Hikaru no Go

Anime with traditional Japanese sports, games, arts, folklore or food!

*or yokai or spirits or anything of the sort

Collecting these like pokemon cards because its become my niche

Every superhero has an origin story ... and so does every anime otaku. While I got exposed to anime when growing up, my own journey only really took off in the early 2000s as digital fansubs became widely available and I took full advantage of the fast (for the time) internet provided by my university accommodation.

My anime watching activity dropped off a cliff as I got older and life got in the way, but by that point I'd already lived through the first decade of the 2000s and watched quite a lot of what came out during that decade. Enough, at least, to make a decent stab at this.

This first decade of the 2000s was transformational for the anime industry, particularly with respect to accessibility to western English-speaking audiences.

Legend has it that before this period, anime fansubs used to get distributed physically via VHS tapes. It was a pain in the ass for fansubbers, distributors as well as the consumers so only the hardcore got involved. However, around the turn of the millennium, the rise of DVDs (allowing high quality rips) and faster internet (enabling tolerable download times) killed off VHS fansubs and ushered in the digisubs era. And with this dramatic lowering of the accessibility bar, fansubs exploded across the internet, bringing in a legion of new fans. (Fun fact: MAL itself came into existence during this early period of digi-fansubs.)

It's not just the illegal side of anime viewing that took off though. Kids' series like Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon were great international success stories in the late 90s and early 2000s, and people realised there was an appetite for anime in western market. More shows started getting licensed, DVD sales boomed and some non-kids anime like Cowboy Bebop even got exposure on TV.

Anime production in Japan ramped up in the first half of the decade, though I'm not sure how much of this is to do with its growing following in the west given it was still dominated by the domestic market. But in the very least, success in the west was beginning to have a significant effect on anime production. One notable anime, The Big O, was allegedly made with western audiences in mind. While in Japan it flopped so badly that only half of the originally intended 26 episodes got made, its international success eventually led to the production of a second season.

As more and more anime titles became available to western English speaking audiences, the industry grew into a bubble. Companies started licensing anime almost indiscriminately and the Japanese companies demanded sky high licensing fees even for shite scraped off the bottom of the barrel that some dog did a number two in. A lot of stuff didn't sell nearly enough to make up the cost and this was exacerbated by a declining DVD market, widespread piracy and, later on, the Great Financial Crisis. Inevitably, the bubble burst in the second half of the decade: US licensors like Geneon and Central Park Media went bust, retailers like Suncoast went bankrupt, and Cartoon Network's anime-focused block Toonami got cancelled.

It's worth noting that anime wasn't the only industry in trouble: the whole bricks and mortar business was in decline, as was the DVD-driven entertainment business. And just like in other entertainment industries, the business paradigm was shifting. From the ashes of the anime crash grew shoots of new life. As the decade drew to a close, Crunchyroll (you may have heard of them), which started life in 2006 hosting user-uploaded pirated content, moved towards exclusively showing legally secured titles. The age of anime streaming had begun.

***

On the anime production side, when the decade started, I distinctly remember 26 episode was considered a standard season for TV anime, with quite a few shows going up to 52. As the decade wore on, 26 episode series became increasingly rare and anime around half that length became the norm as the shorter seasons reduce the financial impact of flops while holding the door open to extensions for successful shows. You can really feel the difference this had on the pacing: early 2000s shows with 26 episodes were generally slower with frequent episodic side stories thrown into the early stretches of the series to pad out the story and/or develop the characters.

Animation wise, digipaint became the norm in the early 2000s, replacing the old analogue method of cell animation. As with all transitions, there were some initial teething problems. For example, early digipaint anime were done in lower resolution as full HD wasn't much of a thing back then. These kinds of issues means that anime made in those early years have aged about as well as milk, and not even remastering can do much to salvage them.

While there'd been plenty of light novel anime adaptations before, the popularity of these adaptations hit new heights during this decade. This probably owes a lot to the ludicrous successes of Bakemonogatari and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Towards the end of the decade, adaptations of light novels with long titles that double as plot summaries also started taking off.

This wasn't just a good decade for light novels adaptations, but also visual novels, including eroge aka hentai games. This can be seen as part of anime's increased focus on catering to the otaku subculture. The shift in focus is also evident in trends like the rise of late night anime and, much to my dismay, the dreaded moe. It's not all bad though. In the case of late night anime, it also gave birth to Fuji TV's noitaminA block, which aimed at an atypical anime demographic and produced a string of critically acclaimed shows (spoiler: some of them are in this stack).

***

Anyway, enough rambling on anime history; now onto the stack itself! I came up with a complicated system to determine the potential candidates for this list. Those who aren't crazy enough to be interested just need to note that I consider all the entries to be at least great (9+/10 on MAL or 2.0+ on my personal scale) and that I'm only including one anime from each franchise (usually the earliest one that provides a good jumping in point). Let me also slap on the disclaimer that I haven't seen a lot of these for well over a decade, so I don't know if they all hold up. Feel free to skip the remainder of this section and go straight to the entries.

The main thing that people might find a bit odd about this stack is that it appears to contain entries prior to the 2000s as measured by the more commonly used metric of starting year. This is because I consider an anime to be from the 2000s if it aired DURING this decade. But that's not all! Things get more complicated for franchises. For these, I'm including multiple entries as a single entity if the storyline are closely connected, e.g. in the case of multiple seasons of a show. This results in the inclusion of series that, while did not air in the 2000s, are closely connected to sequels that did (I prefer this over the alternative of putting in some random middle season of a franchise which is not helpful for anyone wanting to start their exploration).

