'Could you please teach your daughter NOT to put toast down her pants??' by Kara
Wednesday, June 6, 2007 at 7:05 AM

My weird uncle is into those crazy 'cat macros,' and they've started extending into all sorts of geekdom. Last night I made a Doctor Who 'motivational poster', and it seems to have caused quite a stir. I'm proud.

One of the guys at work is getting into anime slowly -- he's seen Evangelion, Kurumi, and part of Noir. (Dear God, he started off weird.) Even with the second as an example, he said, 'Anime theme songs are weird. They have nothing to do with anything.'

Now, I know for the most part that's not true. Even if the song doesn't mention the show by name (which doesn't really happen a lot of lately), it's still related thematically. Some are just close-ish (I wasn't expecting 'Duvet' to have anything at all to do with Serial Experiments Lain, but shows what I know), some are close enough, and then you get the ones like 'Aoki Flamme' from Pumpkin Scissors (an awesome show, coming out over here soon) that pretty much were written just for the show and nothing else.

Now some recent shows still have the title of the show in. The PreCure franchise is notorious for this. The OPs are all very direct, and even the EDs, as poppy as they are, insinuate the name into it somewhere. Robot shows, not surprisingly, do this quite a bit, even the newer ones (well okay, not all of them ... a handful). But I mean look back at older shows where, honestly, they were about that show and nothing else.

So I've been curious, and I haven't really known where to start. I'm wondering, when in the history of anime did the trend really start rolling toward songs that weren't rooted quite so firmly in the show? I'm not quite so concerned about ED themes, although there were a few that still popped the show/character names in. ('Ore wa Akira da! Kimi no nakama da!' I love original Raideen.) I know up to Macross, at least, it was still strong enough, and I know things like Rose of Versailles were breaking off. But where did it jump?

Rather than hiding your l. under a b., I suggest posting any theories to the forum because people need to use the forum dammit so lots of people can discuss and participate.

If you have been, you're doing it wrong!