Opinion Prone

The fansub and scanlation debate is an old debate and not really something I feel like getting into. This post isn’t really about that, though it’s certainly related. What I want to address is more general: in this economy especially, how much of the entertainment people buy have they already sampled? How much of it do they decide to pick up spontaneously, as they’re browsing through the store aisles?

Read it before you buy it? Or buy it before you read it?

For anime, how many of your DVDs contain series you haven’t seen at all until you bought them? The number of series being broadcast on television has been dwindling for a while, but more and more companies are streaming their goods online, in whole or part, so there are still plenty of legitimate ways of seeing a series at least partially before buying it (and in addition to DVDs, there are now also budding download-to-own schemes for various platforms). Does anyone walk into the store without an idea of what they want to get? Does anyone just decide to buy a title coincidentally sitting next to the one they intended to get, thinking that it kinda looks interesting?

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As is my routine now, I reread Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night in preparation for the movie, which debuted at midnight, but which I’ll not be seeing until this weekend. It was either my third or fourth time reading it. I know I reread it two summers ago just before the final book’s release, but I can’t remember if I’d reread it another time between that and when the book itself released (HBP is the sixth book). I think Half-Blood Prince is probably my least favorite of the series. I’ve always felt that my opinion of Harry Potter started to sour a little after the fourth book, after which I felt that J.K. Rowling lost a lot of focus and inserted many unnecessary and pointlessly distracting things when she should have been focusing on more pressing matters —  so I guess the sixth book would be an accumulation of those disappointments. I don’t think my impressions changed much during subsequent rereading(s) of HBP.

So I guess I’m kind of surprised that this time, I think I liked it much, much better.

(This post contains no spoilers for any Harry Potter book or movie.)

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