Would anyone be interested in doing a community watchthrough of a show?
It could be a fun way to get some more interaction going in this group instead of just the "what have you been watching/reading this past month?" posts. We could start with a short, 12 episode show just to see how it goes. If it goes well, maybe we could do it again with a longer show.
Since posts don't die from old age on tildes, we could keep it contained to one post. I believe we could just post a top-level comment each week with something like "Week 1 - Episodes 1-3", then keep all the discussion for that week's episodes as replies. Users could visit the post whenever, collapse all replies, and then only open up the episode discussions they want to participate in to avoid any spoilers.
This would prevent multiple posts cluttering up the front page for everyone, but would still be easy to navigate. It would take some self-policing to make sure that nobody else posts a top-level reply, but I think it could work.
What does everyone think? And any suggestions for a show? I'm thinking something like Erased might be good since it has a fairly broad appeal.
Edit: Assuming we do a 12 episode show to kick things off, what day of the week would everyone want me to post episode discussions? And how many episodes per post? We could do something like 3 episodes every Friday, or we could do 1-2 episodes say every Wednesday and Sunday if we don't want to wait a full week between discussions.
Edit 2: Sounds like we're gonna go-ahead with Erased! I'll put together a schedule and create the post later today with details.
I would be. I don't know how we would do it to keep it from cluttering things up. I think around Christmas we should do a Toradora! groupwatch.
Toradora would be a great one around the holidays!
Unless I'm missing something, I don't think my idea for keeping it to one post per show would clutter things up at all, since it would only be one post that gets bumped rather than a bunch of them. But maybe I'm missing something, I only signed up for this site yesterday afterall. I don't know the ins and outs of how it works yet.
Definitely agreed, especially if we're going to be spacing it out over a few weeks. Roughly one show a month (or fewer if it's longer) is certainly not clutter since it's just one post for that show. That keeps it on par in terms of new posts with the monthly "What are you reading" but still keeps up engagement and has people talking about something we all obviously love.
Super down for this.
Yeah was just agreeing in a "I don't know any way better to do it" way.
I think that would be a fine idea. Make a "Community Watchthrough" thread that can be bumped whenever you all go through a new episode. If it gets annoying for others they can always "ignore" the topic, no harm no foul. Go for it!
i could be down for something like this. maybe see if we can set a time and host it virtually in bigscreen beta.
although i've heard rumors bigscreen beta was going to support flatland desktops, it still seems to require a vr rig.
having not seen erased, i'm interested.
other recent animes i'd nominate are:
lycoris recoil
mobile suit gundam: the wotch from mercury
trigun: stampede
bocchi the rock
i'd like to say that 2022 has been an epic year for anime! it's at least on the level the late 80's early 90's were for cartoons in the usa, but i'm enjoying the complexity and seasonal plot structure more in last year's anime than the mostly episodal plots from the 80-90's american toons... even including”the gummy bears”, ”darkwing duck”, and ”the real ghostbusters”.
i think 2023 will be another landmark year when we look back on it.
2022 was amazing for anime! There were so many good shows released. I haven't seen Erased in a few years, but everyone I've recommended it to has enjoyed it, so I think it could be a good first show to get people here involved. There isn't really any "weird anime" vibes to it, anyone can just jump in. But I'm definitely not locked to the idea and your suggestions could be great as well. If we get enough interest we can host a poll.
Maybe we could save Gundam for a groupwatch down the line since it's a bit longer? I'd like to see how much engagement we can keep week to week with a short show before committing to something longer.
The Bigscreen Beta idea could be a lot of fun, but I think it could be tough to get people together to watch every week or every few days, however often we decide on posting the discussion. But we can certainly try it out. I know there are browser plugins to do Crunchyroll watch parties, I've used them with my brother quite a bit, so that's another option.
i like the way you think!
w/r/t reoccurring watch-alongs, i think we just have to schedule something and stick to it even if nobody else shows up.
like, ”i'll be watching [show] every [day-of-week] at [time]. join me if you will: i'll provide the digital popcorn”
kind of thing. basically announcing when we are going to make time to watch it and have a good time... but let everyone else know they are welcome.
cc: @TesterJ
Maybe for the next watch-along you can ask if anyone wants to be notified when it's time for the next ep discussion, then you can ping them all when you post. I think that's how they do it for book club over at ~books
That's a good idea. I'll ask about that in a feedback post when people have spent more some time with the watchthrough.
this is a solid idea.
i run a small journaling group and we do nightly notification, but without a bot. there's only a handful of us on a common telegram channel, but it works very well.
if i haven't sent out a notification over the common channel or gotten one by 8pm, i'll send one out.
i phrased that poorly.
basically there's 12 of us. notification on the common channel happens between 7:45p and 8p, and works much like ethernet: if that time rolls around and someone hasn't made the announcement to the channel, i'll do it... and everyone else uses the same algorithm.
after that, the announcer and the first couple of ”i'm here's” will personally and individually contacted whomever doesn't check in. we start writing at 8:15.
it sounds more complicated than it is and works because it's not a bot.
so i wonder if something like that but less complicated would work? (clearly not for a shitload of people).
we shall have to try it.
