I hit my one month-iversary a few days ago (the 21st of December was the exact date of that milestone), but I forgot to mention it…

As for today’s subject matter, I managed to get through Birdy the Mighty: Decode’s first season recently, so let’s talk about it.

As soon as you see the OP of Birdy the Mighty: Decode, you know it’s from an older era of anime entirely. Even though it hails from 2009, it’s a testament to how far people can change their daily ways of living in almost a decade.

I mean, these days people from the younger generation don’t think twice about pulling open their browser of choice to do a lot of things, including recording strange events like those surrounding the Ryunka and Birdy. Considering most of the plot revolves around Shyamalan and his plotting to bring world destruction, the bad guy could’ve been brought down by the reach of the internet if the plot were to happen in the current day.

However, that would be no fun.

Another testament to its age is the flip phones. Certainly, Japan has a strange phenomenon where the flip phone may still be in use over there despite being known as the forefront of technology, but the fact Birdy’s friend Tuto takes on the form of a flip phone after his “death” is a bit of a cringe factor when watching this show in 2017. Not because Tuto is able to come back to life – Tsutomu’s bodysharing with Birdy is enough to vouch for that – but the fact Tuto is in the form of a flip phone for most of the show.

After all, doesn’t a flip phone equate to age almost as much as a brick phone in this day and age?

Even the plot’s fairly standard for something that came out in the 2000s, as I alluded to earlier. In fact, because Shyamalan’s motivation is “taking over the world because I think I’m so special”, it feels like it came from the late 1990s. Actually, you’d be kind of on the money there if you declared such a thing – its original manga version comes from 1985 to 1988, which makes the fact I’m talking about an anime about 20 years its junior pretty amazing.

What does this teach anyone? Even though it’s aged badly, it’s not as bad as what’ll happen to all the anime of the current age when people from the future look back at us. After all, the media of the present is filled with smart phones, computers and other concepts we know that age just as badly as flip phones.

Maybe it’s just better to accept works that age badly as products of their time, and not as products of the current time, regardless of when we watch them. Especially because when those people from the future look back at the works we think of as “badly aged”, they’ll be even more confused than we are…

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