my favorite things about long running anime:
- actual eras with distinctive art styles.
- really really good animation and really really bad animation, all in the same show.
- “how many VAs have died so far?”
- no one even knows what the plot is anymore. it’s all lost in the distant past, like valentine’s day.
- they have animated that same opening images a dozen times by now, and somehow they keep getting worse at it.
- that one part that you will never forget because it was so incredibly bad it is seared into your mind for the rest of your life.
- cell animation and computer animation can be compared in a way that they can’t for any show that was purely one or the other.
- that period after Attack on Titan blew up and everything was stylistically thick lines. everything.
- jokes/complaints that don’t even make sense to you anymore. like octopus hair. I rewatched the octopus hair earlier, and I have no idea why I decided it was octopus hair. I mean it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t exactly the “his hair looks like tentacles” that I remember either.
- that one anime original episode that you actually like and will defend to your dying breath as evidence that the anime team is not completely creatively bankrupt after fifteen goddamn years.
- literally watching the effects of years of changes to the anime industry over the course of one show. hey, remember when different directors worked on different episodes all at once, and so the style and animation quality veered wildly from episode to episode? good times. terrible times.
- early episodes whose entire plots could be fixed by cell phones. later episodes where everyone has smartphones. the main character is still seven years old. somewhere, a portable fax machine disguised as a bentobox is crying.