Alright thats it.

[J.M. Matthews]

I watched a bit of the networks. The X-Files, Riverdale (Archie Comics)

I love the X-Files, it's the same show it always was, but more violent

I don't know about Riverdale. I don't get why they're turning Archie into the Sopranos. 

If this were the early 00s, Archie would still probably be a saturday morning franime like totally spies - Code Lyoko - W.I.T.C.H. (you know, Archie's Weird Mysteries) which was animated in Canada-France, or at least I think so. It wasn't too bad like that. I miss funny Archie.

But yeah, Archie was always cool to men and women.

Edited March 15, 2018 by J.M. Matthews

[PokeNirvash]

Seriously dude, what's with all the multiple consecutive posts?

[J.M. Matthews]

8 minutes ago, PokeNirvash said:

Seriously dude, what's with all the multiple consecutive posts?

That seems odd to you? 

That's funny, that's kind of how I always post. I don't tend to edit my posts as one, so I do multi posts.

Sorry if it seems odd. It's because I write so damn much. lol 

To summarize, it I strongly believe if you DO have the podium, soapbox, platform, spotlight,

You may as well take that attention, run with it, and milk it for all its worth! You only live once...

Edited March 15, 2018 by J.M. Matthews

[EyeOfPain]

On 3/7/2018 at 11:23 AM, mochi said:

oh you mean weebs, the kind of people who wear kimonos and anime t-shirts exclusively, only eat sushi and ramen, randomly pepper their speech with the words "Kawaii" and "sugoii" keep Body pillows of naked anime girls and insist that they are Japanese even though they're white and/or Black

Hey, sometimes they're mostly clothed and just in a state of partial undress!

[Top Gun]

Poof probably isn't even reading this anymore, but I just found it, so imma megapost anyway.  Beats doing shit for work.

A lot of big anime fans seemed to get into it by being attracted to something that felt culturally "different," but I came into the fandom via a different path.  I've been an animation fan for as long as I can remember; I think I have to thank/blame my grandmother for this, since she always had a bunch of dollar-store VHS collections of old Looney Tunes and Famous Studios shorts.  (She had to be one of the few grandmothers at that time who owned Fantasia on home video. ) I loved cartoons as a little kid, and even a bit later on when most people my age were into the likes of Saved by the Bell or Full House or Nick's live-action stuff, I pretty much ignored them in favor of the Disney Afternoons and the DCAU and One Saturday Morning and all that good shit.  I watched a bit of live-action TV too, mainly nerd stuff like The X-Files or Star Trek, but it was mostly cartoons.  Even then, although I loved a few of the traditional huge Disney musicals, I don't think they were ever my absolute favorites: I tended to lean towards more serious-minded movies like The Great Mouse Detective, or some of Don Bluth's works, or The Iron Giant.  So I think in that sense anime was a natural fit for me: it was animated, which I loved, but it was a very different sort of animated than the vast majority of American offerings, generally focusing far more on serialized storytelling and serious character development.

As for why I've always preferred animation to live-action in general, it's hard to say, but in a strange way I think I've always been able to relate more to animated characters than live-action ones.  To me live-action acting requires a much greater suspension of disbelief: what you're seeing is a real person pretending to be a character, so it's very easy to see the actor first, and the person they're portraying second.  It takes a very rare sort of performance, something at the level of Heath Ledger as the Joker or Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, for me to feel, "Okay, that person really IS that character."  That isn't to say I don't enjoy a whole ton of live-action television and movies, but it's generally the actor's identity and personality that are foremost in my mind.  With animation it's different: the person you're seeing on-screen really IS that character, because they were originally created as such.  What you're seeing is the "reality" of the situation, for lack of a better term.  Sure, you're still hearing a real person's voice, which is especially noticeable if it's a celebrity or a voiceover artist you're familiar with, but that's a big step removed from seeing the actual person, so it's much easier to maintain the illusion.  Even today, whenever I hear Steve Blum's voice in something, there's a part of my brain that'll go, "Hi Spike!"

