My RL animu-knowledgeable friends will be interested to hear that shortly after the Pain arc finished up, I dropped Naruto for reals. I did this a few months before with Bleach. Both of these pretty much bored me to the point of not caring. No, I don’t care that Naruto became GARuto or whatever. I don’t care that the Vaizards might do something in the near future. I don’t care that Sasuke is still being whiny. I don’t care that Bleach has moved less than 24 hours in the last two years.

So what am I caring about?

Bakuman

As far as manga goes, Bakuman is pretty meta. It is a manga running in Shounen Jump by an artist/writer duo (of Death Note fame) about a manga running in Shounen Jump by an artist/writer duo. The good things about it are great writing and pacing (stuff actually happens and is interesting) and pretty neat art. The unique things that it brings are an inside look at the manga serialization process and a number of pretty cool original manga concepts that make up the manga series that are featured in that universe’s Shounen Jump.

Cross Game

Cross Game is a baseball and romance manga. It has a pretty heavy emphasis on the characters and their development outside of baseball, which is the most interesting part. It’s a pretty realistic and moving manga about some kids who play baseball. D’awwwws and BAWWWWWs all around.

Fullmetal Alchemist

You should know pretty damn well why I care about this.

Hayate the Combat Butler!

An impoverished, almost indestructible guy gets hired as the butler of a rich little girl. This is a comedy series that likes to transform into a harem series at times. The characters are all fun and the parodies and references come fast. Knowing that the mangaka is a student of the mangaka who did Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei explains a lot.

Kure-nai

A guy gets hired to protect the daughter of a rich, powerful family, at least in the beginning. I really liked the anime, but the abrupt ending made me seek out more. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be as updated as frequently as I’d like, but I’m up for more of Shinkuro’s and Murasaki’s adventures.

Liar Game

A naive, honest girl gets tricked into joining a game that risks bankrupting her, so she gets the aid of a con-artist with an M.A. in psychology. This is all about mindgames and psychology. In fact, the entire macguffin is to win mindgames. Of course, this means seeing the trickery that we’ve become so enamored with from Code Geass and Death Note.

Mahou Sensei Negima!

A ten year-old wizard in training is assigned to be the teacher of a class of middle school girls. It sounds pretty terrible and it starts off pretty terrible. The mangaka wanted to do a shounen battle manga, but was forced to do another harem series, since he did Love Hina. He basically tricked them by starting out like that but about 40 chapters in and 250 chapters later, we end up in a very different place with an unlikely and absurdly powerful shounen protagonist.

Mirai Nikki

God is dying so he gives twelve people a diary that reveals a selective near-future and tells them to kill each other so he can determine who gets to be God next. On the surface, we’ve got mindgames. However, a very whiny protagonist and his psychotic yandere makes this three times as entertaining than it would have been otherwise.

Saijou no Meii

This isn’t being regularly scanlated, but it is still being serialized. If it got regular updates, I’d be all over it so hard. This is essentially the shounen version of Team Medical Dragon by the mangaka who did Yakitate!! Japan. This contains the usual surgeries and hospital politics.

Soul Eater

Shinigami students collect bad souls in master-weapon partnerships. It’s not the most original series by any metric, but it does manage to be pretty cool. Don’t let the weak anime ending fool you. Much like the FMA anime, the direction that the manga takes is far more interesting. The nice thing about monthly serializations is that stuff tends to happen each chapter.

Soul Eater evokes memories of the first Fullmetal Alchemist for me. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Both are popular shounen manga that are serialized monthly, and even in the same magazine. Both have been adapted into anime by the same studio, BONES. Both adaptations have fantastic productions values. Both adaptations suffer from original content.

One of the problems that you run into when adapting an ongoing manga into an anime is that the anime moves faster than the manga. There are a number of hacks to get around this. I don’t think any of them have been well received.

The first way to do this is to attempt to animate the entire thing. The big, recognizable shounen series do this, like Dragonball and Naruto. The problem with this is that no matter how far ahead the manga is, the anime will always catch up, and when that happens, what are you supposed to do? The way this usually happens is by writing filler material, either before you catch up or when you catch up. This never works. In the case of Rurouni Kenshin, it ended the anime prematurely. In the case of Naruto, it caused almost two years of non-canon material, driving many away.

