Don't expect a best of 2018 post

At the start of March in 2019 I made my best Anime of 2017 post, at a time when most people were already done making best of 2018 stuff.  But I feel a more accurate analysis of any year's Anime is better achieved by providing some hindsight to it, some time for recency bias to wear off.  So me ranking my favorites when over a year had passed since 2017 ended I figured would be an insightful experiment.

But part of why 2017 was a good year to do that with was because I'd seen more stuff from 2017 then any other single year, and the thing is I think that's still true now.  2018 is still a year where I haven't seen much more then I watched at the time.  But I do think it's interesting now to look back on 2018 because of how that was a year defined by me not seeing eye to eye with the general anime community, or even the specific niches I frequent.  

I don't set out for that to be the case, I want the shows I like to be popular, I want people to know what I'm talking about when I reference them.

I tend to keep what's going on with PreCure in my mind separate because it's not really part of the seasonal cycle per se.  But besides that the shows I somewhat agree with popular opinion on are either from the end of the year or the one show I didn't watch till later, SSSS.Gridman.  And pretty much no movies I actually saw at the time like most Western fans, but even more so me since I wait for the Dubs.

A lot of the most popular and talked about shows of 2018 were ones that didn't interest me, either I saw none of them or I dropped them pretty early on.  Meanwhile the show I was initially calling the Anime of the year was one no one but me kept watching, Katana Maidens.

I'm seemingly the only person to complete Reveue Starlight who didn't love it, indeed it's rare for me to even finish a show I wound up disliking that much.  I gave it perhaps a higher MAL rating then it deserves just from starting pretty good.  But the show most people are defining as one that started good and then bombed was one who's ending I adored, Darling in the Franxx was perfectly fine, I don't care if they foreshadowed them being aliens are not, it was obvious they were bad guys from the start.

Citrus is in my opinion the Yuri Anime of the Decade, but the "Respectable" Yuri from 2018 that most Yuri critics were pointing to as what people should make in contrast to Citrus was all stuff I found boring and forgettable.

The same didn't exactly happen in 2019.  I still opted out of a number of popular shows and still completed a few that were mostly overlooked.  But comparatively I was watching more stuff that was actually popular to talk about.

I've also been thinking about 2017 a bit more.  When I made that post last March my mind had already changed from what I originally thought somewhat.  Now my mind has shifted more, and I've seen even more stuff I originally skipped like season 4 of Symphogear.  Maybe in time I'll be able to give it a proper top 10.

Update:  I skimmed my MAL and was suprised to find that the amount of TV Anime I've completed from 2017 and 2018 are exactly equal.  I guess in 2018 I completed a lot of forgettable shows that I then forgot about.  However I've still seen way more movies from 2017 then 2018.  And as far as ONAs go I've completed none from 2018 or 2019 but a handful from 2017.

Looking forward I still have more stuff I want to return to from 2017 then 2018, I'm still putting off LWA and Re:Creators.

Update again: Actually because I watched more 2 core shows from 2018, plus I completed Hugtto, I have indeed watched more episodes of TV anime in 2018 then 2017.  I still feel like I have a better general picture of 2017.  For 2018 a lot of the biggest events were ONAs of which I have still seen none.  Of course from neither year have I seen any Movies that aren't franchise films.