Nani?!

Anime pulls in everyone—brilliant creative people making something beautiful, and complete losers whose entire identity is defending a character pillow. You learn to ignore the latter. The art is what matters, and when you find an anime that hits, everything else disappears.

I grew up on Sailor Moon, Pokémon, Dragon Ball. Then Attack on Titan, Carole & Tuesday, A Silent Voice, and the strange ones: JoJo, Space Dandy, Serial Experiments Lain. If you can look past the fanservice and the embarrassing parts of the fandom, there are complete universes worth getting lost in. Real storytelling, real art.

Germany’s been obsessed with anime since the nineties, but finding a good German podcast about it barely happens. So when Viet Nguyen from Rocket Beans and Jolina Bering, a psychologist, started Nani?!—anime slang for what?!—I was honestly surprised it took so long. The podcast is just two people talking casually about their favorite childhood animes, weird new releases, whether something like Jeanne the Kamikaze Thief, that RTL II show everyone watched growing up, might have accidentally awakened something in a lot of viewers.

It’s good because it doesn’t try to be anything else. Two people who like anime, talking without performing, without pretending to be experts. That’s it. That’s enough.