I’ve been writing about anime on the internet for twenty years, and my relationship with the medium has almost constantly changed. As a young person, I think I understood what I wanted from anime very well:
Relatability
Plenty of people want to dress like the characters in Bleach and Jujutsu Kaisen. If you don’t have the best relationship with society, like Yusuke Urameshi or Naruto—or with your past, like Spike Spiegel—maybe seeing their struggles and triumph will offer catharsis. A lot of kids want to be built like a Saiyan; or to be technically skilled enough to make up for their small size and girly appearance, like Himura Kenshin.
My interest in anime and manga first peaked at age twelve; and the characters who stand out in my memory were all in some part anti-heroic (Bandit King Jing), hyper-intelligent (Artemis Fowl), sociopathic (Seta Soujirou), misunderstood (InuYasha), and feminine (Haku). I admired things in the medium beyond the personal aspect (like cool violence, mild sexuality, and colorful characters); but those characters in whom I saw some aspect of myself were the ones who drew me most into the obsessive depths of fandom.
Relatability is the aspect in which anime handles most of its wish-fulfilment; but this doesn’t just mean in the childish sense of admiring superheroes. When Tatami Galaxy spews inner monolog at a hundred miles an hour detailing two years of a miserable college student’s life inside of one episode, that is also wish-fulfillment in how it appeals to relatability. Bird described the feeling of watching that show as, “like therapy;” and I feel exactly the same way about The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl; but there is another, bigger reason I love that film beyond how I can relate to Yuasa Masaaki’s presentation style:
Reality
Even the most abstract art tends to speak on some aspect of reality—sometimes only in the fact of its existence. Anime encompasses a broad spectrum of art, including very abstract pieces (1001 Nights) and stuff that blends real photography into the world, which can only be considered as abstract as traditional film (Nyanbo); but if we’re talking about the most broadly-appealing, popular anime, most of them follow the same rules that novels, comics, and film do, in how they attempt to contain just enough verisimilitude to keep the audience capable of relating to it (while also pumping enough wish-fulfilment into the presentation to heighten the experience beyond the regular state of reality without quite totally escaping it).
Broadly speaking, the human experience is consistent enough that stories only need to use visual touchstones (faces are by far the most common ones) and references to common ideas (like high school) to make the undercurrent realism of the story feel immediate; at least until the story potentially breaks verisimilitude in the eyes of the viewer (panties falling from the sky onto the main character’s face, for instance).
Reality sometimes feels cursory to anime (especially in cases when the creators don’t understand reality); but in cases wherein the show has something meaningful to say or comes from a unique perspective, it can also enrichen the audience’s understanding of reality and teach them something about the world.
As I’ve grown, I’ve become too complicated to relate to any character in the “OMG they’re JUST like ME!!” kind of way that I felt towards characters (whom I wasn’t really that much like) for aesthetic reasons as a child. Instead, I connect to the worldview—the overall lens on humanity given by shows like Sangatsu no Lion, Log Horizon, Shirobako, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Mobile Suit Gundam, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and other shows that make complex and interesting statements about human nature, helping me to contextualize my own understanding.
Other shows with philosophical core statements resonate with my outlook on art, like Space Dandy or Kill la Kill, and push the medium further into its other appeal:
Rarity
Horror and grotesquerie tend to use familiarity as a lure into a threatening unfamiliarity. To a lot of audiences, even benign unfamiliarity is viewed with a sense of hostility. Anime will show you many alien forms; some find the cute styles of girly anime to be off-putting and ugly; while fans of more stylistically-driven works will often completely ignore banal or unattractive ones.
Artistic drama usually walks a few steps away from the relatable, into the imagination of creators who feel compelled to tell stories probably because they need to communicate something they haven’t seen represented yet.
What sends me towards investigating a new anime often isn’t the expectation that I will fall in love with it: instead, it is pure novelty. I want to see something different specifically because it’s different. If something feels like more of the same, then I need to be in search of more of the same (lesbians, action-adventure, comedy) to want to see it over and over again; but if I’ve never seen something before, I can feel enriched even be the experience of discovering why I didn’t relate to it, if it’s something that I never would’ve had a chance to consider otherwise.
In theory, animation is my favorite medium because of how it allows endless possibilities in expressing imagination; but in practice, there is only so much anyone really knows how to create. When someone figures out how to do something a little bit different, it affords everyone else the chance to study that and see if they can figure out what the creator was trying to communicate, and how they can incorporate that understanding into their own creativity going forward.
Relatability is a gateway into appreciating something; whether it’s on the aesthetic level (like how I feel towards late-2000s SHAFT shows like Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei and Hidamari Sketch), or connecting with the characters and their situations on a personal level (like I felt towards K-On in the early 2010s). Lucky Star only ever became more relatable as it fleshed out its own sense of reality; while Mobile Suit Gundam doesn’t ask you to connect with its story and characters at all—but instead to face the reality of their situation and to feel empathy with them.
It almost feels like real drama… until you remember that the war is being fought by giant humanoid robots made of the incredibly-rare space-forged Gundanium Alloy. I could theorize all day about why that’s cool, but what matters is that it is.
You're around if not exactly at the same age when we first met, and I was for the first time articulating my ideas and feelings about anime. I never did write a comprehensive framework, nor even address the thing as a whole "anime." It was strange because I had a mature outlook towards created works but was only a beginner in (in)formal anime appreciative writing. The clear difference between us is that you've been writing and talking about anime for all your life (approximately) and you have lived in, through, and away from it.
...Just like me these days. This is why this post speaks to me -- not so much the content: I don't disagree with it even if I don't really have much to say about it or have feelings about it; but what I feel is how it got here. You've lived lifetimes it seems to me. I have as well. And now anime to me is just another medium that has works I really like, but whose vast majority of outputs I tend to ignore.
Watch Pluto. It's an achievement.