A quick meme response

[dolorosa_12]

Day Eight of the fandom meme is:

H: Do you prefer live action TV shows or animated TV shows?

I think it's fairly obvious that, with two notable exceptions (Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Daria), my TV preferences lie in live action TV. There's not any real reason for this, and I do watch the odd animated TV series, but I'm not naturally drawn to them, and I seem to take more chances on new-to-me live action TV shows than I do with animated ones.

Those of you who do lean more towards animated TV shows, what do you like most about the medium?


I: Has online caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?

J: Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over the internet.

K: What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?

L: Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves.

M: Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

N: Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).

O: Choose a song at random, what ship does it remind you of?

P: Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).

Q: A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.

R: Which friendship/platonic relationship is your favorite in fandom?

S: Show us an example of your personal headcanon.

T: Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

U: Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.

V: Which character do you relate to most?

W: A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.

X: A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.

Y: What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?

Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!

Comments

[naye]

Honestly, I blame (thank?) imprinting at an early age. Because I was watching Belgian and Japanese animated tv shows before I could read they were hugely impactful to the kind of storytelling that resonated with me - especially the Japanese series I watched as a tween I felt took me seriously in a way that shows aimed for kids my age in my home country did not. (I watched Japanese shows on French TV and thought they were French until...pretty much until I got the internet and could look things up when I was already in my later teens.)

There's tropes (narrative and character) that show up in anime that I grew to love, and I never found those in live action TV for kids. (Mainly: lots of danger and injuries and even death. Those stakes!) And those plots that stretched out forever! I was hooked.

As an adult I still find the animated medium deeply gratifying because there's no need to suspend disbelief by overlooking poor CGI or terrible costumes - in animated stories, everything is real, and only the animators' imagination sets the limits.

And again with the imprinting - I'm not a fan of a lot of prestige TV (much of it goes too dark for me), and the particular tropes I am a sucker for happens...okay, at this point I'll say "in non-Western" TV rather than animated shows because clearly the Chinese dramas know how to get me!

[dolorosa_12]

That makes perfect sense — if those shows were giving you the kinds of tropes and character dynamics you wanted, of course you would go on seeking them out and find more and more that gave you the same kind of happiness. I think for me, the stories (tropes, character dynamics and so on) that imprinted on me at an early age were mainly books, and so that's what I kept on seeking out — finding my preferred tropes and character dynamics in TV shows is a rare occurrence, although it happens sometimes.

I find dreadful low budget live action TV has its own charm, but you're right that it's hard to suspend disbelief.

I agree with you about 'prestige' TV, though. I've never watched a single episode of e.g. The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad or similar (nothing against people who like them, but they're not my thing). I don't mind sad, grim, or 'gritty' stories — one of my favourite TV shows of all time is Peaky Blinders, which is a highly stylised (lots of slow motion, melodramatic panoramic scenes and over the top music) gangster show set in Birmingham in the 1920s and 30s, where a lot of the characters are violent, brutal, and make terrible choices. The difference, for me, is whether the show is glorifying in selfishness (so characters make selfish choices that tip over into violence, and the show wants me to voyeuristically enjoy it) versus whether the characters are doing violence, but due to fear, trauma, or some mistaken belief that they're protecting their families (found or otherwise) or communities from worse violence. It's a fine line to draw, and I'm not sure I'm explaining it well, but it's a distinction that makes sense to me. Of course it's also perfectly fine to want to avoid all kinds of shows about violent, brutal people, whatever their motivations!

[nyctanthes]

I've found myself gravitating to animation, the last few years. I like the length and the fairy tale quality of a lot of it (fairy tale in the dark, Brothers Grimm sense of the word). There's a good mix, in both Western and Japanese animation, of both humor and drama. They're less arc-dependent as well; arcs definitely exist but the episodes can stand alone. And the number of them tends to be limited.

Last but hardly least, some of the shows are just beautiful to watch.

[dolorosa_12]

That's really interesting to — I would never have thought of animated TV series as having a Grimm-esque fairytale mood, but that probably reflects my lack of familiarity with the medium.

The lack of arcs would bother me a lot, though. I'm not such a huge fan of case-of-the-week storytelling, and tend to gravitate more towards things that have long arcs, and that reward sticking with the story for a long time.

Beautiful animation is really wonderful, though, and certainly a joy to watch. As I say, I don't watch a lot of animated TV, but I am a huge fan of the animated films of Cartoon Saloon, all of which are simply gorgeous, and of course I love Ghibli movies as well.

[nyctanthes]

Oh, I misspoke. There are definitely arcs. But they're not the same kind as Netflix, and what arc-heavy tv has turned into over the years. Perhaps because anime is coming from manga (i.e., a pre-existing source) but there's a serial nature to them that also includes a contained story within the 20-25 minutes or so each episode runs.

In terms of the Grimm, I've been thinking about this since I read some Phillip Pullman essays a couple of months ago. He was talking about characterization in folk tales/fairy tales, and it made me think that in some ways (though I wouldn't stretch this too far) manga/anime characters share some commonalities, in terms of their archetype-ness, with those in fairy/folk tales. (For example, there's often not a lot of time spent on psychological depth, to make them "real people" that we would identify with.) Again, this is a very broad generalization and there are examples where there isn't the case. But it's something I've noticed.

[dolorosa_12]

I really must track down that Pullman interview, because from your summary it sounds as if it really gets to the heart of what I love about fairytales. Medieval literature is similar — it's not completely devoid of psychological complexity, but for the most part characters are archetypes and tropes, rather than people.

[geckoholic]

Hmmm. I wouldn't say I lean towards animated media, I enjoy both, but as a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, I really like that animation has less restrictions than life action, and commit to a different aesthetic. They can be more otherworldly, more easily.

[dolorosa_12]

That makes a lot of sense. Low budget SFF really looks tacky, and although that can be part of the charm, it doesn't help with suspension of disbelief. Animated SFF, on the other hand, always looks beautiful, as long as it's made by competent artists.