Welcome to “12 Days of Anime 2021”, a writing challenge in which I look to have an article a day for 12 days leading up to Christmas, all centered in some way on anime or anime-related topics. You can find last year’s stories at this link over on Anitay, as well as re-posts of my 2018 and 2019 series here on Medium. Big, big thanks to Stanlick for creating the header image outline template.
Really, the header image kind of says much of it, really. Adulthood and parenthood and other demands on my time, mean that really, it’s hard enough some days to keep up with just a handful of series, given school nights and Scouts and similar things.
I used to do a lot of my anime watching on Friday evenings with a friend who’d come over most weeks. We’d typically watch a number of series that we had in common, and sometimes some older series as well. Then COVID happened, and we stopped getting together.
This has actually led to an increase in watching shows together with my wife over the last year and a half, which is nice, although it really does impact the timing more, between us having to take care of a 9 year old in the nighttime.
But that being said- again, it’s nice. And it’s nice feeling a little more relaxed in watching fewer shows. (In fact, talking with my friend who used to come over, he also enjoys not feeling like “we must get through all these anime” every Friday as well.) While my wife and I do tend to still watch more of our anime together on weekends, it’s nice to be able to at least sometimes keep up with a single show on a weeknight, keeping the backlog down as we go.
Really, the only thing with watching anime more with my wife is that it does make it more difficult sometimes when we get behind, say due to holidays (like now), or in the summers when my wife is off visiting family.
While it also hasn’t led to a drastic change in the shows I pick to watch, I do find myself thinking even more of what shows might work well watched as a family, not just shows that I like.
As for my manga reading habits… well, not much has changed there. I still mostly tend to start reading manga (or light novels) after seeing adaptations. The one exception was picking up several volumes of Komi Can’t Communicate prior to this season’s adaptation, although I haven’t completed them prior to it airing (I did get the first volume started before episode 1, but after that, it’s been more catchup).
While I still have somewhat of a preference for e-books, given their flexibility, size, and ability to be read in bed without needing to have the light on, I do still purchase a few in “dead tree” form, certainly at least when I have gift cards to Barnes & Noble or similar, although I also bought some from my local anime store.
Really, much as I want to, I seem to have less time even for reading these days than watching anime. Not just for manga and light novels, but in general — which is also an issue for the sci-fi book club I joined through my local library. In terms of manga and light novels, in some cases, it means that even the stuff I have read, like reading ahead on Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon, apparently I read up through volume 6 previously, yet other than Ilulu’s introduction, I don’t recall anything particularly past that. To the point where I’m planning to re-read the entire series from the beginning.
Sometimes, there just aren’t enough hours in the day, y’all…