Another big reason is in the storytelling format.  It's common for anime series, at least ones that are original works and not adaptations of a manga or novel, to be planned from the get-go with a defined final length, which I feel is hugely beneficial to telling a well-structured story.  I'm of the firm belief that good writing requires knowing your end goal before you ever put pen to paper, and at least having a general idea of how you're going to get from point A to point B; that's way easier to do if you know in advance how long you have to say what you want to say.  (Most of my favorite anime series tend to fall somewhere around the 26-episode length, which I've found was a great timeframe for them to tell a good story without overstaying their welcome.)  Contrast that with American television, which at least until very recently has always been based on the seasonal model: shows keep getting renewed as long as they're successful, often for far longer than the original creators ever envisioned, and can be canceled at the drop of the hat if their audience falls off.   It was a very rare show like Breaking Bad that had an overall planned length and was given the creative freedom to tell its entire story successfully.  Most of the time, you wind up with a complete clusterfuck in the vein of Lost, where it became blatantly clear to everyone as time passed that the original creators had no goddamn clue where they were going.  Not to say this doesn't happen a lot in anime as well, but there's far more opportunity for a shorter self-contained story there.  At least the rise of streaming seems to be allowing for more that sort of storytelling in live-action productions.

One more thing to toss on the pile is genre preference.  The vast majority of Western live-action TV series have tended to fall into a few broad categories: you have your half-hour sitcoms, your police procedurals, your medical dramas, and...not a whole lot else honestly.  More niche shows like Star Trek stepped beyond those boundaries, but they were few and far between.  I tend to not be super-interested in real-world-focused fiction in whatever guise it takes, so that never left me with many options.  In contrast, anime deals in a huge range of genres, many of which you'd never see in live-action outside of a big-budget movie (and some of them not even there).  You're not going to scratch an itch for space-opera or hard sci-fi or giant robots or high fantasy or psychological horror in many other places, and anime has been doing a lot of that stuff from its very beginning.  For a general nerd, it's hog heaven.  Now granted, live-action TV has been making some significant strides in that regard, especially when it comes to streaming, but as I'm not a huge fan of consuming media via streaming (and loathe binging) I'm not even aware of much of it.  Plus I already have a massive anime backlog, so I don't really need to pile anything else on my plate.

There's a lot more I could talk about here, whether it's how I got into anime in the first place and how that informs my tastes today, or even little things like preferring the half-hour TV format to the full hour that non-sitcom live-action almost exclusively uses, but this is already way too long and no one's going to read it anyway.  Long story short: I've always liked cartoons over live-action, and anime tells more of the sorts of stories I prefer, so that's pretty much what I stick to.  I can't even remember the last live-action series I watched in its entirety...Firefly, maybe?

Edited May 7, 2018 by Top Gun

[EmpressAngel]

On 5/5/2018 at 10:58 AM, EyeOfPain said:

Hey, sometimes they're mostly clothed and just in a state of partial undress!

But my sexy One Piece boyfriend pillow is cool, right?

[Phillies]

cause 3-D girls pig disgusting 

[EyeOfPain]

15 hours ago, EmpressAngel said:

But my sexy One Piece boyfriend pillow is cool, right?

Who's your One Piece boyfriend? 

[Gyaos]

On 3/6/2018 at 7:34 PM, Poof said:

Why are people so obsessed with anime?

It was practically been built into many of our childhoods, which helped. Anime was very different from American cartoons. I grew up with Japanese animation at a very young age too. Voltron was probably the first anime I ever saw, albeit in an edited format.

I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with anime to the point where it's all I think about, but to say I don't enjoy it and don't go out my way to watch Toonami every weekend would make me a liar.

Edited May 8, 2018 by Gyaos

[EmpressAngel]

1 hour ago, EyeOfPain said:

Who's your One Piece boyfriend? 

Ace and I are very happy together.