2009-03-22
What Jigoku Shoujo taught me about my tastes in anime
One of the things I've found is that I learn more about my tastes from the anime that I strongly dislike than from the anime that I like. It can be hard to figure out why I like something, whereas with stuff that I dislike there's often something in specific that I can point at and say 'that, I can't stand it'.
(Reviewers are familiar with this; I've read many comments that it's much harder to do an informative positive review than an informative negative one.)
Which brings me to Jigoku Shoujo, which I watched a few episodes of once upon a time. I started with high hopes, because the general setting sounded promising (I like the general 'modern supernatural' genre), but I found that I just couldn't stand the actual show; I had an immediate and violent dislike from the first episode onwards.
(I only watched more than the first episode because I hoped that the first episode would be an aberration and the show would change.)
What Jigoku Shoujo taught me is that I cannot stand seeing ordinary, decent people tormented to the point where they are desperate enough to damn themselves just to get the torment to stop. That this was what most episodes were about (see here for more details) made the show completely unwatchable for me.
(A disclaimer: this is not a review and I am not saying that Jigoku Shoujo is a bad show. Since I couldn't watch it, I have no way of forming an opinion about its quality; all I know is that it's very definitely not for me.)
Why Roving Thoughts
In theory, when I started writing WanderingThoughts it was going to be for anything that I wanted to write about. In practice, it rapidly developed into what I've called a techblog, a blog for writing about technical computer stuff, and no longer felt like an appropriate place to write about other topics.
(I've admired people who mixed topics in their blogs, and I think in general it's a good thing, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it.)
But I do have other interests, other things that I've wound up wanting to write about. So that's what this is, and why; it's a place where I can write about topics that don't feel appropriate for WanderingThoughts.
(I am calling it RovingThoughts because I am terrible at coming up with good names for things.)
Although predicting the future is dangerous, I expect RovingThoughts entries to be much less frequent than WanderingThoughts entries. I also expect the topics to vary significantly, since this time around I really do mean for RovingThoughts to be for anything that doesn't fit in WanderingThoughts and quite a few of my interests have nothing to do with each other.
Sidebar: logins here
I have not copied over logins from WanderingThoughts to here, partly for technical reasons. If you want a login here, send me email; I would be happy to give you one.
(Use the email address that is associated with WanderingThoughts.)