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

[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.