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I need to face up to the fact that I’m a dork.

You may recall my admitting I was hooked on Naruto a few months back. Well, Doc, it seems to be getting worse. I’m actually starting to recommend stuff to the guys at work now, and when you’re giving anime tips to Asian guys, you know you’ve got a problem.

Here’s a quick run-down of my three favorites from the last few months. for the benefit of any fellow anime neophytes in my mostly-nonexistent readership:

Naruto

Naruto is the adventures of the title character, a 12-year-old ninja, and his friends, mentors, and neighbors from the village of Konoha. Naruto is hyperactive, loud, not incredibly smart, and has a bad-tempered fox demon locked inside him.

I’m still hooked, though I’m deep in filler territory between Naruto and Naruto: Shippūden, wherein the various 12-year-old ninjas find themselves entangled in a series of sub-par plotlines while waiting for the end of season 9, after which they’ll appear again in Naruto: Shippūden suddenly three years older.  There are a few story arcs I almost wish I’d skipped, but I’m at the point where I can see the light at the end of the filler tunnel, and I’m no quitter. I’ll stick it out.

Death Note

I loved Death Note. A lot.

At the beginning of the series, which runs 37 half-hour episodes, Yagami Light is a high school student who stumbles on a notebook. Anyone whose name is written in the book will die, and Light decides to use his new found power to reshape the world as a better, safer place where he will be God.

He soon finds himself opposed by forces which include the Japanese police, the American FBI, and others, including the eccentric “L,” a freelance detective with a brilliant mind, a wicked tennis backhand, and an insatiable sweet tooth.

I was hooked on Death Note from the very beginning, and as I approached the end of the series I actually felt sad that it was going to be over. While the plot runs into occasional tangents, on the whole the story is strong and the characters are fascinating.

FLCL

This 6-episode series focuses on the daily life of Naota Nandaba, a 12-year-old boy growing up in a quiet industrial town where nothing interesting ever happens — that is, until the day Haruhara Haruko runs him over with her Vespa and beats him with her guitar, and robots start sprouting out of his head.

FLCL is, at various times, fast-paced, complicated, touching, philosophical, and absurd, and more often than not it’s most of those at the same time. Despite a plot involving a multilateral intergalactic war, the real story in FLCL is the coming of age of young Naota. Over the course of FLCL’s six episodes you see his view of the world shift,  as he leaves behind his childhood perspective and learns to see the world through the eyes of an adult.

I’ll confess there were several times I lost track of what was going on, since FLCL’s dialog can be fast, muli-layered, and liberally sprinkled with Japanese cultural and language references that were a real challenge for me. Still, even with the occasional times where I really wasn’t sure what the hell had just happened, I really enjoyed FLCL and it’s something I think I’ll watch again just to try to pick up things I missed the first time through.

P.S.

Thanks, Scott, for giving me a Japanese equivalent to bakgwai to use when I’m talking about Japanese stuff.

I’ve always thought anime fans were on the upper rungs of the geek ladder, possibly even higher than myself. I could never see the attraction of the badly-animated cartoons, and how someone could spend hour upon hour watching them — especially when those people are around my age. I mean, sure, I was a huge Speed Racer fan back in 1971, but cartoons are something I mostly outgrew years ago (although, admittedly, Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network is a whole other matter. I completely understand the attraction there).

I cut the guys I work with a little slack — after all, they are a bunch of Asian guys, so maybe it’s a cultural thing I can’t be expected to understand. A couple of ‘em have been recommending things to me for years, but… well, come on, they’re cartoons. I have better things to do.

Well, I did. It seems I’ve really gotten hooked on Naruto lately, after finally having it recommended to me by a fellow bakgwei I know from outside work (and yes, I do realize I’m using Chinese slang in an entry about Japanese animation, but I don’t know a Japanese equivalent of bakgwei, and we white ghosts have a reputation for not being able to tell them apart, anyway). I’ve been downloading fansubs and transferring them to my phone, and it turns out they’re just the right length to fill up one of my train rides to or from work. I feel like such a dork; while everyone else on the train is reading the paper, or listening to their iPods, or just taking a quick nap, I’m glued to a cartoon about a bunch of 12-year-old ninjas.

I’ve never denied being a bit of a nerd, but I’d really thought I’d plateaued, and that my dorkiest days were behind me. However, it seems that, even in middle age, I’m finding way to elevate myself into ever-higher reaches of geekdom.

Feel free to give me a hard time about it, but if you do you’d better be ready for the Thousand Years of Pain.