For a pretty significant portion of my life, I was (at the VERY least) receptive to the idea that you sometimes just needed to get back up and try again whenever you failed. I’d grown up on that idea, caught in an inescapable bad living situation through no fault of my own, so it was a sentiment that appealed to me. Even as I got older, my problems changed, and everything stopped being a waiting game until I could finally escape it (like my home growing up), the message still resonated with me. I’m a pretty soft touch, after all. My heart is near the surface and moves easily, so any story about grit and determination and carrying on despite impossible odds could tug on my heart strings. That’s probably why I was pretty receptive to Shonen anime (“shonen” here being a genre of anime classicaly aimed towards young boys, featuring adventure and fighting and easily-digested morality typically dispensed around or within the aforementioned fighting, thereby showing the righteousness of the heroes’ ideals when they emerged victorious from combat against their hated foe) as a whole when I was introduced to it. So much of it features characters that are the living embodiment of “just try again/harder and you’ll eventually succeed!” and I was pretty much always down to watch whatever. Not everything needs to be high art and sometimes fun can be fun and a cheap tug at the heartstrings will play you just as well as a subtle and artful thrum. It never really bothered me, especially considering that I don’t actually watch a lot of anime as a whole, so I never interrogated it.

Now, though, as I’ve separated myself from the people who first introduced me to anime and begun to seek it out myself, I’ve found my tastes shifting. This isn’t just because I’m finding stuff that is more receptive to the kind of critical engagement I enjoy or just because I’m actually digging into shows more deeply on my own now that I’m not being primed to ignore stuff and feel a specific way about it (as best exemplified by how I feel about Hunter X Hunter watching it along with Medica Club Plus versus when I watched it with my ex-roommates back in 2018), but because I’m just kind of tired of the idea that things will work out in the end if I just keep trying or love my friends or fight to protect people. I’m tired of the idea that you need to just keep trying until you succeed. I’ve spent too much of my life struggling for just one step further–fighting against myself (my mental health, usually), against the abuse of others, against the way I was raised to be a specific type of person–to really enjoy that any more. You’re not actually guaranteed success if you just keep trying. You can spend your entire life failing to do something and sometimes you actually should give up on people. Life is, of course, much more complex and nuanced than shonen anime depicts it as, most of the time.

Excellent, nuanced work within the genre exists out there, of course. I’m painting with a broad brush because I’m finding myself tired of an entire genre as a whole, but I’ll be the first to list my favorite exceptions. I just also don’t think I can keep up with a bunch of shows I used to follow because I’m no longer moved by that kind of struggle these days. Well, I’m not positively moved by that kind of struggle. I don’t have the emotional resiliance I once did and I don’t think I’ve got it in me to watch some kind of teen or young adult get endlessly and repeatedly beat up so they can stand up one final time and overcome whatever trials and tribulations were before them with one final bit of effort. Which isn’t to say I’m contemplating giving up or changing the way I live my own life, either. I’m still going to keep struggling forward one step at a time, same as I always have, because the alternatives aren’t something I want for myself. I just don’t really want to watch stories about people doing a similar thing except their problems are ones they can solve by punching someone or something. None of my problems would be solved by punching something one more time, no matter how powerful that punch is. All my problems are complex emotional issues, financial issues, or broader societal issues that might one day be addressed via violence but only if things go really, really, really badly in a way that I’d really like to avoid (remember kids, it really sucks to live through a revolution and that’s not a thing anyone should want as their first stab at addressing a systemic issue).

All of which is to say that I’ve stopped watching most anime, since the stuff I was clued into falls into that kind of shonen trope. I’m looking for new stuff, but I am also trying to thread the difficult needle of finding something that won’t be emotionally draining in entirely different ways. After all, even if the show DOES tackle difficult emotional and societal issues in a smart, nuanced way, I’m still on the ropes, emotionally and mentally speaking, so I can’t really handle shows that deal with anything too dark or constantly difficult. Which mostly leaves romcoms of some kind or another, I think. I dunno. I’m really not an expert on the space as a whole and am only trying to find something in the anime sphere because I’ve got a Crunchyroll account so I can watch Hunter X Hunter and don’t want to pay for a third monthly streaming service. I’m already out of Disney stuff I want to watch and will probably be dropping that once I get through Andor Season 2 or decide to start skipping months of listening to A More Civilized Age so I’m not paying for Disney+ to watch four episodes of a show per month. Anyway, if you’ve got any recommendations, I’d love to hear them. It doesn’t need to just be anime, either. I’ll take anything since I really need more “shut my brain off and watch something” shows that actually have some substance to them so I’m finding myself WANTING to turn my brain back on and engage with them. I’m starving for good media over here.