Changing Tastes in Anime

I started actively looking for and watching anime when I was fourteen years old when my then step-dad's friend brought home a disk of twenty episodes of Dragonball for me, since I told him I used to watch a lot of Pokemon and Sailor Moon. I say watch, but I was basically obsessed with those two shows. I even sang the opening for Pokemon live in front of the whole school during a student talent show and people talked about it for years because of how bad it was.

But that is neither here nor there. My point is that back then I used to be really into, not the typical shonen like Naruto or Bleach (those never really stuck with me for some reason), but still fantastical shows like Death Note or Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann among many others. But as the years passed by, I started to loose the interest in anime for a few years, thinking that I had outgrown it.

But a somewhere around two years ago I got back into anime in a big way. Not to the extent that I was before, where I could binge-watch a show in a day because I just don't have that kind of time these days with work and other things. But what I noticed was that those fantastical and over the top shows didn't captivate me as much as they once did. These days, when I watch an episode or two of a shonen series (with an exception for Jojo's Bizarre Adventure) I find myself becoming kind of bored and thinking "I've seen this so many times before".

So what are the shows that captivate me these days? While I still like some space operas or fantasy shows, it's the more grounded stories about normal people and their relationships that interest me and can keep me watching for hours on end. Sure, the shows can be a bit silly and comedic. But at the end of the day we get to follow actual people in situations that you can relate to, be it in high school or adult life instead of a person piloting a giant mech, which is a thing you will never do in real life.

It was also recently I found my great passion for yuri and shoujo ai manga, which is something that I would never have imagined myself reading when I was fifteen years old. That and I am also more open these days to watching different things like Yuri On Ice, which became one of my favorite series in recent memory.

So what made me want to write about this was sitting down and watching Tsuki Ga Kirei and just thinking about how it really hooked me and made me want to watch more straight from episode one. How a show about two kids in middle school and them growing up could be so captivating to me. I think it's because we've all been there. Being the awkward kid in a new class trying to find what group of friends you fit into. It's just more relatable than someone being stuck in a video game for example. But that's just my opinion of course and yours might be totally different and I would be really interested to hear if and how your tastes in anime have changed over the years.