My 2014 in Anime

As far as things go, 2014 has been a good year for anime. It's not over yet, but with just a month to go, we're halfway through the fall 2014 season and there'll be no more newcomers, so we should be in a position to make our judgements by now. My favourite part of watching anime as a hobby is making judgements up front before a season, picking what I think will be the most interesting and then losing interest in them as they air only to find a show about trains was the sleeper hit of the season. Here's a breakdown of what I watched this year from the ones I dropped to the ones I've picked up late. This is no "best of 2014" mind, and it's all my personal opinion. So, in no particular order:

Naruto

Naruto is over. When you end a manga after 15 years, there will always be fans who like the ending and fans who hate it. These are the thoughts of a reader who stopped paying heed to Naruto approximately 6 years ago coming back for the final 5 chapters, as such, it won't be particularly in-depth, and any attempts at recapping the story up to that point are likely to be hilariously wrong and exaggerated.

I said goodbye to Naruto during the Pain fight in Konoha all those years ago. I stopped reading around then because, like with Bleach, I grew tired of sitting idly by as an extremely tired story continued to be squeezed of all it's originality. As a younger man, I was adamant in not wanting my favourite shows to end. I wanted things to continue forever just like Dragon Ball Z felt like it had done. Then there came a time where I realised the importance of the conclusion. Continually repeating the same tropes and overextending a story ruins franchises. Now I adamantly believe the best shows are those who have known when to end a good thing at it's peak before a concept grows stale.

Even Kaguya thinks this series has gone on long enough.

Naruto was a gateway show for a lot of people of a certain generation who enjoy anime today. It was often never the first people see, but the show that made people aware that there was a whole world of anime and manga out there. Around 2003, I was amongst the rush of youngsters eating up the early episodes of the anime, though I stand by that the only part of Naruto that stands up to this day is the Zabusa arc. I digress, after the first few episodes of Shippuuden, I grew fatigued from the lackluster story and decided to just read the manga instead. It would only be so long before I realised how little I enjoyed spending 10 minutes a week reading Naruto that I decided I should give that up too. Off the top of my head, I believe this was around the time Nagato had blown up Konoha and I realised how little I cared about the whole deal.

Going on from there, I retained a small but still real sense of investment into at least knowing the backbone of what happened from there. I would ask a friend of mine who continued to read to tell me the gist of things. I know vaguely about Obito being Tobi after all (shocker, I know), Danzo being donezo,  and the sage of the six paths' mommy being revealed as the big bad guy.

McBusted - Tourplay

This isn't particularly the usual sort of thing I like to blog about on here. If you were to look at the contents tab, this one is going to stand out like a sore thumb I'm sure. When I tagged along to the cinema to see McBusted's tour documentary, I was told that it would be amusing if I was to talk about this on my blog. I disagreed vehemently, not my thing. But then I was offered to have my lunch paid for if I was to write about the documentary, which sort of sweetens the deal. It just goes to show you that even with regular readers probably in single digits, you can still sell out. Also, doing this means I can probably do another anime post soon without oversaturating the whole blog.

I'm not a fan of boy bands, that's not surprising. I've not particularly ever been their target audience, but I admit that some parts of McFly/Busted have warmed up to me over the years that I've been around their influence. I was told how similar I was to Tom Fletcher, and that kind of helps me feel more empathy for him. In fact, a couple of years ago I tagged along to one of McFly's concerts at Wembley Arena, I think it was the Memory Lane tour. It was an ok experience, definitely missing out on some of the fun from the nostalgia of their older hits, but it seemed like so would 70% of the fans, being so young, provided they weren't listening to McFly as toddlers. It was to my understanding that the point of greatest hits tours was for people who'd have been fans throughout to relive those eras of the bands careers.

Guilty Crown

     When Guilty Crown first aired in 2011, I dropped it after the first few episodes. If it wasn't for the fact that Supercell and EGOIST weren't so heavily featured in the soundtrack, I would never have picked it back up and wouldn't be writing this blog on it. A year after it finished I took another shot at it, but got bored again around episode 6. Eventually though, I felt wrong calling My Dearest one of my favourite songs in the world whilst being so quick to ignore Guilty Crown that I decided I had to sit down and watch it all. Having done so I am filled with many mixed feelings.

There are a lot of spoilers below and this entire blog post will only make sense for those who have finished Guilty Crown.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

I've never been a fan of The Beatles, though I've tried. The only song I enjoy listening to has to be Norwegian wood, and it's entirely due to how much I enjoyed the book that shares it's name. It's quite a skill for a novelist to awaken interests in you through prose that didn't exist before. Perhaps through the way I find myself identifying with the characters, I find myself taking on aspects of their personality through memetic imitation. Perhaps each person will find different writers able to cause these interests and feelings in themselves, if so, Haruki Murakami is an author able to do that to me.

