Hello and 今日は! Welcome to my rather half-assed little blog/world/whatever.
First, a little bit about me. I represent the second generation of anime - that means I'm not old enough to remember this weird foreign stuff first hitting sometime in the '70s, but I can recall haunting the tiny JAPANESE ANIMATION section in the back of Suncoast and pining for its overpriced VHS tapes of bad Streamline dubs (which were for whatever reason locked away in plastic cases). Before there were entire walls in Barnes and Noble, before there were fansubs - heck, before there was Amazon Dot Com - our generation got by with piecemeal get-togethers, traded third-generation tapes, and watching the same six crappy movies over and over again on the Sci-Fi Channel at whatever godawful times they happened to be airing them. No one had any idea about the cultural background that this stuff came from, and no one quite understood why we even liked any of it - least of all us. At the time it was like peeking in on a secret world which we didn't really understand, but which had lots of brightly-colored decorations and some cool explosions (and it didn't hurt that most of us were in puberty and there were scores of scantily-clad girls running around). By the turn of the millenium, I don't think there was a single one among us not shocked to suddenly find that a a cultural substructure and even an industry for this stuff had sprung up under our noses, along with a new generation that (broadly speaking) knows a whole heck of a lot more than us about what's going on with these crazy foreign cartoons. That, more than likely, is you.
And that brings us to theOtaku, which is the kind of site that I still can't quite believe exists (for various reasons). Yet I'm a member, and yet here you are reading this rather overlong introduction. I'm now a graduate student in religious studies and philosophy but, despite all odds, still a fan of this stuff long past the point where I might have been considered an expert (as being a longstanding veteran doesn't get you much on internets). Watching anime is part of who I am - I don't think I would have ever bothered following the path I'm currently on if certain shows hadn't roughly shoved me onto it back in the late '90s. On the other hand, I'm now pretty well already moved into my new home, with Kant, Heidegger, and Dionysius to keep me company and no harems nor giant robots in sight. So I don't know quite what to think of my current status - I still enjoy anime (and its cute girls and otherwise), but not always in the same way that I could way back when. Now if I watch for anything other than surface amusement, I tend to read and interpret these shows in the same way I would a philosophical text - which in many circles goes by the name "taking shit way too seriously." There's something absurd about it, to be sure, but I guess I've been on the path of absurdity too long now to step off and join the folks who actually do something with their lives.
Anyways, I'll be posting things like random thoughts and goofy movies here whenever I have some free time to do so. Maybe we'll all learn something in the process, yes?
