A Big Ol’ Pile of Anime Recommendations (2017)

Doing a lot of research means doing a lot of reading, which means the idea of doing more reading in your spare time kind of makes your eyeballs want to roll out of your head and boycott. So this year, when I felt like diving into fiction for fun, I found myself gravitating to visual media more than novels—and thus, as I’m sure you’ve noticed if you frequent this blog, I ended up watching a lot more anime than usual. It’s barely any compared to the people who routinely keep up with multiple shows coming out every season, but hey, from what I have dug through this year I’ve discovered some real gems.

It’s nothing as comprehensive as a Top Ten or a year in retrospective, simply series that I completed that I would (even with the caveats noted) recommend to other people. And without further ado, here they are:

URAHARA and the Crises of Creativity

Here’s a question for all you content creators out there: would you let yourself be turned into a cartoonish alien being and taken into space if it meant you were guaranteed endless praise and popularity for the things that you create?

At the heart of the pastel-toned magical girl adventure that is URAHARA is a story about the dilemma of creativity. Creators—be they writers, artists, chefs, designers, etc.—are an incredible breed because of their imaginative abilities, and their power to give the things in their imagination physical form for others to see. The great magical halo surrounding The Artist is their ability to do what they do purely for the love of it… but as I’m sure many of us know, The Love Of It can only get you so far. After all, what’s the point of creating if you receive no approval, praise, or recognition for your creation? Creating art for art’s sake often gives way to anxieties about creating the “right” kind of art, creating art that people will like, caught in an endless tug-of-war between trying to follow trends to get a foothold and trying to be “unique”. The very human need for validation, and the contradictory yet complementary need to be seen as different and individual, is a driving force in content creation, as it is the driving force behind the conflict in the middle arc of URAHARA.