Love Yuru Camp? You Should Try One Piece!!

Do you like Yuru Camp? I love Yuru Camp, it's one of my favorite shows. Aside from its general technical excellence and tightness of craft, I just love the vibe of Yuru Camp. It's a story about strangers getting to know each other and bonding over new experiences. They may not necessarily become best friends, but there's something wonderful about the ways they bond. They eat delicious food together, they travel to interesting and well realized locales together, they see beautiful sights together, they sleep in close proximity to each other in tents, and even though they may disagree sometimes and not everyone is always totally comfortable around each other, they eventually form the bonds of close friendship and family. The vibe of great friends enjoying each other's company over travel, sights, eating, and sleeping together is fundamental to what makes Yuru Camp a great story. And if you're a fan of Yuru Camp for the same reasons that I am, I have a great recommendation for you: One Piece. 

"ONE PIECE!?!?" I hear you asking in shock and anguish. "But blog writer guy, One Piece has nothing in common with Yuru Camp" I hear you continue with a tone somewhere between confusion and befuddled amusement. In broad strokes, this is obviously true. Yuru Camp is a slice of life title about a group of high school girls who go camping, and One Piece is an action/adventure title about a band of pirates running from the law while searching for treasure and stopping corrupt authorities. The former is a cozy coming-of-age sitcom and the latter is an epic and action packed adventure. But I can't help but notice that when people talk about One Piece, a lot of what I hear is about how much they love the bonds that the Straw Hats share. I've heard so many times that what makes fans so ardently in love with the show is that the characters build a cozy little family on the ship, full of personalities that don't necessarily always get along with each other but nonetheless have a strong bond. And I've been told that some of the best moments of the show are the times when they eat delicious food together, travel to interesting and well realized locales together, see beautiful sights together, and sleep in close proximity to each other on the same ship. These are the things that make many people fall so deeply in love with these characters and their relationships, which makes the more action heavy segments feel that much more meaningful. Hearing this makes me want to watch One Piece, because it sounds like it captures an ethos comparable to Yuru Camp. 

But if you were so caught up in the obvious genre difference, or were otherwise who my theoretical shocked anime fan was representing, you may not have thought about the similarities that these shows have. While their appeals are very different in many areas, in many other areas they are surprisingly similar. There are many reasons that a show might be among someone's favorites, and oftentimes those reasons are rather specific. If you latched on to Yuru Camp because you love camping and you enjoy the travel tidbits and the nitty-gritty details of set-up and clean-up, or because you're a moe enthusiast and just find the girls to be charming and adorable, then I definitely don't recommend One Piece. And if you like One Piece because you're drawn to adventures in ambitiously realized fantasy worlds, or because you think pirates are just the coolest and enjoy the aesthetics of piracy, I definitely don't recommend Yuru Camp. But in at least this one other regard, I can easily call them great recommendations for each other. Getting too caught up in the broad strokes of "what" a show is can make it more difficult to recommend things to people who enjoy "how" a story does things, or how it feels to watch the parts that make you love it. 

Thinking about it just a little deeper, I don't think it would be controversial to say that shows in the same genre are sometimes poor recommendations for each other. One Piece is a fantasy show, but that doesn't mean Berserk is an obvious recommendation. Yuru Camp is slice of life, but I'm pretty confident it's not quite the same as Hyouka. So why could it not also be the case that the opposite is true? Sometimes, shows of completely opposing genres can be perfect for each other. 

And yet, in my experience, anime fans are pretty obsessed with genre as a metric for discovering new series, making recommendations, or finding things to enjoy. If someone says they've never seen an anime, the first thing that's often asked is "what are your favorite genres." When someone asks for recommendations themselves, they often list some of their favorites and ask for things of a similar genre. Which begs the question: why the hell are people so obsessed with genre? 

Well as a short-hand, you can gain a lot of information about a show by knowing its genre. A genre is essentially a collection of archetypal story structures that have tendencies to include or exclude certain elements that might be appealing to people. An action show will have action scenes in it, a romance story will have a romantic relationship of some sort in it, a comedy will have jokes in it. Genre stories are also fairly limited. Individual genres might be broad relative to themselves, but there are only so many ways to tell a story and have it be of a certain genre. Or to where it isn't a certain genre, for that matter. There are only so few jokes you can have before comedy becomes one of the genres of your show. So if you're looking for super basic information, you might find a lot of utility in thinking about genre. 

But if I asked you why you liked your favorite show, I don't think many people would mention genre. I don't think the appeal of Yuru Camp is that "it's a slice of life story." It's not like I love every slice of life story, or like the ones I do like to the same degree. For that matter, it's rare that any singular element of a story is what makes you enjoy it. While some people might be more drawn to a story about certain subjects or with certain elements, do people who like camping like Yuru Camp because it happens to have camping in it (and will thus like any TV show or movie to heavily feature camping), or because it captures a particular vibe through its unique combination of characters, aesthetics, cinematic choices, atmosphere, and yes, subject matter? 

