Between the Masterpiece and the Waifu Pillow
Every fandom has its problem fraction, but anime managed something special: it recruited both genuinely interesting creative people and some of the internet’s worst inhabitants into the same space. For every person who found their way to Serial Experiments Lain or A Silent Voice and came out understanding something new about loneliness or grief, there’s someone with a half-naked minor as their profile picture losing their mind in bad English at anything resembling social progress. They share the tag. You navigate around them.
That said: falling headlong into a great anime is one of the more reliable escapes from the slow disaster of daily life. The classics carry extra weight because they arrived when the brain was still building its permanent architecture—Sailor Moon, Pokémon, Dragon Ball did things to how a generation of kids processed story and consequence that no one was measuring at the time. The better modern work holds up just as well: Attack on Titan, Carole & Tuesday, A Silent Voice. And then there are the ones that operate on their own logic entirely—JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Space Dandy, Serial Experiments Lain—where trust is required up front and the payoff arrives sideways.
The English-language podcast space for anime is crowded and uneven. The German-language equivalent barely exists, which is strange given how embedded the medium has been in German pop culture since the late nineties. Nani?! is a small attempt to fix that: Viet Nguyen from Rocket Beans—Germany’s most prominent gaming and nerd-culture YouTube network—and psychologist Jolina Bering talk through the anime they grew up with, strange recent releases from Japan, and the particular kind of formative weirdness that certain series leave permanently behind.
One conversation touches on Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, a magical girl series that aired in Germany in the nineties and apparently did something significant to the emotional and sexual formation of a portion of its viewership—the kind of detail that sounds like a joke until you start counting the people who nod knowingly when it comes up. The podcast has the quality of people who love their subject without needing to perform it. Worth following.