Hello,
As usual (almost every wednesday), let's stop a bit the episodic coverage of the winter season 2011/2012 in order to talk about a topic who interest pretty much everyone who follows anime every single season week after week.
Yes, I'm talking about the routine we all pass through in the days just before the beginning of the new season in order to decide which anime to follow and which to drop as uninteresting.
As you know, in the ideal world we would have an infinite amount of time allowing us to watch every single anime every season. Unfortunately for the most various reasons (work, school, etc..) we are bound to decide what to follow and what to drop.
What I want to talk about today is the process that allow us to decide if a particular series is worthy watching or not and the problems of every system we can devise.
In order to better understand the process we use in order to decide which anime is worthy to be watched we need to go and analyze the mediums of information we have available just before we get to watch the actual series.
I think the most common ones and the ones we need to analyze are five and are Trailers, Bloggers Reviews, First Impressions, Cast and Visual Style.
The first thing I use every season when getting information over a particular series is to give a look at the trailers available in order to understand what we are talking about and what we can expect from the series.
It's nice to see people debating and speculating based on a simple 30 seconds trailer and it gives off plenty of information about the level of "anticipation" by the community over a particular series.
Unfortunately, being a trailer a "promotional material", they often don't represent what you're going to get in the real anime. We often found cases of anime badly animated with a wonderful enticing trailer.
Side by side we have another two kind of mediums that are Blog Seasonal Previews and First Impressions. While they are generally a good way to understand more of what you're going to watch, they have a couple of issues that make their use problematic when deciding if a particular series is good to watch.
The main issue with both is that they follow strictly the tastes of whoever is writing the preview. It's very, very hard to decide based on the ideas and opinions of people who may have different tastes from yours.
Try to think about Milky Holmes, it got bashed in pretty much every preview around the net, but I still love it and I heard of other people doing the same. I could have missed such a gem if I simply followed the advice of the previews available.
In last instance, if nothing else seems to work, we can rely on the visual quality of a particular series (character drawing style, animation quality in the trailers, etc...) and the cast (Seiyuu, Director, Animation Studio, etc...) that is working on the project.
The first information is good to understand if you're going to like a particular series animation or characters, but at the same time is pretty much useless when we're talking about actually enjoying a series. (See Guilty Crown for an example)
The second information is also a nice one in order to spot some particular "gold member" of the cast you know to be exceptionally good, but is, just as the visual quality, useless in order to understand how the series will actually end up configuring itself.
After many seasons trying to figure out what is the best way to detect anime to drop undefinitely, I ended up watching at least one or two episodes of any series before dropping anything in order to be sure I am not losing a great gem.
I'm still doubtful this is the best way to proceed though, as I found in multiple occasion series who I have precedently dropped (Ore-tachi ni wa Tsubasa ga nai as an example) who were actually pretty good after watching them completely from start to finish.
I really wonder if someone around the world has come up with something smarter and maybe more time-efficient to do the same job...:P
And you? How do you decide which anime to watch every season? Do you ever give a second chance to a particular anime you dropped in the past? Did you ever got surprised after watching a particular series again?
See you soon,
feal87