So I've been labelled, some time back, as the "harem monster". This is mainly because I had wandered into #Animeblogger one day asking for new romantic comedy anime recommendations, and every suggestion tossed out I had already seen relatively recently. When asked to list those anime I considered to have seen too recently to be suggested, I rattled off maybe thirty to forty titles. (This was true; at the time, I had marathoned about thirty to forty romantic comedy and slice of life anime over the course of about three months.) This is apparently unique among anime bloggers or some such; I keep saying that I'm easily satisfied, but nobody seems to remember.

However, I'm easily satisfied in much the same way a meat-eater is satisfied: give him a slab of steak, and he'll be perfectly happy. Present him with a stalk of broccoli, and he'll look at you as though sizing up how tasty your head would be in barbeque sauce. I am satisfied when the anime I watch has elements I like in it (in the right proportions), and I seldom ask for anything more. These elements are generally seen to be relatively easy to come by (comedy, passable plot/characterization, cute girls), and while I'd be happy with other factors to my tastes (intelligent concepts presented in a viewer-friendly yet accurate manner, some Moments of Awesome), they will come as a pleasant surprise, rather than something which I will actually expect. This does not actually mean that I am easily-pleased by all subpar works; just the ones which strike my fancy.

Part of why I like romantic comedy anime is because they invariably have various cliches built into their very premises, and in this case, this is good. It's a sort of comfort food; it's familiar, which is the reason why I enjoy watching anime like that, when times are stressful and I need something to remind me of the happier things in life. A sort of escapism, perhaps.

To once more sing the praises of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, it has all sorts of cliches and standard stereotypes, and then subtly subverts them, yet in a way that if we like these stereotypes, we don't actually mind the subversions. I've seen various comments on how MoHS manages to skewer the whole moe archetype, and while I can kind of see that point of view (in an intellectually-detached manner, with the understanding that this is How Other People Think and never How I Think), I find that it's not difficult to take it all at surface value, and enjoy the moe for what it is, rather than what its purpose is meant to be.

Which may be one reason why I like Lucky Star, despite the mixed reactions it got from bloggers. Since I can't really think of a better way to segue this ramble into Lucky Star, we'll just pretend that it's done and move on.

Lucky Star is Slice Of Life, plus a zillion other random references. Now, Slice Of Life anime can be said to be a niche market, regardless of how many people actually like a specific example. This is because it either appeals, or it doesn't; whether it appeals to a given viewer depends on whether this Slice Of Life is a Slice that the viewer actually wants to see, or at least is familiar with (and wishes to be reminded of). If neither are present, then the anime will be tepid, at best.

This also applies to the humour: the jokes and gags which allow us the most ready laughs are those which reference something the audience is familiar with. I can go "evidently Yukito failed his Will save", and this will merely puzzle readers who are not also tabletop gamers (particularly D&D). Such jokes seldom age or translate well, unless the reference is timeless enough to be familiar to the Average Person of the Future (difficult enough attempting familiarity with the Average Person of Today).

But we do end up with comments on episode 5 of Lucky Star complaining that Konata's MMOG-playing went on for too long, when conversely, I would have loved to see more, since I could relate to the "just one more level- ooh! Rare item!" situations, based on my experience with Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft. (In City of Heroes/Villains, which is the only MMOG I'm actually playing right now, "rare items" were only introduced at the beginning of this month, so there's no real culture of loot.) And Konata's humming of "solo hunting deshou deshou~" cracked me up, since I am a MMOG player who also likes MoHS. This may not be the niche audience it seems, but I have no statistics to be certain.

Lucky Star, to take an example of many other such anime, is enjoyable to me because I recognize what it presents. I can laugh at the jokes because I know what the jokes mean, and when the show obviously makes fun of something quintessentially fannish, I can laugh at myself, because I don't feel that the show is laughing at me.

(On a tangent, this is why I've not really been able to "get" certain fan-parodies like the AMV Hell series: not only do I not recognize a lot of the anime and songs, for those that I do, I get the nagging feeling that my tastes are being put down and demeaned. Again.)

Anime like these are fun to watch. They may not be particularly deep or thought-provoking, but they're the sort of shows I want to watch, because they give me a sort of safe zone of familiar things (that are easy on the eyes). Occasionally I feel as though I am surrounded by connoisseurs of caviar and Belgian chocolate and foie gras, when all I really want is to have a nice warm home-cooked meal; it may seem perverse, but I've seen it in others often enough to believe that this is at least partly human nature.

So instead of the expensive dishes of deep and dramatic anime, I'm content with the comfort food of mindless romantic harem comedy fun. Preferably with lots and lots of moe characters whose personality traits I can already point out within the first five minutes of their respective appearances.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 2:01 pm and is filed under anime, ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.