'pologies for babbling: i'm sort of incoherent this evening. too much stress.
I think I get it, the system is to increase the chance of there being at least one person who remember to start on time and then keep tracks of who got the message and who still needs reminder right?
yes, this is it exactly!
it's a lot simpler than it sounds, i just haven't figured out how to describe it efficiently :(
knowing that it's not a bot checking up on you and knowing it's your friends and that the responsibility is shared (so a single person doesn't get stuck doing it, plus there's no rotation to keep track of or dread as it inches closer) really, really helps.
anyhoo: i'm looking forward to getting this started.
can we do voting on tildes.net, do you know?
If you mean poll then sadly no, iirc people used to link to another polling site but I don't remember which one
crap. i really want a good tildes app. i had most of a good community driven vote example post i wanted to run by you that hearded the kittens by setting a goal, asking for help, etting a date it needs to be completed by, and offering a preselect ”top picks”.
then i tabbed away to look up a few more anime for examples and when i came back my unsubmitted post was toast.
'pologies.
i will rewrite it later or tomorrow when i'm at a keyboard mot a tablet. i'd love to hear your take on it.
i'm new here, does /u/mundane_and_naive work? this is soft of a test
oh no need to sweat it, you can use any methods and people will be generally cooperative
and yep that works :)
It would probably really depend on the show, especially how easily available it is (and if it has good subs)... but as a concept I would definitely be interested in this, since I have been meaning to start watching more anime again. And I have also been kinda locked into certain genres (scifi, dark fantasy, shonen) for most of my anime watching life, so a chance to branch out and try something new would be nice.
Erased looks intriguing, and its on Netflix, so if you pick that I would be in!
Love to hear it! I suggested Erased because it might not be something everyone has seen, it's short, and it's available on Crunchyroll, Netflix, and Hulu, so most people should be able to watch it.
Man it's been ages since I used tildes but I'd be up for something like this. I often do watch parties with my friends and the biggest issue has to be synchronisation. I mostly solved that by using jellyfin but it crashes / desyncs sometimes so it's not perfect. From what I've heard there's also a browser extension for netflix that lets you watch along. As for anime I'm fine with watching anything I haven't watched really
When I suggested this I wasn't even thinking about syncing up viewings, I was just thinking of setting up a schedule for posting episode discussions at consistent times every week so people could watch whenever and then come discuss. But it seems like some people are really into the idea of watching together, so maybe we can give that shot!
Oh so more like the watch parties r/anime does occasionally where you watch it on the same time and report your findings. That's also a possibility of course
I know it would be tough for me personally to attend a synced up watch party every week since my schedule is all over the place and I'm out of town a lot, but I can always post the discussion thread consistently and if anyone wants to watch together, they're more than welcome. If we can nail down a time, I can just add that info to the main post.
And yeah I'm mainly looking at this in a similar way to how r/anime does its series rewatches. Except we'd just modify the format to fit how Tildes works.
Sounds like a great idea to me :)
I think it's a great idea and I'd be willing to participate if possible (also +1 for Erased). As for show suggestions, I think anything that'll spur folks to participate in the thread is perfect for this kind of thing. Since we'd probably want to avoid the situation of people not participating due to having watched the anime not too long ago, perhaps going with a show that wasn't aired recently would increase participation? Then again, this is assuming the majority of the users here currently watch regularly. Either way, your initial proposal is a very solid option and I'd totally be down to watch Erased.
Some suggestions off the top of my head: Terror in Resonance, Kids on the Slope, and 86 (might be too recent) are all around 12 episodes long.
86 actually has two seasons so is /technically/ 24 episodes long. Still one of my favourite anime :p
That's a good point about recent shows. I agree that watching something slightly older would be better for discussions. Of your suggestions I've only seen 86, and I agree it might be too recent, but it's a great show and would absolutely get people talking. Maybe we can put a schedule together for future watchthroughs with all the different show suggestions.
