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.