Finally, when judging whether these multi-entry entities are good enough to actually make the cut for the stack, I try to decide based on the merits of the entries that aired during the 2000s as a whole. To illustrate this with a real example, the reason why the Kara no Kyoukai movie series did not make the cut is that while they included a great movie in Paradox Spiral, I don't consider the entries released in 2000s to be great as a whole. Similarly, even though Cowboy Bebop qualified for this list due to the Knocking on Heaven's Door movie airing in 2001, the movie itself fell short of being great so the franchise didn't make the cut (though it would if I were making a 90s stack).

Confused? Good. It wouldn't be my stack if it weren't built on top of a convoluted system! But hopefully things will become clearer as add case-by-case clarification in the controversial entries themselves (disclaimer: it may lead to further confusion).

A comprehensive watch order of the Hikaru no Go series, which includes every entry of the Hikaru no Go franchise.
Original Guide: https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=1865227

AEGC Interest Stack index: https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=2017008

The bottom 50 of the top 100 anime gathered from TV Asahi's Japan-wide survey, conducted with multiple age-groups, into the best animated series.

(No. 85 is Tom and Jerry)



(https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2005-09-23/tv-asahi-top-100-anime-part-2)

100% purity here! Not a single bit of nonsense relating to sex!

I can't believe I had such a hard time making this stack >:'[ I'm a poor Christian boy


((If you find anything here with a sex joke please contact me immediately I want this place to be a light in the ecchi-filled darkness))

Part 1 to my previous No Sex Jokes or Ecchi stack here: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/4654


Feel free to DM or message me about any questions, suggestions, or opinions about this stack!

Criteria:
1. The anime is based on a manga that ran in Weekly Shonen Jump.
2. The protagonist (presumed male) is voiced by a female VA at least most of the time -- doesn't qualify if the character is usually voiced by a man but voiced by a woman when shown as a child in flashbacks.
3. The rare series with female protagonists (i.e. Cat's Eye, Dr. Slump, Stone Ocean) are excluded. Girls voiced by girls aren't rare. We're interested in dudes voiced by ladies right now!
4. If the character is voiced by the same VA across multiple sequels, only the first entry is included. On the other hand, if the character is voiced by different female VAs in different entries, those are each included.

Includes:
• Anime that depicts a culture accurately, seriously and maturely.
• Series that are purely historic
• Historically accurate works
• Traditions
• Historical settings

Includes Sports anime with epic moments that gives a ton of feelings.

Original Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5iOt8pVw2A
Created May 15, 2022

A list of various internet personalities and what they consider the best anime ever made. The list includes personal favorites and objective picks for quality.

Part 1: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/19710

Anime about games involving strategy and logic, from Mahjong to high stakes baseball games

There is a wide variety of anime, which are considered by a regular part of the community as "underrated", which did not have the popularity they deserved for being so good or were simply forgotten once their fashion stage was over, based on these comments , today I bring a stack with anime series of this type in case you are interested.
Note: I also included movies.

Continued from: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/20823

What the title says, any anime which has over 1,000 fanfics on AO3. (Note: anime with 10,000+ fics are on their own list, so if you see anything that’s super popular that's missing, that’s why) And since the tagging system on AO3 is a bit inconsistent I made a few choices:
For anime with separate tag categories for the manga and anime adaptation, I only took the fic number for the anime entry, I did not add them together. For anime and manga which have already been lumped together under one tag I used that number.

For anime with reboots where the reboot and the original got lumped together I chose the version with the most members on myanimelist to represent it (like Fruits Basket)

For franchises which have all been lumped under one tag, I chose the earliest tv series installment of the series to represent it. (for example Gundam, or Lupin III). But if an individual installment of that franchise tagged separately also reached 1,000 fics by itself it also got included. (like Gundam Wing)
Exceptions to this rule are the Fate franchise and Yugioh, because I don’t want to make another list just to squeeze those in lmao. Here are the individual installments of those which have all reached 1,000:
Fate/Grand Order
Fate/Zero
Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's
Yu-Gi-Oh! GX
Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V

And if you notice that I’ve missed anything feel free to let me know

This is a list of awesome anime for awesome people that understand how awesome anime is and want to get better at seeing what is actually good. Not everything in the list is a masterpiece (most are) but everything is essential to understanding anime as a medium for drama.

This list will help you grow as a person. While the list is mainly based on my personal opinion it does note the average score of the series.
The list is made with the idea of reccomending series to people newer to anime and still trying to find the direction they want to take their preferences hence it has multiple entries of different genres.

This list will be 50 entries long, so prepare you buttcheeks and enjoy the ride.

(the list is in no particular order.)

Anime that were dubbed in its entirety by Ocean Productions, a Canadian based dubbing group in Vancouver, Canada.

There are some rare cases like Megaman NT were dubbed but not fully and I decided to exclude those. Dragonball Z was also dubbed by Ocean Prod. at one point in time but they didn't dub episodes 68-122 (To stay ahead with Funimation's dub). Z Kai also has a full dub but that will never see the light of day so I won't include that on these lists either.

Anime where the protagonist can see things that others cannot see; ghosts, yokais, monsters, etc.