So, The Best Show of 2009 Is…!!

…fuck if I know! 2009 has been a very, very strange year for me in terms of anime consumption. 2007 and 2008 were all about consuming as much as possible as fast as possible, which was a great way to start, but by the beginning of 2009 I realized that there was a lot more to anime than just watching it and enjoying it – you had to really savor it, study it, and have your fill. And so if I try to recount what the best shows I watched in 09 were – not even focusing on the ones that actually aired this year – most of what I get is rewatches of shit I’d seen in years passed.

But not all of it – there were still a decent number of shows that I first watched this year, though most of them were things that I’d already been watching before and simply picked back up (such as Darker Than Black) but even then, there are exceptions. The best shows from years past that I started from scratch this year and finished were probably Ranma 1/2, Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A’s, and… fuck if I know, seriously, I can barely remember a lot of it. I know that I watched a decent amount of shows at the start of the year, fell out a lot during the late spring/early summer thanks to graduation, picked back up in the summer and fall, and then kind of hung in limbo. The truth is that there weren’t a lot of shows I actually finished this year – even from the stuff that was old, most of it I just watched a good portion of and then promptly… stopped.

If things weren’t so complicated, I might have done as GL told me to and posted about everything I watched this year, but since it IS complicated, I might as well just talk about the shows I watched that actually aired this year. Which is just as goddamn complicated.

If I told you what the best shows I watched that were airing this year were, HANDS DOWN, NO FUCKING CONTEST, it would be Toradora and Casshern Sins. They are both in my top 10, nothing else is even in my abridged favorites list. HOWEVER! I consider them cheating because both of those shows started in 2008! I already started liking both of them before this year began, and Toradora in particular was the first show that I ever admitted to my favorites list within half of it’s airing. So those two are disqualified.

Well, here’s the thing. I only finished one show that aired this year. No lie. It’s crazy. I mean, look at this list I made last year of all the shows I watched. I considered 2008 to be somewhat of an off year, producing a few shows that I enjoyed a lot, but only one that really knocked my socks off. I still managed to finish 14 shows (okay, some are movies and OVAs, but I don’t even know if I finished any 2009 movies or OVAs) and there are some considerable episode counts on the things I had ‘watching’ or ‘on hold’ – and considering I went on to finish Toradora, Casshern Sins, and most of Soul Eater, I’d say it was a pretty good run. I also had watched at least the first episode of everything that aired, which I can almost say about this year but, alas, can’t.

What happened? What went wrong? Last year it’s true that I never made it past the first few episodes of a show while it was airing – I’d usually wait until the end of a season and marathon the shows I liked during that season. This year started with the winter season, which was incredibly weak for me besides the still-airing shows. The only shows I remember being interested in were White Album and Maria Holic, but even at the end of the season, I marathoned neither.

Next was the spring season, which was actually really decent! It had a lot of shows I was excited about! K-On, Shin Mazinger, Sengoku Basara, Saki, and perhaps more that are slipping my mind. I watched the first one or two episodes of all and finished NONE of them at the end of the season. Not even the ones I really thought I would! I thought for sure that I’d end up marathonig K-On! and SenBasa at least, but it didn’t happen! Shin Mazinger at least I would attempt to marathon later with No Name, and we were 7 eps in when we had to postpone the marathon and have just never gotten back to it!

Then the summer season began and I thought for sure I would watch something! There were some surefire hits lined up for me! Aoi Hana, I loved the manga years back, never even started the show. Bakemonogatari I thought I’d love, watched one ep, didn’t keep watching. Same was true for Canaan, Umi Monogatari, fucking Juuden-chan, only 1 ep each. Finally, there came a point where I actually noticed what was going on. In September I decided to try and catch up on some airing shows, so I watched 3 eps of Kanamemo (6 were out) 5 eps of Yoku Wakaru Gedai Mahou (didn’t continue) and 6 eps of Bakemonogatari (didn’t continue). It was at this point that I REALLY looked and realized that, oh my god, I had not watched more than 6 episodes of any show to air that year (and had only made it that far a week before.)

So I picked up Canaan, which had 7 eps out, and watched those 7 – I got HUGELY into it, loving every minute. Watched and blogged eps 8 and 9, then never finished the damn show. But in the mean time, I had become determined to finish SOMETHING – so I did – I went back and marathoned Sengoku Basara.

Therefor, Sengoku Basara is my choice for my favorite anime of 2009. Sure, it would only rank around, say, 70-80 on a favorite anime list if one existed, but I didn’t watch enough of anything else this year to know if it stood up to it.

Oh, but wait! What happened to fall? Fall was back to the way I was used to – I got really excited about watching and blogging the new shows, watched a lot of first couple of episodes, got real excited – shit, I even blogged three whole eps of Railgun and Kuuchuu Buranko! And then, I proceeded to just not finish them, and will probably marathon most of the shows when the season ends. Ah, well. Better luck next year.