On Me Rewatching Anything

Lets call this a subtle #TheJCS post for Gridman because I’ve already written about Gridman before hand and really don’t want to it again. I just don’t have the passion to do it.

Media consumption is such a unique thing, isn’t it? It feels like there are so many steps in watching something besides just choosing to watch something and then performing the act. For starters, that choice starts initially with watching something in disc form, on a streaming platform, or even on a tv channel. Two of those are becoming rarer than the other considering the wide expanse of the internet itself and the decline of disc media and cable/satellite television. There is also the matter of choosing when to watch that something, how much to watch of something at time, and whether to watch something new or old.

So with that set up, let’s talk about me once again because that seems to be a continuous thing on this blog. I feel like I watch things differently then a lot of people I follow. I am in my continuous run of watching seasonal anime when they are appear along with older series on top of that in different levels of engagement and speeds. I watch some older and/or non seasonal series during the weekends that I do no watch during the week and vice versa. I do that because I am a huge scatter brain who constantly needs a change in what they are watching to keep them entertained. I also have a really long and strong memory.

What that leads me to is not rewatching anything over and over again because I get bored easily. My somewhat steel trap of a memory will just say “you’ve rewatched this recently and you know what happens” and then blank it out. I don’t even like it when the lyrics of a song are repeated multiple times in a row because it gets a little frustrating. “I get the point, go to the next verse or get more original”. I don’t even want to watch my favorites over and over again even if I want to dig more into them. It’s hard to watch something that just smacked you in the face and see anything different in the same thing when it immediately follows through with another smack in the same thing.

The only rewatches I do are either a very, very long time after I watched it, so like five to ten years, or the context of the watch has to change in some way. That is either watching it for a group event for something like #TheJCS where we watch it together or showing it to other people in which I watch their reactions instead of the show. For the JCS or something similar, I can switch my mind around by changing context of the watch and decide to either look deeper or not depending on how frustrating the show could be. It’s hard though.

If you are wondering about a poll that I put up recently with Planetes and Birdy the Mighty: Decode on them, I haven’t watched either of those shows for somewhere around a decade. That is long enough to have it to where my own context behind an anime I’ve seen can change. I know that some people suggested a series from 2018 or so to rewatch and I still consider that way too soon because I still remember most of what happened and, as established, I didn’t just want to rewatch something to rewatch it. Even if it’s a fun and emotional show to watch, it’s still too soon.

So, thank you for diving into the mind of a mad man. I.E. me because I doubt that other people have this same thought process when watching anything. I don’t know, you can prove me wrong or not by sharing your own thoughts if you want to.

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