Hit 500 hours of anime this week and it messed with my head

I was just checking my MyAnimeList stats for fun on Tuesday and saw I passed 500 hours logged. That number hit me hard because I never thought I'd watch that much in a year and a half. I started with Attack on Titan back in 2023 and now I'm deep into stuff like Gintama and Legend of the Galactic Heroes. The scariest part is how normal it feels now like 12 episodes is nothing. I actually had to stop and ask myself if I'm using this to avoid doing real stuff like homework or hanging with friends. Has anyone else hit a big milestone number and freaked out about how much time anime eats up?

3 comments

3 Comments

phoenix_grant3419d ago

500 hours is nothing though, I passed that in like my first 8 months of really getting into anime back in 2020. You're looking at it all wrong, 500 hours of anime is just 20 days out of 500+ days of being alive, that's like 4 percent of your time at most. The real question is whether those hours were spent on stuff that actually made you think or feel something, or if you just binged whatever was popular. I've watched over 2000 hours at this point and my grades actually got better because I stopped going out and wasting money on dumb stuff with people I don't even talk to anymore. Not saying everyone should just sit and watch anime all day but people act like time spent on entertainment is automatically wasted when really it's just as valid as scrolling social media or watching sports. You probably learned more about storytelling and character development from those 500 hours than most people get in a whole semester of some boring class.

logan_young2919d ago

Man I felt that in my soul, especially the part about learning storytelling. I'm at like 1500 hours myself and I swear I've absorbed more about plot pacing and character arcs from anime than any English class ever taught me. Still can't write a decent hook for a paper though, go figure. But yeah, people act like binging a show is somehow worse than scrolling through TikTok for four hours straight, which doesn't even make sense when you think about it.

vera51419d ago

i mean are we really gatekeeping how many hours of anime makes someone a real fan now @phoenix_grant34