Lots of people have told me what to expect from Lucky Star, but I went back and re-watched an episode at random the other day and it did very little for me. I think in the case of slife-of-life it may be something inherent in my nature rather than something placed in my mind.

@OGT: Very good point. Couldn’t get into Tengen Toppa, Lucky Star or Macross Frontier until someone told me what I should be expecting from them. Then it clicked and I really enjoyed them. Mushishi never caused me any such difficulty though (and I adored that too.)

It’s possible that I was subconsciously predisposed to dislike Kanon. I try not to bother with the subconscious too much, on the grounds that if I can’t detect it it’s not much use to me. I don’t think I watched the show expecting the wrong things – but then I don’t know the genre, so I didn’t know what to expect. Except for an old remark of CCY’s, that Shuffle!, ‘It’s like Key, but with breasts’, which suggested to me that Kanon might be a bit like a weepier Shuffle!, without breasts.

. . . maybe that wasn’t too helpful an attitude, in retrospect – especially since I wasn’t exactly blown away by Shuffle!.

That said, there were some moments in Kanon that got me on the verge of tears, and did affect me emotionally. And, while I have cried at anime plenty of times before, I think it takes a special combination of circumstances–attention paid to the episode, mood at the time of viewing, etc.–to determine whether I am emotionally moved to tears by an anime, or whether I sit there, bored.

It might also have been that you went into it with a (possibly subconscious) “I’m not going to like this” thought in your head, even if you thought you were giving it a fair chance. I’ve had issues like that in the past–it took me two months before I actually managed to watch an episode of Mushishi and actually like it, because I’d start up every episode with the notion that I wouldn’t really like it. Then it finally got driven into my skull that it wasn’t trying to be “creepy” as I thought it was being (and you still can’t tell me that there’s parts of Mushishi that don’t creep you out), but rather what it was actually trying to do: tell very human stories.

There’s a huge quality gap between Mushishi and Kanon, of course, and, given your tastes, it’s no surprise that you didn’t really like Kanon, but sometimes, the difference between liking a series and not liking a series is simply a state of mind. It’s part of why I still can’t bring myself to watch Kaiba past episode 1, despite the fact that I really want to.

@ koneko-chan: The same thing’s nearly happening to me (you can see it’s been seven days from this post and I’ve only managed one other)!

Sigh. Once again work+real life has kept me ignorant about the recent happenings in the anime bloggosphere.