12 Days of Anime – Day 4 – Overanalyzing Anime

If you’ve been following my blog for this past year, then you know I love to analyze anime.  Doesn’t matter how fundamental or trivial the concepts or details are, I try to flesh out whatever interests me, and what I hope interests my audience, as best I can.  But sometimes I can take it a little too far.  When only ten words can be used to convey a point, I’ll use ten thousand.  When a gag was just meant to be only included for mere laughs, I’ll hypothesize the metaphysics so the joke and use it to explain obscure themes or perceptive character development.  It’s something I just started doing this year and my new love for going overkill on my analyses earns a spot on my 12 Days of Anime.

I’ve been following anime for a long time but never thought too much of the material, except when series like Neon Genesis Evangelion or FLCL required you to think.  Only a few years ago did I start following a pair of anime blogs when my enthusiasm in anime was reborn and began to follow the anime community around.  It was here where I found interest in analyzing anime.  Previously, I had just assigned scores and rankings to every anime I watched but never really questioned what it was about anime that I liked or what made Anime X better than Anime Y.  My interest steadily matured until I decided to start my own blog.  But coming up with analyses each week proved to be challenging at first and I clearly struggled with creative writing, so I decided to try and overanalyze a few topics and see where it took me.  The results were mixed but I had an incredible time writing and found myself a niche within the anime blogging community.

What I think I enjoy most about overanalyzing is the fact that I take an idea, theme, concept, or character set up by the creators, explorer their defined boundaries and then go beyond them.  It’s fun to see where you end up with your thoughts and opinions on these things when you go outside the creator’s intentions or try to predict the future and end up failing miserably.  And it’s fun to take a random, minor detail, one that has no real meaningful significance to the anime, and try to give it meaning.  It’s rather pointless in the long run but they are fun topics and I get interesting responses from people, too.  I try not to overanalyze topics too much but every once in a while I want to have some fun and try to go where no one, not even the creators, have gone before with a subject.  It’s something I found out about myself and anime this year and is deserving of a spot on my 12 Days of Anime.