No anime is dropped forever: 1–5

There is no such thing as drop­ping an anime forever. When I use the term ‘dropped’ that does not mean that’s the last I’ll see of that anime in my life. Drop­ping a show means that I don’t have the enthu­si­asm to watch this show cur­rently and at a later date I’ll return to that anime. This later date may be the time when I’m stuck on a desert island with noth­ing other than a port­able dvd player and a ‘Lucky Star’ box­set, but I will one day return and give the anime another shot. With this in mind, com­bined with the fact that I’m only 4 series away from ‘drop­ping’ 100 anime, accord­ing to my MAL account, I’ve decided that I’m going to take a look back at all those series I’ve dropped, recog­nise why I dropped them and eval­u­ate when I should give them another go.

07 Ghost

Dropped after: 7 episodes

Why I dropped it: 07 Ghost is the ulti­mate example of how utterly mis­lead­ing first impres­sions can be. When I reviewed the first epis­ode when it came out, I abso­lutely loved the thing and gave it an A-, some­thing I’ve done less than 5 times since start­ing my first impres­sions posts over a year ago. That first epis­ode, and the fol­low­ing epis­ode, were action packed with a fast-paced plot and everything fit­ted beau­ti­fully. I even went so far as to berate those who dis­missed this as fangirl fod­der. Then the main char­ac­ter went to that church. And stayed there. And stayed there. And stayed there. Plot advance­ment ground to a halt and then the BL really kicked into gear. So not only had they ruined what star­ted out as a pretty damn epic anime, they had ground it to a halt with bish­ies. Frus­tra­tion kicked in faster than bore­dom and the show was dropped.

Rebirth Chances: Rather low. From what I heard, the main char­ac­ter never leaves that bloody church and in the few reviews I read, the vil­lain Ayanami (whose name I can remem­ber for rather obvi­ous reas­ons) was cri­ti­cised for being a one-dimensional char­ac­ter. Con­sid­er­ing he was the char­ac­ter I felt had the most poten­tial, that’s a real blow for the chances of a rebirth. Still, it was dropped more out of frus­tra­tion than bore­dom and my dis­like for bishie-laden anime has been slowly drop­ping so I might give it another shot one day, except maybe only after I’ve given the manga a shot first.

11Eyes

Dropped After: 1 episode

Why I dropped it: For­get­table? No really, I can’t remem­ber a thing about that first epis­ode and even read­ing my first impres­sions of the show did little to bring back the memor­ies (this will prob­ably be a re-occuring theme in these posts). Let me just ctrl+c, ctrl+v…

There must have been about 10 panty flashes but they were far from being the worst part. Far worse were the pain­fully gen­eric char­ac­ter arche­types and con­ver­sa­tions that we’ve seen a bizzilion times before. It’s as if the cre­at­ors were try­ing to be as gen­eric as pos­sible and suc­ceeded spectacularly

Ah My Goddess

Dropped After: 13 episodes

Why I dropped it: I was actu­ally quite hope­ful going into Ah My God­dess. I was look­ing for some­thing to re-capture that feel­ing of a genu­ine seinen romance series that worked, like Chob­its or Love Hina. And the romance did work, I guess. It seemed very miso­gyn­ist but whatever, who am I to judge if a women genu­inely wants to act like that. It just wasn’t that inter­est­ing to watch. Once Beldandy had decided she loved K-1 and to stay with him forever, it stopped hav­ing any real appeal. The real killing blow, how­ever, was read­ing reviews of the later manga chapters that quite clearly stated that noth­ing had changed. Ser­i­ously? There’s even another sea­son of these guys car­ry­ing on their rather unevent­ful lives? I know people say this is part of the series strength, but I could’ve done with a bit of fanser­vice to spice the mono­tone atmo­sphere up a bit.

Rebirth Chances: Aver­age. 13 epis­odes is quite a lot and quite frankly, it’s the length this series should’ve been. Not 2 bloody sea­sons long + OVA’s plus whatever else. How­ever, I have yet to watch that ori­ginal OVA from way back some­time in the mid-90’s and I can’t help think­ing that the shorter run might relight some form of enthu­si­asm for the series again.

Ai Yori Aoshi

Dropped After: 8 episodes

Why I dropped it: Mildly inter­est­ing fact: My first intro­duc­tion to manga was when a friend of mine bought a bunch of manga with pic­tures of semi-naked women. Actu­ally he wasn’t my friend, I thought he was a twat, but I was a horny 13 year old and he had ecchi manga so who was I to pass up this glor­i­ous oppor­tun­ity. It was sev­eral years later that I found out what those three manga’s names were. The only good one among the three was Lova Hina, and you can blame that manga as the reason I’m writ­ing here today. One of the crap ones was Ai Yori Aoshi. When I figured out which one it was, I decided to watch the anime in yet another attempt to rekindle the feel­ing that Chob­its and Love Hina achieved (this will prob­ably also be a re-occurring theme). Very sim­ilar to Ah My God­dess, the rela­tion­ship was awfully miso­gyn­ist but sorta worked, but the anime itself was awfully bor­ing. It developed into a crappy harem where noth­ing happened, not even any­thing worth laugh­ing at. The killing blow came when they spent an entire epis­ode try­ing to free a fer­ret from behind a dresser. Yeah, really riv­et­ing stuff.

Rebirth Chances: Aver­age. At least these two get together prop­erly (I think they do any­way) and the char­ac­ters were kinda hot. That ‘fer­ret stuck behind the dresser’ epis­ode was really, really dumb but besides that it wasn’t that bad a show. My search for good seinen romance has abated in the past year or so but when the fires to get some proper romance aimed at my demo­graphic comes again, I might give Ai Yori Aoishi another shot. Mind you, this also has a second sea­son. Please stop drag­ging out these shows!

Air

Dropped After: 6 episodes

Why I dropped it: Again, Air wasn’t a bad anime. In fact there was a lot to like about it. I’ve always liked those sar­castic Kyo Ani male leads and while this fel­low was no Kyon or Tomoya, he was still a lot of fun to watch. The moe-ness was…umm, very moe. Really, this is prob­ably the most moe anime ever made and I can only ima­gine the instant split in fan­dom if it aired today. I don’t act­ively dis­like moe, it just doesn’t appeal to me. What I’m try­ing to say is that the killing point for this show wasn’t the moe, it was the attempts at tear-jerking. Oh dear god could you not be so bloody blatant and obvi­ous? I think it was epis­ode 5 where the fan­sub­bers put a notice say­ing ‘be pre­pared to bawl your eyes out’ and the only thing my eyes did for that epis­ode was roll sky­wards. The next epis­ode fin­ished with that gao girl ran­domly bawl­ing as hard as she could in what was the most stu­pid attempt to pro­voke a reac­tion in the viewer. Also, I was watch­ing this just before I had reeeaaallly import­ant exams…yeah, that might have had more to do with the drop than any­thing else

Rebirth Chances:Very High, but not any­time soon. I do intend to go back to Air one day, mainly because I’m really inter­ested in that whole mys­tery aspect with the wings and everything. At 13 epis­odes, I think I could eas­ily sit through a few eye-rolling scenes to see how that mys­tery aspect pans out. Not any­time soon though, because I’m in a bit of a moe-hating phase of my life, but when I return to this anime I might go to the movie first.

So yeah, this will prob­ably be a weekly thing, depend­ing on my mood and the recep­tion the early posts get. Do leave com­ments if you think I should pick-up one of these anime again.

::Edit:: I changed this from 100–95 to 1–5. If I was to fea­ture 5 dropped anime per week, it would take 50 weeks in which time I’ll prob­ably have dropped another 20-odd series