The Deep End.

2024-11-09

I'll give you two examples in this post of communities where there's a sense of a "beginner" form, an entry point, the shallow end where new initiates are to be weaned in. I'll try to demonstrate why this process sucks.

Anime

First off, anime. Cowboy Bebop is the classic beginner anime. It's the go-to default when introducing someone to TV anime. Q: "Hey I want to get into anime, where should I start?" A: "Cowboy Bebop". On a surface level, it makes sense. Bebop is an excellent show, there's no doubt about that. It's extremely watchable, it has a great first episode, that first episode has a great first 5 minutes, it hooks you from the start. The whole show takes a great deal of inspiration from western movies. It has a high quality English dub because the director, Shinichirou Watanabe personally oversaw it, since he envisioned the characters as speaking English. The animation quality is way above average, the fight choreography, the soundtrack, I mean what's not to like about cowboy bebop? So what am I complaining about here? Precisely this. You're a new anime fan, you finish bebop, you say "that was great, what can I watch next that's like that?" And then you're fucked. Because nothing is like Bebop. I mean sure, we have our stock of "shows that are kind of like bebop enough to tell people about who have just watched bebop", trigun, samurai champloo, space dandy. But that's it! Once you've watched those shows, you're done, and none of them are as good as Bebop anyway! The very reason you recommended a new viewer to start with Bebop is the same reason why Bebop is a terrible first anime. It's a lot like western cinema and nothing like anime!

You introduce someone new to anime, and you give them the canonical critically acclaimed stuff, Cowboy Bebop, Studio Ghibli movies, Ghost in the shell, and Akira, then congratulations, they are now really into anime that is absolutely nothing like anime.

Now obviously, the presents a problem. Anime is a pulp genre. Being an otaku is less like being a fan of mainstream cinema and more like being into horror b-movies. It's an insular thing, it's low budget, low oversight, and it's full of it's own culture of tropes and cliches. In other words, judging anime by the same criteria you would judge a regular tv show or film on is like judging a giallo movie on it's plot and acting. That's not why people come here. If you do that, you're missing the point entirely.

In my opinion the best beginner anime would be something that is a stand out execution of an average genre. If you show someone That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime as their first show, and they like it, you can be pretty damn sure they actually like anime, and you have fifty million other isekai they can watch next. Slime isekai is actually representative of anime as it really exists, with the stuff otaku like about anime. If you show someone k-on and they enjoy it (only a psychopath wouldn't), then you can be pretty damn sure that person actually enjoys anime stuff for anime reasons. If you show someone yuu yuu hakusho, and they enjoy it, you know they are actually into the stuff about shounen that makes it shounen. The optimal introductory anime should be representative of anime as it actually exists, and centre some aspect of otaku culture. That includes the parts of otaku culture that might be off-putting to some people, the weird sex stuff, the tropes, the limited animation. If someone can't hack that, they're not gonna be into anime! And that's perfectly ok! Not everything is for everyone, and it's best to get people to the realisation that this medium isn't for them as quickly as possible, rather than them being let down later when they figure it out themselves.

Another aspect to note is that many otaku are also in it for the sense of community, for the online discussion, the fan-works etc. So picking something more contemporary and relevant might be something you want to consider. I probably wouldn't recommend Lucky Star to a new viewer since the references are all pretty dated by now and they're not going to get them anyway. Unless you already have a knowledge and interest in otaku culture circa 2007, the show is going to be nonsense to you. Something like No Game No Life is a bit more timeless while still focusing on otaku main characters. But really I think Steins;Gate might be the perfect choice. It has a cast of otaku characters, it's set in Akiba, it's based on a visual novel, it has a host of tropes which are still relevant (although some of them are ageing out of relevancy such as maid cafes), and it's a story that pretty much anyone can enjoy, as demonstrated by its extreme mainstream popularity and consistent high rankings in anime ratings databases. But you could also go with something like Bocchi or Freiren, a modern, popular, good show which has the staying power to remain in mainstream discourse for at least a good few years from now.

But the ultimate truth is this, there is no good beginner anime, because that's a weird ass concept. There's just anime, and if you like it, you like it.

Linux

Linux has the same problem. We have this idea of a "beginner distro". Let me tell you something you already know, distros do not (really) matter. Every mainstream distro is either debian based or arch based. The only major difference is the package manager, and most of the time, pacman and apt are going to be just as good as each other. There are some distros that a beginner should absolutely avoid. Yeah, don't start on Alpine or Void, something like that with the more obscure stuff like mussl or busybox or an init system that isn't systemd. Other than that, which distro you choose doesn't matter very much at all because everything is modular and can be switched in and out with ease. Whenever I watch youtube videos of people trying out linux for the first time, 99% of the shit they talk about is just the desktop environment, not the distro. It's not immediately obvious to someone who has only ever used windows that the desktop environment is something non-fundamental that can be easily switched out, and is not distro-dependant.

I have a major problem with "beginner distros" which try to set themselves up in such a way so as to direct new users away from ever having to use the terminal. Just like in the anime example, the problem is that you're going to have to use the terminal eventually, you may as well get over your fear and dive right in. In fact, doing lots of stuff via the terminal is one of the great things about linux! Avoiding it because it's scary is a tautology, it's scary because you're avoiding it. I know I just said distro doesn't matter, but I'm going to give my recommendation now.

Arch is the best beginner distro.

Installing arch is not hard any more thanks to archinstall. You're going to be left with a fairly minimal system that you have at least a basic understanding of thanks to the install process, and you will also have been forced to learn how to follow instructions from the wiki, and use the terminal. You will immediately be left with an intuitive understanding that the basic terminal interface is the "real" thing that's going on under the gui.

After the install process you now have the single best documented linux distro thanks to the arch wiki. You have a large community online for support. You have access to the AUR. You have excellent compatibility with steam and proton. And on top of that you can install anything you want. Gui wrappers for package managers are a stupid idea which only further pushes new users into learned helplessness. You only need to learn the following things in the terminal.

And then some sort of text editor, nano is probably the best option for a beginner. That's it, you have now learned to use the linux command line. It took you less than a minute.

Why is there an entire cottage industry of distros trying to prevent people from taking one minute to learn those basic commands? I have no clue, but we probably shouldn't be encouraging it. The same is true for websites. Non-techie users end up with websites that use complicated tech stacks with insane backend stuff I don't understand, a million client and server side scripts, crazy complex stylesheets and whatever. Whereas the tech savvy people have simple websites with pure html + css and maybe a little bit of javascript. To the layman, this seems completely backwards! And the layman is correct. Only the severe linux autists end up with simple systems, while the beginners are left with complex systems they can't possibly hope to understand, and that's by design!

Conclusion

Beginner anime attempts to introduce people to the medium by having them watch shows that are as little like anime as possible. Beginner distros attampt to introduce people to linux by havin them use generally applicable linux tools as little as possible. This mindset is absolutely backwards. I am a strong proponent of throwing people into the deep end.