By: Peggy Sue Wood | @pswediting

About eight or nine years ago, I drifted away from MyAnimeList. Not in the sense I stopped using it entirely, but more like I just stopped logging in frequently and stopped using it to save my watchlists.

I made this change because I wanted something more… mine and modifiable. Around that time I was a newly working professional and I was getting into using Excel sheets a lot more. I ended up making my own Google/Excel sheet to track everything (and I do mean everything: anime, manga, webtoons, light novels, web novels, regular novels, TV shows, articles, etc.) thereafter. It’s a pretty extensive self-archive that’s very messy in places, but comprehensive in a way that works better for me.

However, when I made that switch, I never deleted my old lists. I just left them there.

Well, recently I logged back into MyAnimeList to explore its manga features more seriously for a post I’ve been thinking about writing on User Interfaces and reading, and instead properly sampling said interface I found myself doing some wandering through my old lists. Clicking through old entries and scanning the half-forgotten titles gave me a nice little snapshots of a past version of my taste.

There were movies and series I hadn’t thought about in years, like the Garo Movie: Divine Flame and Towa no Quon (all six OVAs), which I still remembered as being epics I loved at the time of watching.

Thinking about it, it was actually kind of nice to do in the moment. Maybe it’s a sign I’m getting older, but sometimes nostalgia feels just as satisfying as something new. I find myself reflecting on that more often now, especially when I search through our blog or revisit older posts.

There’s a… pleasure or nice-ness in stumbling across an old favorite and remembering why it mattered in the first place. It’s also a little strange how easily things fade. Like, realizing the post I’ve been wanting to write was one I already did a few years ago or being reminded of a show I loved that I hadn’t seen in forever and then, re-reading my post or seeing it on the list, makes me want to seek it out and binge it for the day (like I did with not that long ago with one of the series I found on my old lists). The memory is not completely lost, just buried beneath everything that came after and you get to re-experience it again, if that makes sense.

I’ve come to appreciate revisiting those old lists (enough so that I made a post about it, after all!). They let me reconnect with my past self, with titles I finished, and ones I never returned to, in a way that feels more grounded, I guess, than my undated spreadsheet or a distant memory.

All that said, I don’t think I’ll go back to using MAL as my primary tracker for content. I like my system too much. Still, I don’t think I’ll get rid of those old lists either so that, maybe, several more years from now I can go back again and re-live this experience once more at a later date.