So Gigguk made this video about what changed over the years with watching anime and he mostly focused on how it’s very hard to keep up with seasonal anime. Instead of watching the selective good shows of the past, anime fans nowadays are trying to watch as many currently airing shows as they can. I agree with him, I’ve noticed it myself years ago. For something to be trending it has to be on-going. If it’s over, so is the buzz, so what’s the point in watching a completed series?
This is the effect of being able to watch a show the moment it’s coming out, instead of being forced to wait years for it to be completed, brought over, subbed and distributed. Being able to instantly get whatever you want has made people impatient and focused a lot more on what’s airing instead of what’s worth it. This in turn has multiplied the amount of data or entertainment we can consume a hundred times compared to the time before the internet. And because there is so much of it, it also makes it hard to remember or care about most of what we consume.
All those are nothing new if you watched enough of my videos. What I want to remind you though, is that you don’t have to behave like that. You don’t have to consume as much as you want for the sole purpose of following what’s trending. Not when you know beforehand that you won’t care or even remember most of that crap, a week after they are over. I advise you to always go for selective viewing. Focus on the few things that interest you instead of trying to watch everything and not caring about a single one of them.
Which I am pretty sure most of you are doing anyways. Isn’t this the case with every new season? You try to follow dozens of shows and by the third episode, you end up dropping most of them and keep up with the ones that you like the most. You shouldn’t feel bad for not consuming more, if you are not motivated to do so. If a show is underwatched and underrated, I’m pretty sure there will be enough people praising it after it’s over and will attract enough of you to check it out. But in order to do that, you should stop giving a damn about only on-going series.
My channel is focused on telling you what is worth checking out. The Squeeze videos, the Studio Evaluations, even the Lessons from Past Anime are all about what is good and completed. By extension, they are also supposed to be improving your critical thinking, so you will know by yourselves what’s worth it from what is currently airing. If you watch enough of my videos, you should be able to distinguish the flavor of the month from the good shit which will have staying power way after they are over.
I plan to make a new series of videos, called Anime Legacy, which for many of you will feel like I am regurgitating everything I said in the Anime Squeeze videos, but they will be focused on the staying power of anime of each year. How much to we remember them after all those years. How much are their worth to be remembered and do they deserve their fame after live action and cartoons were up until recently in a golden age. I believe it will be interesting to double check how much of it is nostalgia or hype at the time they came out, and today they don’t mean that much.
But until that happens, always remember. You don’t have to watch everything. Use your critical thinking because very few things are actually worth your time. Unless of course you are an episodic “reviewer” who deliberately does not improve his critical thinking, so he can perpetually hype everything he’s watching, and rehashes the exact same nonsense in every episode, just to keep making money by repeating himself.