A Call for More Curiosity

I was originally going to make a tweet thread on this, but I think that creating a blog post for this was a much better idea for this. There is just a lot of misunderstandings that comes from one tweet getting focused on versus others. So here, let’s get this one out of the way. I think that a lot of problems in human society comes from the lack of curiosity and the need to be comfortable. For example, us with European origins come from either barbarian folk who roamed free and/or people building high castle walls to keep out the nonexistent monsters late at night and other people we don’t know. There is a fundamental thing that comes from people just wanting to stick with what they know and barely wandering outside. A lot of problems come from people justifying their positions instead of reaching outside more. Oh btw, this article is about anime. Let’s just discuss that fact instead of everything else I mentioned for now.

Let’s discuss the short life of people in the anime fandom. It’s supposedly two years, right? Can you imagine why that is? So many people start with a limited variety of anime, right? Shonen Battle fans don’t usually wander outside of that realm willingly a lot of the time. I also don’t see people who enjoy older science fiction anime don’t usually wander outside of the sphere. I am not going to say that about just other people. It took me a long time to break out of just watching older science fiction and gundam anime to try other things out. I mean, I’ve finally got around to trying different sorts of things. I honestly feel like if I didn’t try to watch more genres and demographic focused anime, I wouldn’t be in the fandom as much as I am. Even with the vault of older anime out there, watching seasonal anime has allowed me to try more things which dug me into trying older works of the same variety.

From my experience and watching other fans, I think there needs to be a call for anime fans to be more curious than they are. If you are already trying different things every week, then this post isn’t about you. This is about people who build walls around their own interests and make justifications about shows they enjoy when they are outside of those walls. “Oh, this anime isn’t like those other types of anime at all. Uh uh, nope.” Do you know how dumb that line of logic is? Stop making excuses for things you don’t know about just to keep inside of your own personal castle. If something has a weirder art and animation style than usual, but has a genre and story you like, try it out. If a seasonal show or a just a show in general shows up you find at least remotely interesting, try it out. Be curious, don’t be afraid. If nothing works out, what do you lose besides a little bit of time?

There is certain line about how “curiosity killed the cat”, but I don’t think watching anime threatens peoples lives. You know, unless you are watching anime on your phone while driving a car or walking in front of a lot of people while watching anime on your phone and not paying attention to what is going on. You shouldn’t be doing those things anyway. If anything, I don’t think there is anything wrong with not liking things either. If you don’t like something that you tried, then your pallet still expands because you know something that you don’t like now with certainty other than just “yeah, I won’t like that”. I feel like just going on a randomizer on Crunchyroll or anywhere that has one is helpful in this regard.

Do I feel like this blog post is going to change anyone’s world? No. I doubt I will change minds. I don’t think the text and words of some random guy on the internet are going to ever be considered that valuable or even considered then other people. I’m just saying that there is a weakness in our community that would help make it much more fun and varied then before. I also guess someone had to say it and turns out that person was me. Welp…

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