My daughter is 13, and is getting in to anime, I guess. She’s been binge watching Attack on Titan this week. I know exactly nothing about it because I’m not interested in it, but I’d like to find her some good anime to watch, that isn’t full of the typical borderline porno stuff it seems is popular with G*mers.
Can anyone suggest a couple to get her going? I’d like to do something for her and get a jellyfin server going but dunno what to put on it. What would you suggest for someone getting into anime? Are there services worth paying for? Should I just be sailing the seas?
Asking her she says she likes
No Hero Academia,
Naruto,
Dan Da Dan,
Jojo,
Thanks yall.
ETA - I just gave her the list of stuff suggested so far and she squealed. She says thanks. I appreciate yall. Kiddo is happy then daddo is happy too.
eta2 - I have to go to bed, I was supposed to be asleep an hour or two ago but everyone has given me such a big list to start on that I didn’t want to not tell anyone thanks. Thank yall. I have a chance to give my daughter some media she will like, so I score some points with her for being a good dad, and I have a cheap excuse to sit and do something with her, even if it’s just television entertainment. At some point mom and dad aren’t priorities anymore and I have a chance to bond some more. I appreciate that the most I think.
That’s funny. It’s actually My Hero Academia, unless she told you the romanised Japanese title, which is “Boku no Hero Academia,” but “no” doesn’t mean like “zero” here, it means “of” or similar article; Boku is “My” but masculine, so “Boku no Hero Academia” means “my hero academy,” from a boy’s perspective. Because the main guy (also the narrator) is a guy. You could say “Watashi no Hero Academia” which would mean “My Hero Academy” from a feminine perspective, or you could say Watashitachi no Hero Academia, which would be “Our Hero Academy.” So ironically a girl saying “Boku no Hero Academia” only works as it’s a title; typically, a girl wouldn’t use Boku though, which makes the English name more inclusive. /languagenerd
Demon Slayer is a good one. If you like girl-empowering stories for her that lack fan service, The Promised Neverland is a good shonen (young men targeted) action series that stars an 11-year-old girl who is going up against adults to save her 36 adoptive brothers and sisters from something revealed at the end of the first episode. There’s some bad stuff here, but it would be PG-13 in the US, and not even a hard PG-13. Like PG-13 horror, people die, but it’s mostly off-camera and implied.
Not action, but I’m also a big fan of Erased and Your Lie in April. Sometimes it’s good to break up an action series with a slice-of-life series. When we talk about TV shows with the best endings, Six Feet Under is constantly brought up as it pretty much has, objectively, the best ending to a TV series, ever. Well, for live-action acted shows (as opposed to animation). For animation… it’s pretty much Your Lie in April. YLiA is the 6FU of anime. A deep emotional investment that leads to an awesome payoff. Awesome in its original definition, not necessarily the first definition you think of. Because that ending was certainly awe-inspiring… in kind of the same way a nuclear mushroom cloud inspires awe. Not so good for those caught in it though. But awe-inspiring from where you sit. Both of those shows ended like that. The kind of ending that makes you turn off the TV, get up, and go outside and touch grass.
Either that’s how she referred to it or it’s how I heard it. I really don’t have a frame of reference as I’m not an anime guy so…
Thanks for the recommendations. My list of stuff to check out is silly long now. It’s gonna take me forever to work through it but thank you all the same. I appreciate it. Sorry took so long to respond, it’s been a busy work day.
I heard that. I wasn’t trying to correct you on the name, just saying it was funny because of the translation and what all that means. Language nerd and all that.
I’ve been watching anime for about 25 years, but I still don’t think of myself as an anime guy. What I like are good stories, and I don’t particularly care what country they’re from and if they’re animated or computer animated or live action or not. It’s all kind of the same to me. And now AI is starting to be a thing, I don’t think it should be telling stories (since it would just be plagiarising — it isn’t capable of original thought or inspiration), but it can certainly be used as a tool. I don’t particularly care for it, but the newer generations will accept and even embrace it.
So that’s my advice: look for the stories. Anime “as animation” is fine if you’re after pretty animation — Demon Slayer is good for this; so is virtually any film by Makoto Shinkai, in particular Garden of Words, your name., or Weathering With You. Garden of Words, which is only like 45 minutes long, was commonly referred to on Reddit as “Anime Wallpaper: The Movie” because it was so strikingly beautiful. (Another short film, about the same length, worth watching is Summer Ghost. Just saw that one recently. And, good story there too.)