All right! This is something I wanted to do once I had finished Legend of the Galactic Heroes. An anime A to Z challenge!
The premise is simple: watch and post about an anime that starts with each letter of the alphabet, starting with A. It can be a movie, OVA, long, or short. If it has a page on MAL, it’s allowed. As long as you start with an A anime, and end with a Z anime. Re-watching anime is allowed. Posts can be anything related to the anime: reviews, thoughts, analysis, et cetera.
For the purposes of this, I will be using the titles as they appear on the anime search function of MyAnimeList. I feel like romaji names can count too, but for now I’m going to stick to the names as they appear on MAL’s anime search.
The reason I decided to do this was mainly because there are so many anime that I haven’t seen. One method I’ve never used before to search for “new” anime that I haven’t seen is sorting alphabetically. I decided to scroll through the first few letters of the alphabet on MAL and see what I hypothetically would watch if I decided to do this A to Z gauntlet.
I was surprised to find a couple of anime I’d never heard of that I’d be interested in watching. With this little test proving to be a success, I decided to commit to the full challenge. So far I’ve only got A to D planned out.
There are a few anime I’d like to re-watch as well. So there are some letters where I have a feeling I will be debating between re-watching something, and finding something new to watch. I’m sort of looking forward to these little trade-offs. There are also some letters where I feel like there may be NOTHING that I am very interested in – and this will just force me to watch something I might have normally shied away from. I’m hoping to be pleasantly surprised in those moments.
I also haven’t watched very many anime movies – something about sitting through something that’s longer than 22 minutes / episode makes me hesitant, although I really shouldn’t be. So I’m hoping to find a few movies to watch during all of this.
So that’s what I wanted to post about today!
This is what I’ll be doing for the next while – I’m currently halfway through anime A.
Naturally anyone who finds this idea interesting is more than welcome to try it out as well.
Until next time!
Thanks for reading.
I’d been considering doing something like this as a challenge for awhile but at the moment I don’t really have the time or the focus for it. Still, I might look at starting it and just spreading over a very long period of time. Because there are a lot of anime out there I’ve just never watched that might be fun to discover through something like this.
Best of luck with the challenge and I hope you have fun.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Thanks! Just looking through various anime of a certain letter and having to decide on only ONE anime for that letter has been pretty fun so far.
I would certainly enjoy reading how something like this goes for you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ll have to see what my work schedule is looking like for the next few months. At the very least, I should be able to knock off a few letters over the Christmas/New Year’s period if not before.
LikeLiked by 1 person
One letter a month and you’ll be done in 2020!
LikeLiked by 1 person
That is a long project commitment, though that’s probably about the best outcome I could hope for at this point in time.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Have fun. I do something similar with an article series titled, “Anime ABC’s” but mine differs in that I have the community vote on what I watch instead of picking myself. I’ve been running that series for about 2 years now but I also tend to write huge essays for them XD
LikeLiked by 2 people
Very cool idea.
Yeah big essays aren’t really my forte, but who knows. I might challenge myself to write different types of posts with this.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I swear that most of them don’t start that way. I am just a long-winded writer. I’ve made a couple on the shorter side though. Any way, my goal with that series was to do something different with each letter (be it format, length, etc..) so maybe consider doing that? You might surprise yourself even!
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is a fun idea to find new anime. I don’t have the patience to sit through a whole season of something atm but maybe I should do this with movies and OVAs, that could be fun. Well, I look forward to see what anime you come up with. Good luck!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks!
I need to check out some anime movies myself. I see that Studio Ghibli challenge going around, and here I’ve never seen anything by Studio Ghibli. Hoping I come across some that pique my interest with this whole thing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have only seen a few Ghibli movies and so many people praise them so yeah, there’s a good start.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have a friend on MAL who undertook this challenge. It put him through Hell, but he ultimately came out on top, and raised his power levels to unimaginable heights! As for myself, I would probably make a list first only to ditch it, and pick something at random. It’s how I usually pick things to watch. Good luck to you in your conquest to become more powerful than ever before!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Just another feat of strength to add to the history books.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m not particularly fast at anime challenges and I’m currently in the middle of two of them anyway (one associated with the anime list site I use and the other being the TBR/W tag), so I’ll have to turn the invitation down for the moment. It does sound like a good idea though and one that I might want to try sometime in the future…of course, if I had the time, planning etc. to do it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wonder how long it’ll end up taking. I think I’ll be finished before 2019? Or maybe early 2019. Currently not planning on watching any anime longer than 24 episodes.
LikeLike
Love it. Making a note to try this, starting in January. I’ll give myself two weeks to get through each letter so it’ll end up taking a year, but it means I can continue watching my regular challenges at the same time.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Looking forward to seeing how it goes for you then! I’ve already found some great anime I didn’t know existed.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hoping to find some gems. I once watched 365 films in a year and saw so many films that I would have never watched if I hadn’t being doing that challenge. Loads were far better than I’d expected too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: New Year's Resolution for Inskime – Inskime
Pingback: Revisiting Last Year to Announce this Year – Phoenix Talks Pop Culture Japan