One of the things you normally don’t think about when talking about watching anime, is watching anime with your parents. It often comes up as something to be avoided – as opposed to something to be embraced, particularly with the amount of sex that comes up in Anime. However, once you get older, it gets a bit easier to talk about watching anime with your parents – and it helps if your parents are long-time fans of Speculative Fiction. So, with that in mind, I figure I’d give an update on how it’s gone, and give some notes on some of the shows we’ve watched.
The whole “Watching Anime with My Parents” process started back in 2018, which probably turned out for the best because once the Pandemic hit and we stopped going out to do stuff, it helped provide a useful routine to provide a highlight to the weeks. I knew a few things going in to help moderate my decisions – my Dad was also a fan of mysteries and Jazz music and did miniatures wargaming back in college, and my Mom doesn’t handle horror well.
So, my first pick was not what you’d consider the default first show, but I think it helped some when it came to other works – Girls und Panzer. It played in to some of my Dad’s miniatures experience (though he was more of a medieval miniatures player), and some of the more wacky elements of the series helped ease them in to concepts that would come up with other shows. Both parents generally liked it, and were interested in watching more
From there, we decided to move into doing two shows – a lighter show on Friday, the last day of Dad’s work week (as he hadn’t retired yet), and a more dramatic show on Saturday. The first of our serious shows was Cowboy Bebop, moving in with the Jazz & Mystery thing – Mom & Dad both liked it, but I don’t think it necessarily grabbed them. I think they were more familiar with a lot of the concepts already, so it didn’t have the same novelty that it did back in the day.
From there I generally picked up a few other things – Mom has some difficulty with a little more complicated plots, at least in terms of involved anime – some twisty but otherwise linear plots – like with Yamato 2199 – were fine. Additionally, they were okay with a little fanservice or risque humor so long as it was part of a larger series with material to sink their teeth into. The blue humor in Genshiken and Moyashimon was fine, as they’d both gone to college and had encountered similar blue humor in their friends’ circles there. Similarly, while my Mom wasn’t a fan of the more risque elements in My Dress-Up Darling, the fact that there was so much material related to costuming (both parents had also been part of the SCA) and that some of that humor was related to things you have to deal with in costuming, made up for it.
By contrast, while they appreciated the stupendous quality of the animation in Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, the risque jokes went a bit too far for them, to the point that we didn’t watch Season 2. There was almost a sense there, as we’d watched it after the KyoAni arson, that I felt they were watching it in tribute to the victims of the arson and taking appreciation for the craftspersonship of those who had been lost.
In terms of other things I’d found – my Dad is not a mecha guy. He’d enjoyed Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex, and I’d loaned him my copies of the Evangelion Manga (as he’s also started getting into manga as well), so I’d had the idea to go from there to The Big O – and he bounced off it, hard. Since then he hasn’t really been into trying other mech series – no Gundam, Macross, no Patlabor. By contrast, I loaned my Mom the Gundam the Origin manga, and she read it all the way through.
Both aren’t particularly into heavily episodic storytelling in dramatic or dramedy series as well. When we watched first season The Slayers, everyone was onboard until the series finished the Rezo arc, and then as things shifted into the episodic for a while, everyone lost interest. They were into Ranma 1/2, as the series is more strictly a comedy, though we stopped at the episode before Happosai’s introduction, I don’t like the character, and even they could tell from the next episode preview that he was a bridge too far for them – especially since the series tends to over-use him in the stand-alone filler episodes.
We’d also gotten into My Hero Academia, but as the series went on and the stakes of the work got higher, my Dad fell off some – hitting a degree of superhero burnout. While I’m current on the anime on my own, we didn’t watch the most recent season. What has grabbed everyone though, is Spy X Family. The mix of slice-of-life comedy, well-animated action, and the various absurdities in the plot scratched an itch for both of my parents – to the point that at PRGE last year, I picked up a Spy X Family print from Artist’s Alley, which has been hung above the TV.
Currently, we are watching the most recent series of Spy X Family, and will be starting Apothecary Diaries shortly.
If you’ve taken the plunge on trying to watch anime with your parents, I’d love to hear about it, and how well things turned out.
