how age and exposure to anime affect our preferences.

Well this is just more on being personal than actually explaining things... so this post is a little but all over the place :))

I’m pretty positive that all of us have a good share of our very own ‘personal anime history’. Some bloggers have a small page or post of it on their blogs while some just share it to other people through forums, MAL profiles, or other means of sharing.

This little history of ours basically goes around how we first found anime, manga, seasonal anime and how our preferences change over time. In my personal point of view, our age and exposure to anime basically play the biggest roles in the development of our current preferences in anime (and that’s what I’ll talk about here).

I’m pretty sure that most anime fans are aware of the basic gender-age related genre – shounen & shoujo and seinen & josei. These four are divided by gender and age bracket for its target audience but anyone can generally just watch anything. I believe that these gender and age brackets basically give an overview as to how much one can appreciate or understand a series in general.

shounen-battle-adventure? :))

I wouldn’t want to expound so much on these four but in general shounen & shoujo caters audience between the ages of gradeschool to highschool with shounen series being obviously for boys while shoujo series are for girls. Seinen & Josei, on the other hand, simply goes around for audience around 18yrs old and above thus having deeper stories, characters, more violent battles and such (you get the point).

These age brackets are basically how writers set the content of their series because with age comes the viewer’s ability to understand or appreciate a story or a set of characters, as I have mentioned earlier.

Now that I’m done with that, let me go over how one’s exposure to anime affects his anime preferences together with his age. I guess this is where we’ll go through our anime history (my anime history for this post but you can take a look or reminisce at your own as you read my post, if you can relate, that it :3).

While those gender-age-based genres generally relies on content, as anime fans who did not grew up in Japan, we rely on what is available on our local televisions. Here in our country, Philippines, I remember when I was in 2nd grade an anime airs weekly – Hell Teacher Nube/Jigoku Sensei Nube (Mondays), Ranma 1/2 (Tuesdays), Master of Mosquiton (Wednesdays), Sorcerer Hunters (Thursdays), Fushigi Yuugi and Pokémon (Fridays) and somewhere there is The Vision of Escaflowne, Lupin III and Flame of Recca/Rekka no Honoo (any Filipino readers out there that can probably remind me of their schedule? XD). I’ve also seen Yu Yu Hakusho (Ghost Fighter) but I think it aired separately from this set (I think even before these were aired in the country).

Yu-Gi-Oh! - Hyakunin Isshu style

There were a lot more stuff that were made available in local channels (and naturally they were in Filipino dub) during those times and I generally watch most of them but I think that Pokémon was my fave. Throughout my gradeschool days, I think I grew up being a shounen series fan since shoujo series weren’t exactly offered so much in local television (if they were offered such as Card Captor Sakura I seriously just missed them =__=). At fifth grade, my love for shounen series grew after watching Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters. It was the series I considered my fave until I dropped anime during my highschool days and went back to anime through Yu-Gi-Oh!5D’s before college.

Throughout my first two years in college I’m into streaming anime. From watching Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s, I randomly discovered Angel Beats! thus my discovery of KEY anime. I was exposed to other KEY series such as CLANNAD, Kanon and Air. From there, I further searched for romance-drama series – oh you know KEY series :3 I came across more romance series, seasonal anime (and downloading from torrent. LOL) and my history goes on.

Currently, I believe that my preference in anime has greatly changed. Although I still watch and occasionally enjoy the series I watch back then, my focus on watching kind of changed from plain romance and drama to something that inspires or has some pretty sensible plot or pretty relatable characters (maybe that just sounds so stupid -__-). I’ve grown more critical in what I watch. I think that this is basically because of the number of series I’ve seen (200 isn’t exactly that many but still it’s a pretty huge number), the variation of their genres and probably my exposure to blogging also had an impact.

I’m pretty sure that sooner or later my taste in anime will somehow change. Actually I’m sure that interest will change soon (and I can already see that coming) that I might even set anime aside (but probably not for good). ANYWAY, we all have changed in interest, preferences and such that I’m pretty sure that you guys also went on some changes in taste since you started watching anime. Anyone want to share stuff on how your preferred series/genre changed over the years?