For the longest time, people had recommended this jazz bar owner turned author to me, but I was often unable to spare the time to find my entry point. In fall 2012 however, I was in the midst of a reading streak fueled by a HMV sale on books, and I was able to find Norwegian Wood for a few mere pounds. I had no idea if this was one of his best works, but for a price so low I didn't see much harm in taking a gamble.

Upon reading even the first chapter, Murakami's distinctive style hit something deep within me. His insight into the mind of Toru Watanabe is so well formed, and the entire book is steeped in a wistful tone. Though told in Toru's point of view, the narrative at times is very hard hitting and devoid of reaction, certain plot points are delivered so matter of factly that they leave a lump in your throat whilst the story skips along with little comment. It is an extremely kafkaesque style, and a most unromantic romance story. That's not to say the relationships forged don't feel authentic, the characters are very three dimensional and you feel for them in all the ways intended.

I was barely able to put Norwegian Wood down once I picked it up, and once finished I felt a great urge to read more by Murakami. Recently I managed to track down What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and 1Q84 and can confirm that this author is not a one hit wonder. It takes little consideration to say that Norwegian Wood will go down as one of the most influential novels of my young life.

"Isn't it good, Norwegian Wood?"

Sword Art Online

I'm going to go right out and say it, SAO is my favourite shounen animé in years. One day I'm going to run out of series of stuff that I'm blinded by my own bias with and perhaps talk critically on a subject, but that'll have to wait for a day I'm not talking about Sword Art Online. Or Metal Gear. Or Dragon Ball Z.

Other than Shingeki no Kyojin (which I do love, but not as much as SAO), I've lost interest in shounen animé, all I can bare nowadays is DBZ out of nostalgia, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, SAO and Shingeki. A younger me was obsessed with hits like Naruto and Bleach, and I mean no disrespect to shows of their ilk, but I just don't have the energy to keep up with convoluted plot lines like who has what sharingan and why anymore.

I feel like Sword Art Online is an entirely different breed of action show to those two. There are similarities, but all in all it's undeniable that the pace is much faster due to it's season-based format and the story arcs being far more condensed and streamlined, even when the Aincrad arc takes place over 2 years.

Metal Gear Solid

Kept you waiting, huh?

I think I've mentioned this at every possible opportunity on every possible platform but I love Metal Gear. I love giant robots and complicated plots that make me feel clever for following them, and even though I didn't when I started playing the series, I even love sneaking games thanks to MGS.

My first encounter with Metal Gear was through the demo for MGS2 packaged with Zone of the Enders. Back then, my dad's then-partner's brother and I were pretty close. I was an impressionable young kid into foreign martial arts movies and sci-fi rated for ages considerably above my own and he was a sage of those two things and patient enough to put up with hanging out with me. I'm pretty sure it was through him that I ended up with a copy of ZoE1.

First playthrough of the MGS2 demo terrified me. It set me on my merry way on the tanker in the Hudson river, rain pouring down, tasked with obtaining intel on something I had no knowledge of. My pre-teen hands were too lacking in dexterity to sneak past any of the guards with reliable precision and I couldn't calm my nerves quickly enough to tranquilise them before they spotted me. The tension hit me hard, and for maybe another year, I never touched the full game. I was scared of Metal Gear Solid, and thought of it as far above my skill level at the age I was then.

My cool almost-step-uncle Phil would later lend me his full copy of MGS2, and for a good month or so, it didn't enter my PS2 out of the anxiety I felt from the tanker chapter demo. I can't remember what finally gave me the courage to have a go at it but once I did, I was hooked. I still sucked at the game, but the story drew me in (even though I didn't understand any of the plot points from earlier games) and Hideo Kojima's philosophical commentary blew my by then teenaged mind. I beat the game in a summers afternoon just as I was about to leave for the city centre with some friends, and a sense of achievement struck me for the entire day.

Dragon Ball Z Kai 2014 - The Great Saiyaman and World Tournament Sagas

I've been a fan of Dragon Ball Z since I can remember. Alongside Pokémon and Cardcaptor Sakura, it was one of the first animé shows I watched as a child, long before I knew what animé was. As soon as I was old enough to stay up as long as I wanted to on weekends as a child, I would stay up long past my parents so that I could watch Dragon Ball Z on Toonami at 1:10AM for years. In that case, I probably should have been more attentive about the remastered series DBZ Kai, but in reality I only watched the remastered episodes whenever I visited my mother and managed to stick it onto the magic Sky+ record thing.

So after taking a hiatus in August 2011, DBZ Kai resumed at The Great Saiyaman Saga this April just past. For exposition, Dragon Ball Z Kai is a recut HD remaster of the original show, slimming down on filler content and providing a story closer to Akira Toriyama's manga. Because of this, new scenes have been animated to bridge the gaps left by removing some content, and due to being created with the classic style in mind, they fit in rather perfectly.

The following contains a rundown of the events of the first two mini-sagas of the Majin Buu era, so there are spoilers, but these episodes originally aired 20 years ago now.