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?
Those of you who have been following me for a while might remember that a while back I tried to do a weekly feature where I compiled cool fanart pictures I found on Pixiv. It fizzled out after nine weeks because it turned out that finding fanart and writing little blurbs about each picture took a lot more time than I was expecting, so I eventually gave it up in accordance my honeymoon period with Pixiv ending.
Well, now I’m temporarily back doing a fanart piece—although this time I’m doing it for Crunchyroll’s long-running Fanart Friday column. As one might expect, I decided my theme for the week would be idols…”Lessons in Idolatry” was the subtitle I decided to go with. So, yeah, check it out and enjoy all the idols!
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.
Yeah, yeah, I know—this post was maybe a bit lazy. However, people seem to be having a good time with them AND I started a Monmusu best girl war in the comments, so I’m considering it a success.
After last week’s column on the “trapped in an MMO” genre, I was feeling pretty frisky about genre analysis, so I went back to sweep up the shows people mentioned that I didn’t address. This time, however, I’m playing around with the idea of genre and “gamified world” settings—it gets a bit more theoretical and less pointed than last weeks, but I think the post is more fun because the ideas are more adventurous.
As a disclaimer, since all of the commentors on Crunchyroll felt obligated to point this out—yes, I’m fully aware the stuff I’m talking about in this post wasn’t “invented” by anime for this particular genre. Of course, I probably don’t need to tell you guys that. You know me well enough to actually listen to what I’m trying to say. Ah, well, such is the price for writing for an audience on a big site versus on my blog. That’ll teach me to sell out…
Mage in a Barrel 