Not a large percentage of anime fans are known to be sports fans, no doubt because a large percentage of anime fans aren’t known to be the physical type in the first place. I never played football as a kid; I played baseball in elementary school but I sucked hard at it and never really gave a chance to sports as a whole. As such, I wasn’t really interested in watching sports either, but a few years ago I had a revelation – theoretically, I should like watching football.
I see football as a game of tactics. You have opposing teams and you must strategically place your soldiers as well as engage them in skirmishes with hopes of victory. The coach isn’t quite like a tactician, seeing as he doesn’t have full control of what the team does, but overall the team is going to need to strategize their movements, and often do so on the fly. Now, sure there’s some fun taken out if you can’t be the tactician yourself, but I also think there’s entertainment to be had from watching what is, for all purposes, a war in your television.
I like war, I like tactics, and I certainly like violence – so it stands to reason that I could enjoy football, but there’s one very clear reason that I don’t – it’s fucking BORING! It’s not the fault of the game itself, but the action is just broken up so much! You have to sit around for minutes between plays listening to the announcers and rewatching what you JUST saw, and then there’s a goddamn fucking commercial break every five minutes! I don’t have the patience for it! Three hours worth of one football game is time I could spend watching, for instance, 9 episodes worth of anime!
But wait a minute, this actually reminds me of a certain kind of anime! You know, the kind where one fight can last about 9 episodes? The shounen action genre! And it’s problems are very similar.
I have come to realize that I really enjoy shounen action manga. Why? For one, I like violence, and for two, I love the themes of friendship and never giving up – those are the things I live by, so shounen manga feels very natural to me. And what’s more, manga moves quickly. In the past couple of days, I’ve read 20 volumes of Bleach, and I loved it. The manga reads very fast and were it not for my interweb connection being totally ass a lot of the time, I’d have read that much in probably 2 days flat. It was fun, fast, and cool as hell, so why wouldn’t I like the anime?
Simply put, there’s too much additional shit! A 20-minute episode of shounen action anime tends to be an adaption of something I could read in 2 or 3 minutes! This is what I call the ‘AAA problem’ (Action Anime Adaption Problem) and I realized the connection to football when my dad was watching one of today’s games. At 3:10 PM, there were 10.5 minutes left in the fourth quarter – ostensibly, there should then be 10 minutes left in the game, however, I knew that the game would air until 4 o’clock. That’s 40 additional minutes! Who wants to sit through all the extra shit?!
I’ll admit it, I have a short attention span. I can’t really keep up with something if I keep getting interrupted (hence my utter failure at marathoning) and with the AAA Problem, I just can’t concentrate on all the padding and inane dialog for long periods of time. For me to enjoy something like Bleach, I need to be pounding through it like a damn hammer. I think I’d enjoy American football if I could do the same.
“American Football”
You probably wanted to say “USian handball”, right ? Or rather “USian shouldershove” ?
I really don’t give a fucking flying fuck what the fuck you call the stupid shit, I just know that the most commonly accepted title is ‘American Football,’ and to ‘USians’ America means 50 states, there’s no distinction between that and the rest of ‘the americas’, which is the title we’d use if we ere actually referring to the whole thing.
American Handegg
If we went with “Yankball” we could cut it down to two syllables >_>
I don’t know about this comparison. The pauses in foot actually serve to let to analyze what just happened, otherwise it would just be an hour of dudes smashing against each other. I’ll certainly give you the commercials, challenges can be bullshit sometime too. Your problem also might be that you aren’t emotional invested in the by having a team to root for. Don’t you fucking sass sholdershove like that, karry.
“The pauses in football actually serve to let you analyze what just happened” I wish I knew English gud.
I will admit that the slow-mo replays can be helpful, but otherwise, I really don’t need too much to think about what’s going on.
Consider also that here are football video games out there, and they basically trim all the fat off of the game until it’s just tactics and playing. A lot of people seem to like these games, and I’ve played them and concluded that if football was like watching these gams, it’d be far easier to watch.
As for emotional investment, the problem is that the teams change members all the time so I find it hard to think of a team as good when they wont even be the same at all in a few years.
Well I doubt anybody needs the time, but people still like to have it.
That’s true for playing a football game, but, and this could be just me, watching someone play a football game is boring as hell.
