OK, I give up for real this time.

You know how you hear that all the cool kids are doing something so you give it a try and you don't like it and you figure that something must be wrong with you and then you forget about it for a while and then you try it again and you still don't like it but are left with this lingering confusion about why everyone else seems to like this thing and either they are crazy or you are and then finally you realize that everyone else is crazy and you are the sane one.

Well that's where I am with anime. I really have tried to like it but it's like country music. You can call Johnny Cash country but he is really just his own thing and he's good. But the core of country just sucks, sucks, sucks. Same for anime. There are occasional cross genre pieces that I have really enjoyed or at least found moderately fascinating (Ghost in the Shell, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and a few others) but in general it's just terrible. I really don't get it and I've tried past any reasonable amount of time to "get it".

My last effort was prompted by a list of anime recommendations on Steve Yegge's blog. I really like reading this guy. He seems to have a halfway reasonable head on his shoulders. Why that should indicate he has good taste in anime is not clear, but I thought I'd give it a shot. So I took one of his top picks, Last Exile. And from the first episode it sucked and pissed me off. But he said he was going to name his kids after the main characters, so maybe it gets better, I think. And my wife has the same mixed feelings as me about anime but she indulges me and we keep working our way through. And the story just gets more and more random and stupid. It's all the worst parts of Steam Boy, except it goes on for hour after hour....

So it's official. Anime is dead to me now. And like an abused wife in some crappy country song I'm still open to the idea that anime is awesome and I'm just missing something. But please tell me, what am I missing? What do people think is so great about Last Exile in particular and anime in general?

... END TRANSMISSION ...