This Week in Anime

How Do You Manage Your Anime Backlog?

Nicky
As the year passes, simulcasts come and go. When a new season comes around, anime viewers with voracious appetites stack up their plates with all kinds of tasty new shows, confident that they'll be able to eat all of them. However, consuming that much media is a different story; sometimes, we get busy, make plans, and end up watching another show or other media that's more appetizing, or maybe we aren't that hungry. Either way, it's common for anime fans to have eyes bigger than their stomachs, and we end up with a lot of leftovers!

Some of my backlog has been stuff I stopped watching months ago and never went around and made time for before the end of the year, continuing shows I fell off on (this is what some seasonal charts might qualify as a "leftover"), or the previous season of a show that got a second season this year. It's not necessarily a condemnation of a show and more like how fickle humans can be. We always prefer to chase what we think is the freshest and hottest thing, so other things begin to look "stale." But it's not like anime ever turns bad after some time, and likewise, it's not wasteful if you don't watch something immediately. I covered a bit of this in our discussion of BIG anime premieres over here, but I wanted to do a more detailed discussion on how to make clearing your plate more interesting.

Plus, even though we watch anime for money, we don't always have time for everything either, and what better example than to reveal a bit about ourselves and, better yet, hold ourselves accountable for our various watch crimes for all our dear readers to judge?

Meanwhile, I might not have time to watch something when I don't have to work on it, or I may end up loving something I just covered, but then I have to figure out how to squeeze it in with the rest of my schedule. It's also good that you mentioned PLUTO because Netflix's binge model should be held responsible. Everyone I know has had to make room to accommodate them, and your options are either to drop everything to watch them the minute they're out or to savor them. I've had interesting cases of both this season where I plopped down to watch Scott Pilgrim Takes Off that hit my timeline like a Truck-kun but have been slow-burning and savoring each episode of PLUTO because those hour-long episodes are dense and take a while for me to digest.

It's also not like you have to binge everything to enjoy it! I binge a lot, but I recognize that doing it for everything isn't healthy, both physically and mentally. Sitting for hours without moving puts strain on your body, and your brain gets hyped up on the excitement like a bowl of candy. I could get as much done by properly pacing myself, taking breaks, and giving myself time to process what I've seen. However, doing so requires more deliberate methods and, therefore, "less fun." I have all the anime I watch as a list on my computer that I check daily, which is how I know how far behind I am or what I still have to watch.

Doing it this way can feel like "work," as it might be weird to put admin time towards your hobby. For me, anime is work, but tracking isn't new, given the popularity of several anime tracking sites like MyAnimeList, Anichart, Kitsu, and others.

Admin habits take commitment, and it's fortunate that most streaming sites already have passable enough watchlist features. I find the onsite ones a bit clunky and hard to navigate. I don't use tracking websites either, as it can be overwhelming to think about every anime I've ever watched. Still, logging my experiences is useful and fulfilling, especially at the end of the year when I've forgotten everything I've watched or have stuff from previous years or seasons. Otherwise, I might forget that I never finished wonderful anime like Skip and Loafer, or I might fall too behind on Dead Mount Death Play, which had a second cour this season. An external system can work as a gentle reminder.

Nothing motivates us to do something like good old-fashioned peer pressure! Wanting to be part of a conversation with other people gets a fire under your butt. It can be hard to watch a show nobody's talking about. When Dead Mount Death Play was airing its first cour, very few people around me were talking about it, but seeing the few people around me be happy about Solitaire motivated me to revisit it.

Solitaire is a Ryohgo Narita character in how he's a comparatively normal guy whose bit is that he's bluffing. It's oddly relatable and instrumental in peer-pressuring my co-writer and our readers to check it out!

Or you can do what Steve and I did and make it a challenge, like with School-Live! for our spotlight on Masami Ando. Even though we're just two people, the effect of having someone else making you accountable is the same as if you were in a group.

This also applies when watching something with someone else in the room. While occasionally I might have trouble paying attention to something I'm watching alone, I usually pay more attention when another person is watching with me. I have no choice but to let the episode play out instead of pausing and getting up like I normally do. This phenomenon is called "body doubling," and it also works virtually! One of my secrets to watching so much anime is that I don't always watch anime alone, and I owe a lot to my friends and partner(s) who've watched anime with me.

There's also a dark side of watching with other people, though, as you have to manage not only one schedule but also others! Anyone who has tried to schedule weekly tabletop games can tell you how difficult that can be. Even with just your immediate household or relationships, it might be difficult if your anime-watching buddy or you don't have the same schedule or the same taste. Suddenly, watching alone becomes unappealing when you could spend quality social time with people, or one of you might get ahead of the other, and you have to keep track of how much you need to catch up before your next session. That's why I developed my basic make-shift tracking system; it made it easier to communicate with other people I wanted to watch anime with!

I've heard it gets particularly precarious when you live together. You don't want the dangers of looking at another person's laptop and spoiling yourself. I've also had times where my partners were gracious enough to rewatch episodes to help me catch up. I've done the same, too, which is how I watched the first half of the Scott Pilgrim anime twice, as I had initially planned to watch it separately while my partner was away.

On the flip side, my partner has been rewatching S1 of Vinland Saga with me, as I meant to watch it when it came out on Amazon Prime, then HIDIVE, then Netflix, and now I waited so long that it finally ended up on Crunchyroll along with the second season. I guess sometimes good things DO come to those who wait.

For something as story-rich as Vinland Saga, I wanted to make sure I appreciated it, so it's fine if I had to rewatch the few episodes I had already completed.

While something like Skip and Loafer is pretty light, I had no problem skipping back to where I left off. Now it's December, and I still haven't started Vinland Saga Season 2, which begs the question, do I have time to watch everything before the year ends?

That's how it was with last year's Akiba Maid War. In 2022, I caught up after all the hype but had to live with the fact that I couldn't squeeze it into my top five even though it was this close to making it. It was okay because I knew other people would recognize it like the fighter it was. However, I can't say the same for every show.

This brings me to the bummer realization that we don't have time for everything, and that's okay! Not only do we have to plan what we watch, we have to ensure we have actual time for them, and sometimes that means cutting shows or re-evaluating whether we need to watch them. Either way, it involves fantasizing about watching the show and being deliberate about actually watching it. For example, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about watching Vinland Saga but kept a packed schedule without confronting the reality of when I would watch it. Now, after reviewing what the rest of the month looks like, I think if I watch a few episodes every day, I might be able to complete both seasons, but I know it'll come at the price of finishing up other things in 2024 or dropping them entirely to have the actual time.

See, real progress! While people have many ways of getting things done, sometimes it just takes a push to get the ball rolling. Doing a column about it is a good example since it's specific, there's a time constraint, and we have to be accountable. However, even though most of our readers might not be writing about it, it's pretty easy to recreate similar circumstances for free! Please tell us what anime leftovers you'd like to finish, what methods you use to plan your anime time, and how your watchlist for this year compares to what you watched. If you've got that one show lingering on your list all season or year, I give you full permission to kill it or go for it. Any time you spend enjoying yourself is time well spent, but nothing wastes more time than sweet hesitation.