Even though I don’t, I’m a Cowboys fan no matter how many retards or criminals they hire, plenty of people pick a team each season because of that, so if you want to give football another try that could be something you want to do.
I’ll agree kadian1364 though, it is kind of an indoctrination thing. I too wasn’t that fond of football several years ago, but I live in Texas and most of my family likes football, it was inevitable.
This puts me in mind of an article Kieron Gillen did for Escapist a while back. It’s mostly about how Sensible Soccer made him appreciate football (eh, well, um “Soccer”, I guess), but in there is the assertion that, uh, “Soccer” is the superior game because it has no breaks.
I offer purely in the spirit of pimping an excellent piece of journalism. No attempt is made to present a value judgement. ;)
Maybe I should try watching soccer, then. I have certainly been impressed from what I’ve seen of how people can keep track of handling such a small object over such large distance.
That makes Eyeshield 21 the best thing ever!
This is why I love Mahou Shoujotai so much, I think. Every episode is eight minutes long, and because every episode is eight minutes long, not one second is wasted. There is at least one episode which contains, no joke, more plot development than entire arcs of Naruto. Not filler, genuine arc bullshit. Not the most impressive achievement, admittedly, but still fairly impressive.
It’s pure storycraft. The actual plot is the fairly generic fantasy-world-under-peril-saved-by-love-and-teamwork manga stuff that allows me to refer to things like Gantz and Berserk as “palate cleansers”. It’s solid, but nothing to write home again. The craft though, oh the craft. Beautiful. Not one line, not one scene, not one frame that does not advance a plot, a character, a theme. Usually more than one and often all three at once.
And, actually, fair props to Utena here. Every fight is two or three minutes long. They last long enough for the combatants to sum up the conflict of the week in a few oblique sentences and then shwip, off comes the rose. No muss, no fuss, no standing around for two episodes so we can watch a flashback we’ve already seen.
Indeed. I love both of those series, too, but uh, those are also both SHOUJO anime (well, Mahou Shoujotai isn’t really, but it’s stylized as one.) The biggest difference in shoujo and shounen is that shoujo is all about a plot beating ahead like a bat out of hell and shounen is about a plot moving very slow. Actually, part of the reason I don’t like most shoujo is that it moves TOO fast, putting importance only on the fact that things are happening, and not taking time to flesh out the inner workings.
I know you were referring to Shounen works… but my brain inevitably wandered off into the Greater Pastures of Fight Inflation ™ and hey, there was Shoujo. Soz.
Personally I thought the main difference between Shounen and Shoujo was that in Shoujo epic hair is EPIC >_>
I watch football all the time, but rarely just football. The game’s too long and there are too many pauses for it to be an efficient use of my time; I usually watch anime, do homework, check twitter/email, or read blogs at the same time.
But you got the two main appeals of American football down: 1) a highly complex strategy game 2) violent impacts between high performance athletes.
As one of those rare hybrid sports and anime fans, team sports fandom is pretty much akin to indoctrination. You either played sports when you were young and developed a grassroots appreciation for whatever sport, or your parents raised you from an early age to be a Lions fan, Bulls fan, Manchester fan, etc. Usually a bit of both siutations. Then you grow up and do the same to your kids, and the (“vicious” depending how bad your team is) cycle continues.
Ya. And as I said, the only reason I never liked it growing up is that I never could play it, and my parents weren’t that into it (my dad watches games, but doesn’t get all into it.) Funeral, though, played a lot of football (he was playing varsity his freshman year of high school and was a consistent MVP for most of his childhood), and so I can see him get totally sucked into watching it, even though he is a nerdy anime fan like anyone else (just a 6′1″, 270lb. uber strong nerdy anime fan). Seeing someone like him be into it helps me realize I really could potentially enjoy it.
I shudder at how Vagabond might be adapted — given all it’s contemplative moments. It’s great as manga but as anime… I don’t know…
I think that’s probably why Vagabond HASN’T become an anime yet. But I don’t know, maybe Madhouse could do it with the guy who directed Texhnolyze and Shigurui. I’d certainly like to see him try.
