"Watching TV" and "Watching anime"

I'm sure all of you have been asked the question "what are you doing now" or "what are you up to". Most of you must have answered "watching tv" at least once in your life. But what exactly does "watching tv" refer to?

This is something that has poped up in my mind before but haven't given it any detailed thought. So I figured its time to dig into the meaning of "watching tv" and "watching anime".

If someone asks you what "watching tv" means or what it consist of, most of you will probably give a list of the types of shows that are available.
The list will look something like:
- sports
- drama
- romance
- reality
- adult (you know what I mean)
- comedy
- cartoon for kids
- cartoon for adults (family guy, south part, etc...)
- horror
- sci fi
- informative (news, weather, discovery, etc....)
- anime
- action
- fantasy

Based on this list, "anime" can be considered an answer for "what are you watching"

Now we move on to what anime consist of.
Based on the 10+ years I've spent watching anime, I believe I can provide a fairly good list regarding types of anime out there.
- sports (though most of them barely qualify as sports)
- comedy
- romance
- horror
- sci fi
- drama
- action
- adult
- kids
- fantasy

If we compare the two lists, you will notice a lot of similarities between the two. Hence making "anime" a somewhat awkward answer for the question stated earlier. What this tells us is that anime has developed to the point where it holds the same amount of variety as live action shows does. What I'm trying to say is that the general public has very little to no knowledge on what anime consist of. Most parents or even younger kids are unaware of the other 80% of anime which didn't make it to the NA market. They assume anime is basically characters with big eyes and fancy outfits and they fight using some sort of super natural abilities, which is not true at all.

With that being said, I believe the way we view tv and anime should be changed. Instead of anime being part of "TV". I believe TV should be branched into live action and animated, as illustrated in the diagram below.


And both live action and animated will have their own types of shows.


Without going totally off topic, I'll like to share a recent conversation between myself and Okama_King, the owner of this blog. We were discussing about this very same topic and I mentioned that if there are anime convention then why not live action convention. Okama replies saying there are ones for star trek, buffy, and xena, just not live action in general. He went on to state that anime is different becuase it lets its viewers to cosplay as the characters in the show. Meaning that anime has more unique looking characters and costume. However, that is a misconception of what anime is. If you pay close attention to the cosplayers (I know that may or may not be entertaining), you will notice most cosplayed characters comes from only a hand full of series out of 20-30 of them. Similar to live action, a good portion of anime character are dressed in normal clothing, making it pointless to cosplay.

So, what I wanted to tell you guys is that anime is no longer about fancy clothing and super natural power battles only but a mixture of everything and should be treated equally with live action.