Day 4 – Yuru Yuri’s Gateway to Girls’ Love

Going from K-On to Yuru Yuri was only a natural step. Like the previous work, it was beloved both on /a/ and in my specific friend circle. I watched a fair few shows purely due to the number of good reaction faces that they had on offer and this show fits within that questionable lineage, at least to some degree. Coming in, I expected it to be another toned-down slice-of-life a la K-On. After all, that show was the platonic ideal of CGDCT in my head. I had no idea what I was really in for.

Day 3 – K-On Forced Me to Engage with True Friendship

 

I feel like I was prepared to like slice-of-life from the beginning. The fun episodes that others would call filler in Code Geass and Oreimo were some of my favorites and I had always loved the relaxed atmosphere present in much of Pokemon, especially during Hoenn. Most importantly, the cartoon which had kept me from the depths of depression during 7th and early 8th grade, My Little Pony, was, for the most part, just like a slice-of-life anime in structure, bar the opening and concluding arcs that bookended every season. It really can’t be overstated how important MLP was to me back then, introducing me to girl x girl shipping, providing a warm and compassionate message at a time where my depression was at its absolute peak, and giving me a space to tentatively explore the codification of gender, allowing me to indulge in remarkably feminine things while backed by an entire community with which to defend myself. Having cared so much for this series, it’s really not such a shock that I gravitated towards K-On.

Day 2 – Discovering Otaku Culture Through Oreimo

Code Geass is otaku as all get out but there aren’t actually any otaku in it. The series certainly made me fall deeply in love with both it and anime as a whole but it was utterly incapable of introducing me to perhaps the most important part of otakudom: the broader culture. Furthermore, I couldn’t actually assign Code Geass’ traits to its place in a wider subculture, it was just a good time. In order to discover all this, I had to find a light novel adaptation, a work which valorizes its heroes for being fans of the very media being consumed. And for me, that work was Oreimo.

Day 1 – Code Geass, the Perfect Introduction to Anime

As with many sub-millennial Americans, I spent my early years watching anime. Pokemon, Yugioh, and Sonic X were mainstays due to their associated properties, of course. Other Toonami series(though not Adult Swim ones, those were too risque for my young mind) were also watched in my house, most notably Zatch Bell, which I really gotta do a video on someday, it’s fantastic. Anyway, anime was the norm during childhood and due to my frankly excessive level of internet use, I was well aware that the shows I was watching were Japanese. But over time, I drifted away from the medium, spending more and more hours a day on video games.