For those who prefer (or need) text...
Average ratings for anime I watched with mom
S tier
- Laid-Back Camp the Movie
- Mitsuboshi Colors
- Hitoribocchi no Marumaruseikatsu
- Lupin III Part 2
- The Boondocks
S~A tier
- Samurai Champloo (I rated higher)
- My Deer Friend Nokotan (mom rated higher)
A tier
- Hyouka
- Kaguya-sama: Love is War ~The First Kiss That Never Ends~
A~B tier
- Library War (I rated higher)
- Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (I rated higher)
B tier
- Oomuro-ke: Dear Sisters
- Cells at Work!! season 2
- Cells at Work: Code Black
- Ranma 1/2 reboot
- Minami-ke: Okawari
C tier
- Memories of Phantasm
- Barakamon: Mijikamon
D tier or barely remember
- Tamako Market specials
Ranking of anime I watched by myself
S tier
- The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
- Cardcaptor Sakura
A tier
- Maison Ikkoku
- Futari wa Precure
- Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card
- Sakura Wars
B tier
- Stardust Telepath
- Toradora
- Wataten
C tier
- Asteroid in Love
- Amanchu
D tier
- Smile Precure
I don't think anyone necessarily wants a month-by-month summary in text of the anime I was watching, but what I will say is that, aside from the things actually marked on the chart — namely anime I watched while sick with a cold or immediately thereafter, and anime I watched immediately before, during, and after my trip to the USA — there are some other things that happened in my life that the anime chart sort of "reflects".
What the anime I watched says about my 2024 (and 2023)
At the start of 2024 I was watching Cardcaptor Sakura, and the reason why was basically because in late 2023 my laptop stopped working, and so for a period of a few days in late 2023 I could really only easily access the anime on Netflix on the nearest smart TV. And of the anime there, Cardcaptor looked the most interesting. By the start of 2024 I'd gotten an old laptop and installed adblockers etc to go back to my yo-ho-ho ways, but in any case Cardcaptor proved to be a smash hit for me, and I probably wouldn't have gotten around to watching it if my laptop didn't one day stop working. It was really only well into 2024 that my own laptop started working again.
I started watching Maison Ikkoku because it kept showing up in online anime quizzes that I'd do with my mom. We ended up not doing very many of these quizzes just because there were so many things we didn't recognize in them that kinda sucked the fun out, but Maison Ikkoku showed up in enough quizzes for me to learn to recognize it, and it just caught my eye because it's Rumiko Takahashi and it seemed like a good vibe all around. So I gave it a shot.
I tried Smile Precure because the Saban version, Glitter Force, was on the TV when I went to some younger cousin's birthday party, and I was struck by how it was a Norwegian dub of an Americanized version of a Japanese cartoon, and you couldn't even select the Japanese audio track on Netflix, only English ("original") and Norwegian. So that little oddity made me curious about the original Japanese version, and after I found that I didn't particularly enjoy Smile Precure after the first episode, I decided that I might as well try the original Futari wa Precure to see how it compared — and that ended up being a smash hit for me, though I didn't binge through all the episodes like I did with Cardcaptor.
I ended up watching Toradora because I was around that point in the year just feeling kinda gloomy about the state of the world, and I was experiencing bouts of paranoia, and I just wanted something sweet to relieve that feeling, and a Hexbear recommended it to me.
At some point in February I met a guy through my welfare contractor who was an anime fan and an immigrant with limited Norwegian proficiency. Figuring that I could make a friend, and through a shared interest offer him some good conversations to help build his language skills to boot, I asked him about his favorite anime or anime he liked. And he told me that he was fond of ID Invaded, and so I gave that anime a shot and I told him what I thought of it the next day. During that conversation, he said that I seemed like the type of person who'd enjoy Wataten.
I had incidentally already tried Wataten back in 2023, and I did not have a very pleasant experience with it: although the first minute of Wataten seemed very promising, pretty quickly into the first episode was the scene in which the main character (an adult woman) essentially falls in love with a primary schooler. This was completely out of the blue for me, since I misread the plot description, and so I ended up just freezing up for a minute just trying to process what I was seeing, thereafter I said out loud, "UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.....?????", thereafter I hit pause and said out loud, "Oh, we are NOT doing 'pedophilia, but make it kawaii', I'm out of here.", and closed that tab.
So when that new immigrant friend had said that I seemed like the type of person who'd enjoy Wataten, I was slightly tempted to say, "Uh, what's that supposed to mean?" — but I'd been told to always "show tillit" and take others' recommendations seriously. So I decided then that since I already knew going in this time that Wataten was an anime about a pedophile, that I should measure my expectations accordingly, and try watching it precisely because it was so weird and uncomfortable, as a "challenge to myself".
In the end I decided to put Wataten in B tier, not necessarily because I approve of how it portrays the main character's "thing", but just because I found it to be an interesting, conflicting experience, and even enjoyable at points.
So yeah, maybe it's weird to chart my "treats" from month by month, but ultimately it is those little details like what shows you're watching that form the background of your own daily life, and it's those details that you're quick to forget years or even just months later. And those little details, as I've shown, do often end up revealing what kind of a place you're in — recent events, things you're looking forward to, your mental state, whatever it may be. So this was a fun project for me.
Edit: I might as well mention that I'd already seen Azumanga Daioh, Samurai Champloo, and Haruhi Suzumiya in previous years.
