patgund | Anime 101........

Last night, found myself in an interesting situation.

Trying to explain an anime series to my mom. Who has never watched anime before, and who's main exposure to any Japanese series was watching "Kikada" and "Rainbow Man" with me when I was 8 years old and living in Hawaii.

To make matters worse, it was the first five episodes of a series I'd never seen before, namely "MS Gundam Seed". So I don't know what's going on either, but at least I'm used to waiting to get the back story filled in along the way. (Besides which, I've gotten mixed reviews on "Gundam Seed", but since the only Gundam series I hated was "Moble Fighter Gundam G", I figured anything that didn't have moble suit pro wrestling was a plus.)

My mom, on the other hand, isn't used to this. As a result, I kept being peppered with questions like "What was this "Bloody Valentine" thing they keep mentioning" (Answer, I don't know, I expect to get more info on that later in the series). "Who's the good guys and who's the bad guys??" (Answer, at this point in the series, or later on??). "Why are the roads curving up" (Answer, they're on the inside of a space colony, and the colony rotates to provide gravity, so the city and roads are built on the inside to take advantage of this.) "Why are they using giant suits of armor"? (Answer, it's an Gundam series, it's required)

And my comments during the episodes ("Ooh, heavy energy weapons and missles inside a colony, bad idea!", "Ah, here's the mandatory masked super-ace bad guy", "Okay, here's where the hero's home is destroyed, giving him the reason he needs to fight", etc.) weren't overly helpful either.

I'm used to the way an anime series throws the viewer into the deep end at the start. This is a bit hard to explain to someone who's never watched anything like this before.

Could have been worse I guess. I could have been watching "Hellsing" or "Trigun".......