanna "feel" the show, I'd rather watch some hentai because i fw that and i like the "feeling" it gives me. |
| . |
| Gyakku da... It's the opposite for me, when I was growing up I used to watch avant garde, cult, psychological thrillers.. But now I stay away from such things. May be it's because I'm older they negatively effect me more or I've become much softer and kinder person.. I now enjoy light-hearted slice of life and comedy.. You can laugh at me but I've to take care of my mental health and watch things that makes me happy and helps me deal with stress and anxiety. |
| There is not one single interpretation of these kinds of anime. You're never really ready to watch them, you just do it one day and hope it's for you. Also, what does politics have to do with this? I assume you mean that you're more open minded or sth, so your interpretations can be less biased and more accurate to the masses, which in itself defeats the entire purpose of their experimental nature... |
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| No one ever told me that anime had "levels". I must have done something wrong in the last dozen years of watching anime. Jokes aside, the only anime that is perhaps better not to watch at the beginning are those with a lot of references to other series like Gintama |
thewiru said: How can I ever be sure that I'm ready for "harder" anime? And if I'm not ready, how can I become ready? It all comes down to experience and your skills at art interpretation. If you're feeling unsure of it then you can try to interpret a painting or a short poem every day to get better at it; this is at least how I was learning to interpret art when I was younger, and it helped. Have fun! |
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| When you are interested in the idea of a more artsy, none straight forward or whatever experience. Some will never be interested, some will love it no matter when they watch it. |
| Also available at: YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK8spdL1M_J-z0vO2C7jPLw Second Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AshPolygonsDo/videos Why You Should Watch Akudama Drive: https://youtu.be/Yw0r52wRjgA A Love Letter To Anime「AMV」: https://youtu.be/YQyqxFM2m9Q My referral code to a website/app that gives you free money (a few cents a day) by using a few megabytes of your internet for file sharing. We both get a bonus if you use my link: https://r.honeygain.me/ARSHIA7942 |
thewiru said: How can I ever be sure that I'm ready for "harder" anime? And if I'm not ready, how can I become ready? To answer your question, you are ready when you feel like watching those anime, simple as that I aslo don't get what you mean by "harder anime", they're just anime with different storytelling styles, and like with all storytelling styles, they'll resonate with some people but not with others Also just because you grow to like a certain storytelling style, doesn't mean you have to like or understand every single anime with it, you're allowed to have your own opinions and drop things that don't resonate with you even if they're highly acclaimed |
| Once you get bored enough by the others. |
This dance is the pinnacle of human achievement. |
| I prob will never watch difficult anime because I don't want to tire myself out to watch those. I'd rather use the time to rewatch something I enjoyed. |
| Honestly? Treat the "easier" anime you already enjoy like you would a "harder" one. Examine the themes and what you get out of it besides pure entertainment. It's much much much easier than it sounds too. There's no wrong answer to those things. Someone may disagree with you and you may disagree with them on it but if you can cite the material, you're golden. Death of the author and all that. I'd recommend brushing up on some film theory and all that if you don't have a background. Anime is a branch of that, after all. |
| There are no difficult anime, only people deciding things are too difficult for them. It's all just entertainment. Sure, maybe you won't get it. Who cares? If it was fun you can watch it again and maybe then you will get it. If it wasn't fun "getting it" won't magically make it fun. |
| I've always found the idea that you need to work your way up to 'harder' anime weird. Like, imagine telling someone that they need to start with Spongebob before they can work their way up to Breaking Bad (or whatever). Also, sometimes things just don't resonate with you and that's true with all media, not just anime. If you were able to analyse KnB on your own, you understand the basics of media analysis: you just need to practice those skills now, same as with anything else. |
| What the fuck is about this anime difficulty ? Despite the face-value depth, them all are nothing but escapism. |
SgtBateManSep 6, 9:43 AM
Help! I need somebody. Help! Not just anybody. Help! You know I need someone. Helpppppp!  |
| Watching artsy fartsy nonsense is not a skill, it's something you either like (=pretend to like to seem smart) or don't. |
This dance is the pinnacle of human achievement. |
| If I think something looks interesting, I'll watch it. I would rather not force myself to try & like a show. |
Reply to dumbandinsane
why does this community HATE avant garde so much lol
| @dumbandinsane Because it's filled with incurious teenagers and manchildren who lack any sort of introspection lol. It says so much more about them than the media they're disparaging. It reminds me of the people in gaming circles who want to call games art but get upset as soon as you treat and analyze a game as art. You can't have it both ways. It's completely okay to like stuff that's not pushing the envelope. If someone just wants to watch DBZ all the time, it doesn't bother me at all. It seems so strange to be so against people wanting to find something deeper in a medium they love though. |
Reply to Guilmon1
Frumptastic said:
Honestly? Treat the "easier" anime you already enjoy like you would a "harder" one. Examine the themes and what you get out of it besides pure entertainment
Honestly? Treat the "easier" anime you already enjoy like you would a "harder" one. Examine the themes and what you get out of it besides pure entertainment
Yes, many people don't do it and dismiss some very interesting stuff even in some less "hard to understand" anime and then complain they are bad and have no value
| @Guilmon1 Very true, i second that 👍 |
Reply to deg
when i find it interesting and motivated enough to watch then im ready any time
deg said: when i find it interesting and motivated enough to watch then im ready any time Same here, just need to find the time in the sea of seasonal anime I'm in. |
| As long as you have enough media literacy to gain literally any meaning from an anime, then I'd say your ready for comparatively harder ones. |
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Reply to Frumptastic
Honestly? Treat the "easier" anime you already enjoy like you would a "harder" one. Examine the themes and what you get out of it besides pure entertainment. It's much much much easier than it sounds too. There's no wrong answer to those things. Someone may disagree with you and you may disagree with them on it but if you can cite the material, you're golden. Death of the author and all that.