The alternative, which I theorize works better, would be to animate a season or two, and then stop and wait before animating any more. This was the approach taken by JC Staff with Shakugan no Shana. The problem with Shana Second is that they still ended up having to write bad original content even after waiting for a year. At this point, it’s not clear what they’re going to do with it, since they’ve written themselves into a corner and Shana is pretty popular. Otherwise, I’d say this is the best course of action.

There’s another option, which is to set a bound on the number of episodes, adapt as much as you can, and then fill the end with an original ending. This is what BONES did with FMA and Soul Eater. The problem with this approach is that the anime ending will be compared to what happened in the manga. In most cases, the manga will be superior in terms of development. This makes sense, since the characters have more time to undergo development and there’s more time to develop a more intricate plot. The other problem is that this closes the door on any adaptation of the later parts, unless you pull an FMA and remake the entire thing from the beginning.

Soul Eater suffers not because its anime-original end arc is bad, but because it’s not as good as what’s in the manga. Unfortunately, there is some really cool stuff that happens in the manga that we’ll likely never see because of the anime-original ending. The characters and the world get much more development and the events that take place are a lot less contrived.

It’s unfortunate that it’ll have to live in the shadow of the manga, because I really enjoyed the anime. The animation for the fights was awesome and the music, done by the guy who handled music for Gurren Lagann, was excellent too. Most of the disappointment comes from what could have been rather than anything it did wrong.

I’d always considered myself a fan of anime for a long time. But it wasn’t until July that I realized that I hadn’t really watched that much. You see, following Naruto and Bleach for years gives one the illusion that they’ve watched a lot of anime. As it turns out, you’ve just watched a lot of Naruto and Bleach. Once I realized this and that there were tons of titles that people were talking about that I had no idea existed, I sought to remedy the situation.

I took advantage of the fact that I’d stopped raiding in WoW and didn’t need to block off four hours per night anymore and, later, that I’d be on a work term at home when all of my friends would be busy with school or outside the city and I went through almost everything of interest from the past few years. Anyhow, here are 2008′s (that is, aired during 2008) most influential anime for myself.

Mobile Suit Gundam 00

I’ve always liked Gundam, even though I’ve still not familiarized myself with UC. But, you can count on me watching a Gundam show. As a result, even though it wasn’t entirely captivating to me like SEED was, I still made sure to catch 00. As the aforementioned WoW raiding picked up, 00 soon became the only show I was following. And while the first season of 00 didn’t win me over, the second season is quickly redeeming its predecessor.

Soul Eater

This is probably the anime that brought me into watching anime as it aired. I don’t even remember how I stumbled upon this. I do remember that it was the stunning OP and the amazing animation in the first episode that won me over. I’ve said constantly that while the premise is a bit typical, it’s the quality of the production that makes this series shine. It’s been about three-quarters of the way through and it still holds true.

Clannad

There are two reasons I picked this up. The first was that I’d just finished 5 Centimeters per Second and was in the mood for another sadface anime. The second was Clannad After Story’s OP. It was my introduction to the visual novel adaptation and harem anime. It wasn’t what I was expecting. It turns out Kanon, which I watched afterwards, was what I was expecting. Anyhow, Clannad and Clannad After Story remain as some of my favourites and it’s influential for opening me to the genre. This lead me to watch things like ef – a tale of memories, which I consider a good result.

Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion

I’d mentioned this anime a week or two ago and why it was important. For me, it introduced the anime community on the Internet: a vast collection of various anime blogs and 4chan’s /a/. And it’s through this machinery that I gather information about other anime, empowering me to trudge through and find out what I’ve missed over the past few years.

Xam’d: Lost Memories

Xam’d is a very good reminder of why I hate Sony. It’s a shame that one of the best shows of the year ends up with pretty much the worst distribution model. Other than that, the show began with some definite Eureka Seven vibes, which I forgave, since it had a main character that wasn’t Renton Thurston at the beginning of E7. As it went on though, it really turned into its own thing (other than those wings) and it’s influential because it’s just damned good. If it’d already ended, I’d probably crown it the best anime of the year.