Why Do I Love Anime?

I got tagged!! To be frank, I don’t usually like doing tag posts. It makes me feel obligated to write something I may not have time to write, or something I might not feel is necessary for me to write, but… Mel from Mel in Anime Land tagged me in something I was going to write about anyway, so what the hell. I’ll do this tag and I’ll do it happily!

And, like usual, there’s a set of rules and whatnot (the only thing I’m not going to be doing is tagging 3 other bloggers for the challenge because I’d rather not force them into anything)—check them out below:

 

• Write a post about anime, naming your favorite thing(s) about it. Be as personal or impersonal as you’d like to be; maybe write about how it helped you through a tough time, or taught you something, or just how much fun you’ve had with it.
• Nominate 3 bloggers for the challenge.
• Link back to the original post: Ty-Chama’s Why I Love Anime Challenge

 

 

Why Do I Love Anime?

 

This tag is tough for me—it truly, one hundred percent has been a tough topic for me to pinpoint. Why do I love anime? What’s in a show that makes me fall in love with it; what’s in a show that makes me laugh and makes me sit on the edge of my seat biting my nails; what’s in a show that makes me tear up and want to curl into a ball never to be seen by humanity again?

The OPs and EDs are one of the first things I love about anime. While that might seem a bit odd, I can’t even begin to tell you how much of the music library on my phone, tablet, and laptop is from anime. I have entire soundtracks from feature films, OPs and EDs that I put into playlists categorized by mood, and even then, when I’ve gone through the OPs and EDs, there’s the artists’ catalogs to look at. For example: Banana Fish. The first OP of this show was “found & lost” by Survive Said the Prophet, and I fell in love with it. After listening to that song nonstop I began listening to their other songs, and I just love the band. The third season OP for Haikyuu!!: “Hikari Are” by BURNOUT SYNDROMES, is another one that I listen to daily. Another OP that I’ll listen to constantly without any shame is the Angel Beats! OP: “My Soul, Your Beats”… Something about that made me feel more emotion than I thought was possible listening to a song. Now, before I get carried away with OPs and EDs, there’s more I’d like to list.

In some anime there are real relationships. What do I mean by this? I mean, well, exactly what I said. The relationships between two characters, or even the entire cast of characters, feel genuine and real. We have the stereotypical head-butting characters, but I’ve actually seen those types of people—the people who can’t seem to agree on anything, but they care about each other and love each other, and can’t seem to be away from the other or they’ll simply fall apart and not know what to do. It’s not completely genuine, no, but there’s enough emotional stock and reality in them that I can put myself in one of their shoes, put my brother or a close friend in the other character’s shoes, and laugh because I feel like it’s so true.

There’s something about the anime community, too, that makes me love the medium even more. Before this last year I’d sort of stray from talking about anime other than the late-‘90s and early-2000s anime because I knew the friends that I had didn’t have much knowledge outside of those (considering I was born in 1993 and most of my friends are now younger than me). I have one friend, though, who I was never on edge talking about anime. He’s a coworker, and is actually twelve years older than me, but we found common ground, and we became insanely close after a while because we both opened up after talking about anime (and I even spent half my homeless period of August 2018 with him). We watched Toradora! together; we watch Harukana Receive together; we watch Hanebado! together; we watched Sakamoto and Haikyuu!! and Classroom of the Elite (I miss that show, dammit!), and we talk about Schrodinger’s Cat Bunny (Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai) constantly. But, this wordpress community, and the other friends that I’ve made since moving into my house seem to embrace my love for anime, and nobody mocks me or has anything nasty to say. Some people will ask “Have you watched X yet?” and I’ll just laugh and usually say no because I’m busy watching other anime, but that sort of interaction, the interactions I’ve had on wordpress because of anime and the people I’ve talked to on here and twitter and whatever…that makes me love anime even more—because I know that through the craziness that is anime somebody’s bound to love it and want to talk.

I even had a friend today, one I didn’t think knew anything about anime or manga, or even care for that matter, tell me: “By the way, you spell Haikyu with one ‘u’” when I wrote something about the show on twitter (I always write Haikyuu!! because it’s written with the dash in katakana on the Japanese manga, extending the “u”…but that took me by surprise, it really did). I don’t think it really matters much if it’s Haikyu or Haikyuu, but having him do that threw me for a loop and I questioned if maybe there’s more anime love in him than he’s let on… Eh, oh well, that’s part of the community.

Finally, I love anime because it’s my escape. Most of you may know I suffer from GAD (generalized anxiety disorder), and that I’ve struggled with it constantly over the last few years—I’ve had anxiety attacks that have crippled me physically for hours on end, mentally for days, and I’ve even had anxiety attacks that have caused me to completely freak out, scream, thrash, and almost cut ties with some of the people closest to me for a period of time. And a few things helped me. 1) music; specific songs from an Australian band called Hands Like Houses as well as anime OPs and EDs (THANK YOU “My Soul, Your Beats”!!!). However, there are times where neither of those aspects helped enough to calm me down and get the hell out of my head, so I turn to 2) Anime. I put on shows that are light-hearted, or emotional, visually breath-taking, or simply stupid-funny, or ones that I watched when I was a bit younger (Violet Evergarden; or Toradora!; or Wolf’s Rain; or Studio Ghibli movies; or Highschool of the Dead; or Vampire Knight; or…you get the picture). Anime became my escape from the world and my own safe haven from my own head. It became my solace, and the place where I can be on my own, watching, analyzing characters, the artwork, the animation, and whatever else, and simply envelope myself in the story while everything else fades away.

 

Well, I may have gotten a little deep in this post, but it was a tag asking why I love anime, so I guess I answered the question? Let’s go with that. Anyway, like I said at the beginning, I don’t think I’m going to tag anyone, but honestly, if you want to write a post about why you love anime I’d love to read it. Maybe we have some things in common? That would be cool.

 

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Alexie 🙂