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With me, it either hooks me and I'm interested in seeing how it's handled, or I'm not.

Even when I can predict what will happen, I still like seeing it happen, since sometimes it's not exactly what I think, or have some bits of differences in it.

But most of all, I just like to let go and have fun with things every now and then. Manga by its definition isn't supposed to be higher reading.

Complete curiosity since I get the vibe you've probably seen it. What did you think of Ghost in the Shell? The series and third film moreso than the first 2 films.

Loved the first film, felt the second was a letdown, didn't see the third (actually, might've seen it on TV) but I think I might have it around here somewhere. That's the one based on the series, right (Solid State Society or whatever?)

In general I wasn't that thrilled with the show. It was good, I guess. And they had a lot of deep thought put into everything. I just didn't like it because the whole "hey, this is the future and we make a living off of trying to confuse our audience by reminding them that this is the future" didn't sit well with me.

Also, I hate politics and every episode of the show was like 2 minutes of action scenes and 19 minutes of going through the paperwork necessary to obtain a permit so that they can search the home of a foreign diplomat suspected of human trafficking.

Doooooooohohohohohohohohohohohoho.

It's deliberately a slow, fairly realistic series. It's FAR outside the norm for most anime. If it were quick, or heavy in action, or anything of the sort, it'd ruin the whole purpose of the series.

I enjoyed it for the realism and the build up, which led to some pretty crazy stuff (in the context of the series, that is). I enjoy my fantastical stuff like Berserk just as much and more blood-pumping stuff like Ippo, but it's stuff like Monster that allows me to have some mote of faith in anime/manga.

Oh, I'll admit that it's a change of pace and that I like the direction that it was going in... it's just that it moved so god-awful slow and the 'major plot points' that it went past were so self-evident four or five episodes earlier that it's not the shocker that they make it out to be.

"Oh god, it's YOU!" ...yeah, we know.

"Oh god, I was responsible for that!" ...well, yeah that's naturally progressing logic from the thing you found out months ago.

"I was surprised to find that he thought nothing of human life." How is that surprising by now?

I wanted to watch more, but I tabled episodes for later and never got back to them because... honestly... I had more immediately entertaining things that I could do with my time.

@nighthunter: Like I said, it probably confused me in that regard. Something about the end of the 2nd Gig. Seriously, I was probably distracted by the Major's boobs.

And I don't necessarily think that it'd right to ever lump "anime" or "manga" into one big generalization. It all depends upon the author, which goes the same for anything, really. The only thing that makes it an anime or manga is the art style and presentation.

One reason I prefer anime over western comics is that the dialogue feels more like something someone would say in the middle of an action, or whatever dramatic pose or angle they're given. In the cases I remember in western comics, you see too many cases of big splash scenes with dramatic poses that don't really convey any sense of progressive motion, while the characters go through massive amounts of dialogue as if time was simply frozen.

Not that anime doesn't do that as well, but they do it in such a way that the pause of time feels much less. Of course, I could be going by examples of bad Western comics rather than the good examples.

Really, it all boils down to a matter of preference. At least within anime, it's better to consider things from that three division standpoint of shounen, shoujou and seinen. Cog is definitely the type of guy who would enjoy seinen a lot more than any other of the three types.