I’ve been talking to friends recently about how keen I am on The New Sincerity, and basically doing away (except when it’s really merited) with being only ironically in favour of stuff, and indeed also doing away with generally being sarcastic about more-or-less everything in the world.
It’s VERY EASY to make fun of pretty much everything humans do, as we’re really very silly creatures. It’s much harder to actually be interested in things and honestly pleased by them .. and be willing to express this in the kind of culture I’m immersed in daily where poking fun is expected and rewarded, and actually liking stuff just makes you a target for the previously mentioned fun-poking.
With that in mind, I would like to inform readers that I watch a lot of episodes of the anime version of Naruto, and I like it. The characters are all quite stereotypical, especially for anime, but those stereotypes exist for a reason – they tend to connect with you, in a Hero of 1000 Faces manner.
This show is both popular, and aimed at kids, so anime fans of the neckbeard variety do tend to look down on it a bit – those kind of people tend to have some commonality with indy music kids, in that the minute something is popular, it’s instantly less cool! … Exclusivity is greatly prized.
I, however, happily admit that I like it a lot.
So, given that I am trying to stop trying to be Too Cool For School, and that I already like one kids anime show, I am going to engage in an experiment.
I am going to watch the most hated kids anime show, and I’m going to try to watch it honestly an unironically, and I’m going to post the results here to my journal.
I intend to watch every single episode of Dragonball Z, and report my findings to you.
October 28, 2008 at 1:35 am
Aw, that’s sweet. Now I can feel better about being such a huge bitchy cow today, because you are balancing my karma. Remember, all that sarcasm has to go somewhere.
October 28, 2008 at 2:46 am
Ha, you had me totally fooled until that last line.
October 28, 2008 at 3:24 am
Oh look. Sarcasm. 🙂
October 28, 2008 at 2:48 am
But being sincere is SO SCARY. It just ain’t natural for the Gen X!
October 28, 2008 at 3:46 am
I admire your resolve, but I’m concerned that you’re going to start with the hard-core rather than easing yourself in. I myself really tried to enjoy Dragonball-Z and just couldn’t, it was just too… too… I don’t think there are the words in the English tongue to describe it. I just hated it, and not even ironically, just plain ordinary hate.
October 28, 2008 at 5:04 am
Yeah, I gotta say, I’ve watched a bit (not a lot) of Dragonball, and it seems to me that it’s a lot cooler in concept (or in summary) than it is in reality. Perhaps if you only watched every third or fourth episode it’d be bearble.
October 28, 2008 at 7:03 am
Worry not my friend, I fully & happily admit to enjoying sappy romances no matter how it’s presented 😉
EACH to their own, fuck what everybody else thinks.
October 28, 2008 at 9:04 am
If you want an actually entertaining kids Anime show of the Drgonball variety (episodes that play like a video game with each subsequent bad guy being a levelled up version of the previous one) I highly recommend “One Piece”
I got quite into it for a time till work and life made me have to stop watching it.
Just saying is all.
October 28, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Dude, without irony whatsoever, I love the Veronicas, Christina Aguilera and almost every cartoon ever made, and I am telling you: Dragonball Z is arse. I tried watching it, and even I hated it. And this was at the exact same period of my life where I was watching Pokemon religiously every morning…