[Triple_R]

While I respect the AS member who started this thread, I largely disagree with him on what he is proposing, and I think it's important for me to elaborate why, because I think it touches on key philosophical differences on how some of us view Anime Suki as a whole. Discussing such differences on how AS members view Anime Suki is probably good for this site and its community, so that we can all have a better understanding of what each of us wants this site to be.

Now my impression is that felix's view on Anime Suki is that series threads and series subforums are first and foremost for fans of those respective series. Now if I agreed with felix's view here, I might fully agree with what he's proposing in this thread. However, I don't agree with felix's view here.


My view, which I think is shared by a lot of members on this site (even if it's only at an implicit level), is very different. I think that the entirety of Anime Suki (including all of its series threads and series subforums) are for all anime fans who are members here, not just fans of one specific series. Let me elaborate on what precisely I mean by this.

The Ano Natsu series thread isn't just for fans of Ano Natsu in particular. It's for all anime fans who are members of the AS community.

A lot of us here on this site approach anime the same way that movie aficionados approach movies. In other words, we watch a lot of different anime titles as we want to see a full range of what the anime world has to offer. We often like to compare and contrast one anime to another. We are moreso fans of anime as a whole (as a genre, or a medium) than fans of specific shows. That's not to say that we don't have our favorite shows, but rather that we don't focus most of our time on just a handful of titles that we like.

Now just as movie aficionados don't like every movie that they end up watching, a lot of us anime aficionados don't like every anime we end up watching. But because we're anime aficionados, we're going to watch a lot of different anime shows, especially ones that gain a lot of attention from the anime fan community as a whole. And also because we're anime aficionados, we're going to give most anime shows we watch at least the good 'ol three episode try. So that means that for an anime aficionado on this site that is deeply disappointed by a particular show, you'll probably see at least a few weeks of him or her heavily critiquing the show (Nostalgia Critic style, in some cases ).


Now I think it's reasonable to expect a person who's been consistently hating a show since Episode 1 or 2 to drop the show at some point. At some point, continuing to stick around and heavily critique a show week-by-week, on a forum like this one, does seem a bit masochistic and counterproductive to good conversations (since there's only so many times you can raise the same criticisms over and over again before they start to seem stale).

But this point is well after a mere three episodes, and that's all we're at so far in Ano Natsu.

Ultimately, this sort of consistent week-by-week heavy critiquing almost always sorts itself out (with one exception, which I'll get to in a bit). Eventually, people will drop shows that they are consistently disliking/hating (key example given the specific example raised by felix in the OP: Reckoner is no longer watching Guilty Crown to the best of my knowledge), leaving only fans of that particular show left posting on it. I would argue that this can create a very different problem of "all-praise all-the-time" that's not terribly more useful than all-criticism all-the-time, but I digress.


The one exception to this is when you have a viewer who was enjoying the show a lot for a decent string of episodes, but then the show made a big change mid-stream, and the viewer who was really liking the show before that shift is very displeased with that shift. When that happens, the show's fanbase as a whole is likely to get polarized (I've seen this with Shakugan no Shana, Haruhi 2009, Ore no Imouto, Hanasaku Iroha, and a few other shows), and that's just the way it is. A show making a big content/tonal/artistic shift will inevitably have this result. If I'm watching a show for the action scenes and you're watching the same show for the dialogue, and suddenly its 50/50 ratio between the two elements shifts to almost nothing but dialogue, it's only normal that I'm now very displeased with the show whereas you're still loving it since you're getting more of what you love about it.

So when shifts like this happen, you're going to get weekly critical posts right to the bitter end, as people have already invested a lot of time in a show that they thought they were going to like and were in fact liking for a long time. Because these people invested a lot of time in a show, I think they have a right to see it through to the end, and continue to voice their displeasure with whatever the big shift was (i.e. a lot more fanservice than before, a lot less action scenes than before, the artwork gets K-Onified, Kyon can't get out of that blasted time loop, etc...).


So, that's my overall take on the issue. I'd love to know what my fellow AS members think of it.