Monday, August 18, 2014

Meandering Mondays: Forging a Fan, Introducing Anime to a Friend

Hi everyone,  last week I wrote about the history of Toonami, one of the major sources of anime in America and many people's first introduction to anime.  As a follow up I figured I'd offer advice about how to introduce your friends to anime.


To start off with the most important thing to know is how interested your friend is in anime.  If they can't wait to get started then that's great, but if not you might have to give them a nudge.  The first step in this is simply asking them if they'd like to watch an anime with you.  If they say yes then you just need to pick a show and start watching.  If they say no be respectful, you can always ask again later or you can find out why.  They might have already tried anime and found it boring or think that it's not something that will interest them.  If this happens you can try to convince them that they might want to try it again but don't push too hard, if they are resolute in refusing then accept it, anime isn't for everyone and if they don't enjoy it then it defeats the purpose of anime.

Don't be this guy forcing people to do things isn't nice and might be illegal


Most people probably won't just say yes or no they might want to know a bit more about what you are going to watch which means you need to pick a show or give them some options.  This brings us to the next step of the process: picking what to watch.  The key to this is picking a show that they will enjoy.  They two parts of this are accessibility and taste.

Taste is relatively obvious, if your friend likes action movies and shooting games then picking a high school romantic comedy isn't as good a choice as a spy thriller or giant robot fighting.  A more subtle thing to consider is what things your friend doesn't like.  Someone who is more conservative might find fanservice offensive and your religious friend might not enjoy a series where the church is evil.  Overall the main goal is a pick a show that will leave a good impression on them and shows that there are anime that cater to their preferences.

You want the show to leave a good taste in their mouth
The second part of picking a good introductory anime for your friend is accessibility.  Basically you want a show that can be understood without much background or outside knowledge.  To some degree this is unavoidable since most of our friends don't know much about Japanese culture but some things are easier to explain than others.  Explaining that the Japanese school year starts in January is easier than explaining the complexities of feudal Japanese society.  Another thing to consider is subbed versus dubbed.  Dubbed anime tends to be better for this since it makes the experience more like watching normal television.  Subtitled anime has it's advantages but for an introduction having to read subtitles makes the experience just a little more complicated and can be problematic depending on your friend's opinions on reading. 

Anime should not require a class to understand

If both of these steps go well you should be all ready to start out watching anime with your friend.  Hopefully your friend will enjoy the experience and come back for more at some point in the future.  What you do next is pretty flexible they can watch on their own or you can make it a group activity. 

Well that's a general overview of what you should consider when watching anime with a friend for the first time, I hope it was helpful and I'll be back next week with a new topic. 

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