I made a similar post asking what different appraoches people have to seasnal anime here:
https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=1802873
As for your concern about forgetting details OP, I totally relate.
One season I even tried rewatching the previous weeks episode every week before watching the new episode. But that had many problems.
Some people will claim they remember everything about the previous weeks episode. I call bullshit. There are also people that claim they have an objective taste in anime and that they aren't influenced by the opinions of others.
People claim a lot of bullshit on forums.
But of course, with some shows it isn't really that important how much one remembers week to week. Where the plot is really straightforward, comedies, SOL and the like, or where each episode is it's own story (episodic anime, as opposed to serialized).
But there is another factors that I think is even more important than how much one remembers of the previous episode: Immersion in the the atmosphere of a show.
When a show relies on building a really compelling atmosphere, it will take a bit of time to really get immersed. For me, it might take half an episode. Sometimes more. So with some anime, I've had barely any time to really get in the mood, and then the 25 mins is over. But when I have several episodes to watch at once, I can go straight in to next episode already completely immersed. This is a huge deal for ones enjoyment of some shows.
I don't really recommend binging entire seasons though. There is a sweet spot that depends on the anime, but I rarely watch more than about 4 episodes at once, 5 at the very most.
With all that in mind, how I've appraoched seasonals has changed every season for a while now.
I tried to watch everything weekly for a while.
Then I decided I'll wait until the end of the seaosn and not watch weekly.
Then I decided I'd watch the first episode of everything and choose based on that what I will watch weekly and what I will wait for. That was my appraoch last season. But it has it's problems. The first episode is a huge deal. It can really hook you in. If you watch the first episode and then wait three months, any sort of excitement you might have had will have faded. A much better experience would be getting excited and then being able to go straight in to the next episode while the hype is fresh.
So this season I'm being very picky about what I watch the first episode for. If it looks even vaguely plot-heavy, or atmosphere-heavy, am I not even watching the first episode, but waiting until it's all out. |