12 Days of Anime (2013) – Day 7 – Anime Away from Home

Although I have watched anime away from home prior to this experience, it was always a momentary event.  Whether it was watching an episode of Kare Kano in Italy in 2002 or bits and pieces of Nichijou while in Tokyo in 2012, I’ve experienced watching anime away from my computer or my TV.  However, prior to this year, it had always been just an episode or parts of an episode.  I also was not taking screenshots or blogging my thoughts on these episodes either.  So when presented with the challenge of moving away from home for 3 months, from August to October, I wondered how my habits of watching anime and blogging anime would be impacted.

Rather than bore you with the details or living through that experience, I’ll just summarize what I learned from this time.  To be quite honest, there was not a significant impact like I had envisioned.  The main difference was switching from two large monitors at home to watching episodes on half of a laptop’s screen.  The difference in size was rather substantial, watching anime in about a quarter or a fifth of the space I’d usually watch them in.  Of course, it made it easier to read the subtitles and watch the action on the screen at the same time, but it’s impossible to discern and appreciate the level of detail in the art and animation.  Since I’ve moved back home, I’ve tried this a couple of times with a few episodes of anime, and I certainly appreciate the full-screen versions than the tinier ones.  Of course, both styles are certainly watchable, but watching anime in this format reinforced my thankfulness in my current anime situation.

However, one advantage to using a laptop is that I was able to experiment watching anime in various areas beyond the computer desk.  I had always watched anime on a desktop computer or television, so watching anime from a computer chair or sofa.  Now, with the luxury of a laptop being portable, I was able to try watching anime in bed, outside or anywhere really.  However, I often found myself watching anime the way I always do, which is sitting at a computer desk.  I’ve found that I do enjoy marathoning anime while lying in bed but the positioning can be a bit awkward.  And though I was blessed with gorgeous weather on several of my occasion of watching anime outside, I found myself distracted by various nuisances, like the glaring sun, barking dogs and overly-friendly bees.  The lesson here, I suppose, is that anime is intended to be watched indoors or, at the very least, in quiet places with minimal distractions.

The one aspect in regards to blogging that differed from my experience is that I knew I’d have less time and fewer opportunities to write.  I rationalized that this would meet fewer posts or different styles of posts or something new altogether, but it never had a significant impact on how I blog.  Taking into account that I’m always late in my Weekly Anime posts, I suppose you could say there was really no difference in how I blogged.  Still, I realized that my timing of these posts was much later than normal, including a few that were over a week late, though that depends more on how many shows I’m watching and how I feel when it’s time to write than just location alone.  I still enjoyed blogging while I was away from home, so it wasn’t like I was forcing myself to keep this up or anything along those lines.

To be honest, moving away from home for 3 months did not really have a significant impact on me, and you must be wondering why it earned a day during my 12 Days of Anime.  Although I try to tailor these posts to various episodes or scenes or events that have impacted me positively or negatively during this year, these three months took up a sizable amount of my anime and blogging experience.  In fact, I’m rather happy it did not have an impact on how I watch anime or blog.  I think going through this experience and keeping the same or similar habits is probably the best thing that could have happened to me.  And since this event was a considerable amount of my time, totaling the equivalent of an entire anime season, I figured it’d be inappropriate of me to forget this experience.  I suppose you could say the main lesson is that I have a newfound appreciation for doing what I’m doing right now, which is sitting at home, in front of my computer, watching and writing about anime.