JulieYBM wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2024 2:30 pm
I think the
One Piece fans telling you to get it a hundred or whatever episodes are all teenagers or in their early twenties....
...And, again, I think that a lot of this has to do with age. Many of us being told to give these types of series a watch are adults, with less time and energy to waste on a series that's bad. Hell, I don't have the time or energy to even watch the series I enjoy now. How are you going to tell someone to watch 100 episodes when three episodes alone is
an hour of someone's life?
Just to clarify something:
I myself was at least 21 or thereabouts when I first started posting on this forum, and certainly wasn't much older than maybe 22 or 23 when the initial One Piece incident I recounted earlier in this thread had occurred.
Even back then at that age, this whole "you have to get to at least episode 31,567,357,3647,336 before things REALLY get going and pick up, otherwise you can't judge it" thing was
beyond ludicrous. By the time I was 18 or 19, I had two jobs, I was going to college full time, I was dating, I had a large friend group that I'd go out regularly with, and by age 20 I was also struggling with chronic health issues and had to navigate the fucked up U.S. healthcare system on top of all those things, etc.
In other words, even at 18, 19, or 20, most normal people still have a fucking life. Depending on where you live, if you're anywhere from 18 to 21, I got news for you: you're an adult. You're not a "kid" anymore. Endless free time to watch cartoons all day tends to go bye-bye for most people by the time college rolls around, or hell, even by high school.
If you're a late-teenager or early 20-something who is able and willing to spend days and days and days at a time blowing through a zillion hours of something like One Piece,
that isn't normal (or healthy) for that age. At that age, you should be going to school, working, doing fun things with friends, working toward some kind of essential life goals, etc. You know...
living.
The point is, age isn't really a valid excuse here.
The fact that I, as a then 22-ish year old full grown fucking man, who was an employed college student with a girlfriend and a healthy, functioning social life and real adult problems in life on top, took enough of what minimal free time I DID have back then (and to be sure, I probably have even way less now today as a 40 year old man) to watch 50 syrupy/schmaltzy-ass fucking episodes of One Piece... frankly that is BEYOND charitable and dare I say, of nigh saintly-patience (to say nothing of incredibly fucking dumb on my part, I make no bones about that) for most average, regular people at that age and with a regular, active adult life to lead.
Though in my defense, at that point, I was still coming off of almost a dozen years throughout whole the entirety of the 90s, and with little tips of the late-most 80s and early-most 2000s sprinkled in, of not being steered TOO wrong very much at all by most anime recommendations, particularly ones as near-universally enthusiastic as the kind One Piece was getting at that point... but also I wasn't quite just yet fully hip to the MASSIVE change in audience that anime had experienced right around this point and the full ramifications of the transition from the 80s and 90s direct market to the 2000s kids' TV-centric market (though I certainly would be in very short order not long after that).
Point being, I was still at that point in the habit of taking word of mouth from the broader anime community/audience at least mostly seriously, and One Piece was being hyped up, even back in the early/mid 2000s, as being the anime equivalent to The Human Condition Trilogy or something. I was still used/conditioned to THAT level of hysterical hype and universal praise from so much of the anime audience being reserved for stuff like Galaxy Express 999, Ashita no Joe, Grave of the Fireflies, Ghost in the Shell, Angel's Egg, Patlabor, Perfect Blue, Robot Carnival, etc.
So generally speaking, I had more than a decade of being trained to listen to that kind of glowing word-of-mouth from the community (of the 80s and 90s at least) and being usually rewarded with something incredibly special. One Piece was one of several early wake-up calls to me that those days were over with now, and the makeup of the fanbase and what sort of creative elements it valued/prioritized in anime titles wasn't in any way remotely resembling what it once was.
I'm not in any way exaggerating: in 2003/2004, mass throngs of fairly grown people not too much younger than I was or pretty close enough to the same age as me, were unironically talking about this dumb fucking pirate anime like it was life-changing, mind-rewiring stuff, and the edgiest, most engrossing shit Japan had ever put out in the history of all Japanese anime and media.
Just the first few episodes of "You're Schmoopy! No YOU'RE Schmoopy!" thinly and unconvincingly disguised as swashbuckling pirate adventures quickly put the lie to that nonsense, but I still soldiered on for several dozen more episodes out of a combination of disbelief at what I was seeing, mixed with morbid "rubbernecking a car crash" bile fascination, and just the sheer stark contrast between the description/hype of the fanbase for this thing vs what was actually there on screen in front of me in reality. Eventually though I threw in the towel, and I think I watched a bunch of Michael Mann neo noir, Richard Linklater & Sidney Lumet dramas, and Hong Kong Heroic Bloodshed movies for the following few months after just to rinse the taste of emotional diabetes and manchild from my synapses.
I digress. My main point being, the whole "Well these are just 'kids' in their late teens and 20s, so its understandable that they'd make the case to give a schmaltzy pirate cartoon written and presented in the most emotionally histrionic way imaginable more than several thousand episodes before it gets halfway kind of interesting, maybe" is in no way a valid or acceptable case to be made here.
Even at 18 to 20 years old (hell,
ESPECIALLY at 18 to 20 years old), there's something
seriously and worryingly amiss if mainlining thousands upon thousands of hours of a cartoon that consists of little more than the core cast of characters whining and sobbing hysterically about the joys and importance friendship is somehow more appealing to you than just... going out and hanging out with your actual, real life friends.
Because I spread them out a whole bunch (for obvious time and life reasons), those 50 episodes of One Piece I watched took me, I dunno, probably several weeks for me to get through. But I knew/know of plenty of people, including within this very community right here, who ran through WAY more episodes than I did in a
fraction of that time. At roughly the same age I was back then circa 2003/4/5-ish, which was college age for me, and maybe late high school at the youngest for a lot of these folks back then.
This is partly why both One Piece itself, and moreover the diehard, dedicated, and fanatical nature of its fanbase for much of the last 20+ years now, has always left me not just mystified, but also maybe just a touch concerned in some ways. Because people with a full, normal adult/young adult life and with a healthy, functioning, active social life... they don't need to vicariously experience friendship and camaraderie through the conduit of a shitty kids' cartoon (that's ostensibly aimed at pre-teen kids, but is written and presented more as if its aimed at toddlers). They can just go out and experience the real thing for themselves, no problem.
At 18 to 20 years old, no one should NEED to be told by Luffy (through a hailstorm of tears and sobbing) that "Friendship is the most awesome, important thing ever!" 90,000 times per episode across thousands of episodes of One Piece... its the emotional/psychological equivalent of being stressed so urgently the health need for bathing and showering regularly. By 18, it should be a total non-issue and long-since old hat. It shouldn't need to be stated, restated, and certainly not sobbed over so much.
And moreover, if you're an 18 to 20 year old who needs to be told about the importance of Friendship and needs to experience it vicariously through this cringe-filled cartoon because its so lacking in your own life....
...then more than just the fact that that's not healthy or normal, its also more to the point incredibly, deeply, and genuinely, sincerely sad and tragic. Like, for real.
This actually kind of seamlessly branches off into a WHOLE other tangent that warrants its own thread quite frankly, so I'll just stop here for purposes of not derailing this thread any further than it already has been.
