Seasonal Reboot & Recency Bias

Another new year, another new season, another reset. Time to forget everything we learned in the previous season. Remember what a cool idea it was for One Piece to have a soft reboot after every arc, so things can go back to square one? Well, now everyone does it for every show even if it wasn’t intended by the show itself.

After the curse of the seasonal watching became a thing, every 3 months we get a restart, just because it’s the beginning of a new season. Whatever happened in previous arcs does not matter, like in the case you see right here. One guy is saying SAO is still bullshit because he remembers the previous seasons, and the reply he gets is, be patient, we are still in the beginning of the arc. There are 60 episodes out and we are still in the beginning.

You want another example? This guy refers to the Bunny fetish as the Monogatari of our time. And by our time he means the current season, since Monogatari is still not over, but since that was in the previous season, it’s like it was a different century or something.

This is why critical thinking is dead. When you disregard everything that happened just a few months ago, you are left with a bunch of new shows that are nothing special, but since you need to somehow explain why you like them you keep making bullshit excuses, such as it’s subversion, it’s deconstruction, it’s something we’ve never seen before. And it obviously is if you get amnesia every 90 days and forget how you watch the exact same things every freaking season.

And I understand why it’s happening. When you have 50 airing anime, plus dozens more of movies, cartoons, and live action series, it can be very confusing for the average viewer to keep track of all that shit. So you make up reasons for why this brand new thing deserves your attention, thus becoming a victim of recency bias.

So let’s keep that in mind the next time someone tries to make cute girls doing cute things to somehow be the most original thing ever conceived in the history of animation.