A reminder, that if you would like to be involved, just answer the very simple survey here and I’ll consider your question for inclusion in this series of posts. You don’t have to answer the second question but if you leave your name and link I will link to your blog when I respond.
Question: What keeps you intrigued and wanting more while watching an anime (or reading manga)? From Alex.
I’m fairly easy when it comes to keeping me wanting more in a story. Basically, you just have to make me curious without frustrating me. And that is a very easy thing to do because I am a ridiculously curious person (at least when it comes to stories, or so I have been told). Just have a clear plot structure with an end goal but leave out just enough pieces of the puzzle that I’m not sure how you are going to achieve it, and I’ll be more or less hooked. If you add in a little bit of a mystery to solve or some sort of riddle and I’ll be totally locked in regardless of quality from that point forward.
However, I’m also a sucker for good characters and sometimes I’ll watch something where I don’t know or care where the plot is going just because I want to see more of how a character deals with the situations they are confronted by. Characters that manage to draw me in like this are few and far between but they are usually a little bit damaged in some way but aren’t quitters. Rei from March Comes in Like a Lion is an excellent example of a character who managed to draw me into their story even though the story itself wasn’t something that should appeal to me. Likewise, Allen Walker from D Gray Man really hooked me into what even I will admit is a fairly average dark supernatural action story, but because of Allen I was on the edge of my seat every episode just waiting for the next thing to happen.
Actually, I find it more strange when a story doesn’t manage to interest me in finding out what happens next. As a kid and teenager, I was obsessed with completion. I never started reading a book that I didn’t intend to finish so basically once I’d committed beyond the first chapter I was going all the way through to the end. Every movie and series I started would be finished in their entirety and video games were never done until that 100% target was reached (which given how bad I am at gaming was something that almost never happened so a game never ‘finished’).
It is only in the last few years that I started seasonal anime viewing as before, by necessity, I had to wait until shows were finished and available in some form to access. Once I started seasonal viewing I knew my habit of forcing myself to the end of everything I started had to change.
What that means though, is that I will sit through almost anything if I had to and when I choose to cut a show free from my watch list it is because there is nothing that is going to nag at me in the back of my mind insisting I should come back and finish it. Of course that is only true of shows that I cut loose after a couple of episodes. Shows I cut at episode 1 are usually cut because of choices about their genre or characters and the lack of time I have to watch everything and a lot of those titles get a second chance at a later date when I have time to binge them.
Thanks Alex. And now I’ll ask the reader’s what keeps them intrigued and wanting more?
Thanks for reading.
Karandi James
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So, after taking a hiatus from my blog I finally got around to checking these posts out again. Who would have thought a month later I’d see you answered my question! Thank you very much!
In response to my own question, it would be characters that show some sort of goal or make me curious with their actions. If characters are thrown in and don’t seem to add to the story, why have them? Characters that make me ask “what are you planning?” or “why do that, what’s your goal?” keep me watching.
Again, thanks for answering! 😀
Characters who just seem to exist kind of bother me as well. That’s why I find little sister characters and best friend characters sometimes hard to take. Sometimes they are just there because it seemed like the writer wanted a best friend or a little sister rather than because they are going to do or say anything worthwhile.
Characters worth investing my life into. This.
World-building, or an interest in seeing characters mature.
Interesting world building early in a series can definitely help draw me in to the story. Thanks for sharing.