Do you keep up with new anime as it’s broadcast or do you prefer to wait until it’s been fully aired and watch the episodes consecutively?  I used to be the former but these days I tend to wait for a series to be complete and then watch at my leisure.  I’ve thought about what changed my anime watching habits and it comes down to a change in my tastes.

Like a lot of anime fans just getting hooked on the hobby, I watched a lot of different anime at first.  Looking back, I realize some of the series I watched back then (and liked at the time) were not exactly masterpieces. When you’re new to anime, you don’t have a lot of reference points for gauging the actual quality of a series so a lot of what you watch seems good ^^;

Over the years, my more picky tastes have lead me try to filter out the lesser anime and focus on just the series that I can enjoy.  I will admit that I take advantage of the fansub/raw community for the time-shifting ability.  I know some people who will watch everything regardless of the quality.  I just can’t do that anymore, not only because of time constraints and but also because I would probably not like anime much after a while ;)

That isn’t to say I don’t keep up with the new series when they start airing.  I sometimes do watch the first couple episodes of a new series to determine if I would like to watch it completely later on.  Plus, running an image board which is constantly kept up to date with illustrations from the most recent series forces me to stay on top of general plot lines and characters.

In order to prevent yourself from getting stuck in a specific genre or style of anime the key is to find others with similar tastes and leech off their recommendations.  One thing I have learned is that finding others who rate some of your favorites highly and they should be a good candidate for finding new series to try.  Often you’ll find shows you wouldn’t have thought yourself but do end up liking. :)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get back to marathoning Macross Frontier…