Well hey the more the merrier! If we do go with Erased, which it's looking like people are onboard with, I hope you like it. It's definitely a show that anyone can watch, anime-fan or not.
Sounds like you're probably into more psychological thriller types of anime and/or maybe sci-fi? If you like thrillers, Erased should hopefully be up your alley.
Erased is SO GOOD, that's a great choice! I watched it really recently but I'd still be interested in reading people's thoughts on it as they do the watch through even if I don't actively watch it myself at the time.
Maybe we could switch up genres when we move onto the next show? It could help inspire people who wouldn't normally choose to try a certain genre. A nice shortform slice of life one could be My Roommate is a Cat, there's some really sweet moments, some funny moments, and some punch you in the gut emotional moments, and it's visually beautiful too. For sport/coming of age there's SK8 the Infinity which is great fun, and the dub is superb, you can really tell how much the VAs were enjoying themselves! It's 12 episodes (I think? Maybe 14) but it's complete - other sports ones like Haikyuu and Backflip have the tournament aspect so go on for much longer.
Switching up genres is a great idea, I like being able to introduce people to new shows that they wouldn't otherwise check out. It's also a good way to gauge the preferences of the community. If certain genres don't get as much participation we'll know to avoid them in the future in order to keep engagement up.
Even if you've seen it before, feel free to jump into the discussions, just avoid posting spoilers! I've seen it before as well but I'll only be discussing things from the relevant episodes.
I've never seen My Roommate is a Cat or SK8, but SK8 has been on my watchlist for a while and the ED has been on my Spotify since it released lol. I'm definitely down to try either of those for our second watch. There's also Run With The Wind for sports anime, it's made by the same team as Haikyuu. Never heard of Backflip but I'll look into it!
Backflip is high school men's rhythmic gymnastics and it's one of the ones where you can tell someone who actually knows the sport has been involved in the choreography, it's beautifully animated and the soundtrack is one of Yuki Hayashi's best, but I haven't seen the movie yet so I don't know if the story is finished.
I'll definitely avoid spoilers if/when I join discussions! I'm currently lending a 15 volume book series to a friend and I'm rereading them all before I lend her each one so that I can reply appropriately to her reactions haha!
Sure. I'd be a good way to get back into animes.
If this happens, could it have an exclusive tag? Like "Anime watchthrough"? I'm tired of looking up an episode discussion only to find everything about the show, except exactly the episode discussions. With an exclusive tag, I could see a list of every discussion done down the road, right? That would be a time saver.
I usually watch any anime once it's done airing, while I read along the episode discussions for fun. I may participate, but my schedule isn't looking good. So I want easy access to all the backlog you can provide.
I just joined, so I'm not very familiar, but if we can have say a generic "episode discussion" tag, and then additionally a tag with the anime name, maybe suffixed with "episode discussion" as well, that might make it both easy to search for discussions and have them be easily filtered out for those who aren't interested.
Yeah, we need to experiment and see what can we do with the tools provided by this platform. It's like an Isekai: reborn in another forum!
I'm not sure how tags work here yet, but that would be very handy. Searching for episode discussions can be a pain sometimes.
If you're the one who would post the episode discussion, I recommend you to read the page about hierarchical tags, because I think that would do the job.
I suggest:
Thanks for the suggestion, I did end up going through that before creating the thread. One of the admins(?) came in and changed the tags I created to better ones, so I'm going to just use those ones moving forward.
IIRC after 7 days you become a "moderator". I think it's in the ethos that basically everyone is a "moderator", and thus is able to change tags. So I think tags can be a bit fluid, especially at the start.
I think any power user can get the authority to change post with enough trust on them, but using generally accepted tags for now it's a good idea, until we get to understand more about this site.
That sounds like a lot of fun!
Sounds fun! Depends on the show for me, but I love the idea!
I'd be down, though I just joined so I'm not very familiar with how tildes works. Perhaps a movie might work better for a first trial run? Lower threshold and simpler to execute imo.
If we do decide to do a tv series, for pacing, I'd prefer having single episode discussions with variable timing, vs a batch of episodes with static timing. It's just too easy with batches imo to get a scenario where like episode 1 of the batch finishes something, and episodes 2 or 3 are mostly disjointed from it. Of course if the batches were curated then it could still work, but I think keeping discussion to a single episode is the easiest and clearest way to have discussion.
That's a really good point, but I see two problems with doing it just one episode at a time:
If we do it weekly then that's quite a bit of time between discussions, people may finish the series on their own instead of waiting and that defeats the purpose of this.
Doing more frequent posts may make some people feel like they have to "keep up" with the watch, or they may fall behind on the discussions because they were too busy to watch in a short amount of time.
