#anime000

Lately, I've been picking out my favorite anime disks from my anime bookcase, and putting them into temporary spots on my more accessible bookcase. For a long time now, my anime bookcase has been blocked off by a growing pile of mail packages from figures that I still need to unbox. It makes it really difficult to watch from my anime collection. Which I thought was fine, because I can watch Crunchyroll. But with my wifi occasionally going down more often, the industry news reporting Crunchyroll dropping more series (like my beloved Claymore), and with my new Arcane blurays coming in and reminding me that I don't have to depend on streaming, i thought it was time to make my favorite anime disks more accessible in a less temporary way.

I've also come to accept in recent years that I no long really play videogames. it used to be a big part of my life, that I still love. But I am now a videogame fan, the way most people are sports fans: They watch other people lay it professionally on TV, and just keep up on industry news. And I think I'm fine with that now. So there's no reason for my videogame collection to stay in some of my most accessible shelves, when I don't really need to access them. Better to give that shelf space to my anime disks.

Though I find a lot of these points valid, it's kind of ironic, because I enjoy the superhero movies that are repeatedly cited in this video essay as examples of bad movies (too reliant on "bathos", as per the premise of this video essay). Thor Ragnarok, Thor Love & Thunder, Guardians of the Galaxy movies, James Gunn's Superman, James Gunn's The Suicide Squad,…and I've only heard good things about James Gunn's Peacemaker series.

I wonder if this is related to the stage of media I grew up during. I was a Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan, at the time when its creator's sense of humor felt fresh and new. It was subversive in a way we were ready for at the time. I watched Coppola's Dracula and loved it. It released 5 years before the Buffy series. I didn't grow up on "Monster Squad" and I didn't get attached to Scooby Doo. I watched Dark Shadows (1991) and Forever Knight. But I also watched X-Files, Sam Rami's Hercules, Xena Warrior Princess, etc. We were not lacking in sincerity back then. So when the villains in Buffy The Vampire Slayer would break their own "aura farming" (as the kids say), to make a joke, it was genuinely funny. Maybe that's why I still find the MCU's bathos humor funny.

I loved when Thor threw that ball at the window and it bounced right back at his head. I loved when The Master switched from his speech about the signs and earthquakes pointing to the fulfillment of a prophecy that would grant him power, to asking someone's opinion on the magnitude of the earthquake.

I still like sincerity, sure. Sincere, earnest characters are one of my favorite archetypes. I love anime, manga, and all the sincerity that this video essay speaks about. But the current generation talks like they are desperate for it. Like they are oversaturated and done with anything less. But I guess they did grow up with the MCU, with Snyder's Superman movies, with so many movies trying to emulate the MCU, etc. For them, that was half their lives. For me, far less. I grew up with an endless stock of sincere media. I had room for both bathos and pathos. Maybe because I was already well stocked on exposure to pathos, I had room for bathos. I guess the kids have every right to act starved and hungry for pathos these days. Because they are.

Well, there are like 20-30 anime every season, and 4 seasons EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Plus manga. And light novels. And manhwa. And Web Toons. And Chinese comics. Is it really a loss to just drop American (superhero) movies?

That sounds like a convenient cut to a backlog to me. Especially in a world where everyone has a backlog in MULTIPLE MEDIUMS: movies, series, comics (from any country), podcasts, YouTube channels, Twitch streamers, books, videogames, etc.