Endless Eight

Sports anime about things that can only vaguely be considered sports.

Hibike! Euphonium, Initial D, March comes in like a lion are more obvious ones but band anime like K-On!, Bocchi the Rock!, and Nana also have a similar appeal.
These all have some kind of competition or performance involved, so they are structurally similar to sports anime with character drama and training/practice leading up to a big climax that caps off both the drama and the training.

Maybe this genre isn’t so niche as these shows are all very popular, but I don’t often see people consider them to be similar in any way.

Good pick. I would say Haruhi Suzumiya, Gamers!, B-Gata H-Kei, and The Tatami Galaxy also fit this description.

There are 8 anime that made me cry, in order from ~2019 to 2024:

1. Sora yori mo Tooi Basho
2. Hibike! Euphonium 2
3. Mawaru Penguindrum
4. March comes in like a lion
5. Clannad: After Story
6. March comes in like a lion 2nd Season
7. Toradora!
8. Spirited Away

Highly recommend all of these

The tl;dr is “Yui x Ritsu”

The slightly longer story is that if you watch K-On! while really trying to overinterpret every interaction and assume more stuff is happening off-screen, a few romantic dynamics develop, with Yui x Ritsu being the most obvious.

The full story is 13+ charts and an 8 page writeup that I did as a personal project to justify this overinterpretation. I may post it somewhere if I ever decide to clean it up and make it presentable to the public eye, but there’s a lot in there. Ui x Nodoka. The Azusa->Yui->Ui and Jun->Mio->Azusa parallel. Yui-Mugi breakup arc. The Azusa human instrumentality arc.
My friends have called me schizophrenic for making these charts and while I don’t agree with their non-clinical use of the word “schizophrenic”, you should know that when I say “speculative / non-obvious” for K-On! in particular, it’s at about that level of extreme interpretation.

Cardcaptor Sakura, Princess Tutu, Toradora!, Maison Ikkoku, Chuunibyou, and Kare Kano are all contenders. If I can expand to speculative / non-obvious romance, then K-On!, Hidamari Sketch, Hibike! Euphonium, and Bocchi the Rock! are also up there.

Overall, the main couple from Cardcaptor Sakura may be my favorite, just extremely cute and well-paced. Miya & Yuno from Hidamari Sketch are also a really great couple.
Also, shoutouts to this guy who did an extreme overanalysis of how gay Hidamari Sketch is.

As someone who actually did learn Japanese through watching anime, it took me about 3 years. I started watching anime regularly in 2018 and when I was watching Hori-san to Miyamura-kun in 2021, the last two episodes had not been subtitled, so I watched them raw and mostly understood it.

A lot of people will say that it’s impossible to learn just via watching anime, but have not actually tried it. Yes, if you have subtitles on, it’s easy to let yourself totally ignore the Japanese. But it’s not impossible, and if you are focused, you can still learn even with subs turned on.

Later on, I started taking classes in Japanese at college and started learning a lot more. But just knowledge from watching anime was enough to pass an oral placement test and skip the first 2 semesters. If you are serious about learning Japanese, I recommend taking classes or studying it seriously online. There’s also better input resources than anime such as streamers or even conversation analysis audio for linguistics research.

But I am convinced that anime is still a very good tool because many people like anime and are already very motivated to watch it. This is a very big strength because the biggest obstacle to learning language is giving up. This, combined with Japanese’s very very simple grammar and verb conjugations actually makes it a very easy language to learn, imo.

Imo, pre-2012. I think you could also argue that 2018 or 2020/2021 is the start of the modem era of anime, or even 2006.

I don’t believe it actually bans “Pikachu” when spelled as 光宙 because ピカチュウ is actually a pretty reasonable reading, although maybe not the #1 most obvious one. Based on a random Japanese article I read about it (link), I really don’t think 光宙/Pikachu will be technically illegal, although all the English articles will say so because it’s click fodder.

The law bans: things that are not related to the kanji reading at all, things that add unexpected extra stuff on the end of the obvious reading, or things that mean the opposite of what the kanji means.

I don’t believe any of this applies to Pikachu, and the examples they cite are not really comparable.

あのーヒトデと交換していただけませんでしょうか？
Text: Ummm, could I trade it for a starfish? (Spoken very formally)
Not 100% sure what she is talking about, maybe the popsicle.
Maybe should be interpreted more like “could I have that [popsicle] in exchange for a starfish?”

If someone has never really seen any anime before, I think Mushishi is a good one to recommend to people. It doesn’t contain any of the less-palatable anime tropes, can be enjoyed by any age group, and is just overall really chill and interesting. It’s also episodic, so if they watch 2 or 3 episodes and decide it’s not for them, they still get a full story without missing out on anything.

Little Witch Academia is what got me into anime, good pick.

Hibike! Euphonium was directed by Ishihara Tatsuya, who has also done a bunch of other must-watch anime.
Kanon 2006, Clannad, Haruhi Suzumiya, Nichijou, Dragon Maid S, and of course Hibike! Euphonium.

Mushishi is awesome and is one thing that I think you can recommend to any age group-- 5 years old or 105 years old.

The Evangelion rebuild movies have been untouched on my PTW for maybe 5 years now.

If anybody hasn’t heard of CITY, it’s essentially Nichijou 2. So excited that it’s getting an adaptation :)

リリィ is a common way to write it, although I’m not sure why it’s more common than リリー (perhaps just cause the ィ is more of a phonetic addition rather than a semantic one). Here’s a list of fictional characters whose name is spelled リリィ. It’s probably supposed to be a less obvious way to evoke the idea of yuri. There seem to be a couple other series that have had similar titles like “Comicリリィ” or “アサルトリリィ Bouquet”.
Anyway, the “Lily” isn’t the only remarkable part of the title, what does “Momentary” mean here? Leave it to Japanese pop media to take random English words to make titles that kinda work? but wouldn’t really work well in English. Shoutouts to “Battle Tendency” and “Delicious in Dungeon”.
But yeah, it’s definitely not a localization of yuri/ユリ/百合 because the title doesn’t say that at all.

*愛が足りない？(Not enough love?)
愛が足 means “love is feet”

The word you’re thinking of is “fantasy”

There are decades worth of good anime out there. If new stuff isn’t doin it for you, pick up a show from spring 2006 or something. A lot of trash comes out every season (and always has) but nobody is forcing you to watch it.