Dropping a show is difficult.

I’m a little bit behind schedule, so there will only be a short post today. Don’t worry, I have something fun planned for Friday, as well as for next week, I just need a good chunk of time to edit and proofread chapter four of the Necromancer’s Daughter.

So instead I decided to go on a bit of a rant about something I’ve been “struggling” with for years. I don’t like dropping shows. According to my anime-planet account I’ve seen 989 individual entries over the span of a little more than a decade. Obviously this includes OVAs, movies, specials and some music videos as well. I do love me some J-pop, after all. But still, that’s a lot of shows. When I look at my dropped list, it only has 20 entries. I don’t count shows I drop before finishing the first episode, but I do count everything else for this.

This has had me wondering over the years what benefit there still really is to tracking how much anime you watch. I doubt I’d reach the point where I’d accidentally rewatch a show and not realize it, and if I did, then so be it, that’s not a bad thing. I suppose it’s good to keep track of which things you still want to watch, but we all know that watching the things on your to-do list is a myth anyway. We’ve had a pandemic for over a year and I barely watched anything outside of seasonal shows. So there doesn’t feel much point to it.

Then there’s the dropped shows. And this is why I started this post. I don’t like dropping posts. It kind of gives me anxiety to not watch something until the end. To give an idea of what I dropped, here’s a quick list:

Now I do think a lot of you will agree with me that some of these shows are pretty awful (Looking at you, Promised Neverland 2nd season). There’s some shows on there that just didn’t mesh with me, like Redo of a Healer and Watamote. I don’t think those are bad shows per se, they just weren’t for me. So 20 out of more than a 1000 is not bad right? 2% of shows that started weren’t finished. Yet it still gives me a strange bit of anxiety.

Is this weird? Am I weird? Well, I am weird, but is this part of the reason? I’d love to hear your opinion on it. Do you drop a lot of shows, or are you like me and do you force yourself through mediocre shows just to tick the little box?