elrond99

I just finished watching Your Name with my 69 year-old mother. She couldn't follow what was going on with all the body-hopping and time-skipping, unfortunately. I don't think she liked it much. I also saw Justice League at the theatre yesterday. It was okay. DC just can't keep up with Marvel at all.

Sorry, I can't recall exactly. But I was looking for somewhere to chat with folks about anime aside from reddit and MAL. So it may have been a search as simple as "anime forum" or "anime message board."

I had a couple friends in high school (like the mid-late 1990s) who were into anime, but I never got into it at that point for some reason. I mean, I'd watched some Ghibli films, like most people, but had never explored anime beyond that. Until I was into my 30s, I had always viewed anime as being a) Ghibli movies, b) kid shows, like Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh, or c) pervy boob shows. And being a single guy, living alone, it was actually that last option that opened the door for me. I remember stumbling across a clip of Sekirei on YouTube and thinking that it was kind of hot, for a cartoon. That was about four years ago. I was at my local comic book store buying some board game stuff, and I spotted the anime section so I just strolled over and saw the Sekirei DVD there. So I bought it. I watched it, thinking it would just be some silly-ass show with tons of cleavage (like an animated Baywatch or something), and I was actually surprisingly taken by the story in the end. It's funny, even stupid harem shows can have a tenderness to them, and a decent story. After that, I discovered MAL, and the incredibly wide and wonderful world of anime. The thing I love most about anime is just how it's different from Western TV. Stories are my passion, I love TV and books and movies and video games. And Japanese storytellers have a subtly different way of approaching and telling stories. So having consumed so many Western stories over the years, it was very refreshing to find something different. I wouldn't say anime is necessarily better or worse than Western TV, but I just love that it's a different lens. And four years in, I'm still not tired or bored of it. I still find shows that surprise and inspire me.

Chihayafuru probably works better in the original Japanese anyway. The subject matter, Karuta, is very language-oriented. That’s just why I was impressed by the dub, it could have been a disaster, but they chose to still use a lot of Japanese language mixed in with the English. It works quite well. Also, not really light-hearted at all, but my favorite shojo/josei is definitely Nana. Amazing show. I’m reading the manga right now.

Not a manga, but Spice and Wolf was the first experience I had with an anime where I reached the end and just absolutely had to continue the story. I didn’t even know what a light novel was, but I happened to be walking past the manga section at the book store and the Spice and Wolf novels were on the shelf. I bought every one they had (I think there were 13 out at the time). Still my favorite manga/LN to this day. Since then, it’s pretty normal for me to read the manga or novels of anime I enjoy. I think the first manga I read was probably Attack on Titan.

Not sure if it falls under the light-hearted label, but I recently finished watching Chihayafuru. It has some humour, some light romance, but it's mostly just a high school club/competition show (like Haikyuu!! but with karuta instead of volleyball). It was a really wonderful watch, I enjoyed it quite a bit (and then promptly proceeded to read the entire manga, which is still ongoing). I wrote a review on MAL, if anyone's interested: https://myanimelist.net/reviews.php?id=263102 Not sure how people on this board feel about dubs, but I usually default to dubs myself (still love watching shows subbed when a dub isn't available). I thought the dub did a great job for this show, which is based heavily around Japanese language and poetry. Karuta is basically a linguistic game, and it couldn't have been easy to write it well in English. I was impressed.

Hey, thanks for the welcome. I think my tastes are pretty varied. It's funny, I actually only really discovered anime due to ecchi clips I stumbled across on Youtube But it opened my eyes to a huge world of great, nuanced shows. I'm really amazed at how wide and weird and wonderful anime can be. There's something there for everyone.

Hi everyone. I just sort of randomly stumbled across this forum while googling random anime-related stuff. Not sure how active the board is, but I figured I'd say hi. As for me, I'm a 37 year old male from Canada. I sometimes feel like an old fart in the anime community, as most fans I encounter seem to be around university-aged. So it can be hard to find people to chat about anime with. Anyway, here's a link to my MAL if anyone wants to get a feel for my anime tastes. https://myanimelist.net/profile/elrond99