Okay, so the title of this one’s a bit of a misnomer since this week’s column isn’t exactly about idol wars in the way something like THE IDOLM@STER‘s idol agency spats or AKB0048‘s literal wars are. In fact, it might be more accurate to say this is more about the war inside me. The war of loving idols. What it’s like to live with love. To love…and live…
Heheh.
You guys probably know better than anyone how overjoyed I’ve generally been with this season. You guys also probably know better than most how, when I’m really feeling happy about something, I just gotta let people know about it. So, of course, that’s what I did with this week’s edition of Aniwords—I told everyone how happy I am about this season (and tried to disguise it with some kind of vague lesson about how we need to be careful when being hyped about stuff to others). Read at your own risk, I suppose…
One thing I really enjoy about being an anime fan is seeing how this particular hobby that I have interacts with the non-anime liking world. I’ve had some great experiences—like friends watching the entirety of shows I like and love (SAO and Chihayafuru, respectively) with me—and some not so great ones. But we’re all anime fans who live in the real world, and not all of us (aka, me!) want anime to just be a hobby that we keep in the privacy of our apartments. I’m not ashamed of liking anime, but every time I try and dodge telling people about it makes me feel like I am.
I don’t want to be that kind of person. I want to be someone who is authentic, even if it means that I get into some awkward moments sometimes. This column is a story about that wish.
Thanks to the influence of a prominent fujoshi friend on Twitter (Mira, if you’re reading, you’re wonderful and yes, this is about you), I’ve kind of been working over the past few months or so at increasing my personal appreciation for good-looking anime guys. Whether they’re cute (you may recall my weekly palpitations over Danmachi’s Bell Cranel) or beautifully hot (shoutout to Kuroko’s Basketball and Kise), I think it’s a good thing for me to cultivate a healthy appreciation for good people aesthetics in both guys and girls.
Happily, the current anime season has had not shortage of cute/hot anime guys to aid me in this quest. So, of course, I spent this week’s Aniwords talking about how glad of that I was.
Alright, this week’s Aniwords is live! Sorry, I’m late posting it over here—I was busy watching the pile of crap that was Charlotte. Anyways, this week I used a sparkly title to talk about getting mad at people’s opinions. This honestly isn’t really even about anime that much, but more about the things that happen around anime watching (or engaging with any kind of media, really).
I’m not sure how much I actually like this post, but it came to me pretty easily, so that’s good, I guess?
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the closing lines of the oft-quoted, oft-anthologized, oft-ridiculed poem by Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— | I took the one less traveled by, | And that has made all the difference.
GATE, much like writers who choose to use “The Road Not Taken” as openings to their columns, takes the more-traveled road as a matter of course—yet, in doing so, it makes way for the discovery of a few rare mushrooms along the path and one big one with a bad smell that covers the whole forest. Now, I don’t mean to be coy here; I enjoyed GATE a whole heckuva lot. It’s a fascinating blend of things I found engaging and off-putting, likable and awful. At the end of the day, though, I’ll always give three cheers for a show that manages to succeed in spite of a fundamentally misguided base premise. There’s something awfully human about a show like that—even if you might not want to emulate it.
Oh, I hear your voices already. “Bless, you’ve already sold out to straight-up lazy clickbait titles and topics?” “So you only really care about views after all—I thought you were different!” “Umm…you do remember that you do end of season rankings, right?”
To which I say, “Ha! Fooled ya!”
I’ll admit this is a title straight up designed to get people to click, but I promise you it’s not for my own affirmation—it’s for something bigger. Namely, the Animator Expo. Now, I’m not a exactly a sakuga buff or a huge industry nerd, but I am invested in this industry and the places it’s going. And I think that path is set out before in the shape of this project. And I honestly think it’s important people take notice. So I went for the hot sell; the easy-in; the rope ’em up strategy. All to get people to watch a weird 7-minute short about a pair of dorky sisters.
This may very well be my most clickbait title yet, but I have no regrets because I’m honestly extraordinarily happy with how this post turns out and I want as many people as possible to read it. In a way, I consider this the sister post to the “Open Letter to Anitwitter” Tumblr post I wrote some weeks back; it just comes at the same general topic in a different way. And what is that topic? It’s paradigms of dialogue; that is, how we talk to each other within the anime fandom (although I hope the points I’m making extend in applicability beyond simply this one fandom). And these are all just, as I see it, me working my way up to what will hopefully be my seminal post on media, anime, and identity—my thesis, as it were, on being an anime fan.
But, for now…here’s the link!
You may recall a fairly silly post I wrote a few months back about how to write (and find a good) season preview. Well, with other anibloggers’ season previews starting to come out and more and more trailers for fall’s shows hitting the net, I got back into that same over-exuberant spirit for this week’s Aniwords. I’ll admit it’s a fairly fluffy post to read, but that’s more or less just the way I wrote it. And its core, “A Foolproof Guide to Getting Hyped for Next Season’s Anime” really does walk you through the way I approach each new season.
Hello, hello! I’m back on the writing grind, this time messing around with talking about anime titles I like and other related topics. Honestly, I really just wanted to tell that story about Heavy Object (which I still maintain is going to be a show about rocks), and everything else kind of just spun out of that. Anyways, hope you guys enjoy my first proper post in about two weeks! Hopefully you don’t find my writing muscles too stiff.
Mage in a Barrel 