== 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
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=5577]], 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Girl]]
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.)