Mizunashi Akari from Konachan / author unknown
Looking back this year, especially the past few months, I realized that I was rewatching more shows then I’m watching new shows. There are several reasons to this, with one being that the current place that I’m living in doesn’t have the best internet, so downloading/streaming the newest shows tends to be a hassle. Added with the fact that I’m still directly going to the fansub site to look for updates, sometime I just get lazy and turn on my external and watch something that I know is good and get over with it.
Just a quick peek, I remembered that I started rewatching Aria for the n-th time, picked few episodes of Hidamari Sketch, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Azumanga Daioh, Minami-ke, picked segments of Legends of the Galactic Heroes, Saki, and Hikaru no Go, and did a rewatch of Maria sama ga Mitaru and Toradora (except for the last few episodes, since it was getting rather painful to see the struggles of each characters close to the end). With those I have categorized them to a few different reasons of why I would rewatch something (aka, why did I like this anime at first so that I would store it on my external):
- Calm, iyashikei (ARIA): I remember rewatching ARIA more than once, and will be THE anime I put to my portable player (now tablet) at least once. I watch it mostly because it is just so calm, and it is a very suitable piece when I just want to watch anime to relax. Just like how I would go back and listen to a pleasant song that makes me relax, I would go back to ARIA from time to time just to be fuwa fuwa (am I using this right) and just Yukkuri shiteitte ne (take it easy).
- Lack of plot, episodic (Azumanga Daioh, Hidamari Sketch etc): This relates to the reason why I rewatch ARIA, as watching shows like Hidamari Sketch, I don’t need to remember too much of what happened before a certain, but only need to remember the personalities of each main character. This is also a reason why I tend to like comedy, since they tend to have static characters (which can be a bad thing at time), but instead makes up for giving the characters various problems/situations and see how they respond.
- Character development (Toradora, Hikaru no Go, Maria-sama ga Mitru): While for the times that I want to just watch anime and relax I would choose shows under the above two categories, for the times that I want to rewatch something longer, something for me to think about, it has to be shows with good character development. Take Maria-sama ga Mitru for example, it was pretty interesting to see Yumi starting off with an normal school girl where some Sachiko fans obviously opposed of to one that have her own fan/stalker, and o man, the transformation of Touko was pretty good also. Yet, the middle parts of the series (the OVA’s) were rather lacking/boring.
- Pure awesome (LoGH): more on that later…
And since any shows that I rewatches must have been interesting enough for me to keep it on my external, so no matter what I rewatch, there is a guaranteed quality of what I watch. At least this way, I won’t stumble on another this-is-so-bad-i-regret-even-wanting-to-watch-this-in-the-first-place type of anime like Zero no Tsukaima.
Yet, because of doing so much rewatching, I have watched a lot less current season anime…