I'd recommend brushing up on some film theory and all that if you don't have a background. Anime is a branch of that, after all.
I'd recommend brushing up on some film theory and all that if you don't have a background. Anime is a branch of that, after all.
Frumptastic said: Treat the "easier" anime you already enjoy like you would a "harder" one. I already do, it's one thing that changed with my "ideological transformation". In the past, it was common for people in the groups I was in to "mock" studies made about subjects we though as being "silly", and we would often call that "a waste of taxpayer money", and people there also had quite the negative pavlovian response to stuff such as video-game video-essays or anything that viewed pop media through a deeper lens. (At the time I was so ingrained in it that I would make threads like this, which nowadays I consider quite cringe). With time - and my "transformation" - I noticed that this was just thinly veiled anti-intellectualism, and I finally noticed that EVERYTHING is worth of analysis. One thing that helped me a lot on my change was this channel of a guy that has a degree in film analysis/criticism, and his channel mainly did videos about old manga, tokusatsu and anime (He's the reason I watched MACROSS). |
Reply to SgtBateMan
What the fuck is about this anime difficulty ? Despite the face-value depth, them all are nothing but escapism.
| @SgtBateMan I don't get the "much escapism" argument: What are you escaping from? Because I'm not escaping from anything. |
| Basically when i'm in the good mood for something more experimental. |
 |
| All anime is very simple. It requires hardly any brain power to watch. If it did, then people wouldn't be watching it. |
Reply to thewiru
Frumptastic said:
Treat the "easier" anime you already enjoy like you would a "harder" one.
Treat the "easier" anime you already enjoy like you would a "harder" one.
I already do, it's one thing that changed with my "ideological transformation".
In the past, it was common for people in the groups I was in to "mock" studies made about subjects we though as being "silly", and we would often call that "a waste of taxpayer money", and people there also had quite the negative pavlovian response to stuff such as video-game video-essays or anything that viewed pop media through a deeper lens. (At the time I was so ingrained in it that I would make threads like this, which nowadays I consider quite cringe).
With time - and my "transformation" - I noticed that this was just thinly veiled anti-intellectualism, and I finally noticed that EVERYTHING is worth of analysis.
One thing that helped me a lot on my change was this channel of a guy that has a degree in film analysis/criticism, and his channel mainly did videos about old manga, tokusatsu and anime (He's the reason I watched MACROSS).
| @thewiru That's really cool to hear. I'm glad you're getting something out of it all. What's the channel that got you into Macross? I think a lot of people don't realize how fun doing the analysis can be too. |
Reply to Frumptastic
@dumbandinsane Because it's filled with incurious teenagers and manchildren who lack any sort of introspection lol. It says so much more about them than the media they're disparaging. It reminds me of the people in gaming circles who want to call games art but get upset as soon as you treat and analyze a game as art. You can't have it both ways.
It's completely okay to like stuff that's not pushing the envelope. If someone just wants to watch DBZ all the time, it doesn't bother me at all. It seems so strange to be so against people wanting to find something deeper in a medium they love though.
It's completely okay to like stuff that's not pushing the envelope. If someone just wants to watch DBZ all the time, it doesn't bother me at all. It seems so strange to be so against people wanting to find something deeper in a medium they love though.
| @Frumptastic A thing I've noticed is that these people tend to treat art (Well, not only art, but that's a whole other issue) like a trip to the zoo: They have their work life, and then they decide to put it "on-hold" in order to go to the zoo. In the zoo, they look at the monkeys, the lizards, etc, they think "That's cool, I guess"... then they go home, continue their work life and don't think about the monkeys nor the lizards anymore. If something, if they found a monkey or a lizard at their home or workplace, they would consider this "an issue" ("Get your politics away from my media!"). The alternative to that (Which is what I consider myself to follow) would be to "live and be one with the forest": You see monkeys and lizards everyday, they're part of your life, they're connected to one another and to you, you don't live in "different universes", you live in the same one. That's what "all art is political" really means: Not that every piece of art is "inherently political in a vacuum", but rather that all art is created in a political context. |
Reply to Frumptastic
@thewiru That's really cool to hear. I'm glad you're getting something out of it all. What's the channel that got you into Macross?
