I don’t have FUNimation or Hulu. I watch anime on Crunchyroll, Canadian Netflix (where’s my Beastars!!???!!!!) and Prime. But for the last few seasons there’s always been at least one series I was looking forward to that ends up on FUNimation and it’s annoying.
Before I get into this, I’m not here to vent about pricing. I think any service that offers me dozens of new anime to choose from each season plus a library of thousands to browse at my leisure, all in a language I can understand (with several choices at that) for 7 to 12 bucks a month, is fantastic buy. I live in a pretty expensive city. That’s like 2 coffees a month.
This said, I’m aware that pricing can be an issue for some and am grateful for the fact that I can afford an extra platform. I know it’s not the case for everyone and I understand it can be daunting to take on another bill just for an extra handful of shows.
As always, my side is really very silly in comparison. Personally my issue is with organization and rational.
One of the big reasons I have been holding out on getting extra platforms is that I frankly have too much to watch already. I have playlists of anime on all three of those platforms and they don’t seem to be getting much shorter or shorter at all. I’m hoping that trying to watch only shows I really like is going to change that but who knows. And I discover animes already in Crunchyroll’s archives all the time!
Essentially limiting my platforms has been a way to limit my each list and keep it reasonable-ish.
The other and more important reason to me which also happens to be way dumber and crazier is the disorganization. I really like having all my Anime in one place. My Cruncyroll watchlist is all organized by series length and genre so that I can easily decide what to watch next. It has the handy calendar of new titles so I can add shows as soon as they show up. It’s great. But now, I have to switch between 3 different platforms and compare in my brain.
I know just how crazy this sounds. Believe me, I really do. But I end up forgetting about shows all the time because they happen to be on the platform I’m not currently using. I can just imagine this would get even worse with more streaming services available.
A little while ago I stumbled upon an app apparently specifically created for my type of crazy. It’s called reel good. It promised to combine my watchlists from multiple streaming sources (Cruncyroll included) and had an enormous library that I could browse and it would show me which platform the show was available on. It would even track new episodes of series on my watchlist and redirect me to my accounts when I wanted to watch something so it would act as a singular interface.
It sounded too good to be true….and it was.
Maybe for more traditional media it would work but it wasn’t so great for my needs. I couldn’t figure out how to import watchlists so I tried manually recreating one by selecting each show individually and adding it in. That’s when I found out that their anime library was considerably less impressive and I wasn’t able to find 2/3rds of the shows I was looking for. Well that was useless….
As a backup I decided to create a combined watchlist by adding these shows to my AniList profile as “plan to watch”. To be fair this is a very good solution and if I had thought f that first I would probably be thrilled but I had gotten so excited about the prospect of all those additional filtering and direct watching opportunities that I couldn’t help but feel let down.
I know in my brain box that this situation is for the best. I’m not renowned for being disciplined when it comes to anime and had reel good worked magically like I had imagined it in my head I would probably have already added FUNimation, Hulu and HiDive by now and just be staring wide eyed and unresponsive at my TV, completely overwhelmed by the abundance of choices…
Honestly, this weird need for a centralized watchlist is the only thing standing between me and certain doom!!!! Or I’ll just get comfortable with using my AniList and doom will come for me anyway.
Honestly, the only reasonable thing for me to do is to forget about this and that was exactly what I was going to do until…. Crunchyroll updated their site and now I can’t arrange my to watch list in whatever order I want and I’m pretty sure a big chink of it disappeared (this is how unreasonable my watchlist is – a big chunk can disappear without me being certain anything happened…) so now the debate is raging again in my head.
If I can’t have a neat little list then why not just get a few more platforms and have the shows I really want to watch. If I have more options I can cut down my watchlist by only picking shows I am truly very excited about instead of sampling everything (the shopping will save me money reasoning…) Watching anime is my favourite hobby, I should invest in it…
This is why I need you guys. I need you to tell me I’m crazy. That explain to me why I most definetly do not need another platform using small words like I’m a 4 year old…
or you could just tell me HiDives, FUNimation or whatever else is out there is more than worth it and I should get it right now!
Out of curiosity, do you have a favourite anime platform? What is it? I’m asking for a friend…