Anime fans have been said to be "database animals" before. That's a term to describe a book I really need to read, but it's also been used to describe the way that anime fans seem to enjoy dividing things into categories and forming attachments based on those categories. A lot of anime involves combining different categories and archetypes so that you can find the specific combination of database elements that appeal to you. It's why we have so many variants of, say, reincarnation stories. Change the elements and you suddenly appeal to a different category. Reincarnated as a Spider and Reincarnated as a Villainess may not seem fundamentally different, but to the database mindset they couldn't be more different; the level of categorical attraction you have to intelligent monsters is probably completely different than the one you have towards villainesses. This attitude is also part of where the -dere archetypes come from, they're categories of traits one might be attracted to in a love interest, which can often be mixed and matched until you've found a perfect one for you. One of anime's most defining traits is the way it seems to cover so many tiny niches you never knew anyone had. You can have your anime girls with any of 50 -dere tropes in many combinations, any number of animal traits of one or more animals, who partake in almost any hobby in existence, drawn in so many different styles. Every combination of categorical attractions will appeal to someone deeply. 

Beyond genre, this sort of database thinking also pops up often in the community. How many people have you seen ask for recommendations of weirdly specific things, like "I want an action show with an OP male main character who hides their power level from others and dates an unpopular girl who is deeply in love with him?" You may have seen a post or a tweet from someone looking for shows about adults with very specific mindsets, or which describe their ideal female characters through various details about their bodies and power levels. I've even seen someone ask for anime that don't have any trees, the possibilities are limitless. 

Maybe that person is you. And I do understand why you might ask for something like that. But let me ask: When it comes down to it and I ask you to explain to me why you like whatever your favorite show is, are you going to tell me that it's because the combination of the girl's dere archetype, height, breast size, and hair color were just made for you? Do you like an anime more when it adds idol dance scenes into the mix of genki small breasted redhead horse girl sports racing melodrama, and do you like an anime less when it has trees? The archetype of the database mindset can be fun, as an autistic person I think I get the joy of categorizing things into highly specific subsets you can't generalize more than most, but it's not just creating a database, it's the essence of algorithmic thinking.

When TikTok recommends you a new short, it takes various categories of things you've watched in the past and tries to match them up to things with similar key words. It makes a database of search terms to match your preferences, and forms an algorithm to keep you watching the same things over and over again. In my experience, it's pretty rare to like a TikTok short particularly more than another similar one. It's like putting things into an AI and having it spit out your taste at you. When Crunchyroll makes its "you might like this" section, it's doing the same sort of thing. It won't get things crazy wrong, but your taste is probably more nuanced than a bunch of vague search terms and key words. You simply can't put the elements that appeal to you on a base level into an AI and get a perfect show every time, and that's without even accounting for your mood that day, new experiences, and other unpredictable elements. When you define your taste by a series of key terms like a genre or a database element, you limit yourself only to worse or different versions of your favorites. You can't find a new favorite with that method. 

I believe that when people ask for recommendations of this sort, they are looking to find new favorites. Perhaps paradoxically, searching for things that "are like" your favorites mean you'll only find things that are similar to them but don't live up to them. Because ultimately, our favorites are not a series of search terms that combined to make you fall in love, favorites are a product of the overall experience of watching a show. A favorite encompasses an ethos, a vibe, and a mindset. They're special because they're deeper and more specific than "female main character, tsundere, flat-chest, blushing, romance, kissing, cute, anime, action, fantasy, sakuga," you get the idea. A favorite is "the particular, hard-to-describe ethos of those moments in Yuru Camp where the girls cook and eat a bunch of foods and then see a beautiful night sky together" which any singular combination of those elements in shows with similar key words will probably not replicate. So the best way to find new favorites is to go the other direction from algorithmic thinking. Rather than finding new things through shared base elements, consider the ethos of your favorite shows and look for things that capture the unique nuances of what drew you to it, even if the overall product is vastly different in other ways. 

This is not to say that genre isn't useful, or that database elements play no role in our feelings towards a piece of media. After all, you may have noticed that I used some examples of this earlier. A Yuru Camp fan who is a moe enthusiast and a One Piece fan who loves ambitious fantasy worlds is using a sort of algorithmic logic with key words. Ultimately, I'm calling for these elements to be less centralized to our discussion of anime, and other media as well. They are a useful tool, but they are not defining of our experiences of media, and yet anime fans have a tendency to treat them as if they are. Genre or categorical attraction might be part of the reason you like any show, but One Piece might be a great recommendation for Yuru Camp fans on the basis of a more nuanced understanding of the person's experience, so don't shoot a seemingly off-kilter recommendation down on the basis of its genre or key words. If you let genre or categories define the conversation, you limit the breadth of what you discover. One Piece is about adventure and carving out a path with fewer limits, so be adventurous, don't limit yourself, and maybe give yourself a chance to be adventurous and get sucked into Yuru Camp's nakama ethos if that's something you love about One Piece. And don't be afraid to give people seemingly out-there recommendations, they might be the ones that instill the most passion.