I think a lot of people don't realize how fun doing the analysis can be too.
I think a lot of people don't realize how fun doing the analysis can be too.
| @Frumptastic It's a very small Brazilian channel called Ilha Kaijuu. If you're also into vidya, he also did a post-grad thesis on the subject. |
Reply to thewiru
@Frumptastic
It's a very small Brazilian channel called Ilha Kaijuu.
If you're also into vidya, he also did a post-grad thesis on the subject.
It's a very small Brazilian channel called Ilha Kaijuu.
If you're also into vidya, he also did a post-grad thesis on the subject.
| @thewiru I'm not going to get much out of that not knowing Portuguese lmao. I bet that recent video on Zardoz is amazing though. I love that movie so much. I am very much into video games and the abstract of that paper makes it look very interesting. I may have to see if one of my wife's colleagues can give me a rundown of it! |
| tbh ... based on your thread and your comments, I'd just call it "growing up", and I think that's generally the solution. I'm not sure what hidden psychological trick you're looking for - it's not like you can recreate your mind and experiences to change your tastes and view of the world on command. And since it seems you consume anime analyses/reviews, it's not like you don't understand why others (dis)appreciate the "difficult" anime either. |
| "I don't know everything, I only know what the internet knows." - Definitely not best girl. "To ask is a moment's shame. Not to, lifelong." - I quoted with a posed look. |
Reply to Guilmon1
@thewiru I get that some people just want cool fights and there isn't a problem, but I agree that the problem is when people are against talking about the deeper aspects (not just politics but politics too I guess), for me the fun is in analysing a story and relate it to real life, either our current reality or the reality the writer wrote the story in, and then relating it to the story again (watching and thinking about gundam after you learn Tomino was a child at ww2 somehow hits even harder)
| @Guilmon1 "against talking about the deeper aspects" >Maybe I am just ignoring what you refer to, but tbh I don't really know what you're talking about: "Against" in the sense of not caring about it (by blocking it out in personal conversation), or against the fact that others are talking about it? And is it mostly because one side wants to focus on the consumer perspective and the other side wants to focus on the producer perspective of the "substance" (message sent/message received)? |
| "I don't know everything, I only know what the internet knows." - Definitely not best girl. "To ask is a moment's shame. Not to, lifelong." - I quoted with a posed look. |
This is the screen you get when you unlock Texhnolyze: You'll then need a score of 1300 to unlock Tantei Opera Milky Holmes. |
 |
Reply to thewiru
@SgtBateMan
I don't get the "much escapism" argument: What are you escaping from? Because I'm not escaping from anything.
I don't get the "much escapism" argument: What are you escaping from? Because I'm not escaping from anything.
| @thewiru you're first and foremost escaping from reading-comprehending my post by feigning ignorance. |
SgtBateManSep 6, 4:27 PM
Help! I need somebody. Help! Not just anybody. Help! You know I need someone. Helpppppp! |
| You are ready when you realize all of the ""deep"" anime is nonsensical and meaningless bullshit that's made purposely vague in order to create a pretense of depth. It appeals to half-wits who love to find logically questionable paralells to ideas they've seen elsewhere, and who love to self-insert their own beliefs and interpretations into a narrative that lacks any intended meaning at its core. Those shows are intentionally created just vague enough so that midwits can convince themselves they're watching something intellectual because they don't understand it, while in reality it's just meaningless fluff cleverly disguised as an intellectual journey. Those shows aren't about offering philosophical insight, but about offering regurgitated surface-level philosophical ideas and letting the viewer project their own beliefs into the show in order to create an illusion of intellectual depth. I have nothing but contempt for people who pretent to be smart by adding shows like Lain or Texhnolyze to their favorites. They mistake ambiguity for depth and vagueness for brilliance. They are truly the dumbest people alive, because they don't realize they're being manipulated into thinking they're smart. |
Reply to BigBoyAdvance
You are ready when you realize all of the ""deep"" anime is nonsensical and meaningless bullshit that's made purposely vague in order to create a pretense of depth. It appeals to half-wits who love to find logically questionable paralells to ideas they've seen elsewhere, and who love to self-insert their own beliefs and interpretations into a narrative that lacks any intended meaning at its core. Those shows are intentionally created just vague enough so that midwits can convince themselves they're watching something intellectual because they don't understand it, while in reality it's just meaningless fluff cleverly disguised as an intellectual journey. Those shows aren't about offering philosophical insight, but about offering regurgitated surface-level philosophical ideas and letting the viewer project their own beliefs into the show in order to create an illusion of intellectual depth. I have nothing but contempt for people who pretent to be smart by adding shows like Lain or Texhnolyze to their favorites. They mistake ambiguity for depth and vagueness for brilliance. They are truly the dumbest people alive, because they don't realize they're being manipulated into thinking they're smart.
| @BigBoyAdvance It's okay if you don't understand them. We won't make fun of you for not liking a show. This performative anti-intellectualism doesn't suit you though. |
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