100 Days of Questioning Whether This Was a Good Idea

This series is my occasional countdown to Anime Weekend Atlanta. I’ve done it two or three times with varying levels of success, and I am once again embarking on a quest to spend 100 days writing 100 posts about anime, manga, animation, comics, film, and conventions. We’ll see what happens.

100 Days of Anime 2026

Day 009/100

Theme of the Day: “One Summer’s Day” by Joe Hisaishi from Spirited Away (2001)

Currently Watching: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

We’re on the ninth day of this challenge, not quite a tenth of the way in, and I’ve got to be honest, I really don’t know if this was a good idea. I realized today that back during the summer when I meant to be preparing for this, my plan hadn’t actually been to blog every day.

There would have been blog posts and Youtube videos and social posts and episode counters or something silly like that. But time got away from me, and I jumped in on a half remembered idea with just a few hours left to post on the first day of the countdown.

So you get this instead. The first time I did this 100 days challenge, I was sharing it with friends and family on Facebook, a primer of sorts for my less nerdy relations on these weird cartoons I went off on pilgrimage for once or twice a year.

Now, though, I don’t have that same audience, and I don’t think it’s terribly useful for me to explain the difference between shounen and shoujo. You’ve got Google.

I did a series of posts back then as a “brief history of anime,” which was incredibly fun to read up on, and the writing was fine, research was passable for an amateur blog. I’ve archived those, though, because I’ve gotten a little more serious about what I put on the web and a little more concerned about amateur research.

I thought about revisiting that series this year with properly done research, but I doubt I’ll have the time and energy to do it justice.

I think (I’m not digging through archived blogposts to be certain) that I capstoned the first “100 Days of Anime” with a post about “what anime is.” And I think past Chase was generally on the right track if a little silly.

I think the whole fan nonsense about defining what is and isn’t anime gets more than a little silly. It’s a time wasting argument for when people have gotten bored with everything else there is to talk about and no one is ready to re-hash subs vs. dubs.

Anime is not a genre or a movement, and the people most concerned with its parameters are the marketers trying to make a buck off of you. It’s a nebulous category of animation with some link (real or imagined) to Japan.

The things people consider anime aren’t always predominantly or centrally made by Japanese people, they don’t always air in Japan first, they don’t necessarily belong to any specific genres or art styles, they’re not always made with a Japanese audience in mind. I could go on.

So is Avatar: The Last Airbender an anime? Who gives a rip? If you need a fandom label to decide whether something is worth your time or not, I turn you to the wise folks at Happy Days.