Since I've seen Erased before, I can curate the episode groupings for now, but that's definitely a problem for other series in the future. Personally, I don't think 2 episodes a week will cause many problems, since the worst that can happen is you finish and arc with one episode and start an arc with another, but we can all discuss it as we move onto other shows.
Also a movie night could be fun! Especially once we start becoming familiar with everyone here.
I think you may have misunderstood what I meant. Basically I think every episode should get its own discussion and the frequency of discussions should be changed to accommodate the desired pacing for the group. Let me illustrate with an example. Lets take 2 series watches, A & B. Lets say A watchers want to watch quickly and average 7 episodes a week on average. Lets say B watchers don't have as much free time, and would prefer watching 3 episodes a week on average. I would prefer a system where for A watchers there is Episode 1 discussion on Monday, Episode 2 discussion on Tuesday, Episode 3 discussion on Wednesday, etc. And for B watchers, theres Episode 1 discussion on Monday, and Episode 2 discussion on Thursday, and then Episode 3 discussion on Monday again. Instead of say, on Mondays there Episode 1-7 discussion for A, and Episodes 1-2 for B.
This is how it was done on r/anime, which I thought worked quite well, and I'm new to tildes, so perhaps some other format will work better for tildes and I'm just too entrenched in how reddit operates (this is certainly the case for me) to see it, but in my mind, even just a port of how r/anime does it should work here as well. I still haven't really taken a look at how tildes operates (I just joined like an hour ago), so feel free to educate me if I'm misunderstanding.
Ah, I think I get what you're saying. Since we're such a small group I'm trying to find a happy medium for people who want to binge, and people who would like to watch at their own pace. Maybe we could do something like 1 episode Monday, 1 Wednesday, and 1 Saturday? I think that's frequent enough that people won't get bored, but it's still relaxed enough that people without a lot of free-time can keep up.
yeah 3 episodes a week seems like a good balance to me. Since 3 doesn't evenly divide into 7, I personally would put the denser part on the weekend. So something like Friday, Sunday, Tuesday/Wednesday would be a bit better imo. But its not a big deal. I look forward to watching Erased again. It's been probably like 4 or 5 years since I last saw Erased, and I don't remember much at all.
Yeah I think Tuesday, Friday, Sunday is good. I'll start putting everything together
Yeah movie night would be nice. We could even do a movie night real soon, like this weekend. It should be easier and less effort to setup than a tv series, perfect for an intro to ~/anime (idk how to refer to what looks like the equivalent of a subreddit) imo.
If it's on hulu, that is great for me. We recently disconnected from netflix, but shows like this with several platforms to access them are a great idea. Count me in.
let's do it!
I started Erased but never finished it..
This would be a wonderful excuse to give it another go!
This could be fun! I see a lot of people mentioning Erased so looks like that will be first, which is fine by me. Love that series. That said, would there be a possibility of watching an ongoing series in the future? The main challenges I'd foresee with that are A) accessibility beyond pirating, and B) making sure it's not a dud.
An alternative could also be a recurring weekly thread where top-level comments are about each series aired that week, and discussion spurring from there.
I would love to have discussions for ongoing series in the future. Your suggestion about a weekly thread is exactly how I was thinking it could be done. Before jumping into that though, I'd like to see how this whole top-level comment thing works in this group watch. I figure it can be kind of a test for how we can do things in this group as a whole moving forward.
As someone who has no friends that watch anime, this sounds fun! And I would like to suggest some kind of vote system to decide the next shows, so that we don't end up in a situation where most people are watching something they've already watched/aren't really interested in. Also, I think it maybe better to do one episode per day instead of batches of episodes (you know, it would be kinda awkward if the batch of episodes has the end of an arc and then immediately start of another arc).
That's kind of what I'm planning on for the next one, we'll do a poll of some sort. And after talking it through with a couple other users, I decided on 3 episodes per week for this first one. I wanted to make it accessible for anyone, so the people who don't have a lot of time to watch anime can still follow along. We may change it for the future depending on the show.
And feel free to join! Episode 2 discussion just went live yesterday.
https://tildes.net/~anime/15zj/community_watchthrough_erased
I would try to partake with this. I am narrow viewed on what I watch, but if it were something I was participating in, I'd watch stuff which I hadn't seen before just to share it with some other people.
If there were scheduled watch parties I would try occasionally to join in, but outside of that I'd watch and report back type thing too.
Great! We've actually started it already and are on episode 2 if you want to join in.
https://tildes.net/~anime/15zj/community_watchthrough_erased