I don’t really like recommending anime. If you have read a lot of my posts, you probably know this already. What anime should I watch is a question that sends unpleasant chills down my spine every time. You would think that a person who spends as much time as I do reviewing anime would have developed a certain skill in the matter and you would be depressingly wrong.
I have eccentric tastes in anime. I am also a wide-ranging lover of fiction and stories so you could argue I have very little taste in anime as I tend to like most of it. But my favourites can be a bit opaque and difficult to engage with unless you are in the right mindset. Or at all really.
This is something I have made peace with a long time ago. After gleefully recommending Humanity has Declined (one of my favourite animes) to a lot of my closest friends who I thought I had a lot in common with, only to have each and everyone of them tell me how absolutely awful the show is, I realized that I should stop suggesting things I like and start trying to suggest tings the other person will like. I’m o.k. at it but not great.
For the record, Humanity has Declined is NOT and awful anime and I’m not the only one who thinks so. It has a respectable 7.7 score on MAL. The thing is, it also has a pretty radical split. The majority of people ether have it as a 9/10 or as a 6 and under. Very few people are neutral on this show. And I think that’s the case for a lot of anime that happens to really speak to me. Which means that if I recommend them to someone who is not in the same mindset, they’ll probably have a bad time with it. And question my taste/sanity.
Of course, this isn’t exactly a problem. I love the media that I love regardless of what others may think of it. And I have a blog I can use to prattle on about the shows that only I like. That’s really one of the main reasons I started this blog to begin with. So, my woeful lack of skill in recommending anime has never been a huge issue. Except for the few friends that are probably still genuinely worried for me for enjoying Humanity has Declined. I bet it was this scene….
What it means though is that throughout the years, I sort of naturally stopped trying to share the anime that I love with people. When I watch a show that I know for a fact someone will enjoy because I know their tastes well enough, I will let them know about it. It usually works out. We can giddily pour over every new episode. It’s a good time. But when I watch a show that I think is fantastic but doesn’t 100% slot into someone else’s tastes, I’ll keep it to myself. In practice that means I have never recommended 90% of my favourites to anyone. Unless you count the overly positive reviews I write but that’s not really the same thing, is it?
The thing is, I kind of want to be an anime ambassador. It’s a medium I truly enjoy and as such would love to share it with others. If for no other reason that once in a while I get that specific high. You know the one. When you’re watching something that seems to have been written only for you and the entire world becomes blurry and for a brief moment you might as well exist in that story. It’s a special type of love that only fiction can give you and for me, the layers of colours and pictures and music only make it better. I want as many people as possible to get that feeling whenever they can. It’s one of the closest things we have to magic and it deserves to appreciated.
Sure, I can do that with safe choices that will have predictable impacts. But what about all the weird stuff that you can never be sure will be someone’s jam. The shows that you, yourself might not have liked at all if you hadn’t watched them at just the right time in your life. Those can often be the ones that get a grip on your imagination and change the way you look at the world just a little bit. Those are also the shows I will unfailingly recommend to the person who will absolutely hate them the most. It’s my own personal little anime tragedy.
I exaggerate! It would be a boring post if I said that people just kind of shrugged and thought it was ok or something. Which is usually what happens. And I’m left there trying to reconcile the fact that maybe the world isn’t what I thought it was if obvious masterpieces aren’t obviously masterpiecing and stuff. The worst part is, that when the other guy asks me to clarify and explain what’s so great about a show, I can’t. I can blabber a bit about cinematic language or theme consistency or just blurt out general notions and eagerly stare at the pother person saying isn’t that just brilliant?!?! while they obviously struggle to humour me and try to remember what our friendship is based on…
Again, I exaggerate. Some of my friends read this blog and I don’t want to get a slew of worried texts assuring me that they don’t think I’m crazy and that I can absolutely recommend stuff if I want to. I should take a minute to say I have been blessed with some truly great people in my life and if there is one thing, I am truly proud of, it’s my ability to choose the best possible friends!
But back to my lack of recommendation skills. I think part of the issue is that I don’t know how to build up reasonable expectations. When most of the shows you really love can be described as simultaneously about nothing and also super weird, it’s though to make sure the other person knows what they’re in for. Another one of my personal issues is that I don’t make connections in my head the same way that most people do.
My background is a smorgasbord of different cultures and influences so when I draw parallels in my head, it rarely matches up to those of other people. My experience with anime is particularly affected by this. So whatever nostalgia I feel or connections I make when watching a show are almost guaranteed not to line up with other people’s experiences.
So where do I go from here?
I have no proof of concept yet but I think the key might be focusing more on mood than content. Instead of trying to find experiences others might enjoy based on the genre or themes of the story, or even the characters, I should focus on the ambience the show creates. And maybe be a bit more superficial. Will they like the visuals is a question I rarely ask myself despite regularly stating that visuals are very important in anime.
It sounds simple but it’s not. Figuring out one’s tastes in visuals is just as difficult as trying to suss out their taste in story elements. And what the heck is an anime mood anyways? That’s probably going to be extra dependent on the viewer. But it’s a start and something I want to try going forward.
Then again I could just ask Dawnstorm how he does it. Every single recommendation he has ever given me has been 100% spot on !
