For over a decade, I’d always thought it would be nice to be able to watch anime as it was being released like “normal” TV. I don’t do fansubs, so when streaming gained mass and momentum, I no longer had to wait 2-years to watch the anime I’d hear people talking about. I was looking forward to being current and being swept up with fandom (like 12 Days).
The thing is streaming didn’t make me more into anime. Keeping up week to week became a chore. It was difficult to watch casually like catching an episode of The Big Bang Theory. Even something with a continuing narrative like The Good Wife is often easier to miss episodes and pick back up than many anime. The few shows I did finish I marathoned them at the end of the season anyway, only being current for the first couple of weeks. Most stuff didn’t get finished.
What I realized is waiting two years to watch what everyone was talking about has its advantages vs. keeping current, particularly when I spend more “nothing better to do than being a loser” time working on my Dungeons and Dragons campaign than I do on watching anime. The hit-to-miss ratio watching shows as they air was so less favorable than to buying stuff on plastic discs two years later. Most shows I bought, I could finish. Most shows I watched streaming, I didn’t finish. It made me realize the value of review and opinion by osmosis. Anime is entertainment, thus junk much of the time, so I’m fine having expectations managed and filtered by licensing companies and other fans.
I am one of those that prefer keeping up with current shows, but I do note what shows I want to watch before each new season, and then only watch any others if a good many people recommend it and have good reviews (ie. ones that show the series fits what I want to watch).
Admittedly, keeping up once a week can waste time or be so darn frustrating, but if I do marathon any series, I know I always want to try and finish them in one sitting, which, for certain long series, can get rather difficult to do without messing up some schedule or other.
Each of the viewing habits have their pros and cons, so I guess just going with which one you prefer is best.
I usually do most of my anime watching one or two days in a month, occasionally checking out a show at the beginning of the season. Maybe it was just ten+ years (started in the VHS days) of batch watching that the one at a time thing is just a habit. It’s not like anime at one point wasn’t a habit. Nowadays, it’s something I still enjoy, but it doesn’t dominate my free time like it did for 4-5 years, which funny enough was before I started blogging.
I tend to watch several shows each season that I keep up with weekly, more often watching an episode every day/every two days depending on how many shows I watch as a daily dose of anime means a nice half hour break for me.
With this, after a few weeks into a new season it becomes obvious what series that I enjoy as those I that I do like I’ll definitely keep up with weekly while those that I don’t care for as much will probably slowly get a backlog until I realize I’ve just about dropped them.
Only every so often do I marathon series and that usually means watching two or three episodes in a row every x days until the series is finished. Just don’t have the time to finish a show in a single day or so.
Although you could say that licensing means the series will already get filtered, enough shows slip past that one can wonder who ever had the idea to invest in licensing and releasing them while other gems may never get picked up for licensing.
“So-Ra-No-Wo-To” FTW. I’m interested in Aisha’s boobies too… lucky Noel.
There are a few shows that I wished were licensed that probably won’t, so there are some things that I’ve wanted to see. Maybe it’s too early in the morning, but I can’t remember the names of any of them, but I’m sure there are some.
I only got partway through So Ra No Wo To. I assumed it would get picked up and it was, so I’m just going to wait for the disc so I can watch it off the computer. Of course, if I ever bother to setup my TV to watch streaming video a lot of what I don’t like about watching these things (having to watch on a laptop) goes away.
Why I totally had missed the news “So-Ra-No-Wo-To” had been licensed! Thanks for the heads up. Even a European release? Excellent.
Licensed by Nozomi (RightStuf). Don’t know when it’ll be released.
I like to watch shows that are currently airing as well as marathoning anime shows, where all episodes are available at once.
the bad thing with shows that are currently is the weekly waiting time.
Im also more critical when I’ve waited a week for the next episode and then it turned out a bit bad.
I can’t watch anime at my PC everything is distracting me there and so I cant concentrate very well on the show Im watching
therefore I watch most of my anime via aharddisk media player on the tv screen.
I definitely think marathoning a show mitigates bad episodes. You don’t say to yourself, I waited all week for that. At least that’s my impression.
Although I do sometimes watch anime series as they air, I also don’t have the time or motivation to always keep up with weekly new episodes so I have a long backlog of series I want/still need to watch. There are definitely some advantages to waiting a year or two to watch a show as after that much time has passed there will be numerous reviews available to filter out the crap. There’s far too much anime out there to watch everything so I do rely on opinions from friends and respectable reviewers to determine what gets my time. For example, I am watching Ore no Imouto because it seemed interesting from the previews but it has actually turned out to be a very mediocre show. Had I waited 1-2 years, I would have known it wasn’t worth my time :-/
This is my philosophy on games. Not only do I get great deals on games after 1+ years, I also get the benefit of knowing what the market deemed good or not. A double win ^^b
With games, I tend to buy them the week of the release and then they sit on a stack of games for almost a year half of the time. Though about 1/4 of the games I play right away. I know the next Dragon Age game is going in the 360 ASAP.