I prefer American football to shounen action anime, because shounen action anime itself actually likes to pretend there is a plot. Football? Not so much! Yeah, there might be some peripheral drama going on (team rivalry, etc.), but it isn’t something which forces its way in in a manner in which it just is crappy and distracts from the action itself, as it could in a shounen show. In other words, my enjoyment can be more mindless and without the interruption of weak stabs at depth.
Also, real life violence is more satisfying than watching anime characters beat down on each other endlessly.
And, finally – I like to watch football, I love to play football. I can’t really playing shounen action anime, sadly.
I’ve played plenty of shounen action anime in my day. All it takes is a zillion toy swords, some friends, and imagination.
I’m confused – what is this ‘friend’ thing of which you speak? Anime bloggers live in boxes in basements, don’t you know?
It’s true. I have no friends, and I literally live in a basement.
You also need to consider the drama and excitement of watching these games live. All the storylines and strategies built up throughout the week are finally playing out. Nobody would sit through the full three hours of a game that’s already finished.
This is a good point. Some people like rewatching good games, but for the most part it’s all about catching the Super Bowl when everybody else does, on Super Bowl… uh, Sunday?
Then again, a disturbing number of people seem to love marathoning One Piece.
It’s still rare to rewatch the whole game, unless it’s a historically significant game. Studies have shown (citation missing) that people are less likely to watch a game in its entirety if they know it’s already over, even if they haven’t seen the game and don’t know the outcome.
The “American” in American football refers to North America as a whole; Canadians play it too (although we don’t watch it) and we definitely don’t call it rugby, so stick to your guns and don’t let those Euros boss you around. =P
The comparison is still interesting – in fact, one of the reasons I dislike football is precisely because it seems like such a combat simulation; I’m one of those hockey viewers who press for less violence and less hits in the game as well. As I see it, it’s simply halfway-baked – if I wanted real combat sports I would prefer to watch something like boxing, fencing, judo, etc. They’re shorter and more focused.
I think the carryover into shounen is valid here too; shounen presents a rather stylized portrayal of combat; specific attacks, often named and decisive, are the bread and butter of a lot of shounen action sequences, rather than choreography necessarily (although this trend has been improving). I’d prefer to watch a much visceral experience by contrast – something short and focused.
My biggest problem with most shounen anime adaptations is that they follow pretty much the same formula of. Step 1 The hero starts off weak and gets his ass kicked by the bad guy. Step 2 Then for some unknown reason the villain mocks the hero and lets him live. Step 3 Then the hero trains really hard and gets stronger. Step 4 Then the hero stares down the bad guy and they fight again (in the days before easy fansubs, English fans would swear that the two combatants were speaking Shakespearean dialog back and forth before the battle.) Step 5 If the hero loses go back to step 1, if the hero wins a new and stronger villain will appear and steps 1-5 will occur until a even stronger villain appears. Step 6 Repeat steps 1-5 until hundreds of episode take place and the series eventually tanks in ratings and is cancelled.
Also, mix-in a big breasted female, or two, or five.
Add-in a couple of buddies that fight along side of the hero and develop bromance-like relationships among each other, so the fangirls have some to write and post at fanfiction.net
And their you have it, a long running shounen anime adaptation.
And see, I love everything about that formula. I mean, it’s exactly like real life!
o_O
So, have you got your first costume upgrade yet?
You know what sport you might like watching? Hockey. Hockey is played really fast, does have some strategy (though not as much as football), and has actual violence (fights). I mean, one guy last year got his throat cut open during a game. Of course, to get the full effect of how awesome hockey is, you would have to go watch a game live. It’s honestly better than watching any other sport live, because there’s so much energy and insanity in the arena.
I actually used to love hockey, until the Whalers fucking moved.
The thing about Hockey is that it doesn’t strike me as a game that takes much skill. I’ve seen it (live once or twice when I was a kid, too) and I always feel like I’m watching pure chaos.
!!! Doesn’t take much skill?!?! It only seems like pure chaos if you don’t know the rules! Quite frankly, hockey probably takes more skill than a number of other sports simply because they are playing it on ice.
See, when I said the same thing to my cousin he said ‘well you have to know how to ice skate well.’ It’s not difficult, seriously. I can ice skate very well and it’s not like I’ve done it often or anything. It’s just really damn easy. And it ain’t like you gotta be a figure skater to play hockey.