The other day a startling realization hit me.
While I’m still watching anime as I always do, my intake of older and classic anime has been on the wane as of late. When I look at the shows I’m currently watching, Heartcatch Precure, Durarara!, Giant Killing, among others, they’re largely new-fangled series. This solution is as simple as watching older series, but my concern lies more in the possibility that I was getting caught in the seasonal trap without realizing it, that I was starting to get new-series tunnel vision. While I think it’s important to watch what’s new, I don’t want my perspective too shaped by simply what is there “now.”
I also realized easy it is for anyone to get caught in the seasonal trap if you’re an internet-based anime fan. Its ease of access is like a warm embrace and it’s all too simple to just let it happen.
Though actually, I have been getting my “classic content” through manga. I’m on an early shoujo kick, picking up volumes of Attack No.1, reading Swan, getting all of Rose of Versailles, but seemingly at the expense of reading newer titles. It’s like with anime I’ve planted myself with the present, and with manga I’m entrenched in the past. It’s not quite what I’d call a “routine,” but before I knew it these had become my fandom habits.
I’m perfectly aware that there’s nothing really “wrong” with the way I’m doing things, but it’s still something I’d like to change before I get too comfortable with it. After all, “Running water never grows stale.”
OGIUE MANIAX 
I’ve fallen into this trap. It’s actually affected how I watch older anime as well. I now find it difficult to watch more than one episode of any anime in a given sitting because I’m just not used watching more than that.
Not that there’s much wrong with that. My weekly watching of Hell Girl have become as regular as my Durarara viewings
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My kitty lurvs running water, won’t touch water in a bowl…. lol, anyway. Seasonal watching is such a trap, and imo, it’s more time-consuming than backlogging. This is likely a personal thing because when I watch, I also enjoy reading entries around blogs. That more than doubles the time required to experience a series, although the converse perspective is that on older/completed series, we may have a tendency to batch or marathon, where we can expend even greater amounts of time than normal.
The good balance is being able to lightly pace through older series, while dominating the seasonal catalog with legend time-management skills… sadly, I am terrible at this, or maybe I’m still too wakai~
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I am one that believes watching older stuff is just as important as checking out the new. I’ve been watching older stuff for about 3 years straight now. Pretty tired of it so I’ve been watching newer stuff.
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I’ve never had this problem because I never last more than a couple of weeks during each season and then I go to muscle through more of my backlog.
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Yeah, I know what you mean. I try to watch along with my backlog or will exclusively watch my backlog and end up in the ancient anime tunnel vision instead of shiny new tunnel vision.
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I’ve found that I get through this sort of thing nowadays by picking out what interests me at the start of the season and giving them my time. This season I’m already up to about five different series (B Gata H Kei, Senkou no Night Raid, Rainbow, Angel Beats, Arakawa Under the Bridge). However, even though I’m several shows deep, all I need to do is watch five new episodes during the week and I’m all caught up.
I use the rest of my time to make a nice dent in my backlog, usually series that I have started yet didn’t finish for some reason or another. Since those go by very quickly I end up thinning out the backlog with relative ease before I have to sit down and really plow through longer ones.
Overall it’s not bad. Compared to recent years I have already finished twice as many anime so far this year than I have in previous years.
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I’m with 21stdigital, I try to make myself watch new shows of the season … and then quickly lose interest in all but one. (This season it’s “House of Five Leaves”)
More importantly: Where did you get Rose of Versailles?! I’ve been making my way through the anime (and trying to avoid the end because I know it’s going to make me emo for a week), but haven’t found anywhere to buy it or the manga. I’m considering buying the German dvds and hacking my computer’s dvd player to play R2.
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I was referring to the Japanese version of the manga of Rose of Versailles, actually, but I have looked into the possibility of owning it on DVD as well.
There are actually a Canadian DVDs of Rose of Versailles with French subtitles. It means it’d be a pain to show others as they wouldn’t have much idea of what’s going on, but I think you can get it fairly inexpensively and it would be Region 1.
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Awesome, thanks!
I’d be interested to see how the manga differs from the anime. I’m afraid that the Japanese manga would be even more incomprehensible to me than the French subtitles :) or the Japanese audio for that matter! Sometimes I can understand a decent bit of spoken Japanese but can’t read a whiff of it.
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