A Quickie on Mental Bandwidth
Author’s notes are often interesting because they point to interesting things. That is if you can read past the knee-jerk-ish explanation and suppress the reactive instinct to point and laugh about his seems-totally-wrong-to-me assumptions…and bring it down down to his level.
Generally speaking the concept of mental bandwidth is a logical one, but just like most things to do with human perception, it is flawed to an extent. In this case, it’s not only flawed in that it doesn’t apply to every person, but also because they’re just measuring it wrong.
Reaching from my personal anecdotes, the sampling bias here is that I only bother to watch twice (or more) shows that really catches my attention. Specifically, I’d watch the raw once it comes out, and the sub again soon after. This season, for example, it’s just ef, but back in 2006 I was really crushing on things like Haruhi, Simoun, and a few others. The bias here is that I like to watch shows that are visually expressive–think FLCL or Paranoia Agent (lol) or ef, for example–which means that bandwidth becomes a real problem. And I’m not even taking subtitles into the equation. Take Satoshi Kon’s works for another example. He purposely jams and packs his films to the brim so it not only constantly engages your mind and your senses, you can do it again by rewatching it and get more out of the works than you did the first time.
In short, rewatching the same show over should have a drastic, different effect than watching it the first time. In fact, that much should be extremely obvious. It’s obvious enough that people who do rewatch their classic favorites go out of their way and note how similar it is the way their hearts flutter as with their first encounter, as if that shouldn’t the case! Plus, what may be an unremarkable visual cue the first time through may turn out to be a huge attention-grabber the second time because now you’ve gotten closer to the creator’s state of mind. A trivial non-mentioned item can be as big as a continent (of Australia) on your second peruse through ef a tale of memories, for example.
The other side of the coin is equally true as well. And that’s the usual case. There’s little point to rewatch a lot of the anime out there. We just don’t do it. (In another sense, it’s like watching parts of Fushigi Yuugi and you know she’s saying “Tamahome” and he’s saying “Miaka.” You don’t need subtitles for it.)
Needless to say if you rewatch a show again, subtitled, you should expect a different experience than watching it for the first time, no matter what format you saw it in the first time or second time.
That said, sometimes the subtitles just get in the way. I’ve ranted about this a couple years ago too but the point is once you understand what happened, you can just pay attention to other things and thus notice more details. (Or in some cases, you just don’t care about what the characters are saying but how they are saying it.) In essence that’s what I do when I rewatch anime. It’s probably an odd reason to do so but I can’t help myself. If you have a penchant for Makoto Shinkai’s 5cm/s, then you’d know what I’m talking about after your 15th time through the cinematic trilogy. It’s when you’re in the zone, you’ve come to know the words by heart even if you can’t recite it, but it’s like a man dying of thirst, squeezing on a wet sponge for all the water its got with all the strength he has left. Every moving shadow, every shade of color, every photoshop lighting effect. It all start to mean something.
It’s no longer about bandwidth. You are throttled by your internal limitation on what you can understand and perceive.
Thankfully most of the time you don’t have to go that far. Despite my crappy jokes I think it’s a general fallacy to compare a subtitled-translated production with one that isn’t for people who are struggling with the language and culture. Because, gasp, you can pay attention to the subtitles too. I believe that is the reason why we think there is a limit on mental bandwidth, even if I imagine many people can watch anime with subtitles and miss nothing they would otherwise miss when watching anime without, at least for certain titles. It makes much more sense to measure bandwidth by doing a blind test/survey and see how well a random sample of people understand, say, Ghost in the Shell subbed versus dubbed. It’s a movie where the dialogs matter and also visually stimulating. It would be an interesting experiment regardless what the results turn out to be.
It’s my personal goal to watch something a few times subbed, memorize the dialog, and then watch it raw, fully understanding it. I could do that in 3 watches of something good, most likely. One day I shall.
I agree rewatching is an absolute necessity for animu. I won’t permanently solidify something in my favorites anymore unless I’ve seen it at least twice, preferrably three times. I think 3 is an ideal minimum for seeing a series. The first time, you watch not knowing what to expect, and it blows you away. Sometimes, your second go through disappoints ou because it doesn’t bring the same surprise you had the first time. So the third watching is there because you have a more balanced idea of what you think of the show and can now figure out exactly what you like about it. A lot of the anime I’ve only seen once I am never sure if I want to rewatch, but when I’ve seen something 3 times I feel like I want to watch it over and over again, and that’s how a favorite should be.
EDIT: I’m pretty sure this comment managed to be off-topic but I’m not sure since I didn’t read ani-noto’s post.
Maybe that’s why I enjoyed code geass S1. I watched the whole thing raw and then the S2 batch I got was subtitled. Although I admit “Don’t tase me bro” did make me chuckle xD
I think S1 was also better than S2, lol. But yea, YOU can go without subs and ought to.
Wish I could go without subs. Alas, for me who is deaf, that’s no option :(. and this despite the fact that I’ve learned japanese to a certain extent, so I could probably get by on raws if I could hear, but.. T_T .
It is infinitely better if you want to rewatch a series to get stuff then feel like you have to in order to get stuff. But I’d say that’s neither here nor there. :P
N: you’re actually right on target with that comment. All I am saying is people should rewatch shows if they think they’re getting more out of it after watching it one more time. Obvious, right?
Author’s point is kind of the point I made 2 years ago. Despite not understanding Japanese, watching something raw has value as well. Part of it is because subbing does affect the visual elements of the show, but also because it’s one less thing you worry about. And you can always watch it again w/ subs (especially for shows you want to watch again).