Twinsies!
Quarantine has let me reflect a lot and I ended up realizing how far apart me and anime grew. And I have to say there is part of me that is genuinely DISTRAUGHT at the fact that 20ish year old me doesn’t love anime the same way 10 year old me did. Anime was the thing that showed me that animation and comics could be more than funny colorful, distractions. If I hadn’t fallen in love with Sailor Moon when I was a kid I wonder if I would’ve still decided to be an artist. I literally owe my career choices to anime, and the fact that I just can’t get into as much anymore has been harder to swallow than I expected.
I suppose it’s not a complete loss. I think one of the reasons I began lamenting my loss of anime-love was that I’ve found myself reading a lot of those Korean shoujo scroll webtoons. The colors and characters remind me of all those 2000s shoujo anime I used to love (that seem to have practically dried up ), while not have as many of the cliches that I remember drove me away from it (sheepish female lead, a-hole male lead). And I have to agree with @Kaydreamer that I have been watching a lot more western cartoons recently like She RA and Steven Universe. The people who make those show are around my age so I know they were watching the same shows I was as a kid and it really shows. That’s probably why 2010s-2020s cartoons have felt more like 90s-2000s anime. Even now the only anime I’m giving a try is “Sk8 the Infinity” and the only reason I’m watching that is because it reminds me of a (really BAD) show from the 2000s called Air Gear that I was obsessed with. THAT is how stuck in the past I am.
Huh, I went from anime and manga to western cartoons and Korean comics? More of a literal move than an up and down motion. Either way, while I don’t think I’m that less of a fan girl or an “artsy weirdo”, I definitely have moved on to different albeit similar things. I think I know too much to enjoy anime the way I used to. It’s like looking-back on “happy” childhood memories and realizing things were way more messed up than your adolescent brain could’ve proceeded at the time. I still can’t ignore what it meant to me even if things are different now.